Chewing Over the West: Occidental Narratives in Non-Western Readings (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in English)

Chewing Over the West

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

119 Series Editors

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

†Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Chewing Over the West Occidental Narratives in Non-Western Readings

Edited by

Doris Jedamski

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

For Jaap and Karlien (Leiden) and for my mother (Mireval)

Published with the financial support of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden

Cover design: Gordon Collier and Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2783-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2784-8 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

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Theme and Identity in Postcolonial Arabic Writing RASHEED EL-ELANY

1

Moving Pictures: Western Marxism and Vernacular Literature in Colonial Indonesia KEITH FOULCHER

37

Mother Tongues with a Western Accent: Indigenous Negotiations with English Language and Narratives in Kenyan Art EVAN MWANGI

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The Development of Modern Burmese Theatre and Literature Under Western Influence U WIN PE (MAUNG SWAN YI)

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Writing Against, Writing With: The Case of Algerian Literature AMINA AZZA–BEKKAT

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The Use of T.S. Eliot’s Literary Traditions in Contemporary Arabic Poetry S A D D I K M. G O H A R

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War and Ideology: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and the Vietnamese Novel Without a Name by Duong Thu Huong URSULA LIES

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Under Indian Eyes: Characterization and Dialogism in Modern Hindi Fiction THOMAS DE BRUIJN

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In Search of a New Image: An Indian Madame Bovary? GUZEL V. STRELKOVA

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Chewing Over Ethnographic Models: Berber Writings from Algeria DANIELA MEROLLA

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The Naya drama in India: Rediscovering the Self in the Western Mirror ANNA SUVOROVA

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Hybridity in Komedi Stambul MATTHEW ISAAC COHEN

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“Elementary, My Dear Wat”: Influence and Imitation in the Early Crime Fiction of ‘Late-Victorian’ Siam RACHEL HARRISON

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The Vanishing-Act of Sherlock Holmes and Indonesia’s National Awakening DORIS JEDAMSKI

349

Notes on Contributors Index

381 385

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to express my gratitude to the contributors, who showed inspiring enthusiasm in this project and who kept up their over-all cooperation and patience even in times when the editing process seemed to be foundering. It is almost common knowledge that a book project takes more time, more energy, and more patience than is initially reserved for it. A seemingly endless series of unexpected obstacles kept prolonging the editing process, sometimes leaving me in despair, wishing I had never started it. Crashed computers and lost files, or files that were incompatible, providers failing to send or receive messages plus communication problems of many other kinds, misread style sheets, and even contributors who seemed to have vanished altogether; all that did not really help. But in the end, it was life itself that caused the most drastic delays: the loss of my father, the birth of my daughter, the new, magnificently hectic and enchanting life with her, a new job – “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”; I could not agree more with John Lennon when I recollect the countless nightshifts at my computer, frantically trying to meet self-imposed deadlines that were fated to be jeopardized by yet another unforeseen ‘detail of life’. A ‘medal for patience’ should be awarded to Gordon Collier, technical editor of the Cross/Cultures series at Rodopi, who with his kind, witty, and encouraging emails did more to keep this project going that he himself probably will realize. I also wish to express my gratitude to Justin Watkins at S O A S , who did not hesitate to help selflessly with some intricate Burmese reference details with only a handful of Dutch stroopwafels in recompense. I owe special thanks to my brother, Frank Teichmann, who deserves a kilo stroopwafels for his very critical but highly constructive comments on my introduction to this book, conveyed in some late-night discussions at

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the massive wooden table at my mother’s place over a good cup of café au lait. This project would not have been possible without the kind support of the International Institute for Asian Studies (I I A S ) in Leiden, which not only facilitated a workshop in preparation for this volume but also partly financed the publication of it. I am also grateful for the financial support provided by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (N O W ), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science (K N A W ), the Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies (C N W S ), and the Leids Universitair Fonds (L U F ) for their financial support of the preparatory workshop. My heart-felt gratitude goes to my family and close friends who, never failing to support and encourage me, have patiently put up with my at times utterly asocial behaviour and grumpiness over the last couple of years.

DORIS JEDAMSKI LEIDEN, OCTOBER 2009

Introduction D ORIS J EDAMSKI

Postcoloniality: A Matter of Perspective

R

E C E N T D E C A D E S have seen much debate on (post)colonialism, (post)modernity, on cultural and national identities, their constitution and representation, and on a phenomenon dubbed ‘writing back’ – the response of formerly oppressed cultures and nations to their oppressors.1 Coined by Salman Rushdie, the term ‘writing back’ was adopted by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in their trend-setting book The Empire Writes Back.2 The title itself and, even more accentuated, the first line of the blurb on the book’s back cover bring to the fore the major restriction of their approach, and of the discourse that was to develop from it in the following decade: “The experience of colonization and the challenge of the

1

In scholarly writing, the notion of ‘writing back’ no longer refers exclusively to the postcolonial situation but also includes various social, religious, and ethnic groups and covers, for instance, gender-related forms of counter-discourse. A valuable overview and critical discussion of the core debates on postcolonialism is provided by Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London & New York: Rouledge, 1998), and in The Post-Colonial Question. Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers & Lidia Curti (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). For some brief but enlightening thoughts on postcoloniality in its relation to postcolonialism, see the introduction by Keith Foulcher & Tony Day to Clearing a Space. Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, ed. Foulcher & Day (Leiden: K I T L V Press, 2002): 1–17. An overview of the issue of cultural identity can be found in the collection of essays Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay (Sage: London, Thousand Oaks, California & New Delhi, 1996). 2 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989) prominently cites a statement by Salman Rushdie (“the Empire writes back to the Centre”) as the guiding theme of their book.

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post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English.”3 It is undisputed that the then newly emerging scholarly awareness of this “new writing” was an essential step towards the acknowledgement of ‘the postcolonial’ and the basis of postcolonial criticism. But the “postcolonial world” by no means expressed itself in English only (or in French, Spanish or Dutch for that matter), although one must conclude, from the studies that have appeared since then in great numbers in the field of postcolonialism and cultural criticism, that the key feature of writing back is indeed the use of the language of the former colonizer – a valid assertion so long as the addressee of the writing back is the (former) colonial Western power and its representatives at the ‘Centre’.4 But the notion of ‘writing back’ implies more than a counter-action aimed at the ‘Centre’; it is a multi-layered process of self-articulation that redefines Self and Other, questioning cultural and political demarcation lines. This volume understands ‘writing back’ as a complex process that can involve more than two parties, and that, while clearly involving the (formerly) colonizing culture, does not necessarily target it. With his category of the “immigrant,” Albert Memmi, about fifty years ago, made an attempt to capture the situation of the formerly colonized that left his/her native country to live at the ‘Centre’. In comparison with the “new citizen,” who remained in his/her place of origin as witness of or participant in the nation-building process, or the “son of the immigrant,” who was born into and absorbed by the culture of the ‘Centre’, the “immigrant” remains trapped between two cultures in the most substantial and tangible way.5 Memmi’s model and its terminology are to a certain extent outdated and disputable, but their core notion still prove helpful in the 3 Ashcroft, Griffith & Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, cover. For a more detailed critical assessment of the title and the volume as a whole, see Vijay Mishra & Bob Hodge, “What is post(-)colonialism?,” Textual Practice 5.3 (Winter 1991): 399–414. 4 All binaries bear problems, and dualism such the Centre and the Periphery, the West and the East form no exception. A number of case studies in this volume indeed expose the ‘West’ as the rather relative point of reference that it is, no geographical constant but determined by changing positions and perspectives. 5 Albert Memmi developed these categories, ‘le nouveau citoyen’ (the new citizen), ‘l‘immigré’ (the immigrant), and ‘le fils de l’immigré’ (the son of the immigrant) in The Colonizer and the Colonized, intro. Jean–Paul Sartre, tr. Howard Greenfield (Portrait du colonisé précédé du portrait du colonisateur, 1957; tr. Boston M A : Beacon, 1969). The binary distinction of the Centre (equated with ‘the West’) and the Periphery (the rest of the world?) is a simplification rightfully criticized by many; the terms are applied here in direct reference to the contemporary debates and for the sake of clarity of the specific argument only.

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effort to position the present collection and its objectives in relation to the main currents of postcolonial studies. When, during the 1950s, Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon were among the first to raise their voices vehemently, they did so by “writing from within the centre as a critic of it” – in French, the language of their former colonizers.6 And, like Salman Rushdie about thirty years later, they wrote back to the ‘Centre’ as the ‘immigrant’ who took colonial reality and its legacy back to the ‘Centre’.7 It was ‘immigrant’ intellectuals – writers and theorists like Fanon, Memmi, Rushdie, but also Edward Said and Homi Bhabha – who opened up the most focal avenues to a new understanding of the postcolonial condition. It does not matter here whether they celebrate or condemn the immigrant’s position (‘getting the best of both worlds’ vs. ‘falling between two chairs’); in one way or another they all point to the cultural dislocation and the quasiimpossibility of ‘postcolonial’ authenticity, theorizing spaces ‘in-between’, and forms of hybridity. It is beyond doubt that they speak out of experience, having themselves endured forms of alienation and conflict, something that does lend full authenticity to their voices, but their perspective does not transcend the specific perspective of the intellectual and elite ‘immigrant’ with a cultural and educational background of Western orientation. Some vague awareness of this limitation transpires from Rushdie’s assertion that the ‘immigrant’ “is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.”8 It is evident that among these ‘fragments lost’ are the appreciation of and communication with the ‘new citizen’, hence constructive awareness of indigenous forms of expression in the indigenous languages. One might, however, even suspect that those have never been part of the immigrant’s mirror, broken or not. It is certainly not the intention here to diminish the merits of those immensely influential writers and theorists or their works; on the contrary, they provided the very foundation for postcolonial criticism and helped induce the deconstruction of Western hegemonic paradigms. This collection of essays would perhaps not even have come into existence without their thought-provoking theorems, which also echo throughout the book. On the level of theory, Said’s provocative criticism of Western ‘readings’ 6

Mishra & Hodge, “What is post(-)colonialism?,” 400 (quotation refers to Salam Rushdie). I am leaning on Rushdie’s notion of ‘the immigrant’ re-importing the Empire to the Centre as depicted in “The New Empire Within Britain,” in Salmon Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta / Viking Penguin, 1991): 129–38. 8 Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 11. 7

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of non-Western cultures or Bhabha’s constant, wise endeavour to deconstruct the predominant dualism of binary thinking so essential to the securing of Western hegemony provided postcolonial discourse with the most valuable tools and opened up novel perspectives on processes of cultural appropriation. Their works evoked new questions, inviting, among others, a re-assessment of predominant binary distinctions such as Occident/Orient, West/East, Centre/Periphery, or Self/Other. Hence, Rushdie’s overall appraisal that the “broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed” can fully be subscribed to when measured by the great impact that these ‘immigrant thinkers’ exerted on Western discourses.9 However, it cannot pass unnoticed that to substantiate their theories those scholars (like most theorists in these and related disciplines) tend to turn to literature written exclusively in the languages of the (former) colonizers.10 Deliberating on the mirror-notion frequently employed in the field of literature, other questions arise as a logical consequence, questioning the adequacy of the image itself: Is there any such thing as an intact mirror? If so, where to find it? What would it reflect? Does not the reflection of a mirror always produce a distorted (even reversed) picture – and is clean perception at all possible? The mirror-image reduces literature to a mere reflection of reality, not acknowledging the complex phenomenon that it constitutes, a multifaceted process rather than an evident product. Striving to integrate new perspectives into the prevalent and inevitably fractional picture of postcolonial literature, this collection of essays deliberately neglects the perspective of “the immigrant” in order to turn to “the new citizen” (using Memmi’s categories one more time). Consequently, the essays presented here all focus on forms of cultural articulation produced by non-Western cultural agents in a ‘native’ language and in the historical, 9

Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 11. Almost symptomatically, publications specifically in the field of (post)colonial literature focus on literatures written in the language of the former colonizers. The conference volume Colonizer and Colonized, ed. Theo D’haen & Patricia Krüs (Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000), is only one example among many to illustrate this glaring misproportion; only three out of 48 contributions deal with literature / film produced in a non-Western language. The last decade, however, has seen a small number of publications that concentrate on non-Western forms of cultural / artistic articulation in non-Western languages; among them, in Dutch, Weer-werk: Schrijven en terugschrijven in koloniale en postkoloniale literaturen (Work of resistance: writing and writing back in colonial and postcolonial literatures), ed. Theo D’haen (Semaian 15; Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië, 1996), and Foulcher & Day, Clearing a Space, on Indonesian postcolonial literature and theatre. 10

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socio-political, and cultural context of their ‘native’ country.11 With a broad comparative approach, this collection aims to open up insights into intercultural and intra-cultural discourses relevant to the postcolonial situation that, to date, have not been paid due attention.

Literature and Chewing Over the West Literature in its broadest sense played a significant role in the construction of individual, cultural, and national identities. It was a vital element in the social and cultural processes that are generally subsumed under the terms ‘decolonization’ and ‘postcolonialism/postcoloniality’. Modern literatures all over the world developed under the impact of two competing tendencies: the demands of newly emerging nation-states on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the paradigms of Western modernity and globalization that ignore and even negate territorial and civilizational boundaries. It can be argued (simultaneously contesting Huntington’s notion of clashing civilizations) that there are no clear-cut cultural or civilizational borders but that they are, as part and parcel of hegemonic discourses, negotiable, constantly shifting, and thus obscure.12 In the course of such processes of negotiation and demarcation, the ‘civilizations’ involved developed sets of beliefs and ideas delineating the Other. Not only did the ‘Occident’ construct the ‘Orient’, as Said would put it; the ‘Orient’, too – in fact, most regions and cultures exposed to the Western striving for power and dominance – composed their own sets of beliefs and ideas that were to mark off the ‘Occident’ or West, or whatever other Other challenged the self-understanding 11 It might appear as an ironical stroke of scholarly fate that this volume has found the kind interest of Rodopi and is now published in the framework of a series that focuses on ‘postcolonial literatures in English’, clearly indicating the desideratum of a forum for comparative literary studies in non-Western literatures and languages. 12 Taking up Wallerstein’s position that “the concept of civilizations (plural) arose as a defence against the ravages of civilization (singular),” Johann P. Arnason contends that “civilization in the singular was an ideological projection of the capitalist world system and its expansionist dynamic; the plural version of the concept is therefore best understood as an empowering device designed to boost peripheral resistance to the systematic centre by contesting the cultural hegemony of the latter”; Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003): 7–8. Revisiting the paradigms of multiple modernities and civilizations in this context can provide an additional tool enabling the emphasis to be shifted from the ever-domineering ‘Western Self’ to the selfarticulate ‘non-Western Other’, deconstructing the seemingly undisputable demarcation-lines defined through Western ‘modernity’ and ‘civilization’.

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and representation of the articulating Self.13 Owing to the actual power relation, the latter did not have the determining and devastating effect on the former. But especially after 9/11, obtaining a better understanding of those perception grids on all sides has become crucial. On this plane of cultural awareness, both the actual and the imagined interaction among the various sides found a unique form of articulation; here literature anticipated, communicated, questioned, and developed ideas and values, engaging old and new narratives. Since Hayden White, the concept of narratives as a decisive means of communicating the past (and thereby the present) has long found broad acknowledgment. All the more astounding, then, that in the discourse on (post)colonial intercultural encounters and the literatures involved in them, the specific scholarly expertise and its presentation should hitherto have been so scarce. As shown above, the interrelation between decolonization, nation-building, identity, and narration has been studied predominantly from the perspective of writing in the language of the former colonizers. While the (post)colonial literatures in English or French have succeeded in attracting due scholarly and public attention, the literatures in indigenous languages and their role in constituting national and cultural identities are generally marginalized, if not altogether ignored. Any text analysis is condemned to operate within a closed frame, missing the “open-ended plenitude of meanings connecting unpredictability with other meanings and texts.”14 An attempt can be made, however, to broaden that frame of reference, as Mishra and Hodge demonstrate with their critique of The Empire Writes Back: “For the authors of E W B (The Empire Writes Back), once the context of a text is understood, there is nothing terribly difficult about a Sanskrit compound or a hidden cultural text which might require specialized knowledge to identify.”15 Taking as their example the Indian song of Gibreel quoted in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and discussed in The Empire Writes Back, Mishra and Hodge demonstrate with acuity how postcolonial readings of non-Western texts are destined to miss fundamental layers of cultural information when the (at least twofold) linguistic and cultural competence is lacking:

13

This volume also aspires to show that, provided the Western bias commonly attached is abandoned, the terms ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ can still be of good service within a critical approach to postcolonial literatures. 14 Mishra & Hodge, “What is post(-)colonialism?,” 403. 15 “What is post(-)colonialism?,” 403.

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The fact that beneath the song is an entire text of Bombay Cinema which, to the bilingual reader, would recall, more specifically, Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 (1955) is knowledge that E W B must either ignore or relegate to the level of spurious or unnecessary footnote. This supplementarity, however, even in terms of E W B ’s own design, is counter-discursive in a radically different fashion. The supplement, the anecdotal invasion or culture-specific power, is, however, a form of intervention that questions […] the very adequacy of a theory of the centre and its periphery.16

With its challenging diversity in geographic focus and methodological approach, Chewing Over the West outlines the discursive dynamics of nonWestern literatures and, against the backdrop of the postcolonial situation, maps out their cultural, artistic, and intellectual spaces. Acceding to the premise that postcoloniality does not begin with the date of declared or obtained independence but that it can even be at work in societies that have not even been officially colonized, the majority of essays presented here reveal “subaltern discourses that shadow colonial paradigms at all historical stages of the colonial experience” and “discursive formations that are ideologically, not temporally, constituted.”17 But it is not the relevance of literature within the framework of decolonization and postcoloniality only that this volume wishes to underline; it also gives emphasis to the agency of the indigenous individual in the process of shaping a (post)modern identity while already being confronted with the even more opaque phenomenon of globalization. In some circles, the conviction still prevails that Western literature, as part and parcel of Western education, came to the non-Western societies as a generous but politically meaningless gift from Western civilization. Being widely underestimated agents of cultural, political, and narrative potency, non-Western literatures have been utilizing Western forms and narratives creatively for their own purposes. That by no means reduces the non-Western cultures in question to mere passive or subordinate recipients; on the contrary, they actively responded to and acted on the impact of the ‘Other’ culture. In a process of interaction and negotiation, non-Western literatures selected, rejected, remodelled, and functionalized Western forms and concepts in order to make them serve indigenous discourses. In the process of this interaction, boundaries were crossed and demarcation-lines shifted, not always along unequivocal political, social, or 16

Mishra & Hodge, “What is post(-)colonialism?,” 403. Keith Foulcher, “In Search of the Postcolonial in Indonesian Literature,” Sojourn 10.2 (1995): 151. 17

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cultural classifications. Many of the hybridized forms springing from these processes helped configure real and utopian identities and contributed remarkably to the self-definition of individuals, groups, and even nations. Scrutinizing the processes of selection, appropriation, and utilization of Western literary or linguistic elements which were ‘chewed over’ with feelings of ambiguity, suspicion, and even disdain, but also with curiosity, fascination, and enthusiasm, the findings presented here give testimony to a fascinating scope of creative ‘responses’ to imported thought and discourse. The essays provide and analyze tangible data that not only encourage genuinely intercultural comparisons but also allow for hitherto unheard voices to sound. (Semi)colonialism and postcoloniality are not manifested as a single, universal form of experience and are hence presented as diverse literary expressions and often ambivalent and contradictory voices. At the same time, unexpected parallels invite further examination. Overarching models and methods for accommodating the hybridity of non-Western literatures that flourished in the tense but stimulating cultural framework of postcoloniality, nation-building, and constitution of new subjectivities are desiderata yet difficult to develop systematically, for research data are still scarce. Some initial tentative sketches, however, are tested throughout this volume, though its chief objective is to draw attention to the neglected documents of postcolonial cultural appropriation of Western thought as preserved in diverse indigenous literatures. The case studies compiled here thus share a focus on non-Western texts which, inspired or provoked by Western literature in one way or the other, evince an active response to the impact of the modern Western world. They all adjusted modern Western concepts of narration and thought in order either to contest the same or to incorporate them into their own culture, sometimes, even, as a means of opposing a third party. Looking at examples of Asian, African, and Arab literature, the individual essays shed light on a variety of appropriative strategies in which the Western models have been ‘chewed over’ within the various local contexts. In speaking in terms of metaphoric chewing and digesting as suggested by the title of this collection, one may say that each article follows a specific ‘Western’ model (i.e. a text, a genre, or a type of character) like the blip on an x-ray screen on its journey through the ‘organism’ of the non-Western Other.18 It is the 18

I owe the ‘blip on an x-ray’ image to Tony Day, whose insightful comments during a workshop in preparation for this volume were very inspiring to all the participants. As an image for the Centre culturally ‘eating’ the Periphery, anthropophagy has found entry into a

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indigenous response to this ‘alien element’ in its system that forms the core of all the essays presented here. Perceived as the monitored alien element, the Western element actually becomes the Other, and the eurocentric perspective commonly encapsulated in the binary of Self and Other as widely used in the postcolonial context is reversed. On its journey through the various bodies of literature, the Western element emerges in different places at different times, sometimes disturbing the host system, sometimes strengthening it, but always provoking and intensifying its self-perception and articulation. The case studies presented in this volume depict the various tactics employed in the encounter with the foreign ‘nutrition’ and mark both differences and similarities in this process of ‘chewing and digesting’. The entrenched metaphoric meaning of the image accentuates the premise that identity is constituted as much by exclusion as it is by integration of elements of the Other, blurring the subject’s boundaries and thus undermining the dualistic distinction of Self and Other as it is still commonly employed within the postcolonial context; in the end, the Other is always a constituent of the Self. It is a sad fact that it takes much more than good will and well-meant encouragement for scholars in non-Western regions to enter the arena of international (global?) discourse. Our endeavour to have more contributions from ‘new-citizen’ scholars from the regions in question was not rewarded with success. We are aware of the burdensome legacy of colonialism perpetuated by the various Western ‘-isms’ that still monopolize knowledge and the definition of it – and that do not even shy away from defining the Other’s culture on its own behalf. Pragmatic reasons such as the lack of financial resources, obstructive travel regulations, or hampered access to source-material prevent many keen and capable scholars from conducting this or any kind of research. The few scholars, who, despite all obstructions, do pursue that goal successfully are subsequently confronted with the diffinumber of postcolonial statements and studies, perhaps the most famous of which being that tendered by Oswald de Andrade in “Anthropophagite Manifesto,” Revista de Antropofagio 1.1 (May 1928). In its reverse form, the metaphor of eating the Other’s culture (encompassing possible consequences like poisoning) is quite frequently found in, for instance, Malay literature; the following being only one typical example among hundreds: “Everything that comes from the West is considered good. We do not examine it with due scrutiny but swallow (it) raw without thinking first” (“Segala-gala jang datang dari Barat sadjalah jang dianggap baik. Kita tidak menjisihkan lebih teliti, melainkan menelan mentah2, dengan tidak berfikir”; Abdul Wahuh, “Mentjipta Keboedajaan Indonesia Raya,” in Pedoman Masjarakat 45/46 (8– 15 November 1939): 909.

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cult question of how to make the results of their work known to a broader public.19 Publishing in general, and translation into the common language of scholarship, English, in particular, is hindered by manifold obstacles. Notwithstanding the almost inevitable entanglement of this volume in the matrix of Western epistemology, we very much wish to encourage nonWestern scholars in non-Western countries – the ‘new citizens’ – to partake more vigorously in the debate.

The Essays The fourteen contributions presented here scrutinize the Western impact on non-Western literatures targeting various literary milieux and covering different sorts of literary texts ranging from so-called ‘high’ literature to popular fiction, from drama to ethnographic writing. The essays illustrate the sometimes violent, sometimes subtle conflict that indigenous writers and intellectuals in colonized, semi-colonized, and formerly colonized cultures were facing after the West had burst into their lives with the aim of taking control of their homelands and their minds. The Other’s culture was experienced as malady and remedy at once; and this colonial legacy still lingers on. Western skills were admired and desired; values and concepts such as rationality or individuality were celebrated. At the same time, these very values and concepts were despised as a threat to everything that was familiar. In the opening essay, on postcolonial Arabic writing, R A S H E E D E L E N A N Y impressively depicts this ambivalence as one characteristic feature of Arab perceptions of the West. El-Enany goes back to the first encounter between Arabs and modern Europe in 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt. Discussing the annals of the chronicler Al-Jabarti, he delineates the dilemma that Egyptian intellectuals were confronted with, realizing as they did that Napoleon’s rule brought not only foreign domination but also modernity, its science and inventions, sophisticated administration, and civil rights for the people. Accordingly, their writings on the East–West encounter are marked by a deep tension springing from the recognition of the Western Other as the very foil against which they had to define the Self. The conflict prompted them to denigrate the materialism of the West while 19

In Indonesia and Malaysia, the regions of my expertise, publications like Identitas dan Postkolonialitas di Indonesia (Identity and Postcoloniality in Indonesia), ed. S.J. Budi Susanto (Yogyakarta: Kanisius, 2003), are unfortunately still very rare and clearly dependent on the stimulus (and financial support?) of ‘the West’, in this case the U S A .

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glorifying the spirituality of the East, but the ambivalence of rejection and admiration always remained discernible and would sometimes even coalesce in one person. Throughout history, under French and British rule and with the struggle for independence at its height and into the twentieth century, Arab writers constantly faced the paradoxical situation that liberation from Western dominance meant partial internalization of Western thought. The conundrum of the colonial condition as depicted above has been present in all the regions under discussion in this volume. Often enough, the conflict was blocked off but then resurfaced in a vital artistic production. The need to modernize, however, was clearly felt, certainly in intellectual circles, inevitably leading to the question of how to leave tradition behind without blindly emulating the West. In this volume, the Self and the Other do not emerge as the static components of intercultural relation that the hegemonic debates on (post)colonialism tend to see in them. Rather, they stand as productive variables, also acknowledging the constructive potential generated by the tension between them, a tension in some cases spurred by a third element identified by Arnason as the “internal other par excellence”: It is true that the early nineteenth century saw the rise of an exclusive and domineering Eurocentrism; at the same time, however, the affirmative selfimage of the ascendant West was challenged from within and confronted with visions of possible alternatives that would build on the achievements of existing Western societies. This future-oriented project was the internal other par excellence, and its interaction with more external versions of otherness is central to the problematic.20

A case in point – the Malay short stories inspired by Western Marxism during the 1920s. In his essay, K E I T H F O U L C H E R reveals a seldom considered facet of (post)coloniality. He draws attention to a literature whose producers and recipients did not (yet) perceive the colonial situation as an impasse or even as a threat to their very own subjectivity. On the contrary, for those who experienced a period when cultural demarcation-lines did not always correspond to political ones, certain aspects of colonial life opened up enthralling insights and perspectives. In the early twentieth century, colonial policy in the Dutch East Indies took a momentarily progressive turn. The liberal climate encouraged a small group of progressive Dutch to envision a synthesis of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and to unite with like-minded 20

Arnason, Civilization in Dispute, 331.

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members of the indigenous aristocracy under the label of ‘association’. This ‘associationist’ brand of enlightened colonial modernity found cautious expression in Dutch-language literature written by indigenous writers. Forcefully challenging the progressive liberalism of the associationists, a vernacular literature emerged around the same time. It was also born of the encounter between ‘East’ and ‘West’ but championed a quite different model of modernity, one drawing on the Western “internal other par excellence” – Marxism, a world-view that found increasing resonance in the Dutch East Indies. This literature was written in the lingua franca of Malay and employed indigenous narrative traditions to convey its message. In his analysis, Foulcher gives a fascinating picture of a movement and its literature that were outspokenly anti-capitalist but not yet anti-imperialist, that saw ‘the West’ not yet as a cultural and political antagonist but pursued the vision of a shared humanity. The West was not yet defined as the Other per se. The dilemma of experiencing the West as ‘malady and remedy’ in one was not yet a concern of this literature; Western culture was not threatening but magnetic, particularly Western technology. In the protected space of literature, the playful invention of new cultural and national identities could blossom. After the failed communist upheavals in 1926–27 and the subsequent phase of strict law-and-order policy, this radical but vibrant vernacular literature was condemned to sink into oblivion. In E V A N M W A N G I ’s essay, Marxism left its marks only obliquely. First, it can be traced in Mwangi’s critical reassessment of one of the most influential African intellectuals, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who, a Marxist and novelist, playwright, political activist and cultural theorist in one, proclaimed that the abandoning of the English language was an essential prerequisite for the true liberation from the legacy of colonial domination. Secondly, Mwangi’s general approach concurs with Marx’s tenet that oppression always encapsulates a liberating force. Mwangi argues that the anthropophagic appropriation of the oppressor’s language and culture, here English, and its hybrid outcome has grown into a genuine and thus valuable constituent of Kenya’s culturescape. In its very own way, Mwangi’s essay confirms Rushdie’s observation “that those peoples who were once colonized by the language (English) are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way to use it,” concluding that “the English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time

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ago.”21 But this credo carries the air of apologetic rationalization for a much too eager adoption of the Empire’s language as first language. Mwangi’s essay, on the other hand, presents a wide range of examples from Kenyan arts and literature in order to analyze, first, in what ways exactly the English language was ‘remade‘ and ‘domesticated’, or, to use the leading motif of this volume, how it was ‘chewed over’, in big chunks or small bites, to be eventually absorbed into Kenya’s vernaculars, where it entered all social layers as a productive, sometimes even strengthening stimulant.22 By way of creatively absorbing elements of the colonizer’s language and culture into vernacular children’s songs, tales, novels, and anti-English critical essay writing, local languages developed into the prime medium for talking, singing, and writing back to the former colonizers. Adding a new dimension to Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry and also challenging Said’s notion of a postcolonial nation, Mwangi makes it quite clear that the anthropophagic intertextuality of Kenyan texts neither diminishes nor hampers Kenyanness, nor does it celebrate fragmented authenticity – and it is certainly not tantamount to submission to the West. Providing data and first-hand observations from within the culture of Burma, U W I N P E ’s essay encompasses information and perspectives that contributes remarkably to the comparative exercise taken on in this volume. Choosing a straightforward, mostly chronological style of presentation, U Win Pe’s essay uniquely links up a number of pivotal issues that recur in the specific regional contexts of the subsequent essays in this volume. Portraying the changing reception of Western literature and theatre in Burma throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U Win Pe gives a vivid picture of an Asian society in motion. The role of individual mediators in the progress of ‘chewing over’ Western models and the ongoing negotiation between mediators and recipients are vital aspects brought to the fore in this article. As was the case in Siam/Thailand (see Rachel Harrison’s essay), the role of mediator was to a crucial degree taken by high representatives of the royal court. Furthermore, U Win Pe depicts how Western genres like the novel, but also the modern theatre play and the short story, were adopted and transformed in such a way that generic concepts could no longer uphold a claim to universalism. He gives numerous examples of 21

Quoted from Salman Rushdie, “ ‘ Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist” (1983), in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta / Viking Penguin, 1991): 64. 22 See also Rushdie, “ ‘ Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist,” 70.

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textual appropriation of Western models that capture masterly all the ambiguity intrinsic to translation/adaptation. In his essay, U Win Pe anticipates a crucial conclusion to be confirmed and substantiated by the subsequent essays: when applied in the context of non-Western literature and theatre, a re-evaluation of Western genre concepts and notions of originality and copy is inevitable. Amina Azza–Bekkat, Saddik Gohar, and Ursula Lies focus in their contributions on examples of purposeful and directed ‘writing back’. In all three cases, the Western element is employed to serve the decolonizing process, albeit introduced within varied political and cultural constellations and with different degrees of directness and obliquity. This form of ‘writing back and against’, exercised in Arabic and Vietnamese, constitutes a deliberate act of protest aimed at the oppressor, but only in the case of Algeria is the oppressor a Western colonial power. In the first part of her essay, A M I N A A Z Z A – B E K K A T discusses the appropriation of foreign cultural elements as a principle part of Algerian cultural life and points out that hybridity has at all times been found not only in prose but also in oral forms of narration, in theatre presentations, poems, and songs composed in Arabic and Tamazight. In the second part, the author illustrates with selected prose examples how the French and allegedly ‘superior’ text-culture was being ‘chewed’ by the non-Western culture – to be ‘spit’ mockingly in the face of the (ex-)colonizer. Designed as contrapuntal pieces, prose texts of both the francophone and indigenous literatures of Algeria responded to the colonial oppressors by intentionally inverting crucial expressions of the colonizers’ culture. Central to Azza–Bekkat ‘s argument is the novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus, perhaps the most famous French novel to have nurtured such contrapuntal creativity. The central scene of the white protagonist killing an Arab man on a beach near Algiers reverberates in many novels by Algerian writers, among them Kateb Yacine, Mohamed Dib, and Rachid Boudjedra. With her discussion of some of their novels, Azza–Bekkat illustrates vividly how indigenous writers, by wittily modifying Western elements, turned their novels into weapons to contest, in a non-violent manner, aggression and intolerable violence. Violence and aggression also assume a prominent place in the Arabic poetry studied by S A D D I K G O H A R . While the influence of T.S. Eliot on literary themes and narrative technique in Arabic poetry has been widely researched in relation to the pre-Second World War generation of poets, it has passed almost unnoticed in the study of more recent poetry. Saddik’s

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essay fills this gap. He unravels how Eliot’s works, first and foremost The Waste Land, provided a rich source of inspiration for Al-Nawwab, as reflected in his collection Watariyyat Layliyya (Night lyrics, 1985). Employing Eliot’s modernist discourse but also his concept of tradition and poetic techniques, Al-Nawwab revises Islamic narratives in order to expose the corruptness, decadence, and despotism that, according to the poet, rulers in the present Arab world indulge in. Formulating unveiled criticism and not shying away from using obscene language, Al-Nawwab’s transformation of Eliot’s narrative devices and strategies deviates from Eliot’s moral order; it serves a clear political end. Unlike the preceding generation of Arabic poets, Al-Nawwab no longer emulates the Western model but seeks dialogue with it; a dialogue that bears the same ambiguous attitude towards Western culture as that described in El-Enany’s essay in this volume. Again, the ambiguity proves to be productive, also in the sense that the writing-back, autobiographically tinted, concerns itself only marginally with ‘the West’; the target is the Arabic rulers and the ideological structures that paralyze the people, preventing them from overcoming the political and cultural stagnation. Many non-Western political, cultural, and literary movements adopted Western elements in the course of their struggle for liberation from their own regimes or an external non-Western power, and, almost as a rule, the Western elements adopted were miraculously ‘skinned’ of all their negative attributions when ‘chewed over’ – as if they were consumed as an appreciated delicacy. Such silent shifts in connotation as can be seen in Al-Nawwab’s works also figure centrally in the essay by U R S U L A L I E S on Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name (Tieu thuyet vo de, 1991). Despite the fact that the novel has been banned in Vietnam since its publication, Novel Without a Name is widely read. Refusing to take the official but simplifying view, this novel can be considered the first anti-heroic novel written in the Vietnamese language that dares to take a critical and differentiating stance on war in general and the Vietnam War in particular. As a source of inspiration for her novel, Duong Thu Huong names Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues, 1928). Presenting exclusive interview material in combination with a thorough comparative text analysis, Ursula Lies opens up this Vietnamese appropriation of the famous German novel for a broader interpretation. Lies not only finds striking parallels in content and form between the two novels in question, but she also unfolds the intercalation of prose fiction and bio-

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graphy in both these cases. But most importantly, she draws attention to a form of writing-back that is directed at an internal power. Lies shows how Duong Thu Huong adapted Remarque’s story not only with the intention of emphasizing the cruelty of the Vietnam war (and war in general) but simultaneously to criticize the Vietnamese regime for propagating a distorted, one-sidedly glorifying picture of that war; a picture that presents the Vietnamese as triumphant war heroes, while the terrible loss and civil suffering on all sides, including the American, are concealed. This critical novel, first published in Vietnamese in the U S A and translated into, among other languages, French, English, German, Japanese, and Dutch, made its author a celebrity and an outcast in her own country. The next three essays draw attention to the culturally self-reflective function of writing, rather than enunciating the immediate indigenous response to the West or any other dominating power. All three case studies illustrate the transformation of certain Western narrative modes into a flexible instrument for critical self-reflection on the part of those exposed to and coerced by Western influences. In contrast to the essays by Azza–Bekkat, Saddik, and Lies, it is thus not the unconcealed writing-back to the Other but, rather, the disguised (sometimes unaware?) writing to a new Self that characterizes these cases. D A N I E L A M E R O L L A ’s essay on Berber writing, like those of Saddik and Lies, centres on the autobiographic element in the appropriation process, exemplified by the life of the Berber (Kabyle) writer Belaïd Ait Ali, who, while working as an informant for the French colonial power during the 1940s, began to use Western ethnographic writing to reflect on his own individuality and the uniqueness of his culture. He started re-writing tales and creating short stories of his own, incorporating core features of the genres of autobiography and ethnography, the latter a type of writing designed to serve the colonizer by objectifying and classifying the colonized in order to permit a certain degree of controllability. By autobiographically importing his Self into the text, he not only remodelled the genre of ethnographic writing but also subverted it, to the extent of turning it into a medium of expression for both the de-colonizing individual and the reemerging cultural Self of his people. In his writings, Aid Ali gradually displaces the French ethnographer and voices his own concept of a modern identity and ‘Kabylness’ instead. The above process of acquisition and inversion of a Western mode of writing, and hence world of thought, resulted in a number of remarkable publications in the Kabyle language Tamazight,

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manifestations of cultural articulation that have strengthened the Berbers in their still ongoing struggle for recognition of their language and culture. T H O M A S D E B R U I J N and G U Z E L S T R E L K O V A both investigate the critical, sometimes playful exploration of Western narrative conventions from a different angle: namely, with a focus on the aesthetics of novelwriting in modern Hindi. Modern Indian literature emerged, like the majority of modern literatures discussed in this volume, under colonial rule. In its early years, Indian literature in general was very much determined by political discourses, the moral and ideological components of which fictional characters were given the task of conveying. After Independence, it was Hindi literature that first moved away from the moralist stance and introduced more realistic styles of writing, also allowing for individualized psychological insights. At first sight, the adopted Western form of the novel would appear to reflect the message: modernization and individualization. However, first impressions can be deceptive, as De Bruijn and Strelkova both prove in their close analyzes of selected indigenous texts. The modern Hindi novel in its hybridized form manifests the tension and symbiotic coexistence that simultaneously links and divides all of the modern and traditional worlds involved. Inherent in the ostensibly westernized texts are camouflaged layers of indigenous traditional meaning that could easily escape a purely Western reading – a phenomenon also encountered in other literatures, as this collection of essays documents, but submitted to close scrutiny by De Bruijn and Strelkova in their case studies of Hindi novels from the 1930s to the 1960s. ‘Misled’ by the Western form, the (Western) reader expects a typical novelistic character in the Western sense. But characters in Indian and other Asian novels and short stories are defined and determined primarily by their actions and their social context rather than by their inner urges and personality traits. De Bruijn stresses the fact that to dismiss this feature as flawed literary characterization is engage in grave misapprehension, for the Indian author has at his/her disposal a myriad means of making a character come alive for his/her audience. These tools, however, rely heavily on the use of language and cultural signs that are unproductive for a foreign reader used to Western modes of characterization and lacking the specific cultural and linguistic competence. Looking at another selection of postcolonial Hindi novels, G U Z E L S T R E L K O V A brings the gender aspect into the picture when extracting the image of the modern Indian woman that was emerging during the 1920s. She convincingly argues that this new heroine owes most of her features to

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Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, but points out that female protagonists of Russian literature also contributed to this male re-definition of womanhood and femininity; rather than perceiving Western Europe or U S A as the West, many Indian writers indeed turned to Russia as ‘the West’. The interpretative frame of the new heroines tallies with the ideology and artistic intentions of their male creators. The new female protagonist is associated with a westernized life-style, often reproducing the cliché of a modern Western woman as imagined by male-dominated Hindi society. Remarkably, female (economic) independence is no longer equated with infidelity. Juxtaposing the modern heroine with the traditional Indian woman, most of the Indian writers under discussion persuade their readers that the new heroine is only seemingly Western, that she, in fact, is even the ideal prototype of the modern Indian woman. The apparently independent behaviour of the heroine, however, can only flourish under the guidance of an educated male figure (a husband, father, or enlightened progressive guru). The male hero wisely understands that female independence forms a crucial prerequisite for creating the modern citizen, equipped to live up to demands of the new epoch of modernity. Texts have been travelling back and forth between print media and stage, and many Western texts found their way into non-Western cultures by way of theatre adaptations: an assertion evidenced by Matthew Cohen and Anna Suvorova, who provide abundant proof in their essays for such textual flow between the media. Their discussion relates to the negotiation of form and aesthetics as discussed in the foregoing essays but focuses on the issues of mimicry and authenticity when they mark the ways in which the Western element, again bare of all negative connotations, functioned as a catalyst in the process of defining a national aesthetic incorporating traditional ‘structures of feeling’ (Raymond Williams). A N N A S U V O R O V A presents a complex case of cultural self-recognition through the Western Other, delineating the process in which the Indian Naya drama (new drama) appropriated Western models that consequently helped, in a roundabout way, to revive the aesthetic conventions of age-old autochthonous folk and ritual drama. As described for Indian literature earlier on, the character and objectives of Indian theatre, too, underwent major changes after Independence; blind imitation of Western models was replaced by resurrected national aesthetics – albeit still with the help of devices and ideas coming from the West. The new theatre generation no longer conceived of theatre primarily as a mere source of profit but valued

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it as a means of creative expression. A result of this shift was the naya drama of the 1960s and 1970s and theatre plays in the vernaculars – for instance, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Hindi, and Gujarati. Both the dramatic form and the technique of the naya drama reveal the influence of modern and experimental Western styles. Inspiration was drawn from concepts such as psychological symbolism (Strindberg, Ibsen), the alienation effect or Verfremdungseffekt (Brecht), Chekhov’s polyphony, Sartre’s inner soliloquy, and existential alienation (Camus, Pirandello); Brecht even advanced to the status of one of India’s most celebrated theatre figures during this period. Exploring themes concerning human alienation, the naya drama was also discussed in terms of Indian existentialism. Authentic and complete translations of Western authors had made the new concepts accessible in Indian vernaculars. But, Suvorova argues, however omnipresent the Western element, it was but a bridge leading to a renewed Indian theatre fostering a strong affinity for traditional aesthetics. While the majority of Western texts transformed by the Indian naya drama can be subsumed under the category conventionally labelled ‘highbrow literature’, the Malay komedie stamboel investigated by M A T T H E W C O H E N tended to adapt anything – from the West and East – that could possibly be transformed to entertain a Malay-speaking audience. This popular hybrid musical theatre emerged in the Dutch East Indies in 1891. Employing archive material and press publications of the time, Cohen skilfully links the ample details from colourful stage life to the broader framework of interethnic cultural communication within and beyond the theatre world. He impressively illustrates the various levels on which komedie stamboel touched on and affected the Lebenswelt of its urban spectators. A site of hegemonic struggle, the komedie stamboel was appreciated by Eurasian and Malay critics as a valuable cultural novelty, whereas Dutch critics denounced it as contemptible mimicry of European originals. On an individual level, this early modern theatre offered both the actor and the spectator the space to create new identities beyond the constraints of social order, dress code, or conduct; a freedom that sometimes took its toll in the form of fistfights, injuries, and arrests. In alliance with the interactive situation of the actual performance, the imaginative identities as constituted through acting – the ultimate embodiment of an Other and invention of individual and collective Selves – encouraged both performer and audience to envisage community in novel designs. More than this, the Western

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element in particular invited everyone to reposition Self and Other on a global scale. The two closing essays take as their point of departure the emblematic character of the mastermind Sherlock Holmes, who gave primal impetus to the new genre of detective and crime fiction, not only within his own cultural context but also in many Asian and African countries. Despite its uncompromising mission to defend and restore the hegemonic order, Western detective fiction, remarkably enough, provided a unique and efficient medium in the decolonization process for playfully fantasizing about the strong modern subject and the independent nation – in defiance of the Western powers. In colonial Indonesia and Burma, but also in the semicolonies Siam/Thailand and China, detective fiction came to play an intriguing role in the rapidly changing individual, ethnic, and national selfperception. R A C H E L H A R R I S O N and D O R I S J E D A M S K I show, in their essays, the ways in which the detective in Siam/Thailand and the Dutch East Indies at the beginning of the twentieth century served in the indigenous quest for a self-defined modern and national identity. Simultaneously, the detective impersonates the tension of imaginative and real selves, of utopian and realistic blueprints for selfhood. In the Dutch East Indies, the detective represented a new order still in the making, whereas in Siam/ Thailand he was to defend and strengthen the modified laws of the old order. During his student years in England, Crown Prince Vajiravudh of Siam/ Thailand (crowned King Rama V I in 1910) became strongly attracted to literature and even produced several works of fiction himself. In 1904–05, he published, under a pen-name, fifteen serialized Thai detective stories entitled Nithan Thorng-In (The Tales of Tho’ng In). They featured the detective Tho’ng In and his helper by the name of Mr Wat – not coincidentally, both reminiscent of Holmes and his assistant Watson, as Harrison’s meticulous analytical textual comparison attests. She identifies the stories as intent-loaded adaptations of a number of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was also emulated. Reconstructing the adaptation process in all its intriguing shades, Harrison notes the omission of features as conscientiously as she marks the additions to the Thai version. Transcending the level of textual comparison, she situates this specific case of literary appropriation within a scrupulously researched sociohistorical and political context, elucidating the place that these seemingly innocent adaptations are

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likely to have had in the Crown Prince’s personal political agenda. Harrison unravels four different ways of ‘chewing over’ the Western element of detective stories, all of which display symptoms consistent with a ‘social nervous condition’ or ‘cultural bulimia’.23 As in most other cases presented in this volume, the first and most basic form of the ‘chewing over’ is the actual taking-in of the Western source text by way of translation/adaptation. Secondly, generic features are ‘chewed over’, and it transpires that certain genre markers, such as the detailed portrayal of the detective, were of less importance for Thai readers than isolated and random elements of the content of the crime story – an observation also to be made in the case of colonial Indonesia. At the same time, elements and motives from traditional narratives – for instance, the well-known ghost Naang Naak – find their way into the stories. The third form of ‘chewing-over’ links the Western model directly to the specific Thai social and political reality: the processes of modernization throughout all strata of Thai society, the question of authority, and above all the lingering threat of colonization. On this level, the texts are cunningly deployed in affirmation of the royal court and its assessment of a future affiliation with Western culture and power. The ‘toughest bite’, however, appears to have been the construction of a national Self. While the West, represented by the farang or foreigner, was the Other evidently positioned on the outside, the texts under discussion construct a National Self that additionally rigorously excludes the groups of Vietnamese and Chinese that formed part of Thai society. They were outcast – the ‘Other within’. Jedamski departs from the widely shared assumption that Sherlock Holmes, as the personification of the strong, rational Western subject, fulfils but one task, which is to restore the social, symbolic, and narrative order before the eyes of the reader. In the Malay world of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the literary figure of Sherlock Holmes, the icon of idealized Western modern subjectivity and rationality, was embraced but soon abandoned; the detective, however, remained – in a peculiar hybridized form. Holmes apparently provided the clay used to mould the ideal indigenous model of a strong Self, one that could be both national hero and independent modern individual. He did live on as an icon in advertisements, essays, articles, and illustrations, detached from his own lite23

These expressions were playfully suggested by Harrison herself during the workshop in preparation for this volume.

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rary universe, but it was the indigenous intellectual who took over Holmes’ role as the restorer of order. In the early years and almost as a rule, it was a highly educated Chinese Malay who assumed that role, later sometimes a noble Javanese, while during the late-1930s it was the Islamic-Sumatran nationalist who triumphed in indigenous crime fiction. But what social, symbolic, and narrative order was the indigenous detective expected to be restoring in colonial Indonesia, what order was he supposed to be anticipating, reviving or establishing? Right from the start, the Western lawenforcing detective had to compete with a number of law-breaking and rebellious heroes, also introduced from the West and made accessible through translations into Malay and the vernaculars, among them Monte Cristo, Fantomas, Arsène Lupin, and Rocambole. In a phase of vital literary experimentation, Islamic Malay writers from Sumatra created a blend of both types of popular hero. The result was a Robin Hood-like ‘good bad guy’, the ultimate sleuth, who not only combined within his character the rational law-enforcing detective and the skilful opponent of law and order but who also harvested the fictitious life of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the biography of real-life political leader Tan Malaka, ultimately bringing to life the traditional noble knight, the ksatria. In a celebration of his overwhelming hybridity, this new hero suggests a strong indigenous subject but remains elusive and ambiguous, negating colonial rule first and foremost through his omnipresent invisibility. The essays presented in this volume form but one first step, they do not aim at painting a complete picture. But an ambitious goal will have been achieved if these fourteen essays succeed in indicating to the reader the richness of indigenous literary sources that has for too long been neglected within cultural studies and related disciplines. These sources are far from being exhausted, and many more of them are waiting for the inquiring mind to tap into them. It is therefore to be hoped that the present endeavour, despite its patchwork nature, will stimulate and inspire other researchers to pick up the thread and conduct further research in the field of postcolonial literatures in indigenous languages – both within their own cultural locales and within the broader framework of comparative studies.

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WORKS CITED Andrade, Oswald de. “Anthropophagite Manifesto,” Revista de Antropofagio 1.1 (May 1928). Arnason, Johann P. Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Routledge, 1989). Budi Susanto, S.J., ed. Identitas dan Postkolonialitas di Indonesia (Identity and Postcoloniality in Indonesia) (Yogyakarta: Kanisius, 2003). Chambers, Iain, & Lidia Curti, ed. The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). D’haen, Theo, ed. Weer-werk: Schrijven en terugschrijven in koloniale en postkoloniale literaturen (Work of resistance: writing and writing back in colonial and postcolonial literatures) (Semaian 15; Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië, 1996). ——, & Patricia Krüs, ed. Colonizer and Colonized (Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000). Foulcher, Keith. “In Search of the Postcolonial in Indonesian Literature,” Sojourn 10.2 (1995): 147–171. ——, & Tony Day. “Introduction” to Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, ed. Keith Foulcher & Tony Day (Leiden: K I T L V P , 2002): 1–17. Hall, Stuart, & Paul du Gay. Questions of Cultural Identity (London, Thousand Oaks C A & New Delhi: Sage, 1996). Loomba, Ania. Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London & New York: Rouledge, 1998). Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, intro. Jean–Paul Sartre, tr. Howard Greenfield (Portrait du colonisé précédé du portrait du colonisateur, 1957; tr. Boston M A : Beacon, 1969). Mishra, Vijay, & Bob Hodge, “What is post(-)colonialism?” Textual Practice 5.3 (Winter 1991): 399–414. Rushdie, Salman. “The New Empire Within Britain” (1982), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta / Viking Penguin, 1991): 129–38. ——. “ ‘ Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist” (1983), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta / Viking Penguin, 1991): 61–70. ——. “Imaginary Homelands” (1982), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta / Viking Penguin, 1991): 9–21. Wahuh, Abdul. “Mentjipta Keboedajaan Indonesia Raya,” Pedoman Masjarakat 45/46 (8–15 November 1939): 909.

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Theme and Identity in Postcolonial Arabic Writing1 R ASHEED E L -E NANY

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T W O U L D B E D I F F I C U L T to make sense of modes of writing in Arabic seeking to define the Self in relation to the Other in the postcolonial period, and the changes they have undergone, without first having a taste of how Arab writers approached the theme during the colonial period. In an Arabic context, the two periods form a continuum whose boundaries are not clearly demarcated, and where work produced in the postcolonial period often harks back through stated or implied intertextuality to work produced in the colonial period. Reactions to the invader are not always those of pure horror and rejection; they very much depend on the conditions in which the invaded live, particularly the manner of their government and the extent of oppression they may already be under before the invasion, and the alternative model of government – indeed, the alternative world-view the invader represents. This is not to argue that foreign invasion and rule may be welcome under certain circumstances; it is simply to try and understand the paradoxical nature of some responses to invasion by Arab intellectuals, which were not wholly condemnatory. To begin at the beginning, let us take the Egyptian historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (d.1825), who bestrode the eighteenth 1 In this essay, I have relied on previous publications of mine. These are acknowledged here as follows: Arab Representations of the Occident (London: Routledge, 2006); “The Western Encounter in the Works of Yusuf ldris,” Research in African Literature 28.3 (1997): 33–55; “The Quest for Justice in the Theatre of Alfred Faraj: Different Moulds, One Theme,” Journal of Arabic Literature 31.2 (2000): 171–202; “Tawfiq al-Hakim and the West: A New Assessment of the Relationship,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27.2 (November 2000): 165–75.

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and nineteenth centuries, and on whom we rely for the Egyptian perspective on Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, the first, if short-lived, European act of colonization in the Middle East. Al-Jabarti may have described the French as “devils” or the very “soldiers of Satan,” in his horror at their violation of the Al-Azhar Mosque,2 but this and other descriptions of their brutality in the suppression of Egyptian resistance are doubtless outshone by his detailed accounts of their merits in scientific achievement, and in governance and administration, where in certain parts he can barely contain his admiration. Science and technology apart, there is an account even more revealing of the extent of al-Jabarti’s admiration of the French. By this I mean his account of the assassination of General Kléber, Napoleon’s deputy in Egypt after the latter’s return to France. Kléber was stabbed to death by a Syrian youth, Sulayman al-Halabi, hired by the Ottomans for this purpose. AlJabarti has no words of praise for Sulayman; he does not see him as a mujahid (fighter for the faith), but as an “impetuous rogue.”3 By contrast, he is full of praise for the French, who did not hasten to execute him and the accomplices he informed on, in spite of the compelling evidence, but took their time and arranged for him and all the others to be 2 Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Tarikh Aja’ib al-Athar fi al-Tarajim wa al-Akhbar, vol. II, (Dar Al-Faris: Beirut, n.d.): 220. For a French translation, see C. Mansour et al., Merveilles Biographiques et Historiques du Cheikh Abd el-Rahman el-Jabarti (Cairo: publisher unknown, 1892). 3 Al-Jabarti, Tarikh, 359. For a completely different view of Sulayman of Aleppo and his action, see the eponymous play by the contemporary Egyptian dramatist Alfred Faraj (b.1929), published in 1965 (discussed later). Faraj sees Sulayman al-Halabi as a national hero, and his assassination of Kléber as a legitimate act of resistance against foreign occupation. See also Yahya Haqqi, Dhikrayat Matwiyya (Cairo: Dar Sua’d, al-Sabah, 1993): 161–62. Here, Haqqi narrates how, during his work as an Egyptian diplomat in Paris, he visited ‘the museum of man’, where he saw the skeleton of Sulayman on display as a human murderer. Haqqi is outraged, since he sees Sulayman as a political and not a natural criminal. In his introduction to his own play, Faraj also refers to having seen the head of Sulayman on display at a Parisian museum, labelled as ‘the head of a murderer’. Earlier than both writers and much closer to the time of the event, another Egyptian intellectual had had an encounter with the remains of Sulayman al-Halabi: namely, Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, who mentions coming across ‘part of the body of the late Shaykh Sulayman Al-Halabi’ in the Salle d’anatomie of the Jardin des plantes in Paris. Unlike Jabarti, his tone is sympathetic. He refers to Sulayman as having been martyred (ustishhida) following his killing of General Kléber. See Mahmud Fahmi Hijaz, ’Usul al-Fikr al-Arabi al-Hadith anda al-Tahtawi ma’a al-Nass al-Kamil likitabihi Takhlis al-Ibriz (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1974): 302. The text incorporated in Hijazi’s study is that of the second edition of Tahtawi’s book, first published in 1849.

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tried and sentenced only after being interrogated in all manner, singly and together. He is particularly impressed by the fact that one of those implicated was actually acquitted and released for lack of evidence. He goes on to describe the French as “people who submit to the rule of reason, while holding no religious faith” and contrasts their measured response to the murder of their chief with “the actions of the scum of soldiery, who pretend to be Muslims and claim to be mujahidin, but kill ‘innocent’ souls (…) for no reason but their beastly desires.” By the Muslim “scum of soldiery,” one assumes he means both the Ottomans and the Mamelukes.4 What we see in the work of al-Jabarati is a dichotomy between the rejection of the Other as usurper and a fascination with the superiority of many of the ways of that Other. We can feel the tension in his account, as he tries to explain that superiority in an Other that he typifies as ‘infidel’ and therefore supposedly ‘bad’ according to a world-view that considers everything that is good to emanate from belief in Islam. Hence his surprise at the ‘submission to reason’ of the French despite their being, as he sees it, ‘without religious faith’. This dichotomy of identity, which typecasts the Other as a secular being and the Self as a religious one, was recognized by al-Jabarti from the very beginning of the colonial encounter, and has tended to be endorsed by a significant section of the intellectuals of the Arab world during later phases of the history of colonialism in that region. How these seminal attitudes survive in the national consciousness, in their very complexity and ambivalence, can best be attested by the debate that took place in Egypt as recently as 1998, the year which marked the bicentenary of the Napoleonic Campaign in Egypt. The Egyptian and French governments decided to commemorate the event by staging joint cultural activities; a decision that precipitated a split among Egyptian intellectuals, some arguing against such celebrations, as they would seem from their point of view to honour an act of foreign invasion, while others supported the celebrations in recognition of the fact that the invasion was the act that ushered Egypt into modern times, albeit in a violent way. Paradoxical as it was, al-Jabarti’s was a ‘con-colonial’, as it were, not a postcolonial, reaction to colonialism. That reaction was dictated by the harsh historical realities of the day, which meant that the foreign invaders were perhaps not as bad as the local rulers; and that the marvels of science and administration they brought with them revealed a world full of wonders 4

Al-Jabarti, Tarikh, 359–60.

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and worth exploring, beyond Egypt’s cocooned existence at the time. For a postcolonial, imaginative reconstruction of the historical episode of Sulayman al-Halabi, we need to travel forward in time from the Cairo of 1800 to that of 1965 to consider the play Sulayman al-Halabi, by Egypt’s illustrious dramatist Alfred Faraj (b.1929). Egypt had only been some eight years into her independence from seventy years of British rule. It was led by the revolutionary regime of Nasser, and was in the forefront of the Third-World, anti-imperialist, non-alignment movement. In this political climate and the accompanying nationalist mood, the identity of Sulayman al-Halabi was to be reconstructed in a befitting manner; he was to be transformed from the ‘impetuous rogue’ of al-Jabarti’s account into national hero par excellence. Faraj’s play Sulayman al-Halabi (Sulayman of Aleppo) was first performed at the National Theatre in Cairo in 1965.5 The scene of action is Cairo in the year 1800 under French occupation. Sulayman is the name of the Azharite student from Aleppo who assassinated Kléber, the French general left in command by Bonaparte after the latter’s return to France in 1799. The play is a dramatic reconstruction of the events leading up to the assassination, which portrays Sulayman as a tragic hero and painstakingly analyzes the inner conflict he underwent before the murder. Very little, however, is known historically about Sulayman and much less about his true motives. All that there is to know comes, as already indicated, from the great historian of the period, al-Jabarti, who relied mainly on what the French circulated at the time about their interrogation of Sulayman.6 The main known facts about Sulayman as they evolve from al-Jabarti’s account are: age: twenty-four years; profession: scribe; origin: Syrian from Aleppo; faith: Moslem. Sulayman had received three years of education at Al-Azhar before returning to Syria. He arrived in Cairo thirty-one days before the assassination, and for that purpose. The Ottomans had just been routed by Kléber (at Heliopolis, near Cairo) in their attempt to recapture Egypt from the French, and were looking for someone to kill Kléber. Sulayman, who knew Cairo well, volunteered for the job. There is no clear indication that he did it for money or the promise of it; he was only paid the expenses of the journey. Personal motivation of some kind is not completely absent, however, as Sulayman was promised that his father, a merchant in Aleppo overtaxed by the Turkish authorities, should receive 5 6

Alfred Faraj, Sulayman al-Halabi (Cairo: Dar al-Katib al-‘Arabi, 1965). For a full account of the incident, see Al-Jabarti, Tarikh, 358–90.

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better treatment in the future. The main motive, however, appears to have been ‘to fight the French for the sake of God’; Sulayman was an Azharite graduate who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and, shortly before he was commissioned to commit the murder, to al-Quds (Jerusalem) as well. The assassination does not seem to have been undertaken in a suicidal spirit, since Sulayman states that he had hoped to escape and report his success to the Ottomans in Gaza. He was found near the scene of the murder shortly after and arrested, and admission was extracted from him by torture. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to die by impalement after incineration of the arm that wielded the knife of murder. Another four Azharites, who knew about his intention but failed to report him, were first decapitated before his eyes.7 This is basically all there is to be learnt from history about Sulayman of Aleppo.8 With such scarcity of information about his hero, Faraj could not have been more fortunate. It meant that he was able to portray Sulayman with a considerable measure of freedom, certain in the knowledge that no external model of reference for his creation exists. It is interesting, however, to note that the playwright has found it necessary to make some significant changes in historical material, skimpy as it is. The most meaningful change is the omission of the Ottoman connection altogether. Thus, the idea of an exterior or personal motive of any kind is eliminated. Indeed, when the chorus ask Sulayman at the end of the play why he had to come all the way from Aleppo to kill Kléber when he could have killed the equally oppressive Turkish ruler who harassed his father there, he answers that he could not kill for revenge, but only for justice.9 Although based on historical characters and events, Sulayman al-Halabi is very much a contemporary political play in which the playwright tries to bring a new vision to history, a vision which was particularly relevant and topical in the mid-1960s when the play was written. The 1960s generally represented a peak period in the Third-World struggle against imperialism, a struggle in which Egypt under Nasser played a major role. The play is about the earliest example in the Arab world of the struggle against Euro7

Al-Jabarti, Tarikh, 358–90. For another critic who has looked at Faraj’s historical source to examine the degree of his commitment to recorded facts, see Nasim Mijalli, al-Masrah wa Qadaya al-Huriyya (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1984): 4–21. 9 Alfred Faraj, Sulayman al-Halabi, 146. All references are to this edition, and all translated extracts are by the present writer. 8

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pean imperialism. To quote the author’s own words, in stabbing Kléber to death Sulayman was able ”to offer with one swift action an adequate response to the first challenge from European imperialism to the east in modern times.”10 Though European imperialism may not be as topical today as it was in the 1950s and 1960s when the world was still being reshaped after World War II , this play is an excellent specimen of how each generation is capable of reproducing its literary legacy. Not only was the play, at the time of its writing, a reproduction of an historical event of over a century and a half before its own time, but today, nearly forty years after its first performance, it seems to present itself again with an immediate relevancy to our present world and its most pressing preoccupations. By this I mean the global obsession with the issue of terrorism since September 11. This is so because the play is centrally about political murder: its nature, its morality, and the psychology of its perpetrator. The complexity of the issue can be summed up in the fact that while Sulayman is portrayed in the play as a hero, his embalmed head is displayed in the Criminal Museum in Paris with the tag ‘A Murderer’s Head’.11 In other words, one culture’s hero is another’s criminal. The play opens with an account given by the chorus of the horrors committed by the French in their attempt to subjugate a rebellious Cairo. It is this humiliated Cairo that Sulayman arrives in, he, the young, intellectual idealist, who knew it earlier as a proud city, the seat of learning and the bastion of faith. He is shocked beyond recovery. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with whom he shares many qualities,12 his soul is eaten up by a mysterious and relentless illness, from which he is cured only by the final decisive plunge into action, which also inevitably spells his own destruction.13 Like Hamlet, too, he is torn between action and inaction, or, to put it more accurately in the case of Sulayman, between action and the consequences of action. For him, it was a question of whether it was nobler in the 10

See the playwright’s foreword, Faraj, Sulayman, 15. Faraj, Sulayman, 5–6. 12 Several critics have remarked on the affinity between Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet and Faraj’s of Sulayman. See, for example, Raja’ al-Naqqash, “Hamlet fi al-Jami’ al-Azhar,” in al-Kawakib (14 December 1965); Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, “Sulayman al-Halabi ’ala Masrah al-Tarikhi,” in his Al-Wajh wal-Qina’ fi Masrahina al-‘Arabi al-Mu’asir (Dar alAdab: Beirut, 1973): 235–41; Muhammad Mustafa Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1988): 176. 13 For repeated references to signs of physical and mental strain, see the play, 60, 71, 81, 82 & 84. 11

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mind (to use Hamlet’s famous postulation) to suffer the slings and arrows of the outrageous French or to take arms against Kléber, and by opposing, end Cairo (i.e. have it destroyed in retaliation by the French), as that was the anticipated consequence of his action. Sitting alone on a deserted hill, he addresses the old city in these terms: if the price of your redemption may only be cut from your own flesh, it will be ignoble to buy life for honour, and not honour for life. O Heaven! Be merciful! Yet, I cannot be sure. Where is Certainty? (109)

Hamlet is, of course, not a play simply about a man wanting to avenge the murder of his father, nor is Sulayman al-Halabi just a play about a man wanting to assassinate the commander-in-chief of the foreign army occupying his country. The protagonists of the two plays suffer from the existentialist syndrome. They are both inextricably entangled in the cobweb of human existence – life and death; good and evil; justice and oppression; action and inaction – and in both their voices an unmistakable tone of world– weariness is detectable. It is that kind of world-weariness which is caused by the tug-of-war between a deep realization that corruption is in the very nature of things and an idealistic, martyrdom-seeking urge to put things right all the same. In the longest soliloquy of the play, Sulayman’s words reel under the strain of his mental agony: “Truth is a coin which does not ring true in a usurped land. Yet, on me alone rests the burden of sorting out the true from the false; of action or holding back from action” (142).14 The question which torments Sulayman is not whether or not to kill Kléber, but whether it is moral to kill him in the full realization that his action may unleash untold horrors on the inhabitants of Cairo. His ethical oscillation is between ‘justice and the price of justice’.15 He finally solves his moral dilemma and makes a choice based on pure reason and wholly devoid of emotion (147). He decides that justice is an end in itself and that a judge ought to pass judgment without thinking of the consequences (141). This is where Sulayman parts with Hamlet, for Sulayman’s moment of action was the culmination of a long and harrowing process of investiga14

See Hamlet’s words at the close of Act One: The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! 15 For a relevant discussion of the subject of justice, which arrives at different conclusions from mine, particularly about the contemporary meaning of the play, see M.M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt, 174–75.

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tion, both of his soul and of external facts. When he acted, the last vestige of doubt had been eradicated from his mind. Paradoxically, the act of murder was the moment of his reconcilement to himself; the moment he attained, as it were. Hence his failure to escape after the murder, which goes to explain his total resignation to his fate.16 But not so in the case of Hamlet, who only kills the king in a spasm of anger spurred by the discovery of yet another of his crimes. If it were not for that, Hamlet could conceivably have gone on agonizing over the matter for a further five acts, or indeed indefinitely. Virtually all critical commentaries on Sulayman al-Halabi to hand discuss it with reference to Hamlet. This, of course, is no coincidence, for, on evidence of the play itself, it would be difficult to imagine that Faraj was anything but consciously influenced by Hamlet, not only in the portrayal of Sulayman’s character, but in many dramatic details (e.g., the madness motif, the masks scene, and the soliloquies in the present play; all of which have their parallels in Shakespeare’s). Indeed, considering that Sulayman succeeds in achieving what his archetype does not (i.e. wilful action), it may not be wrong to argue that the play under discussion may have been conceived as a parody, albeit a very reverent one, of its Shakespearean model. Be the case as it may, it would be wrong to assume from the above discussion that Sulayman al-Halabi is a play that does not exist in its own right – because it does. Reading it with reference to Hamlet only makes it all the richer and more engaging. In any case, we should not fail to pause at another aspect of the textual relation between the two plays; an external aspect, we should perhaps call it. By this I mean the fact that Faraj’s play embraces Shakespeare’s play integrally in its structure, characterization, and thematic concerns, if only in part. Here is a postcolonial, nationalist play, dedicated to the denunciation of European imperialism and to the celebration of violent resistance to it, but in the same breath it entwines itself admiringly, devotedly, almost besottedly with the literary heritage of the culture of the denounced aggressor. The situation is paradoxical but by no means unusual; it has, if anything, characterized Arab attitudes in response to European colonialism throughout its history. The relationship has always been a love–hate one; never straightforward rejection on the part of the Arabs. Consider, for instance, how Naguib Mahfouz expressed this 16

This is another detail where Faraj chose to deviate from the historical account for dramatic purposes: al-Jabarti’s Sulayman had intended to escape, as I mentioned earlier.

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ambivalence of attitude in his Cairo Trilogy. Set at a time when Egypt was under British rule (1917–45) and the national struggle for independence at its highest, Kamal, the protagonist of the novel and a persona of Mahfouz, takes part in an anti-British demonstration, but he is puzzled at his own attitude: “In the morning my heart is inflamed with rebellion against the English, while at night the common spirit of human fellowship in pain calls for co-operation in the face of the riddle of man’s destiny.”17 What he is referring to here is his nightly readings in Western thought. Having accepted that, there is no reason why we cannot go on to look at Sulayman al-Halabi in the revealing light of one famous criticism made of Hamlet: namely, that by T.S. Eliot, thereby establishing yet a further bond between the play and the literary traditions of the culture, whose hegemony it has set out to condemn! It will be remembered that Eliot argued that Shakespeare must have suffered from a creative crisis during his writing of Hamlet, which resulted in the play’s failing to be an adequate ‘objective correlative’ to his emotion. Eliot writes: The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion, which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear (…). Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action.18

Read with reference to Sulayman al-Halabi, the above passage will, in my opinion, ring as true. All we have to do is read ‘Sulayman’ for ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Kléber’ for ‘his mother’. The play does seem to have inherited from its progenitor this genetic imbalance between the hero’s emotion and the facts that give rise to it. The trouble with Sulayman is that he is not simply conceived as a political murderer, a nationalist inflicting legitimate punishment on a foreign usurper, but, rather, as a pensive idealist up against oppression per se; against the disorder inherent in the nature of things. “If there were in our world,” soliloquizes Sulayman, “more spikes of grain than words; more words than guns; more guns than bandits, I would not be mad” (104). Such words, and the play abounds in their like, transcend the 17 Naguib Mahfouz, Al-Sukkariyya (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, n.d.): 44–45, quoted in Rasheed El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1993): 89. 18 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1961): 145 (emphasis in original).

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particularity of Kléber and the French in Cairo; what they point to is a condition of deep-seated existential angst par excellence. That is why Sulayman does not try to run away after the murder but sits under a tree and awaits his arrest resignedly. The normal behaviour for a political murderer is to try to escape, no matter how little chance there is, and continue the struggle. But Sulayman was only partly a political murderer, nor could he, world-weary as he was, continue the struggle. It is perhaps this discrepancy between the sentiment expressed and the external facts given to justify it that makes the play conceptually baffling. Alfred Faraj has given us an example of how the artist reinterprets history in the service of postcolonial nationalist sentiment and ideology. However, we have seen how difficult it has proven, in spite of these motives, to disentangle the Self from the Other as separate antagonist identities. In order to denounce imperialism, Faraj used an artistic mould, the tragedy, which is an integral part of the culture of the denounced imperialist Other, and which has entered modern Arabic literature only through the influence of contact with that culture – not only that, but through close association with the imaginative creation of a leading figure of European culture, Shakespeare. At its face value, this looks like a bizarre way to assert identity against the Other; it looks more like identification with the Other. To put it differently, what the play attempts to do thematically, it undoes structurally and by general association. The play qua play argues against itself, against its own central theme. Thus the play is simultaneously a denunciation of colonialism and an implicit celebration of it; an unspoken act of gratitude to its very raison d’être. W⏐X How does the Self defend itself against the colonizing Other? What structures of thought does it create in order to sustain itself in the struggle, in order to raise its morale, and assert its own identity at the expense of that of the more powerful Other? And in doing so, to what extent is the Self prepared to indulge in self-delusion? To what extent is it prepared to invent false conceptions of the Self and of the Other, and adopt them as truths? To answer these questions, we need to look at the work of another prominent writer of Egypt: namely, Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987), a great playwright, novelist, and essayist from an older generation than that of Alfred Faraj. One of his best-known works of fiction is a novel by the title ‘Usfur

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min al-Sharq (A bird from the East), published in 1938, during the heyday of British hegemony in Egypt.19 ‘Usfur can be said to have, to all intents and purposes, introduced the theme of the Western clash/encounter into Arabic fiction: to subsequent writers on the subject, it was always to represent in one way or another a point of departure. Its protagonist, Muhsin, like his namesake in al-Hakim’s earlier novel, ‘Awdat al-Ruh (1933), is admittedly a persona of the author,20 while events, characters, and relationships appear to be modelled in large part on Hakim’s own experience in Paris during his stay there in the 1920s. The parallelism between the author’s life and the novel should, if anything, lend more conviction to the ideas propagated in it. The axial idea in ‘Usfur is that the West is materially powerful but spiritually hollow, whereas the East, materially weak and at the mercy of the West, is the true abode of the spirit and the source of light for humanity since time immemorial. The main exposition of the East–West dichotomy, however, is introduced through Muhsin’s encounter with a Russian worker, Ivan. If we are to believe al-Hakim’s account in the epistolary Zahrat al-‘Umr (The prime of life), published in 1943, Ivan is based on a true character by the same name, whom the author met in Paris in the 1920s. In one of his letters to André, he refers to his friend “Ivan, the rebel Russian.”21 In another letter he refers to him as the late Ivan, “that Russian, who bolstered my faith in myself and the East.”22 Whatever basis Ivan may have had in reality, it is difficult to imagine that al-Hakim’s portrayal of him bore much resemblance to it. This poor, consumptive Russian worker, in exile in Paris, who reads Das Kapital over lunch in a noisy proletarian restaurant, who speaks with authority on the political ideologies of the day and offers learned insights into the religions of the world and their historical development, and who makes sweeping references, in a deathbed lecture, to authors and works as varied as Adam Smith, Aldous Huxley, and Jean Cocteau, in addition to the Bible and the Qur’an, is probably as bad an example as one is likely to 19 Bird of the East, tr. & intro. R. Baily Winder (Beirut: Khayats, 1966). The edition used in this study is that of Kitab al-Hilal, no. 77 (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1957), to which all page references are made. 20 See Tawfiq al-Hakim, Malamih Dakhiliyya (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, 1982): 156; see also Ghali Shukri, Tawfiq al-Hakim: al-Jil wa al-Tabaqa wa al-Ru’ya (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1993): 50, 38–39. 21 Tawfiq al-Hakim, Zahrat al-‘Umr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d.): 83. 22 Al-Hakim, Zahrat, 90.

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find of authorial abuse of character as a mouthpiece for dogma. This character has no function in the novel but to be used to denounce Western civilization in heavy-laden conversations with Muhsin.23 Writing in the 1930s, al-Hakim may have thought it would lend his argument more power for such a denunciation to come from a renegade Bolshevist: i.e. a representative of Western materialism in extremis by the criteria of the day.24 Ivan classifies religions into two categories, those of heaven and those of the earth. The East contributed the first, the West the second. The spirit of Christianity as it emanated from the East was “love and idealism, that of Islam faith and order.” What has the West offered by comparison? Its modern version of Christianity is Marxism, which preaches the founding of the kingdom of one class over the remains of another, while its equivalent of Islam has been fascism, which supplanted faith in God with that in the ‘leader’ and imposed order through terror (88–91). Ivan expresses his scorn for Western science and its discoveries and inventions when compared with the “greatest discovery of the East”: i.e. heaven (106). Europe’s modern science, “its only boast throughout history,” is nothing in practical terms but “toys of tin and glass, which have given people some comfort in their daily life, but drew humanity backwards, and robbed it of its true nature, its poetry and purity of soul” (175). Science is of two kinds: ‘exoteric’ (zahir) and ‘esoteric’ (khafi).25 Europe’s field is exoteric science alone, the science that uses the senses to discover the characteristics of nature. But this, of course, is science that can only probe the “superficial phenomena of life.” The true science is esoteric science, with which “the civilizations of Africa and Asia had truly reached the pinnacles of human knowledge.” As for modern Europe, she is no more than “a child, still playing at the feet of that 23 In his brief comment on ‘Usfur, Von Grunebaum, Modern Islam (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P , 1962; repr. 1982): 277–80, argues, not without good reason, that the novel “can hardly be considered a work of art, but merely provides the author with occasions for unrestrained speechmaking.” 24 For a pro-Marxist treatment of ‘Usfur, which labels al-Hakim as a reactionary for denouncing Marxist thought through Ivan and extolling the spiritualism of the East, see Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, Tawfiq al-Hakim Mufakkiran Fannanan (Cairo: Dar Shuhdi, 1985?): 53–73. For a similar view, see also Ghali Shukri, Thawrat al-Mu’tazil (1966, Beirut: Dar alAfaq al-Jadida, 1982), where the author labels the novel as “a naive, reactionary story,” and dismisses the character of the Russian worker as “a mask behind which al-Hakim hid his views of scientific socialism” (148–49, 151). 25 This is the word al-Hakim uses for batin.

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science” (190–91). The Russian, who literally uses his last breath to deliver his feverish condemnation of Western civilization, has one symbolic wish on his deathbed, which is to travel to “the source, the spring ‘i.e. the East’.” His last words to Muhsin, on which the novel ends, consist of an exhortation to go back himself and carry his memory with him (192–95). These are the basic ideas of the book as directly expressed through the conversations between Muhsin, who is mostly a passive listener, and his Russian friend. But ‘Usfur is also a novel with a love story, which is put in the service of the ideas. The story-line is very simple. The protagonist, Muhsin, falls in love with the box-office girl at the Odeon. The girl appears to reciprocate his feelings, but after two blissful weeks, she dumps him suddenly and cruelly. It transpires that she was in love with her theatre manager and that Muhsin was simply used to arouse the jealousy of her real lover. Where this story ties in with the flagrant polemic of the above conversations is in the fact that Muhsin and the French girl, Suzie Dupont, as she is called, are portrayed in such a way as to be seen as representatives of their respective cultures. Muhsin is portrayed as a dreamer, not a realist; an observer, not a man of action. In his portrayal of him, al-Hakim gives Muhsin absent-minded, thought-absorbed, otherworldly airs. In doing so, he serves two purposes simultaneously. First, he adheres to the presentation of a character that is a persona for himself in a manner subscribing to the romantic perception of the artist as someone not of this world, an image he has nurtured in all his writings. Second, he endorses the commonly perceived image in the West of Orientals as passive dreamers, cut off from the world of reality, action, and enterprise. Muhsin does not know how to court the box-office girl. He simply sits for hours every day at a café watching her and doing nothing about it.26 His friend André and wife Germaine describe him as a ‘dreamer’ (khayali), given to “too much imagination.” “A woman,” they tell him, “cannot be won by imagination, but by reality” (48). On being urged to speak to the girl, he sees no point, as he is certain she is in love with another man. Asked about the source of his knowledge, he has one word in 26

Al-Hakim refers to a one-act play of his, written originally in French, entitled Devant son guichet, which he presented to the real-life Suzie, ie Emma Durand, at the beginning of their relationship. See Shukri, al-Jil wal-Tabaqa, 49–50. The play, written in 1926, was translated into Arabic in 1935 by Ahmad al-Sawi Muhammad. For the text of the play, see Tawfiq al-Hakim, “Amam Shubbak al-Tadhakir,” al-Masrah al-Munawwa’ (Cairo: Maktabat alAdab, n.d.): 803–12.

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reply: “intuition” (62). His French friends, needless to say, are driven to despair at this intuitive approach to palpable, ascertainable reality. Later on in the novel, al-Hakim uses the Russian worker Ivan, in one of the many forced conversations of the book, to dismiss ‘reality’ in favour of ‘imagination’ as a world-view. Muhsin, who appears momentarily to have learnt the European lesson, argues that human misery is due to “ignorance of reality and its direct methods,” and that “nothing in life is gained by imagination.” The Russian immediately recognizes this as a notion that is culturally foreign to Muhsin: “Who taught you that, Oriental?” he asks before breaking into a long speech in praise of imagination and the ability to dream as the only quality distinguishing man from animals, which are confined to the world of reality and matter (104). When Muhsin finally musters his courage and takes action, the shortlived relationship that develops is one, as befits their symbolic cultural roles, in which the girl has absolute power over the youth. Initiative is always with her, and although al-Hakim does not indulge in description of the physical side of the relationship, it is interesting that it is the girl who first kisses Muhsin after he confesses his love to her through the indirect medium of reading to her a Greek poem. The moment is described in epiphanic terms, which also serve well on the cultural level: “Pity those dreamers when they are suddenly confronted with reality, before their imagination has had time to clad it in its adorned attire” is al-Hakim’s authorial comment, describing Muhsin’s elated reaction to the physical fulfilment of the encounter (124). When Suzie later dumps him humiliatingly and callously once he has served his purpose by restoring to her the attentions of the Frenchman she really loves,27 his assessment of the experience is not wholly negative. His train of thoughts goes like this: let it be enough that he had enjoyed a moment of that bliss of which he had been ignorant. Yes, this girl had uncovered for him a facet of paradise, of which his soul had been unaware […]. Thanks to her he now knows what he had not known. She had given him the key to heaven on earth. (142, emphasis in the original)

27

In a further reference to the autobiographical origin of the novel, al-Hakim says that he was so angered by the discovery of Emma Durand’s lover that he tried to hire a bully to give him a good beating, but was unsuccessful. See Tawfiq al-Hakim, Misr bayna ‘Ahdayn (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, 1983?): 49–52.

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The symbolism of this account, never really developed or made concrete by al-Hakim, whose subtlety and artistic skills belonged more in the genre of the theatre, point to the woman (Europe) having brought to Muhsin a new knowledge, and given him the key of heaven on earth. While, on the story level, this may be references to emotional and physical fulfilment, within the metaphoric framework of the book they will be references to the material pleasures and comforts offered by Western Science. That al-Hakim intended Suzie Dupont to stand for Europe and its values, and her treatment of Muhsin for Europe’s treatment of the East, is not in doubt. Indeed, Ivan, the Russian worker, personifies Europe as “a beautiful but selfish blonde, whose only concern is the enslavement of others.” Ironically, this spoilt blonde is the progeny of the marriage of Asia and Africa (the East she later enslaved). But while, according to Ivan, Asia and Africa produced ‘complete civilizations’, equally at home with the two worlds of religion and applied science, their daughter has lost her soul to the latter at the hands of industrialization and capitalism (174–76).28 “Today,” he argues, “ the East has come to understand that his daughter is no more than a dissolute woman” (180). The parallelism between these physical and moral attributes of personified Europe and those of the manipulative Suzie Dupont are obvious enough. Al-Hakim is simply arguing by implication that Europe has treated the East as immorally and irresponsibly as Suzie has Muhsin. Although al-Hakim’s thoughts on Europe and the East found their major expression in ‘Usfur, they can in fact be traced back to an earlier work – his first novel ‘Awdat al-Ruh (The Return of the Spirit),29 written in Paris in 1927, though published only in 1933. An examination of ‘Awdat al-Ruh from that angle will be a useful asset for a better understanding of the author’s views on the subject. ‘Awdat al-Ruh, one of the earliest accomplished specimens of the novel genre in Arabic, is a multi-layered work with, among others, a strong nationalist theme. Written not long after the 1919 Egyptian popular uprising against the British occupation and partly recreating some of its events, the novel is characterized by a strong national28

This view is reiterated in a newspaper article written in 1947, nearly ten years after ‘Usfur, where al-Hakim argues that both Christianity and Islam were based on socialist principles, that it was extreme capitalism, not socialism, that “destroyed the essence of religion.” Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yaqzat al-Fikr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, 1986): 27. 29 Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Return of the Spirit, tr. & intro. William Hutchins (‘Awdat alRuh; Cairo: Matba’at al-Ragha‘ib, 1933; tr. Washington D C : Three Continents, 1990).

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ist sentiment, steeped in romantic idealism. The protagonist of the novel is the adolescent Muhsin, whose development at a later stage of his life alHakim was to follow in ‘Usfur, both novels being largely autobiographical, as pointed out before. It will be sufficient for my purposes here to deal with one famous and much-quoted scene in the novel: namely, the long conversation between the French archaeologist, Monsieur Fouquet, and the British irrigation inspector, Mr Black, taking place after lunch in the lounge of Muhsin’s parents’ house in the country. The conversation is to be found in Chapter Twenty–Five of Part Two of the book. In a manner that al-Hakim was later to use again with equal clumsiness in his presentation of the character of the Russian worker in ‘Usfur, he uses the character of the French archaeologist in ‘Awdat al-Ruh as a mouthpiece for his romantic nationalist ideas about Egyptians and what distinguishes them from Europeans. Viewed artistically, the whole episode is forced on the novel. Neither the Frenchman nor the Englishman is part of the book. They are simply ushered in to have this conversation and ushered out, not to be seen again. Thematically, however, the episode gives al-Hakim a chance to spell out in explicit polemic some of the notions he half-utters in the novel. The conversation takes place as the Frenchman and the Englishman look out of the window and watch the peasants go back to work in the fields after the midday siesta. Mr Black has nothing but scorn for Egyptian peasants; they are ignorant and hardly distinguishable from their animals. But Monsieur Fouquet takes a different view of the matter; a view which Ivan of ‘Usfur was to reiterate in his excoriation of Europe’s science, as falling short of the true knowledge of the East. The Frenchman rebukes Mr Black and tells him that the people he calls ignorant know many things, although their medium of knowledge is the heart, not the mind. “This is an ancient people,” he maintains. “If you open the heart of one of these peasants, you will find in it the residue of ten thousand years of experience and knowledge, layer on top of layer, of which he is unaware.” By contrast, Europe only possesses ‘acquired science’, which ancient peoples regarded as accident, not substance, as merely an outward pointer to the treasure within. “All we Europeans did,” argues Monsieur Fouquet, “was to steal from those ancient peoples the outward pointer without the buried treasure.” (Compare the marriage of Asia and Africa which gave birth to the selfish blonde, Europe, in ‘Usfur above!) “If you open the heart of a European,” continues Monsieur Fouquet,

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you will find it empty. The European lives by what he is taught (…) because he has no legacy, no past to fall back on unconsciously […]. Europe’s only strength is in the mind, that limited machine that we fuel ourselves. As for Egypt, its strength is in the heart, which is bottomless.30

If we divert our attention awhile from al-Hakim’s fiction and turn to his polemical writings, mainly journalistic essays published in the press in the 1930s and 1940s, more or less contemporaneously with the literary works discussed above, we are in for a surprise. The polemicist’s views seem to be in stark conflict with the artist’s. Al-Hakim’s anti-Western invective expressed through the medium of his fiction, as shown above, gives way to open admiration of Western civilization, an idealization of the period he lived in France, and an invitation to his fellow countrymen to emulate that civilization without reserve. The contradiction is of such magnitude that it throws into question the very seriousness of al-Hakim as a writer. Before we look further into this perplexing issue, we should survey his views as voiced in his polemical writings. In Tahta Shams al-Fikr (Under the sun of thought),31 published in 1938, the same year as ‘Usfur, al-Hakim speaks, surprisingly, more reverently and more covetously of Western civilization. Here he argues that ‘Eastern culture’ (al-thaqafa al-Sharqiyya) must “catch up with Western culture, which has added a great deal to what it has taken from early civilizations.” He holds that Eastern culture cannot close its eyes to the great wealth of European culture: “Let us put out our hands ‘to it’ unfettered by the chains of traditions, customs or beliefs! Let us take everything and digest everything!” What matters for al-Hakim is that all this borrowing should be imprinted with the Eastern stamp: i.e. assimilated and made the East’s own, just as Europe did with what it took from other cultures (107–10). These views are reiterated in another article, titled “Turath al-Hadarat” (The legacy of civilizations), included in his anthology of essays, Fann al-Adab (The art of literature), published in 1952.32 Here he goes so far as to blame on the body of medieval Muslim scholars what he calls the ‘intellectual isolation’ of present-day Arabic culture from that of Europe. He argues, 30 Al-Hakim, ‘Awdat al-Ruh, 46–49. For an approach to the theme of East and West in both ‘Awdat al-Ruh and ‘Usfur min al-Sharq, based on al-Hakim’s famous dichotomy of the heart and the mind, see Paul Starkey, From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Study of Tawfīq alHakīm (St. Antony’s Middle East Monographs 19; London: Ithaca Press, 1987): 108–29. 31 Tawfiq al-Hakim, Tahta Shams al-Fikr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d.). 32 Tawfiq al-Hakim, Fann al-Adab (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d. (1952)).

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with an obvious sense of regret, that, had those scholars cared to transfer to Arabic all aspects of Graeco-Roman culture, as they had done with Greek philosophy, for instance, then “something amazing would have happened: Arab culture today would have been the direct foundation of Western culture, […] to which it would have added the spirit of the East.”33 In his article, al-Hakim uses this ‘historic mistake’ as a warning for fellow countrymen to borrow comprehensively from Western civilization and not to repeat the mistake of their medieval forefathers. In another essay in the book, he goes on to compare the life-ethos of the French with that of the Egyptians. His fellow countrymen lose outright in the comparison, which al-Hakim writes in typical orientalist terms – ‘orientalist’ here meant in the negative, Orient-despising sense lent it by Edward Said’s Orientalism.34 They are lethargic time-wasters. They know neither real work nor real fun. “Life in its great and full sense has yet to start in the Nile Valley,” he maintains. “All it knows now is that small life of eating, drinking and cheap pleasure.” This low view of the quality of life in his country is emphasized in his plaintive letters to his French friend, André, after his return to Egypt, which is described as a moral desert to which André’s letters carry “the breeze of great Europe,” and the “fragrance of France.” His letters reflect the enormity of his sense of alienation upon his return to his homeland.35 He speaks of “murderous despair, constant longing for Europe, and days that flow like cold tears.” He tells André that the intellectual climate in Egypt, if one existed, was no longer fit for someone like him returned from Europe, that “the friends of the past were no longer good enough for him. Their talk, their jokes, their pastimes turn me away from them.” “Loneliness in its most perfect and cruellest sense,” he writes, “is the one word to sum up my condition.” In another letter, he speaks of the shock of his first few months back in Egypt in terms of a spiritual death, and maintains that his intellect was in danger of “dying out under the influence of the opium of the East.” His extreme sense of alienation at home is thrown in sharper relief by his sense of fellowship with Europeans: “Just being in a concert hall in Paris […] created between me and every

33

Tawfiq al-Hakim, Fann al-Adab, 122–24. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 (1978)). 35 For a consideration of a different theme in Zahrat al-‘Umr, ie the conflict between the attractions of art and life for the artist, see Jurj Tarabishi, Lu’bat alHulm wal-Waqi’: Dirasa fi Adab Tawfiq al-Hakim (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1972): 29–37. 34

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Frenchman, Russian or German present an affinity akin to that of countryman with countryman.”36 In a chapter of Tahta Shams al-Fikr, al-Hakim turns his anger on the Egyptian woman, who is downgraded in comparison with the European woman for lacking taste, the aesthetic sense, and therefore being also unable to pass on these important qualities to Egyptian children. The art of painting in Egypt will flourish on the day the Egyptian woman cares to adorn the walls of her house with paintings. Likewise, literature will thrive the day she begins to buy a copy of every new book by her favourite author. Only when the sensibility of the Egyptian woman changes, he contends, will Egypt be able to be ranked with civilized nations (197–201). Further condemnations of the East in relation to the West can be found in another collection of short essays, titled ‘Asa al-Hakim (al-Hakim’s walking-stick), written and published, according to al-Hakim, in 1946–51 before being collected in book form in 1954. In one of his dialogues with his walking-stick, al-Hakim describes the East as a ‘beggar’, whose hand is always stretched out for the West’s moral and material charity, and which will never have the respect of the West until it has some ideas of its own to offer.37 These pro-Western views (in the cultural, not the political, sense) are no doubt more in line with al-Hakim’s overall standing in modern Arab thought as a pioneer of intellectual modernization (practically a more selfrespectful synonym for westernization in Arab writing), one of the generation of liberal, European-educated, Egyptian intellectuals who exercised a tremendous modernizing effect in Egypt through their writing, or the occupation of educational or governmental, executive office during the interwar period. After all, this is al-Hakim, who fathered Arabic drama (and to a lesser extent Arabic fiction) through the emulation of Western models. This is al-Hakim, who felt so at home with Greek mythology and its modern reworking in European theatre that he went on to tackle, in his own theatre, themes attempted by as diverse writers as Jean Cocteau, George Bernard Shaw, and Aristophanes.38

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Al-Hakim, Zahrat, 69, 72, 74–75, 91, 171. Tawfiq al-Hakim, ‘Asa al-Hakim (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d.): 52–53. 38 Compare al-Hakim’s al-Malik ‘Udib (King Oedipus) with Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine; Bigmalyun (Pygmalion) with Shaw’s Pygmalion; and Braksa aw Mushkilat alHukm (Praxagora or the problem of government) with Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae. 37

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How, then, can we explain the ambivalence in his attitude, the apparent oscillation in his writings between acceptance of Western culture as a necessity for progress, and its rejection as a materialistic evil? This is a question that cannot be answered in isolation from the historical relation between East and West in modern times at least: i.e. European colonialism. Al-Hakim was writing at a time when Egypt was under British rule, in common with most Asian and African nations, then dominated by one or other European power. The strong nationalist sentiment of a country struggling for independence, for the assertion of its own identity against an occupying super-power with a different culture found an outlet in the apotheosis of ‘the spirit of the East’ and the downgrading of the culture of the hostile Other. Modern Western culture was an upstart among the ancient civilizations of the East, its scientific discoveries and applied inventions nothing but superficial adornments in human history, totally lacking in moral foundation, in wisdom. All that the West gave humanity was materialism in the form of the warring political ideologies of capitalism, communism, and fascism. When Western civilization has destroyed itself through its lust for power and infinite greed, it will then have nothing to turn to but the ancient wisdom of the very East it despised.39 The East shall inherit the earth. These must have been very comforting thoughts for a young intellectual, at once dazzled by the achievements of Western culture and affronted by its subjugation of his country. Indeed, it is not difficult to notice that whenever al-Hakim is writing about the West in a nationalist context, a note of hostility and self-assertion can be heard, which otherwise would be absent. In one article, for instance, he ridicules the West for fussing over the political rights of the individual, while denying entire nations those rights.40 In another article, he argues, in the context of denouncing foreign schools in Egypt which neglect the teaching of Arabic, that “independence from military occupation should be accompanied by independence from all forms of spiritual occupation that oppress our thinking and prevent us from realising our identity.”41 The nationalist cause apart, it must not be forgotten that at the time al-Hakim was writing, Europe had recently come 39

See, for instance, al-Hakim’s article “Shams al-Sharq” (The sun of the East), in Fann alAdab, 125–26. 40 See his article “al-Hadara wa al-Sharq” (Civilization and the East), Fann al-Adab, 119–21. 41 From an article in the weekly magazine Akhir Sa‘a (26 June 1946), collected in Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yaqzat al-Fikr, 69–72.

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out of a world war and was preparing for another. He could be excused for thinking at the time that Western civilization was living in a moral vacuum and bent on self-destruction, and that it was in no position to save itself, let alone others. Indeed, this was the stance of many European thinkers at the time. In ‘Usfur, al-Hakim uses the Russian worker to point out an example of European thinkers driven to despair by the moral impasse modern Europe had reached. He quotes Jean Cocteau describing opium as the antidote of bewilderment and angst. Cocteau’s condition is seen as a personification of Europe’s condition: “Jean Cocteau stands for the whole of Europe in its present crisis. Europe is finished, and nothing from inside her can save her.”42 However, it may be that my above defence of al-Hakim or, rather, attempt at explaining the ambivalence of his attitude towards Western culture is largely redundant, since he has personally rescinded his earlier views in an article which has received so little attention that most of his readers have nevertheless continued to believe that he stood fast by his youthful views. The article bears the title “Tabi’atuna nahwa al-Shabab” (Our responsibility towards youth), first published in the weekly Cairene newspaper, Akhbar al-Yawm, on 28 May 1949, and later included in a collection of articles titled Yaqzat al-Fikr, as late as 1986, only a year before alHakim’s death, which may be why it has escaped the notice of scholars of the author. Al-Hakim’s rescinding of his views, which comes only a little over a decade after the publication of ‘Usfur, is given in the context of recognizing the responsibility that he has as an author towards young people influenced by his writings. He observes that young people who travel to Western countries to study resemble Muhsin and his way of feeling and thinking in ‘Usfur min al-Sharq twenty-five years earlier. He states that, like him, their thought is dominated by the idea of the spirituality of the East and the materialism of the West, and that, like the other Muhsin of ‘Awdat al-Ruh, they take pride in their cultural legacy, which goes back in history for thousands of years. However, rather than glory in the effect his ideas have had on young readers, he wonders whether he should not be now advising young people to not exaggerate in sanctifying their past, to not let the inferiority complex which dominated Muhsin dominate them and make them over-protective towards their subjugated civilization against the 42

Al-Hakim, ‘Usfur min al-Sharq, 180–82.

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civilizations that wield the power. Should he not be encouraging them to drink courageously from every spring and to partake of every heritage in order to enrich their soul and broaden their horizon? (107–13) Al-Hakim goes on to diagnose what he calls “the harm in my old ideas,” as causing young people to use their “Eastern spirituality and the residue of their Egyptian civilization as shields to isolate them from world thought.” He admits the influence of the popular revolution of 1919 and the prevailing nationalist mood on those early works when he pleads with young people “not to think any longer with the mentality of Muhsin; that was the mentality of a young man of the Egyptian Revolution and the national resurrection.” Instead, he urges them “to confront the world with a ‘humanistic’ mentality unhampered by bias of any form.”43 In an even later account, he argues that it was incumbent on art and literature in those formative days for Egyptian nationalism to “raise the morale of Egypt […] and the Arab East […] in front of the overpowering European civilization” (107–13).44 Al-Hakim has started with very contentious tenets about East and West, making some very arrogant and complacent claims about his own culture while denigrating that of the West insupportably. His ideas were raising questions about their sincerity even as they were being written. The author’s profound regard for Western civilization and his realization of its indispensability for his own are simultaneously present in his writings, to the point of self-contradiction and eventual recantation, as we have seen. This ambivalence of attitude, this tense tug-of-war, this love–hate relationship is not idiosyncratic of al-Hakim. It is perhaps symptomatic of the relationship between East and West ever since Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798. And while expressions of this symptom will persist after al-Hakim in the postcolonial period, I do not wish to make the claim that the East’s perception of the West has been static. In history, nothing is static. Changes in perceptions and attitudes will occur from generation to generation and in response to changing historical and political conditions. It will perhaps be appropriate to end this part of the essay with one of al-Hakim’s most direct and most revealing statements on the central beliefs of his two novels discussed here. In an interview given in 1965, he says: “The notion that the

43 44

This and the preceding quotes, Al-Hakim, Yaqzat al-Fikr, 107–13. Tawfiq al-Hakim, Tahiddiyat Sanat 2000 (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1988?): 61.

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East was and still is spiritual only, and that the West was and still is materialistic only is one that overlooks the truth.”45 W⏐X Let us now turn back to the postcolonial period to look more closely at how independence has affected the way Arab intellectuals saw the European Other. We are now in the late 1950s and the 1960s, in the heyday of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism, when Arab countries were seized with Nasser’s fever.46 That was a period of national confidence, when the Self knew no limits and viewed itself as an equal of the Other. There was no need anymore to create false structures based on supernatural assumptions about spirit and matter in order to promote the Self and denigrate the Other, as al-Hakim had done. The achievement of independence; the initial successes of Nasser in confrontations with the old colonial powers, as over the Suez crisis – all this seems to have boosted the Self’s morale and to have led to representations in literature of the Self as an equal of the Other. A manifestation of this attitude could be seen in the work of the Egyptian writer Yusuf Idris (1927–1991). One of Idris’s characters sums up the ambivalent attitude that has characterized Egyptian sentiment towards the colonizing Other from the time of Napoleon onwards; an attitude that fears and hates at the same time as it admires; that wants to emulate at the same time as it is keen to protect its own identity. Let us listen to what Idris’s character says: It was really a confusing situation, but that is the way it was. By nature, I was fond of every thing European […]. On our visits to Ismailia or Port Said, for instance, we noticed the European character of these cities and of the Canal Zone in general: bungalow-style houses with sloping roofs, stoves and chimneys; and of course the tidiness, calm, and order. Order, so distasteful to us, becomes in their hands an art. The art of order: orderly eating, orderly warfare, orderly loving. It made me feel sad to see those things, and deep in my heart I wished that all of us could become like that white, complicated being with its ruddy face. But amazingly enough I never wanted to become European. I dreamt of possessing their wonderful inventiveness, cleanliness, and sense of order, but possessing them myself as an Arab, for I was not prepared to have one single hair of my head changed. Sometimes, when taking part in demonstrations 45

Tawfiq al-Hakim, Malamih Dakhiliyya, 174. Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir (1918–70), leader of the 1952 Egyptian army coup and later president of Egypt. 46

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against the British occupation, I noticed to my surprise that I shouted our slogan “Down with the English!” with as much rancour and disgust as I admired what I saw of them in Ismailia, Alexandria, and Port Said.47

Let us now look at how this tension between the desire to appropriate the qualities of the Other, while preserving the identity of the Self is rendered in a work of fiction. In a novella titled “Madame Vienna,” published in 48 1959, Idris portrays a brief amorous encounter in Vienna between an Egyptian man and an Austrian woman. both of whom had entertained stereotypical cultural ideas about the other. She says to him: We in the West hear a lot about the East, its mystery, its men and its charm. I have always dreamt of a brown Eastern prince as a teenager, and even as a wife and mother. When I saw you, I thought I had found him and that it was a chance in a lifetime.49

The Egyptian protagonist, on the other hand, had come to Vienna determined to conquer Europe through her women, in whom, as he puts it “the spirit of Europe is concentrated.” Through a series of little details and situations, the reality of the European woman, and by implication her whole culture, gradually displaces her mythologized image in his head. When he holds the woman’s hand, he experiences a feeling of fellowship towards her as he notices “her thin fingers, made strong through hammering at typewriter keys” (129–30). Again, when he enters her flat, he is struck by its narrowness and the numerous familiar little objects that he can see all over the place. But when he enters the tiny bathroom and spots there an extended washing-line like the one used by his wife in their own flat and with children’s underwear hanging from it too, he is genuinely shocked, and he asks himself the seemingly naive but enormously significant question: “What use is Europe, then, if her people use the same objects as we do?” (144). What shocks him here is the ordinariness, the familiarity, the ultimate similarity of the Other.

47 Quoted in P.M. Kurpershoek, The Short Stories of Yusuf Idris (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997): 66–67. For the Arabic original, see Yusuf Idris, Al-Bayda‘ (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1970): 181–82. 48

The story was first serialized in weekly instalments in the Cairene daily al-Masa’ between 17 July 1959 and 7 August 1959; later included in Idris’s collection al-‘Askar al-Aswad wa Qiasas ‘Ukhra (Cairo, 1962). 49 Yusuf Idris, New York 80 (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1980?): 141. The book also includes “al-Sayyida Vienna“ (Madame Vienna), re-titled “Vienna 60”. It is this edition of both stories that I use here and all page references in the text are to it.

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On the other hand, when some of his idealized conceptions about the Other are proven in reality, he is, ironically, frustrated rather than gratified. When the woman returns his sexual passion with equal panache, he is at first excited: “This is how a woman should be,” he tells himself. “In the East women are like corpses […] but here when you kiss a woman, she kisses you back; you hug her, she hugs you; you take her, she takes you. This is how it should be” (129). But soon enough, he shrinks before her activeness and reciprocity: “Why doesn’t she lie submissively and let me do the man’s job?” he thinks to himself. “Why can’t she be a little shy? Shyness makes a woman more feminine and a man more masculine” (147). So disturbed is he by the very fulfilment of his previous fantasy that he cannot muster an erection. Ironically, it is only when he closes his eyes and begins to fantasize about his own wife back in Cairo that he can function properly. To his horror, the protagonist sees his Viennese partner pick up her absent husband’s picture and kiss it, after they had finished making love. She admits to him that all the time they made love she had been thinking of him: “I didn’t know that he is my African man for whom I’ve been searching,” she says (162). This confident approach to the theme of the cultural encounter, where Self and Other are seen in equal terms; where the Other is rid of his halo, and shown to be no different from the Self – this approach is, as I have indicated earlier, a manifestation of the newly found national pride and self-assurance in the post-independence period. If it can be argued that in “Madame Vienna” Idris has expressed postcolonial national self-confidence and asserted the identity of the Self vis-àvis the Other while maintaining a realistic balance in his fictional representation of the two cultures, this representational balance is wholly lost in another work contemporary with “Madame Vienna.” In the novella titled “Sirruhu al-Bati’” (The secret of his power),50 published in 1958, Idris presents a vision in which the identity of the Self is not only forcefully affirmed but in which the identity of the invading Other is wholly subsumed, thereby rendering the act of colonization null and void, inverting it, as it were, by allowing the physically colonized to colonize the soul of the colonizer. Let us see how Idris achieves this.

50 The story is part of the collection titled ’Hadithat Sharaf (An incident of honour), first published in 1958. Reference here is made to Al-Mu’allafat al-Kamila li Yusuf Idris (The complete works of Yusuf Idris), 124–92.

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The story is set mainly in an unnamed Egyptian village of the Nile Delta and the protagonist is a child whom we watch growing to manhood as the plot develops. The time-span may thus seem too long for a short story but, as it happens, the plot is endowed with a strong sense of purpose that sustains interest without abatement throughout the extended narrative and until the denouement. This sense of purpose is imparted by the obsessive nature of the protagonist’s quest, powerfully rendered by Idris’s racy narrative and endless delaying techniques.51 The child is intrigued from early on in his life by the mystery of Sultan Hamid, the village saint, whose shrines stands on the edge of the local cemetery outside the village. The saint is revered by the villagers and his holiness taken for granted, although nobody knows anything about his history or origin. When the child passes his primaryschool examinations, his grandfather urges him to go and light the six candles previously promised for Sultan Hamid. The child cannot convince himself that the saint could have had anything to do with his success, but still he honours the age-old tradition, albeit after cheating the saint out of three candles to buy sweets with the rest of the money. From that day on, the saint begins to dominate the boy’s thoughts. After his initial sense of awe, the shrine with its dilapidated walls fails to impress him. What is inside those walls, he wonders, to make the villagers cherish him so in their hearts and talk about him as if he were an enormous being living somewhere? (132). He starts going round the old people of the village asking them about the family origins of Sultan Hamid, but they all assure him the saint was not related to anybody in the village. However, no one but the protagonist seems to wonder how he came to be buried in the village (138). In his bewilderment, the boy seeks the help of the Shaykh of the Kuttab, or Qur’an school, who tells him that the secret of Sultan Hamid may only be reached through dhikr, or the ritualistic repetition of God’s name. He thus begins to frequent the weekly dhikr circle at the Shaykh’s house. But having never liked the idea in the first place, he soon realizes that dhikr cannot solve his problem. He soon makes another logical dis-

51

This view of mine is in sharp contrast with that of ‘Ali al-Ra‘i (in Yusuf Idris bi-Qalam Ha’ula’ (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1986?): 92–93), who holds that the excessive length of the story deprives it of artistic and intellectual concentrations. He writes: “The experience of the peasant child with Sultan Hamid turns with deadly slowness into a national lyric in praise of the inner qualities of the Egyptian people and their insuppressible ability to conquer their enemies.”

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covery: that Sultan Hamid cannot be a saint, since the epithet usually added to saints’ names is that of ‘shaykh’ and not ‘sultan’ (140–42). He soon makes yet another more radical and more bewildering discovery. One Friday he travels to a neighbouring village to watch a soccer match between its team and that of his own. During the game, one of the opponent team’s players kicks the ball so high that it lands on the roof of an elevated stone structure beyond the fields. That turns out to be the shrine of Sultan Hamid, to the amazement of our protagonist, who, on further enquiry, establishes that many other villages in the province had their own shrines of Sultan Hamid (147–48). The boy’s obsession with the mystery wears him out. His health deteriorates and he is obliged to draw back from the brink and forget about Sultan Hamid. Years pass and he grows up, leaves the village, and settles in Cairo. But one summer, while on a visit to the village, he returns home one evening to find a stranger sitting there busy tucking into a huge meal. Hosting strangers passing through the village and listening to their stories was a hobby of the protagonist’s grandfather. On this occasion, the stranger had the appearance of a dervish, but on being asked to what Sufi order he belonged, he proclaims: “We are not an order. We are the Children of Sultan Hamid” (155). With these words, our protagonist’s quest is revived with renewed vigour after years of dormancy. After initial reluctance, the stranger is drawn to speak about the so-called saint. He explains that his hallowed status was gained on account of “his scattering of the enemies, his defeat of the infidels” (157), without specifying who those were or when that happened. In fact, he tells a long story steeped in legend and acts of the miraculous about how Sultan Hamid confronted the enemy when they arrived in Egypt like a colossus, his feet dug in the earth and his head high up in heaven. Scores of men were unable to make him budge, and swords broke on him, leaving him unscathed. Finally, an old soldier realizes that the secret of his invincibility is the purity of his body and that the way to defeat him was to first defile him.52 Thus the old soldier begins to urinate on different parts of Sultan Hamid’s body, which immediately became vulnerable to swordstrokes. Sultan Hamid was thus cut up into millions of pieces, but each piece turned into a man who rose to fight the enemy until the land was cleared of them (157–58). The protagonist does not simply dismiss this account as the ravings of a dervish. He realizes that behind the legend some 52

Compare Lancelot in the Arthurian legend.

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reality must lie. But his extensive research at the National Library in Cairo leads him nowhere: he finds no sultan by the name Hamid to have ever ruled Egypt. The breakthrough happens, however, by sheer accident. The protagonist makes the acquaintance of an eccentric European woman, know as Madame International from her extensive travels world-wide. On one occasion, he tells her the story of Sultan Hamid and his obsession with him, which fascinates her. Eventually she leaves for Europe and he forgets all about her. But many months later he receives a letter from her and it transpires that she, too, had become obsessed with Sultan Hamid and that together with a group of friends she spent months investigating the matter. Eventually she came across a book containing the letters of a certain Roget Clément, sent from Egypt to his friend in Paris, Monsieur Guy de Rouen. Clément, we are told, was one of the archaeologists who accompanied Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, and who was thought to have donned the national habit and settled in Egypt. In her letter, Madame International includes the text of Clément’s last letter from Egypt. The letter is dated 20 June 1801. It continues the writer’s impressions of Egypt and the Egyptians and an account which solves once and for all the mystery of Sultan Hamid, bringing the story to its denouement. The letter is rather long, occupying the last twenty-three pages of the story. M. Clément describes how, on arrival in Egypt, he first thought he had come to bring the flame of civilization to a dark African land, but that soon he was to be touched by its magic and miraculous powers (170). He sets out to correct some of his Parisian friends’ misconceptions about the Egyptians: “The Egyptians […] are not as you say. They do not dance around fire at night, and their women are nothing like the harem of the Thousand and One Nights” (171). In words obviously put in his mouth by Idris, he argues that it was easy to conquer Egypt for a start, but that problems came later. He is held in awe in particular of the Egyptian peasants, whose mystique he cannot penetrate. To illustrate to his friend what he means, he begins to tell him the story of Hamid, one of those peasants who had been the talk of the French army in Egypt for many months. He was an ordinary fallah (peasant) from the Delta village of Shatanuf, where the French built a garrison. Now, although the garrison’s policy was to avoid harassing the peasants, a soldier loses his nerve one day under the hostile gaze of a fallah, and shoots him dead. The villagers go to the captain and demand the life of the murderer. When their

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demand is rejected, a member of the garrison is found dead the following day. The captain arrests the chief of the village and threatens to have him killed unless the assassin delivers himself. A fallah by the name of Hamid gives himself up before the end of the day and the chief is released. The captain decides to hang Hamid after a mock trial, but at the eleventh hour the men of the village attack the garrison and free the man. When the French regain control, the captain executes the chief. A rumour goes around that the escaped Hamid had sworn to kill the captain. Soon enough, the captain’s horse brings its master’s body back to the camp. By this time the news had reached Napoleon himself, who orders no lesser an officer than his second-in-command Kléber to capture this Hamid person. At this point, the entire Delta becomes a safe haven for Hamid. Peasants everywhere have their little fingers amputated and their cheeks tattooed to give themselves two of the most distinguishing physical characteristics of Hamid, and further confuse the French. Gangs form up and down the country who call themselves the Children of Hamid and engage in waylaying the French. Gradually Hamid’s name acquires the epithet ‘the Sultan’ among the people as a token of respect. M. Clément comments breathlessly that the Egyptians “were not a people, but a mass (kutla) which merged into Hamid and made even the General (i.e. Napoleon) look a dwarf beside him” (184). The French finally succeed, however, in finding and killing Hamid. M. Clément speaks of the rage that shook the country and attributes to the incident the second uprising of Cairo during the French occupation. Hamid’s body is not moved from the spot where he was killed, and in no time a shrine with a large dome is built over him and crowds without number start coming to visit every day. Kléber realizes that in his death Hamid has become more dangerous than when he was alive. Again breathless with admiration, M. Clément is made a mouthpiece for Idris’s almost mystical belief in his people.53 We have conquered these people with our superiority, our guns, our brass music, our printing press, and our chemical science, but where can we get their supernatural power to stick together like a solid mass, to love one another, and to survive? Where can we have faith like this? (187)

53 In a different context, Kurpershoek (The Short Stories of Yusuf Idris, 57) comments, “Idris’s articles exhibit an almost mystical faith in the simmering potential of the Egyptian people.”

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Kléber destroys the shrine, exhumes the body, and has it thrown in the Nile. But unknown to him, in no time the body is removed from the waters and a new shrine bigger than the first is built over it, again attracting crowds of pilgrims in their thousands. Driven almost to madness, Kléber decides after consultation with his staff to exhume the body again, cut it up in small pieces, and scatter them all over the country. (Idris here is obviously utilizing the ancient Egyptian Isis/Osiris myth of death and resurrection to give depth to his theme.) Little did Kléber know what he was letting himself in for. The news soon started to arrive that in every spot where part of the body was found, a shrine was built over it. Thus instead of just one, hundreds of shrines were erected up and down the country. At this point in the letter, the mystery of Sultan Hamid which has baffled the protagonist all his life can be said to have been solved. The saint turned out to have been a patriotic hero, who fell in the struggle against foreign aggressors a century-and-a-half earlier and around whom the popular imagination had woven stories elevating him to a saintly, supernatural status; a not uncommon practice in all cultures – that of Joan of Arc is an example that French history itself has to offer. The story could have ended here, the protagonist’s quest having reached its culmination and the Egyptians’ ability to hold their own and assert their identity and unity before the European Other despite his superior power and technology, proven. But Idris keeps the story going a bit longer, giving it a significant, though unconvincing twist. The focus of attention now turns to M. Clément, who becomes obsessed with the phenomenon of Sultan Hamid in his own time, as much as the protagonist was to become obsessed with it a hundred-and-fifty years later. He disguises himself in the Egyptian national dress and is absorbed into the crowd at one of the many shrines built for Hamid. In his letter, he describes the experience in highly romanticized, almost mystical terms, strongly reminiscent of the words of the French archaeologist, Monsieur Fouquet, in al-Hakim’s ‘Awadat al-Ruh, discussed above: It was as if those rough bodies, sticky and dusty, exuded a substance superior to life, the essence of life, the totality of all that is powerful and triumphant in it; all that is invincible, the supreme miraculous power, the very secret of life […]. Hamid’s shrine was the focus at which individual wills converged; a focus that concentrated the will to eternity and turned it into a magical elixir able to achieve it. (190)

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M. Clément is humbled by the experience, to the point of wanting to “prostrate himself before the crowds and ask their forgiveness,” and for the first time in his life he feels “the greatness of life and the splendour of being a human possessed of that miraculous power, the power to come together with other humans in order to produce something greater than the life of each of us” (191). It is amazing that, as Idris put these words in the mouth of M. Clément, he was able to be quite oblivious of the fact that his character was a Frenchman, serving in one of the armies of the French Revolution, a great popular movement which changed human history once and for all through “the convergence of individuals in order to produce something greater than their separate selves” (191–92). Someone in M. Clément’s position should have had little to learn from the Egyptians in this particular connection and at that particular time, but Idris allows credibility to be swept aside by the tide of his patriotic passion. M. Clément’s letter, and with it the whole story, ends on a note of cultural surrender, of wholesale abnegation of the Self and subsumption into the Other. Here is how he describes his agony to his friend: I am afraid, Rouen. I feel an overwhelming power drawing me to those people and calling upon me to know their secret […]. I am resisting violently. My education, my cultural heritage, my intellect – should all hold me back from their mass when they come together, but I am no longer myself […]. I fear that today or tomorrow I may sneak off to one of the many shrines of Sultan Hamid […] and light a candle for him, as I used to do for the Virgin Mary at church […]. I can feel myself walking powerless towards that fate. I can feel my resistance diminishing and coming to an end. Help, Rouen! (191–92)

This vision is unique in Idris’s renderings of this recurrent theme of his. The cultural attraction here is completely one-sided, with the French archaeologist seen to be drawn towards the East to the point of extinction of identity. It is also unabashedly romantic in its idealization of the Egyptians and intellectually naive in using a Frenchman as a vehicle for the expression of this idealistic view. The influence of al-Hakim’s equally romantic view of Egypt in ‘Awdat al-Ruh, discussed above, is undeniable here on the much younger Yusuf Idris. It may also be that Idris had at the back of his mind the model of Nasser; in the late 1950s, when this story was written, a period of national euphoria when the newly independent Egypt seemed to be making headway in every direction, Nasser indeed seemed a focal point which brought together the mass of Egyptian people as an ‘unstoppable

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force’ in their postcolonial confrontation with the West. Whatever the case may be, what is evident here is the influence of nationalism on the Arab intellectuals’ view of the Other; an influence which extends across generations and different political circumstances. In both ‘Awdat al-Ruh and ‘Usfur min al-Sharq, al-Hakim’s view of Western civilization was heavily coloured by the rising tide of nationalist feeling against British rule in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s, as I have argued above. Some twenty-five years later, in the postcolonial period, the argument was still true, as we have seen in the case of Yusuf Idris. W⏐X The heady years of national self-confidence in the early postcolonial period were, however, not to endure. The turning-point was the humiliating Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. Arab intellectuals did not see the defeat in only military terms, but were to see it in the fullness of time as a symptom of the collapse of the national dream in the post-independence period. Colonial rule was gone, but in its place what emerged was not democracy and liberalism but, rather, autocratic governments that repressed individuals and groups, sometimes more fiercely than under colonialism, and disastrous policies that led to military defeats and economic decline. This new sombre mood on the national level was inevitably to lead to a reassessment of Self and Other; one, this time, in which for the first time the Other was to be shown as morally superior – we have come a long way since the days of the materialistic, morally corrupt West versus the spiritual East. Those were notions and artistic structures produced by society as part of the process of resistance to colonialism. Now, while the end of colonialism as such was never to be lamented, its national substitute was not necessarily welcome in the end, as I shall briefly show below. In 1972, the Egyptian novelist Sulayman Fayyad wrote a novel by the title Aswat (Voices),54 in which a young Frenchwoman by the name of Simone arrives with her Egyptian husband on a visit to his native village. She has never been to Egypt before, and he has not visited since he left Egypt to France twenty-odd years before. The author uses the situation to 54 Sulayman Fayyad, Aswat (1972; Cairo: Kutub ‘Arabiyya, second edition, 1977); for an English translation, see Soleiman Fayyad, Voices, tr. & intro. Hosam Aboul–Ela (London: Marion Boyars, 1993).

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explore the cultural values of Self and Other. Simone charms the men of the village; she becomes the object of their secret and sometimes explicit desire. Her beauty, modernity, spontaneity, education, and effortless manner, not to mention her scanty dress, show the women of the village in a poor light in the eyes of their husbands. Life in the village, hitherto complacent and secure in its quasi-medieval ways, is turned upside down, not because of anything deliberate or provocative that Simone does, but merely through the alluring life-model she offers. The author shows her as a force of goodness, beauty, and vitality, offset by the forces of lust, inertia, envy, and primitivism represented by the men and women of the village. In the end, the women of the village, no longer able to contain their envy and their frustration at their own inadequacies that she brought home to them, seize her in her husband’s absence and circumcise her by force. The hapless woman bleeds to death. The symbolism of the ritualistic act is unmistakable. The author casts his own culture as a dark austere force that denies pleasure and rejects renewal, and casts the European Other as the undeserved saviour. Never before has the theme of the cultural encounter been represented in these terms in Arabic literature. The glorification of the Other and mortification of the Self, as seen in this powerful novella, was a reflection of the sombreness of the mood of the Arab intellectual in the aftermath of the collapse of the national dream of the postcolonial period. Fayyad’s work was quick to capture the dark mood of the Arab psyche in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Almost thirty years on, this mood of self-denial, indeed self-flagellation, before the (once colonial) Other continues to be the prevailing mood in approaches to the theme of the cultural encounter in Arabic literature, half a century into the postcolonial era. In recent decades, a new factor has evolved in manifestations of the Arab quest for the European Other in the form of immigration to the very land of their former colonizers. Tens of thousands of Arabs now live in Europe. Some came by choice, perhaps in search of a better life, while others came in search of human rights that their societies, or ruling regimes, denied them, for political, religious, ethnic or whatever reasons. Whatever the case may be, this has introduced a new element into the postcolonial cultural reencounter, which has found its way into literary expression. It is only natural that Arab intellectuals who themselves live in exile should be the ones to explore this new territory. The Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh, who has lived in London since the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon, published a short story in 1994,

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titled “I sweep the sun off rooftops,”55 in a collection by the same title, and, more recently, a novel titled Only in London (2001),56 in both of which she continues, in the manner of Sulayman Fayyad, though in even more pronounced terms, to see Europe as saviour and place of refuge, and as a moral model, embodying the values of freedom and the dignity of the individual. One interesting dimension here is that Europe is no longer a saviour and a refuge only in the metaphorical sense but also in the physical sense: as host and protector; and as provider of opportunity and liberty. What we witness here is a great irony of history: the old colonizer; the old usurper and oppressor, has now become a guardian and a sanctuary. Be this as it may, what concerns me here is the literary irony that follows from the historical paradox. Reading through the literature of the past two centuries produces amazing instances of intentional and unintentional intertextuality. In alHakim’s Bird of the East, we see a Frenchwoman cruelly manipulating the affections of her Egyptian admirer in order to win back the waning attention of her French lover. Both characters were allegorical representations of their respective cultures, as al-Hakim saw the relationship. Consider, by contrast, Fayyad’s Voices, written some thirty years later, where a Frenchwoman is murdered by Egyptian village women, envious of her beauty and vitality. Again, both parties have their unambiguous symbolic values in cultural terms. The two texts, read together, speak volumes about the changing perceptions of Self and Other, or the ex-colonized and the ex-colonizer. What is constant, however, is the continuing Arab quest for the soul of the European Other, for the one thing they wish the colonizers could have left behind when they pulled out their armies and weapons, and lifted their hegemony.

WORKS CITED Al-‘Alim, Mahmud Amin. “Sulayman al-Halabi ’ala Masrah al-Tarikhi,” in his Al-Wajh wal-Qina’ fi Masrahina al-‘Arabi al-Mu’asir (Dar al-Adab: Beirut, 1973). ——. Tawfiq al-Hakim Mufakkiran Fannanan (Cairo: Dar Shuhdi, 1985?). Badawi, Muhammad Mustafa. Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1988). 55

Hanan al-Shaykh, Aknus al-Shams ‘an al-Sutuh (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1994); tr. Catherine Cobham, I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops (St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1994). 56 Hanan al-Shaykh, Innaha London ya ‘Azizi (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2001); tr. Catherine Cobham, Only in London (London: Bloomsbury, 2001).

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El-Enany, Rasheed. Arab Representations of the Occident (London: Routledge, 2006). ——. Naguib Mahfouz: the Pursuit of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1993). ——. “The Quest for Justice in the Theatre of Alfred Faraj: Different Moulds, One Theme,” Journal of Arabic Literature 31.2 (2000): 171–202. ——. “Tawfiq al-Hakim and the West: A New Assessment of the Relationship,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27.2 (November 2000): 165–75. ——. “The Western Encounter in the Works of Yusuf ldris,” Research in African Literature 28.3 (1997): 33–55. Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). Grunebaum, Gustav von. Modern Islam (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U P of California, 1962; repr. 1982). Faraj, Alfred. Sulayman al-Halabi (Cairo: Dar al-Katib al-‘Arabi, 1965). Fayyad, Sulayman. Aswat (Cairo: Kutub ‘Arabiyya, second ed., 1977 (1972)); tr. & intro. Hosam Aboul–Ela, Voices (London: Marion Boyars, 1993). Al-Hakim, Tawfiq. “Amam Shubbak al-Tadhakir,” in al-Masrah al-Munawwa’ (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d.). ——. ‘Asa al-Hakim (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d.). ——. ‘Awdat al-Ruh (Cairo: Matba’at al-Ragha‘ib, 1933), tr. & intro. William Hutchins, The Return of the Spirit (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1990). ——. Fann al-Adab (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d.). ——. Malamih Dakhiliyya (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, 1982). ——. Misr bayna ‘Ahdayn (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, 1983?). ——. Tahiddiyat Sanat 2000 (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1988?). ——. Tahta Shams al-Fikr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d.). ——. ‘Usfur min al-Sharq (Kitab al-Hilal series, no.77; Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1957), tr. & intro. R.Baily Winder, Bird of the East (Beirut: Khayats, 1966). ——. Yaqzat al-Fikr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, 1986). ——. Zahrat al-‘Umr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, n.d.). Haqqi, Yahya. Dhikrayat Matwiyya (Cairo: Dar Sua’d, al-Sabah, 1993): 161–62. Hijazi, Mahmud Fahmi. ’Usul al-Fikr al-Arabi al-Hadith anda al-Tahtawi ma’a al-Nass al-Kamil likitabihi Takhlis al-Ibriz (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1974). Idris, Yusuf. Al-‘Askar al-Aswad wa Qiasas ‘Ukhra (Cairo: publisher unknown, 1962). ——. Al-Bayda‘ (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1970). ——. ‘Hadithat Sharaf, first published in 1958, republished in Al-Mu’allafat al-Kamila li Yusuf Idris (Cairo: ‘Alam al-Kutub, 1971). ——. New York 80 (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1980?). Al-Jabarti, Abd al-Rahman. Tarikh Aja’ib al-Athar fi al-Tarajim wa al-Akhbar, vol. II (Beirut: Dar Al-Faris, n.d.). For a French translation, see C. Mansour et al., Merveilles Biographiques et Historiques du Cheikh Abd el-Rahman el-Jabarti (Cairo: publisher unknown, 1892). Kurpershoek, P.M. The Short Stories of Yusuf Idris (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997). Mijalli, Nasim. Al-Masrah wa Qadaya al-Huriyya (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1984). Al-Naqqash, Raja’. “Hamlet fi al-Jami’ al-Azhar,” in al-Kawakib (14 December 1965).

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Said, Edward W. Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Al-Shaykh, Hanan. Aknus al-Shams ‘an al-Sutuh (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1994); tr. Catherine Cobham, I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops (St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1994). ——. Innaha London ya ‘Azizi (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2001); tr. Catherine Cobham, Only in London (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). Shukri, Ghali. Tawfiq al-Hakim: al-Jil wa al-Tabaqa wa al-Ru’ya (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1993). ——. Thawrat al-Mu’tazil (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida, 1966, repr. 1982). Starkey, Paul. From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Study of Tawfīq al-Hakīm (St. Antony’s Middle East Monographs 19; London: Ithaca Press, 1987). Tarabishi, Jurj (George). Lu’bat alHulm wal-Waqi’: Dirasa fi Adab Tawfiq al-Hakim (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1972). Yusuf Idris bi-Qalam Ha’ula’, collection of essays on Yusuf Idris, no editor (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1986?).

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Moving Pictures — Western Marxism and Vernacular Literature in Colonial Indonesia

K EITH F OULCHER

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N A R C H I P E L A G I C S O U T H E A S T A S I A , where the nation-state of Indonesia now extends over the territory once known as the Dutch East Indies, modern literature in indigenous languages is a relatively recent phenomenon. It began to acquire recognizable form only in the first decades of the twentieth century, when changes in the governance of the Indies began to produce fundamental cultural change in the lives of individuals and their communities. Modernity itself came to the Indies from a variety of sources, including China and the Middle East, and the cultural enactment of modernity was not the exclusive preserve of the institutions of colonial authority. Some of the earliest expressions of modernity in literature in fact appeared in Sino-Malay writing, and represented a response by the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora to changes emanating from mainland Confucian culture of the time. Nevertheless, when literature in Malay by non-Chinese indigenous writers appeared, it emerged from a context that was closely associated with the colonial administration and the early nationalist response to it. In the literature and cultural debate of the later nationalist and post-independence periods, this association led to an anxiety about how to be ‘modern’ without being ‘Dutch’, or ‘Western’. In the early nationalist period, however, un-self-conscious appropriations of the West formed the basis of an indigenous cultural modernity that found expression in some of the first examples of a modern Indonesian literature.

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Moving Beyond Association: The Politics of Colonial Modernity This essay deals with the way the West was configured in a form of modern indigenous-language literature during the period of ferment that Takashi Shiraishi has called an “age in motion.”1 To set the scene, the first part of the discussion explores the political and social environment which gave rise to this early experiment with modern literature in a non-Western context. The period itself is known in Indonesian as the time of the pergerakan (‘movement’). It was a time of great change, which lasted from about 1912 until 1926, and was characterized by a fluidity of ideas and positionings that made demarcations of race, religion, and ethnicity far more permeable than in later periods, when organizational life was dominated by attempts to define an ‘Indonesian’ identity and a politics of ‘Indonesian’ nationalism. In the time of the pergerakan, Marxism, Islam, and the pre-Islamic traditions of Java all intermingled in the fashioning of modern ideological standpoints and cultural identities. Dutch, Eurasian, and Javanese intellectuals and political agitators shared common political platforms and underwent common punishments at the hands of colonial law-enforcement agencies. The concept of ‘Indonesia’ was hardly known; it appeared only in 1924, and even then, not in the colony itself, but in the name of an association of students from the Indies studying in the Netherlands. It was a time when new possibilities of identity were being opened up, but no definitions were yet set in place. The West was not yet a cultural antagonist; it was the locus of colonial authority, but it was also a source of possibilities, to be appropriated in the light of local needs and positionings. The pergerakan itself acquired its character in response to the politics of ‘association’, an earlier-established model of modernity set in train by ‘ethical’ Dutch notions of progress in the colonial context. According to this view, progress was a process of evolution of the native peoples towards modernity under Dutch guidance and tutelage. The proponents of this policy imagined that as the colonial state consolidated its power and authority, and its reach into the lives of its subjects, so there would be a productive association between Dutch liberals, people who were knowledgeable and admiring of the achievements of native cultures, and Dutch-educated native intellectuals, indigenes who understood the role which Western tech1

Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java 1912–1926 (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1990).

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nology and an enlightened modern culture had to play in raising the peoples of the Indies to a superior stage of civilization. Association, in this sense, was the scheme for an evolutionary progress towards modernity – in the language of the times, a meeting of the best of West and East.2 One of the early exemplars of the associationist ideals was Raden Adjeng Kartini, the daughter of a native ruler of northern central Java, whose self-positioning between the emancipatory ideals of Western feminism and the realities of her own historical condition won her many supporters among Dutch liberals of her time, and made her a ‘pioneer of freedom’ in the nationalist myth-making of later histories.3 The associationist ideal of a marriage between East and West received some of its most lasting social impacts through the activities of the Netherlands Indies branch of the Theosophical Society. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Netherlands Indies proved to be one of the Theosophical Society’s most fertile grounds for recruitment and growth. A very significant number of Indonesians who played prominent roles in the modernizing nationalist movement of the late colonial period were themselves theosophists, or had some close association with the movement and its institutions. In the racially segregated society of the Netherlands Indies, the network of theosophical lodges, and the extensive system of theosophical educational institutions, provided a meeting-ground for individuals of Dutch, native Indonesian or Chinese ethnicity that had no equal in the society at large. Influential Dutch theosophists, like Dirk van Hinloopen Labberton, played a major role in furthering associationist ideals in both their personal and their public lives. For example, a close personal relationship existed between Van Hinloopen Labberton and some of the young Javanese aristocrats who founded the first organizations for native advancement.4 He was the first president of the theosophical ‘Association of East and West’ (Associatie van Oost en West), founded in 1912 to pro2 In the 1917 Encyclopædie van Nederlandsch-Indië, the entry on “Associatie” includes the statement: “On the one hand it (Association) refers to the association of the colony with the motherland, the endeavour to link the colony closely to the motherland by making available the benefits of the motherland culture (in the broad sense) to the people of the colony, while fully respecting the character of the indigenous people.” Encyclopædie van Nederlandsch– Indië (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff & Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1917), vol. 1: 67. 3 Jean Gelman Taylor, “Kartini in her Historical Context,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 145.2–3 (1989): 295–307. 4 Iskandar P. Nugroho, “The Theosophical Educational Movement in Colonial Indonesia (1900–1947)” (M.A. (Hons) thesis, University of New South Wales, 1995): 36–37.

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mote the development of modern educational institutions in the Indies.5 In 1918, he and three Indonesian theosophists became inaugural members of the thirty-nine-seat Indies People’s Council (Volksraad), an institution which was established as an expression of associationist ideals.6 In a direct link to the government institution that later fostered indigenous-language reading and writing under colonial tutelage, he was also a member of the Commission for Popular Literature (Commissie voor de Inlandsche schoolen volkslectuur), established in 1908 to advise the colonial government’s Department of Education and Religious Affairs on matters connected with the provision of reading material for use in the native school system.7 Theosophical ideas furthered associationist ideals, because they encouraged the notion that the perfection of humanity could only come through East and West learning from each other.8 In both systems of thought, ‘East’ primarily referred to the spiritual traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism; in the Indies, both looked to Java as the supreme repository of ‘Eastern’ wisdom. This meant that it was essentially young Javanese aristocrats, whose traditions preserved the indigenized versions of Hinduism and Buddhism of earlier centuries, who were drawn into associationist politics. The influence of theosophy meant that Christianity was never seen as a basis for ‘association’, but theosophy’s claim to be the “Root of Faith in all faiths” alienated orthodox Indonesian Muslims as much as it did Dutch Christians.9 As a result, Indonesians who followed more orthodox forms of Islam were less subject to the influence of this thinking, and thus more likely to be regarded as an alien, threatening Other by colonial policy-makers and their supporters. Nevertheless, by about 1912, the association of East and West in the pursuit of an enlightened modernity, even in the heartlands of colonial Java, was proving to be a much more complex and contested arena than associationist ideals had allowed for, or perhaps even envisaged. This was because in Java from about this time, notions of evolutionary progress towards modernity, and the idea of Dutch tutelage in that process, came 5

Nugroho, The Theosphical Educational Movement, 40. H.A.O. de Tollenaere, The Politics of Divine Wisdom: Theosophy and Labour, National and Women’s Movements in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875–1947 (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1996): 289. 7 Doris Jedamski, “Balai Pustaka, A Colonial Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” Archipel 44 (1992): 25. 8 Madelon Djajadiningrat–Nieuwenhuis, “Noto Soeroto, Aristo-demokrat Tanpa Pendukung” (Noto Soeroto, Aristo-democrat without supporters), Kalam 16 (2000): 35–36. 9 See H.A.O. de Tollenaere, The Politics of Divine Wisdom, 286–87. 6

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under direct challenge from competing visions of both the nature of modernity and the process by which it was to be attained. The ideal of evolutionary advancement found itself confronted by direct claims for equality and an end to colonial domination and subordination in all its forms. Henceforth, while associationist ideals continued to influence some of the cultural and educational policies of the colonial government and its functionaries, and remained compatible with some Indonesian expressions of modernity, other prominent Indonesians began to espouse different, and competing, visions of an Indonesian modernity. These individuals traversed associationist thought and its social institutions, only to arrive at more radical positions that ultimately exposed the limits which the logic of colonialism imposed on the associationist experiment. This movement took place within the world of the pergerakan, and it can be traced both directly, in actions and statements of pergerakan figures, and in more mediated form, in the expression of alternative modernities in the creative literature that came to be associated with pergerakan politics. This literature fractured the benign vision of a harmonious evolution towards modernity which associationism encouraged, and drew on the West in a different way. It looked to the West as a source of ideas, and it recognized the West as a central influence on the political and social reality in which modernity was taking shape. However, unlike the case of associationist thought, in this case the West was being appropriated by the indigenous world itself. In seeking to control the process of change, and turn it to advantage, the indigenous world in this tradition of thought took upon itself to select, and at times take instruction from, Western thought. But it did so on its own terms, rather than according to the terms deemed appropriate by a benign colonial authority, as in the associationist model. The age was indeed ‘in motion’, and the West stood ready for appropriation in the building of the new, rather than having any privileged claim to remake the world according to its own image. The sense of a competing vision of modernity that comes to characterize pergerakan culture has its source in the early attempts to challenge the political agenda of the colonial government in the Indies. One of its earliest expressions was the foundation of the Indische Partij, the Indies Party, at the end of 1912 in Bandung, West Java. This was primarily a political organization that aimed to represent the interests of the Eurasian population of the colony, but its slogan ‘the Indies for the Indiers’ had a potentially explosive impact on native subjectivities. To think of oneself as an ‘Indier’

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meant reconfiguring identity away from ethnicity and religion, and into the modern realm of citizenship. It meant joining a struggle where the ideal of enlightenment, the preserve of the West in associationist thought, became weapons that were turned decisively against the West itself. Takashi Shiraishi quotes the words of E.F.E. Douwes Dekker, the party’s Eurasian founder, proclaiming that the Indies Party was “a declaration of war (of) the shining light against darkness, of good against evil, civilization against tyranny, the colonial tax-paying slave against the Dutch tax-scraping state”. Shiraishi comments that this was “a total reversal of the Ethical language, in which ‘progress’ was conceived as the light of Western civilization illuminating the darkness of native society.”10 Through Douwes Dekker’s co-leaders of the Indies Party, the Javanese theosophists Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soewardi Soerjadiningrat, these ideas made the transition into the first indigenous political organization, the Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union). Soewardi was the leader of a branch of the Sarekat Islam in Bandung, and through its journal Hindia Sarekat (The Indies United), he placed the vision of an active politics of citizenship on the movement’s agenda. The vision was quickly tempered back in the direction of association under the central Sarekat Islam and its leader Tjokroaminoto, who drew on indigenous traditions to propose a more moderate political agenda. He made use of Javanese ethics to promote the notion of loyal criticism of the government and Islamic teaching that enjoined obedience to the laws of the state to show that there was no contradiction between loyalty to the government and progress for the native people.11 However, the radical imaginings which Soewardi had entertained continued to gather momentum in local branches of the Sarekat Islam and their publications, even if this was partly fostered through the writing of those in exile from the colony itself. Soewardi himself was exiled to the Netherlands in 1913 after his now famous transgression of colonial order, the political satire Als ik eens Nederlander was (If I were a Dutchman) was translated into Malay. The translation was a defiant gesture, because it made available the terms of a psychological ‘declaration of war’ to the Malay-reading native political public.12 10

Shiraishi, An Age in Motion, 58. An Age in Motion, 62. 12 On this text, see Kenji Tsuchiya, Democracy and Leadership: The Rise of the Taman Siswa Movement in Indonesia, tr. Peter Hawks (Monographs of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies Kyoto University, English language series, no. 18; Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 11

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Soewardi did not return to the Indies until 1919. By that time, the radical element of the pergerakan had drawn a larger following, as the aftermath of the war in Europe took its toll and the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia spurred rumours of change in the Netherlands and beyond.13 Under the influence of the small Indies Social Democrat Party (I S D V ), the first political organization in the Indies to be founded on Marxist principles, Marxist understandings of capitalism, imperialism and the class struggle entered political debate on a wide scale.14 Unrest among the population of Java was showing itself in a turning-away from traditional centres of authority and the search for new leaders and new foundations.15 In this context, the world of pergerakan thought was becoming both more focused and also more complex. The slogan ‘sama rata sama rasa’ (‘equality and solidarity’), coined in 1918, gained wide currency as an all-embracing principle of organizational politics and personal identity. In the same year, however, a revealing series of debates between two pergerakan leaders showed that pergerakan politics had opened up complex negotiations of personal and cultural identity, as individuals sought to reconcile Western notions of progress and democracy with indigenous codes of moral behaviour. The debates, which were analyzed with sensitivity and insight in an early article by Takashi Shiraishi,16 took place between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, one of the earliest pergerakan leaders, and Soetatmo Soeriokoesoemo, a founding member of the Indies Party in 1912, who, by 1918, had become a leader of the more politically conservative Committee for Javanese Nationalism. At the heart of their difference of opinion lay the question of the cultural basis of modernity in Java. The issue was ‘Javanese’ or ‘Indies’ nationalism, but the arguments turned on attempts to define the appropriate cultural underpinning of the political transformations which the pergerakan was attempting to bring about. Soetatmo, the more politically conservative of the two men, completely negated associationist thinking by 1987): 20–30, and James Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997): 26–37. 13 H.M.J. Maier, “Written in the Prison’s Light: The Hikajat Kadiroen by Semaoen,” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (R I M A ) 30.1–2 (1996): 1–2. 14 Ruth McVey, The Rise of Indonesian Communism (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1965): 178. 15 Maier, “Written in the Prison’s Light,” 2–3. 16 Takashi Shiraishi, “The Disputes between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soetatmo Soeriokoesoemo: Satria vs. Pandita,” Indonesia 32 (1981): 93–108.

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rejecting the Dutch/Western notion of intellectual upbringing as the way forward, and replacing it with the concept of moral upbringing, the perfection of moral character through an unfolding of the essence of Javanese culture.17 He urged his audience not to surrender the common language, culture and history which was the basis of Javanese identity in favour of allegiance to an Indies nationalism that had no cultural base or, at best, a cultural base that was no more than a product of Dutch colonial rule.18 His view stood in sharp contrast to the views of Tjipto, who called on his Javanese audience to refashion themselves as people of the Indies, arguing that as this occurred Javanese culture would acquire a totally new character, commensurate with a new age that made the people the subject of the times. In his view, the urgent task was an improvement in the people’s welfare, and this could only be achieved through intellectual training and Western science and technology.19 Significantly, however, in the formulation of their cultural/political standpoints, Soetatmo and Tjipto both appealed to Javanese ethical codes to underpin their arguments. Soetatmo argued that the equality envisaged by the sama rata sama rasa slogan was an illusion, that Javanese culture showed that a focus on individual rights, rather than duties, and an equality that displaced the leadership of wise men (pandita) was no formula for a functioning society. In his view, the present chaotic state of the pergerakan was a clear illustration of this moral truth.20 Tjipto, for his part, proposed that the present trials of the pergerakan were a part of the divine plan, calling up the qualities of determined will and firm character which Javanese tradition recognized as the attributes of the warrior/knight (satria). “In his view,” Shiraishi concludes, “the evolution and liberation of Java was possible only when the people reincarnated the essence of the genuine satria, his moral quality, through uncompromising struggle against the suffocating oppression and exploitation of the Dutch-priyayi regime”.21 In this way, Javanese tradition was being turned both against the Dutch colonial authority and against the ruling class of Java (priyayi). In the approach which

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Shiraishi, “The Disputes between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soetatmo Soeriokoesoemo,” 100. 18 “The Disputes between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soetatmo Soeriokoesoemo,” 96. 19 “The Disputes between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soetatmo Soeriokoesoemo,” 104. 20 “The Disputes between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soetatmo Soeriokoesoemo,” 102. 21 “The Disputes between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soetatmoe Soeriokoesoemo,” 108.

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Tjipto was advocating, Javanese identity was being transformed into a fluid, and as yet culturally-undefined, Indies identity.

Vernacular Literature and pergerakan Culture Tjipto’s call for a refashioning of Javanese identity away from ‘Java’ and towards a concept of ‘Indies’ citizenship contained a linguistic dimension that was obscured in his 1918 debates with Soetatmo. The debates themselves were conducted in Dutch and, as such, Soetatmo’s appeal to the common “language, culture and history” of Java was itself being made from a position outside the Java of his imagination – ‘tradition’ was already in the process of construction. As these debates made clear, however, ‘Java’ was never seen as a basis for ‘Indies’ nationalism, and there was never any suggestion that the language of Java might be the basis for an Indies identity (or, indeed, the later concept of an Indonesian identity).22 Rather, the public language of the Indies world was either Dutch or Indies Malay – the language of the vernacular press in Java and overwhelmingly the language of the pergerakan. In fact, it was Indies Malay, the borderless, free-flowing language of inter-ethnic communication in the cities of colonial Java, that became the basis for an Indies culture and the Indies identity that Tjipto’s nationalism implicitly envisaged. Already by the time of Tjipto’s debates with Soetatmo, Indies Malay was beginning to function as the framework in which a new literary imagination was finding expression. A new type of literature in this language first appeared in pergerakan publications around 1914; by 1918–19 it was acquiring a character that distinguished it sharply from explorations of literary modernity that were emerging out of associationist politics, and which it implicitly represented a counter to.23 The founding figure and main ex22

This is despite the fact that Javanese – spoken by the ethnic Javanese of the eastern and central regions of the island of Java – was then, as it is now, the mother tongue of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Indonesian archipelago. 23 The first examples of literature born out of associationist politics were probably the four collections of Dutch-language poetry by R.M. Noto Soeroto, published between 1915 and 1918 (see Djajadiningrat–Nieuwenhuis, “Noto Soeroto,” 44). These collections drew heavily on the model of the lyrical prose poems of Rabindranath Tagore, evoking the mystical world of Java in a European literary form. They gained considerable popularity among Dutch readers, but they did not inspire a continuing tradition of Dutch-language Indonesian literature. As will be discussed below, the lasting effects of associationist politics in Indonesian literature were felt in an indigenous-language tradition that came to supplant the literature discussed in this essay.

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ponent of this type of literature was Mas Marco Kartodikromo (c.1890– 1932), one of the major pergerakan journalist activists, and an individual whose life and work have come to be seen as the epitome of pergerakan politics and its cultural style. Much has already been written about Mas Marco’s life and work, some of it naming him as the author of work that was actually written by one of his pergerakan associates.24 He first appeared in pergerakan circles as the young protégé of the man who is widely seen as the pioneer of the Malay press, R.M. Tirto Adhisoerjo, who was himself one of the first writers of indigenous-language fiction.25 In 1914, as a young man in his early twenties, Mas Marco established an association of indigenous journalists, and began to involve himself in newspaper publication. In subsequent years, he was associated with the pergerakan press in Bandung and Batavia, before again returning to central Java, where he played leading roles in a series of pergerakan newspapers, including Sinar Djawa (The Light of Java), later known as Sinar Hindia (The Light of the Indies) and Api (Fire).26 Between 1915 and 1920 he was imprisoned on four different occasions for violations of colonial press laws; in between these periods of imprisonment, in late 1916 and early 1917, he spent five months in the Netherlands, as special correspondent of the newspaper Pantjaran Warta (News Broadcast). It was in Pantjaran Warta, immediately after his return to the Indies, that he coined the ‘sama rata sama rata’ slogan, using it as the title of a series of articles demanding that the colonial government legislate to ensure equality between natives and Europeans. This assault on the government immediately earned him another year’s prison sentence.27 24

This confusion stemmed from a 1974 discussion by Henri Chambert–Loir, which suggested that the names ‘Soemantri’ and ‘Synthema’ were pseudonyms for Mas Marco (Henri Chambert–Loir, “Mas Marco Kartodikromo (c. 1890–1932) ou l’éducation politique,” in Littératures Contemporaines de L’Asie du Sud-Est, ed. Pierre–Bernard Lafont & Denys Lombard (Paris: L’Asiathèque, 1974): 205). Successive authors right up to Siegel in 1997 (Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution, 106, 267 fn. 3) followed this suggestion, even though it was corrected by Anderson in 1983 (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983): 37 fn. 52) and Shiraishi in 1990 (Shiraishi, An Age in Motion, 246–47 fn.82). 25 Ahmat B. Adam, The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of the Modern Indonesian Consciousness (1855–1913) (Ithaca N Y : Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1995): 109–21. 26 Shiraishi, An Age in Motion, 79–90, Tickell, Three Early Indonesian Short Stories, 2–3, Chambert–Loir, “Mas Marco Kartodikromo,” 204–205. 27 Shiraishi, An Age in Motion, 88.

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In the course of these years, building the world of pergerakan activist journalism and moving in and out of Dutch prisons, Mas Marco composed a series of stories and poems in which the world of the pergerakan and its cultural outlooks became the basis of a racy, even celebratory, type of vernacular literature, full of confidence in itself and its straightforward appropriation of the West in all its forms. It was above all a literature of the pergerakan newspaper, as Marco followed the already established tradition of the Indies Malay feuilleton, the serialized story whose daily episodes acquired pride of place at the foot of the paper’s opening page. One of his first and most commented-on stories, Student Hidjo (Hidjo, a student), first appeared in this form in Sinar Hindia in 1918; others followed, written both by Marco himself and by his pergerakan associates. Commentators on Mas Marco’s writing have all referred to its cultural and linguistic eclecticism, the way in which Dutch, Indies, and Javanese elements all emerge jumbled together in his stories in new and sometimes surprising ways. They are set primarily in the modern, urban world of the Indies but, like Marco himself, the heroes of his stories may also find themselves in the heartlands of empire. Here they suffer no sense of a colonial inferiority complex; they move with a social and sexual self-confidence that puts paid to the segregations which colonial authority attempted to uphold.28 Shiraishi makes the perceptive observation that the milieu of the stories is marked by a juxtaposition of cultures – there are no coherent wholes, which means that while the characters and the environments they conjure up are not westernized, “cut off from traditional ideas, perceptions, habits, and ethics,”29 nor is there in these stories any coherent meaning attached to these markers of tradition. They stand not in opposition to the West but in juxtaposition to it, an assembly of cultural options available for appropriation according to the outlooks and needs of the pergerakan world. Rudolf Mrázek, in a recent discussion of Student Hidjo, captures the tone of Marco’s writing when he observes that “there seem to be no exclusion zones,” and “everything is possible,” as Hidjo “travels across borders smoothly.”30 28 See Paul Tickell, “Love in a Time of Colonialism: Race and Romance in an Early Indonesian Novel,” in Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, ed. Keith Foulcher & Tony Day (Leiden: K I T L V Press, 2002): 49–60. 29 Shiraishi, An Age in Motion, 31. 30 Rudolf Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton N J & Oxford: Princeton U P , 2002): 145–46.

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It is this porousness of borders that marks the world of pergerakan thought and the lived culture which it gave birth to. There is a jauntiness to it all, a confident swagger that Mrázek describes as the Indies dandy, replicated in dress as much as in speech, and unnerving to colonial authority because this was not just ‘style’ but part of a semiotics of anticolonial resistance.31 In 1917, a Dutch report on Marco’s writing in Pantjaran Warta, beginning with his letters from The Hague and ending with the sama rasa sama rata articles and a set of political cartoons, suggests how unnerving this border-crossing appropriation must have been to the colonial mind. Dutch readers of the report learned that Marco’s call for equality appealed not just to the ‘satria blood’ and messianism of the Javanese tradition, but drew as well on the direct appropriation of Dutch admonitions to ‘the service of freedom’ and the weapons of ‘Faith and Courage’ in the quest for ‘salvation’. The easy transition of Marco’s Malay-to-Dutch translation could only have confirmed the unruliness of his appropriations, as it lay bare his assumption of an idiom that the Dutch themselves never intended to be used on the other side of the colonial divide: Now the Indies government is feeling it! Yes, now the voice of all the people of the Indies cries to the heavens for their rights as human beings. Whoever holds his nation dear will step into the breach for her, and defy exile, hunger, pain and death.32

One of Marco’s co-editors of Sinar Hindia, leader of the radical Semarang branch of the Sarekat Islam and later one of the founders of the Indonesian Communist Party was Semaoen, “the most popular and able of the native leftist leaders.”33 Like Marco, Semaoen was a crusading journalist whose writing and speech-making brought him imprisonment under the imposition of colonial law. In 1919, at the age of twenty, he spent four months in prison, and one of the results of this period of ‘asceticism’ was another work of pergerakan literature, the ‘novel’ Hikajat Kadiroen (The Story of Kadirun). It was serialized in Sinar Hindia in 1920, and some years later it 31 Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land, 146; see also Rudolf Mrázek, “Indonesian Dandy: The Politics of Clothes in the Late Colonial Period, 1893–1942,” in Outward Appearances, Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: K I T L V Press, 1997): 117–50. 32 “Nu voelt de Indische regeering het! Ja, nu de stem van alle Indiërs ten hemel roept om menschenrechten. Wie zijn natie liefheeft, zal voor haar op de bres springen en ballingschap, honger, smaad en dood tarten”; “Mas Marco,” De Indische Gids 39.2 (1917): 1079. 33 McVey, The Rise of Indonesian Communism, 38.

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appeared in book form, published by the Partai Kommunist Indonesia in Semarang. In 1996, it appeared in English translation, accompanied by thoughtful analyses by Henk Maier and Paul Tickell which draw atttention to other aspects of the literature of the pergerakan period. As Maier and Tickell both observe, Hikajat Kadiroen is a tale of political awakening, a treatise on the causes of exploitation and of the inevitability of historical change, lightened by a romantic sub-plot which celebrates a relationship based on love and ethical conduct. Maier identifies two European literary traditions which Semaoen’s ‘novel’ draws on, the Bildungsroman and the roman à thèse. As a story of apprenticeship, the hero’s progression through a series of trials towards a state of self-awareness, Hikajat Kadiroen shares the characteristics of the Bildungsroman with later, and better-known, examples of the emerging Indonesian novel of late colonial times. However, it is distinguished from them by the prominence of its uncompromising didactic intent, marked by the presence of an omniscient narrator who constantly guides the reader’s interpretation of events through commentary and interpolation, giving it the character of an Indies roman à thèse. Like the works of Mas Marco and the examples of pergerakan literature to be considered below, the narrative proceeds through what Maier calls an “emphatic realism”34 – a part of its appeal to its original readers must surely have been the novelty and pleasure of recognition, of seeing familiar aspects of lived experience represented in the conceptual world of the writer’s imagination. Tickell identifies two further European elements, already present in other examples of Indies Malay writing by the 1920s, which can also be seen as part of the cultural make-up of Hikajat Kadiroen. The first is detective fiction, examples of which appeared in Malay translation in serialized form in Sinar Djawa as early as 1914,35 and which remained a popular form of both translated and original writing throughout the late-colonial period in Indonesia.36 Tickell suggests that the detective novel may be the literary model of individualism and scientific rationalism which Semaoen 34

Maier, “Written in the Prison’s Light,” 10. Paul Tickell, “Novels, Politics and Values: Political Discourse and Modern Identities in Semaoen’s Hikajat Kadiroen,” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (R I M A ) 30.1–2 (1996): 150 fn. 3. 36 See Doris Jedamski, “Genres of Crime Fiction in Indonesia,” in Pramoedya Ananta Toer 70 Tahun, Essays to Honour Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s 70th Year, ed. Bob Hering (Stein: Yayasan Kabar Seberang, 1995): 167–89. 35

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draws on in creating a hero with the qualities of “careful and logical thought, selfless behaviour, bravery and an overriding sense of justice.”37 Equally significant, in Tickell’s view of the novel, is the key role which notions of romantic love play as a signifier of modernity in Semaoen’s conceptual world. Romantic love, the free association of individuals in a relationship of shared intimacy, is the antagonist of the coercion and exploitation of arranged marriage, and thus becomes part of the values of modernity which Hikajat Kadiroen champions. It stands alongside logic and reason and an enlightened self-awareness that are the basis of political awareness – a consciousness of the need for change and a willingness to be a part of the struggle for change – which the novel sets out to impart to its readers. This list of the possible models which Semaoen draws on in Hikajat Kadiroen and of the values which the narrative seeks to champion may suggest that it represents a blend of Western cultural and literary elements that makes it entirely ‘new’ in the indigenous world of colonial Java at the beginning of the 1920s. Maier’s observations on the author’s preface to the 1922 book edition of his novel, however, show that the ‘new’ is located here within an entirely indigenous conception of the nature and function of storytelling. “May the readers, gentlemen and comrades, benefit from this book,” writes Semaoen in his preface. “May this story, which I wrote in prison with tears of misery, give pleasure to many, that is to say, to the readers and the people.”38 Here, the new is being presented in terms of the culturally familiar, the Malay tradition of storytelling. In this tradition, the act of storytelling arises from the emotions, in particular the experience of sorrow, and the story itself is seen to offer its readers or listeners both the pleasure of amusement and the benefit of instruction. Semaoen invokes this tradition apparently quite un-self-consciously, suggesting an entirely different way in which the novel may be conceived. Viewed in terms of the Malay tradition of storytelling, the pleasures of recognition that realist detail may impart in Hikajat Kadiroen and the satisfaction at love’s triumph which its romantic sub-plot makes possible fulfil the expectation that storytelling should impart ‘amusement’. Similarly, what the Western point of view identifies as the characteristics of the roman à thèse can equally be seen as the presence of ‘instruction’, certainly 37 38

Tickell, “Novels, Politics and Values,” 143. Maier, “Written in the Prison’s Light,” 8.

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not instruction in the world-view that gave birth to this tradition of storytelling, but of the lessons to be learned from the ‘time of movement’, where cultures and traditions flow in and out of one another, without any sense of a need for exclusion and boundary-keeping. Similarly, though we may see the novel’s purpose as the elaboration of Marxist understandings in the minds of its readers, Marxism here is only a part of what Maier calls “the strange mixture of Islamic, Communist and Javanistic elements”39 that distances the novel from the expectations of contemporary readers and draws attention back to the world of the cultural appropriations that were taking place in the cities of Java in the 1920s. In the following sections of this essay, I want to consider some examples of pergerakan literature that have not so far been the subject of detailed commentary and analysis. They are drawn from the pages of Api, the newspaper of the radical Semarang branch of the Sarekat Islam in 1924 and 1925. They represent the world of pergerakan culture in its final phase before the destruction of the movement in the wake of the communist-led rebellions of 1926–27 and the rise of the Indonesian nationalist movement proper in the period that followed. They comprise a series of short stories and serialized novels, and they illustrate the way in which the characteristics of pergerakan literature already identified were elaborated and developed in the work of a range of mostly unknown writers on the eve of the movement’s decline. Taken together, they remind us of the sense of confidence, the embrace of change, and the un-self-conscious appropriation of Western culture that marked a distinctive phase in the development of indigenous language literature in colonial Indonesia.

Semarang, Java, Mid-1920s Pictures in Writing I want to begin my discussion of late pergerakan era literature by attempting to reproduce in English the opening instalment of a serialized story which began publication in Api on 8 October 1924.40 The opening to the

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Maier, “Written in the Prison’s Light,” 17. Soliskson, “Membangoenkan atau Hikajat Soerja Seorang Intelekt” (Awakening or The story of Surya, a man of intellect), Api ( 8 October 1924). In the translations given here, the modern Indonesian spelling ‘Surya’ is used in place of the original Dutch spelling ‘Soerja’ in reference to the name of the protagonist. This and all the following translations from the Malay are by the author unless otherwise indicated. 40

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story consists of a little over 300 words of Indies Malay text; in English translation it reads as follows: FEUILLETON AWAKENING or THE STORY OF SURYA, A MAN OF INTELLECT Composed by SOLISKSON (Quotation without the writer’s permission is forbidden.) Volume 1 Part 1 One day, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the Pasarturi station of the Netherlands Indies Railways in Surabaya was a hive of activity. The Semarang– Gundih–Surabaya express was just pulling in. Before the train came to a stop, the railway coolies all ran up and grabbed hold of the railings by the carriage stairs, jumping onto the train to carry the passengers’ luggage. They seemed to give no thought to the danger they were risking by acting in this way. They leapt aboard the train while it was still moving, fighting with their workmates to secure a ‘job’. They risked their lives for a mouthful of rice. Once the train had stopped, the voices of the passengers could be heard, shouting for a coolie and calling out to the carts, carriages, and taxis that stood lined up in front of the station. Some were calling relatives, friends, or hotel boys, who were there to welcome them. Among this crush of people stood a young man. He was looking both to the right and the left of him. Beside him stood a mustard-coloured metal suitcase, flecked with white. Glued to the suitcase was a piece of thick paper, on which was written in the black ink that is used for drawing lessons in schools, in big letters: SURYA Semarang These are the words that were written on the paper on the young man’s suitcase. His name was Surya, and he was from Semarang. Near Surya’s suitcase was a red lacquered bag, full of books. Surya was in Surabaya to attend school. He stood looking right and left on the platform in search of the man who was to meet him at the station. Surya had never met the man who was to meet him, and neither had that man ever met Surya. They knew each other only by correspondence. Mustafa, the

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name of the man who was to meet him, was a good friend of Surya’s father. Before Surya set out for Surabaya, his father had written to Mustafa, telling him that his son was going to attend school in Surabaya. He asked Mustafa to assist him by accepting his son as a boarder in his house. He also expressed the hope that Mustafa would not mind meeting his son at the Netherlands Indies Railways station Pasarturi in Surabaya on 10 March 1914 at 3 in the afternoon. In his latest letter, Surya’s father had described his son’s appearance, and the size and style of the suitcase he would be carrying, to make it easier for Mustafa, who had never seen Surya before. Similarly, Surya only knew Mustafa’s name and appearance from what his father had told him. Among the people in the noisy crowd at the station was a man of about 40, walking along and looking all around him. (To be continued)

There is a great deal in this introduction to the story of Surya that illustrates the characteristics of pergerakan literature in general, and points to the novelty of the cultural outlooks which it both embodied and promoted. The age of the pergerakan saw the expansion of modern technology and the industrial capitalism it made possible, and the literary imagination associated with the movement responded to this development with both a fascination with technology and a keen eye to the exploitation associated with industrial labour. Privately owned railways are one of the most powerful symbols of this ‘age in motion’, and it is emblematic that “The Story of Surya, a Man of Intellect” should have as its opening scene the arrival of an intercity express train in the urban metropolis of Surabaya at a time of capitalist expansion in the Indies. Surya himself is a subject of these times, a young man arriving by train in a strange city, to pursue his education. Significantly, the man who is to meet him at the station is a stranger: the extended elaboration of this point within the confines of 300 words of text is an indication of its cultural novelty. Surya is moving beyond kinship relationships into the sort of association that marks the relationship between individuals in an urban setting. The meeting has been pre-arranged by letter and it is only by outward appearances that Surya and Mustafa will recognize each other. The precision about times and dates in the extract is also characteristic of this literature. An aspect of the “emphatic realism” which Maier identified is the ordering of time according to the principles of industrial capitalism, and it appears in the literature in an attention to detail in all matters of measurement and calculation. The realism of the description is highly visual – indeed, almost filmic. The way in which the bustling activity of the

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railway station narrows in on the figure of Surya, standing on the platform beside his suitcase and his case of books, imitates the movement of the movie camera as it pans the crowd before settling on the individual subject of the narrative. Similarly, another individual emerges from the crowd at the end of the description, identified solely in visual terms rather than by information about his identity and role in the story. One of the most striking aspects of the scene that opens Surya’s story is, of course, the picture of the railway coolies jumping aboard the train before it comes to a stop in their anxiety to find work as porters. Here, though, the visual image is not allowed to stand alone. The narrative voice makes sure that the reader is alerted to the exploitation of labour and the disregard for personal safety which are encouraged by the struggle for survival among the urban poor. Other stories of the period share this sense of excitement about urban life, the wonders of technology, and the possibilities of free association between individuals it opens up, while at the same time asserting the need to act with responsibility. Responsibility in this sense may mean learning to manage money wisely; it may also involve the obligation to understand the workings of capital, a knowledge that can only be obtained by the reading of “pergerakan books” and participation in vergadering, the political meeting that symbolizes the new form of association characteristic of pergerakan culture. “I really want to see a vergadering,” says a character in a serialized story called Aliran Djaman (The Current of the Age) from 1925. “In all my life, I have never seen one.”41 Other lessons in political awareness, however, come simply by way of participant observation of urban life. Earlier in this story, Jayus, the same character who has never “seen” a vergadering, is travelling across town by tram with Saroso, a seriousminded friend who is troubled by what he sees outside the tram window: the main roads are lined with shops and the big houses all owned by “foreigners” – what has happened to the urban hamlets of Javanese people which used to occupy this land? Jayus himself supplies the answer, based on his own experience – the house of a Dutchman now stands on land once

41 Tjempaka–Pasoeroean, “Aliran Djaman,” Api (11 August 1925). For a discussion of the vergadering and its representation in literature, see Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution, 111–13.

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owned by his grandfather, who now finds himself forced further and further away from the metropolis.42 All is not simply political education, however. In the following episode of Aliran Djaman, Jayus and Saroso are accompanied on the tram by Haryono, who finds himself smitten with a young woman sitting not far from them. Her appearance is described in detail, and the reader learns that her demeanour indicates she is of noble birth, with at least Dutch-language ‘native school’ or Theosophical Society ‘Kartini school’ education. As Mrázek has shown, the pergerakan hero is not some dour proletarian but an Indies dandy, and there is absolutely no tone of censure as the narrative proceeds to describe Haryono’s overtures in her direction. On the contrary, the mood is playful and plainly empathetic: His chest moved like an automobile about to take to the road. His mind was racing and he was so caught up that he had to stop now and then to wipe the perspiration running down his face and his neck. The back of his shirt was looking wet. A fast-flowing river can be held back by the force of a dam, but passion once aroused … Little by little Haryono had edged himself closer to where she was sitting. Finally he reached his goal, and was sitting in the same row as she was. They began to exchange looks, like a pair of lovebirds. But neither of them seemed able to make the first move. In fact, the girl had been attracted to Haryono since she had noticed him earlier. But as a young lady, it wasn’t proper for her to be the one to introduce herself to a young man. When she could see Haryono was approaching her, she pretended not to take any notice, but she was inwardly thrilled at the prospect of meeting this man who had caught her eye. At first Haryono was too shy to speak to her, but when he remembered the saying “Vragen is vrij” (“There’s no charge for asking”) he summoned up his courage and asked “Mag… mag… ik even voorzetellen, juffrouw? Ik ben Harjono.” (“May… may… I introduce myself, miss? I’m Haryono.”) “Yes, thank you very much,” replied the girl, with a lovely smile. “Ik ben Soediati, meneer.” (“I am Sudiati, sir.”) Thud! It was like a blow to Haryono’s chest, the blood surged so strongly. He no longer looked pale, and his face shone like the full moon. The two lovebirds struck up a happy conversation together.43

42 Tjempaka–Pasoeroean, “Aliran Djaman atau Seorang Gadis jang Sengsara” (The current of the age or A girl who suffered hardship), Api ( 6August 1925). 43 Tjempaka–Pasoeroean, “Aliran Djaman,” Api ( 7August 1925).

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Although there are indeed instances where a would-be dandy may be smitten by a woman of style who turns out to be only after his money,44 Sudiati and Haryono are not to be taken as negative characters only because of their style, their use of Dutch, and their freedom of association. The narrative does not prejudge them, and there is no automatic association between ‘style’ and moral character and political orientation. Much more important in this case is the fact that Haryono is inclined to be careless with money: that is suggested as the lesson he has to learn in the opening scenes of this story. It is, in fact, Haryono’s ‘style’ that is the source of an important political lesson for him. Haryono could be taken for a Dutchman “because of his good looks and his light coloured skin,” but when he goes to pay his fare on the tram, he finds he is asked to pay a surcharge. “But I am a Javanese,” he says firmly, “how much do I have to pay?” “For a Javanese, the fare is ten cents,” replies the conductor. But there is a new regulation: because he is a Javanese wearing trousers, he is charged the ‘foreigner’s fare. In other words, to be a dandy and dress in the European style will cost you extra; keep to your ‘native’ place and you will be viewed with some benevolence.45 The use of Dutch in this extract is interesting. Unlike some earlier pergerakan texts, which use a heteroglossic mixture of languages but include footnotes giving Malay translations of Dutch words and phrases,46 the texts of this period do not normally provide translations when Dutch words and phrases appear. This may suggest that the implied readers of the stories are assumed to understand some Dutch, but it is also an aspect of the realism of the texts. For, unlike later Indonesian literature, in which the speech of characters is ‘translated’ from regional or foreign languages into the national language (Indonesian), pergerakan literature is largely written in the language of the environments which it imaginatively depicts. The use of Dutch in a character’s speech is an aspect of verisimilitude in the way that character is portrayed. It is also important to note that there is no negative association in the pergerakan literary imagination with Dutch language, culture, and people. 44 A good example is the short story by Soemantri, “Tjermin Boeah Keroyalan” (Images of extravagance), in Three Early Indonesian Short Stories by Mas Marco Kartodikromo (c. 1890–1932), tr. & intro. Paul Tickell (Clayton: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1981): 13–18. 45 Tjempaka–Pasoeroean, “Aliran Djaman,” Api ( 11August 1925). 46 See Paul Tickell, “Love in a Time of Colonialism” for a discussion of a text of this type.

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In his analysis of Hikajat Kadiroen referred to above, Maier notes the presence of the “good Dutchman.”47 Good Dutchmen and -women both appear in the Api stories, and they interact with indigenous characters on a basis of equality. In Hikajat Soerja, Surya’s political awakening actually takes place through his meeting with a politically minded Dutchman, the emblematically named Tuan van de Goedezij (‘the gentleman of the good side’). Van de Goedezij is a friend of Mustafa, Surya’s substitute father in Surabaya, and the two men enjoy a relationship that embodies the pergerakan ideal of ‘equality and solidarity’. Significantly, though they learn from each other in matters of the intellect, the compatibility between them is described as one of sentiment: Van de Goedezij had learned Malay and Javanese from Mustafa, and for his part, Mustafa had learned Dutch and all kinds of other things from Van de Goedezij. Even though they were of different races, different religions and each had a different social status, they still both felt a compatibility of feeling, one with the other. From Mustafa, Van de Goedezij found out about conditions in urban kampungs and in the villages. He learned about the backwardness and difficulties of life for most of the native people. He heard about their grievances, and the humiliations which the native people, especially the little people, had to endure.48

The heroes, or role models, of pergerakan literature are always the bordercrossers, those who do not keep their compartmentalized place in the colonial order. Van de Goedezij transgresses this order in a major way, because not only does he share this relationship of intellectual equality and emotional compatibility with Mustafa, but also he is married to a native woman. When he first receives this information, Surya is surprised, not because of the fact of a relationship between the Dutchman and a native woman in itself, but because it infringes his sense of how sexual relationships are ordered in the colonial environment. Mustafa tells Surya that Van de Goedezij’s accountancy business has been so successful that he is earning a salary of 400 guilders a month. “If he is earning such a big salary,” asks

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Maier, “Written in the Prison’s Light,” 14. Soliskson, “Hikajat Soerja,” Api ( 13October 1924). The term bangsa, translated here as ‘race’, carried a range of meanings in Indies Malay. It was used in the sense of ‘group’, in expressions that described the characteristics of a group identity which linked individuals together (such as bangsa Socialist for ‘Socialists’), but it also functioned as the vernacular equivalent of the imported notions of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ (Paul Tickell “Love in a Time of Colonialism,” 53–54), as appears to be the case here. 48

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Surya, “why has he not married a young Dutch lady? Why does he still prefer to keep a concubine?” 49 By having his ‘unaware’ character react in this way, the author of the story suggests that the native observer of a relationship between a white man and a native woman assumes the relationship to be one of sexual exploitation, so deeply ingrained are the habits and practices of colonial subjugation. It is seen as normal that the native woman should be available as a temporary partner for the white man, until his economic status enables him to take a woman of his own race as his legal wife. Until he is advised that Van de Goedezij is legally married, this possibility does not enter Surya’s head. What strikes him as odd is that a Dutchman of means should choose to continue his (presumed) temporary association with a native woman. The author thus attacks on two fronts: an instance of colonial exploitation is exposed and, at the same time, the acceptance of normality is undermined.50 Van de Goedezij’s wife turns out to be a border-crosser in her own right. She is Ida Soemerakhati, the daughter of a court official in the sultanate of Yogyakarta, one of the two central Javanese principalities. Because of her social status, she has been able to acquire a modern education, epitomized in a command of Dutch, English, and French “not inferior to that of young Indo ladies.”51 Surya is excited at the prospect of meeting her, because two years before she was the subject of heated attack in the native press for having committed the crime of forsaking her own identity.52 She has become a prominent pergerakan activist, campaigning through newspapers and books for an end to the subjugation of young women in the royal houses of central Java.53 As a young girl in the court of Yogyakarta, she learned about the suffering of women of her class through her nursemaid, 49 The reference here is to the long-established practice of European men in the Netherlands Indies of taking a native woman as concubine or ‘housekeeper’ (nyai) during their residence in the colony. By the time this story was written, the presence of large numbers of Dutchwomen emigrating to the colony had caused the practice to fall into disrepute. 50 See also the comments by Barbara Hatley, “Postcoloniality and the Feminine in Modern Indonesian Literature,” in Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, ed. Keith Foulcher & Tony Day (Leiden: K I T L V Press, 2002): 150. 51 ‘Indo’ in this context means ‘Eurasian’. The use of this term for ‘Eurasian’ lasted well into post-independence Indonesia. 52 In this case, the term used is kebangsaan, the modern Indonesian term for ‘nationality’. 53 The “emphatic realism” of this description suggests that Ida may be modelled on an actual historical figure. However, I am unable to identify a possible source for her characterization.

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and when she reached an age where she herself was to be prepared for life in the keputren, the palace ‘harem’, she rebelled, both against her father and against her heritage. This meant, in the words of the narrator of her story, that she set herself against those who saw aspirations to freedom as merely the dreams of a ‘traitor’, a destroyer of the traditions of her own people. Quite clearly, the struggle is between humanist aspirations and the weight of tradition, and the defenders of that anti-humanist past spare no effort in their attempts to destroy the danger she represents. Ida is hounded to the point of despair, and Van de Goedezij actually meets her as she sits contemplating suicide in a fast-flowing river. He happens upon her during a photographic expedition along the river banks, and just as, with Mustafa, he established a compatibility of feeling, so he and Ida find that they have met “on an inward plane” (berdjoempa batin) as they leave the river bank together, hand in hand. Outwardly, the pergerakan is a time of organizational politics: Van de Geodezij convinces Ida that she must spare herself to work in the interests of others. But the outer world has an inner dimension, where individuals find common ground on the basis of shared ideals and shared emotions, and establish affective relationships that override the boundarymarkers of the colonial divide. In the strategy they adopt to continue to meet, Van de Goedezij and Ida show themselves to be true pergerakan-era sweethearts. Van de Goedezij appears at Ida’s father’s house one Sunday, photographic equipment in tow, with a request to be allowed to photograph the house for a collection of photographs of Yogyakarta. The reader knows that as a child of the pergerakan, Van de Goedezij speaks Malay and Javanese, but he pretends to speak only Dutch, so that Ida is summoned to act as her father’s interpreter. The photographs are to be published in the newspaper, and this so pleases Ida’s father that Van de Goedezij is able to propose further meetings where Ida will act as interpreter and he will show her father more of his photographic images. The strategy thus exploits modern technologies – photography and the newspaper – as well as multilingualism, as Van de Goedezij and Ida turn their ability to move between different languages to their advantage as cross-cultural lovers. The newspaper especially plays a significant role in advancing the story at this point. Van de Goedezij writes in a Javanese newspaper about the need for Javanese aristocrats to move with the times. This makes Ida’s father angry, and in an effort to prove his loyalty to the sultan, he advances his plans to place Ida in the keputren. Supported by her nursemaid, and expressing her fears to Van de Goedezij

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through their contrived meetings, Ida finally flees. Two months later the newspapers report that she has run away with a Dutchman, that they are now married and living in Surabaya. This is the point in the story at which they meet Surya, and also the point at which the narrative effectively ends. Hikajat Soerja now becomes an extended essay on the exploitation of women, especially those of the aristocratic class, on slavery, and on historical materialism and the exploitation of workers under capitalism, as Surya experiences a political awakening through his discussions with Van de Goedezij and his wife. The sudden loss of a ‘story’ at this point in Hikajat Soerja is disconcerting to the modern reader, because the expectations aroused by the genre of ‘literature’ are not fulfilled here. We never discover whether Ida is reconciled with her father and her Javanese tradition; we do not learn what becomes of her marriage to Van de Goedezij, and we never see Surya complete his education and continue his life’s journey.54 But the frustration of expectations at this point can also be instructive, because we are reminded that we are not always dealing here with literature as it is understood in the modern Western tradition. In Hikajat Soerja there is no well-rounded and satisfying plot, no character development to speak of, no pattern of underlying signification. What we do have is a series of snapshots, of both the physical environment and the thought world of the radical pergerakan in mid-1920s Java. There is, however, a sense in which the realist conventions adopted by pergerakan writers do indicate the kind of exploitation of literary artifice which as modern readers we understand to be a part of the fashioning of literary texts. I am thinking here of the way in which ‘emphatic realism’ is both a style of representation and an artifice in these texts. On the one hand, we may assume that the observations of urban life which abound in the texts, such as the arrival of Surya’s train at the Pasarturi railway station in Surabaya, are based on representation of observed reality in colonial Semarang. They are of value to us, because they function as a photographic archive in words. On the other hand, there are clues in some of the texts that we should not assume at the same time that the representations of people, and the relationships between them which we encounter in these 54

“Volume II” of Hikajat Soerja in fact tells a completely unrelated story, under the subtitle Dalam Bingkil (malaise) (In the workshop (economic depression)). It describes the conditions of life for workers in an iron foundry, when they are forced to seek urban employment after losing jobs in the sugar industry.

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texts are necessarily representations of ‘how things really were’. Rather, the situations and relationships which writers portray make use of realist conventions for rhetorical purposes, to create realistic representations of ‘how things might be’. It should not be surprising to find that this imagined world is often a rhetorical affirmation of the values and outlooks of pergerakan culture. A revealing illustration of how this ‘rhetoric of realism’ might be applied in these texts occurs in a serialized story of early 1925. It is called Siti Maryam, Perempoean Djalang Jang Berboedi (Siti Maryam, a fallen woman of noble character) and it appeared in Api in thirty-one instalments between 20 March and 12 May 1925; its author wrote under the pseudonym of Djola–Djali. In some respects this story presents an immediate contrast with the fragmentary style of Hikajat Soerja, because from its opening lines a much more consciously literary intent is apparent. The narrative voice here immediately recalls the nineteenth-century European novel: I remember it well. It was February 1919 and I was still in Ceribon when I learned of these events. It was 8 o’clock in the morning, and I was stretched out on a divan on the front veranda of a house in the district of Kejaksan. I was enjoying the cool morning air after the rain the previous night, and had no wish to do anything. The morning breeze, coming from the direction of Kuningan, cooled all the bones of my body, and it made me happy just to lie there without moving. Wherever I looked everything was still damp. The leaves in the garden of my lodgings were still wet with dew and the previous night’s rain, because the sun was not yet warm enough to dry them off.

This novelistic opening, full of detailed description and a tone of intimate conversation with the reader, extends throughout the story’s two introductory instalments. It leads to the first of two embedded stories, another selfconsciously literary artifice, that convey the melodramatic tale of the sad fate of the eponymous Siti Maryam. In its outlines, the tale appears quite unremarkable. It is an Indies reworking of the trope of the fallen woman with a pure heart, the character who later became a well-known figure in Indonesian literature and almost a stock-in-trade of Indonesian writers of all kinds. But what makes Siti Maryam unique, and so revealing of its age, is the way in which the characters move back and forth across the colonial demarcations of race and ethnicity, and the clear instruction about these matters which their creator set out to impart through the realism of the text.

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Before her own life is told in flashback, Siti Maryam enters the narrative as helpmate to a young man of Chinese ethnicity who is gravely ill and alone in a hotel room in the west Javanese city of Bandung. He has come to Bandung from East Java to seek his fortune, hoping one day to marry his childhood sweetheart Marsuti, a woman of indigenous ethnicity and thus of a different religion. They have been separated because, the narrator tells us, a proper marriage must be witnessed by appropriate religious officials, and religious officials do not like marrying people of different religions. This centuries-old attitude is very hard to change, because the sense of ethnic/ racial identity (kebangsaan) is very strong. It rests not merely on religion; in the view of this pergerakan-era writer, there is also a material aspect – people do not want to see their wealth pass into the hands of another person, especially if it be someone of a different bangsa.55 Thus true love, that symbol of modernity in personal relationships and a marker of equality between two human beings, is frustrated by the demarcations of race and the preservation of property. The message is very strong, and it is reinforced by direct intervention of the narrative voice and the realism of the text: the reader is clearly meant to sympathize with the fate of these inter-ethnic lovers. Their situation may not be ‘typical’ of lived experience at the time, but they are made real as characters, for the sake of the ideological standpoint of the text. When we come to the story of Siti Maryam herself, we find some notably vivid images of movement up and down class lines and across ethnic boundaries that are constructed to serve the same purpose. Siti Maryam’s remarkable fate may or may not relate to actual lived experience, but the text aspires to the illusion of reality in order to illustrate the anti-human and exploitative implications of class, ethnic, and gender divisions in Indies society. Siti Maryam originates from the depths of backwardness and destitution that the pergerakan identified as the condition of the native poor. Her father was a tanner, and four of her siblings died from the unhygienic conditions in which the family was forced to live. After the death of her father in the great influenza epidemic, her pregnant mother had no choice but to accept the ‘slavery’ of life as servant to a Dutch family in the town of Ceribon. Association with the Dutch brings lessons in hygiene: Siti now follows around after a mother who must pay attention to cleanliness and change her clothes twice a day, lest she risk losing her source of livelihood. In this 55

Djola–Djali, “Siti Maryam,” Api ( 24 March 1925).

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environment of personal hygiene, Siti’s pretty face attracts the attention of her mother’s childless employer, Nyonya de Boer, who soon persuades Siti’s mother to let her raise the child as her own. Her mother is freed from the slavery of domestic work, and Siti herself literally becomes a Dutch girl. She is given Dutch education, her name changes from Maryam to Marie, and in this world where it seems no-one’s blood is really pure, she passes as Nyonya de Boer’s own daughter. She is known as the belle of Ceribon, sought after by all the young men (Dutch boys fill the house to glimpse her beauty!). In the kampungs, musicians sing about her in their songs. Siti Maryam/Marie rejects all proposals of marriage, because – another child of this “age in motion” – she thinks someone who is married has lost her freedom. But her downfall comes, as popular prejudice in Indies society would have it, in the form of a Eurasian boy and his sexual adventurism. She is raped by a nephew of her foster-mother, the son of a sugar-factory owner from Central Java, who leaves her pregnant and gives her money, which she attempts to refuse. When her pregnancy is discovered, she loses her Dutch status, as Nyonya de Boer chooses to assert the demarcations which her status affords her: “Tell me the truth. Who is it you’ve been playing around with? Do you want to plunge yourself into misery? Why did you act this way? Do you want to bring shame on me? I’ve looked after you properly since you were a little girl, and now you throw this filth at me. Come on now, tell me the truth. Otherwise you can leave right now. Hey! You’re a girl out of the kampungs. I brought you up properly and you do this filthy thing. You bad girl!” Marie couldn’t reply. Her lips trembled, forming the words to ask forgiveness, but she was so frightened she couldn’t speak. Her heard pounded so much her whole body went cold. “Come on. Answer me! Are you deaf?” asked Nyonya de Boer in a loud and angry voice. Marie still couldn’t answer. “Answer me. Don’t play the fool with me. You’re a girl out of the kampungs. There’s no way you can be made a respectable young woman. Eh … al draagt een aap een gouden ring blijft hij een leelijk ding (a monkey with a golden ring still remains an ugly thing),” said Nyonya de Boer, referring to kampung people as though she believed that their ways were depraved beyond redemption.56

This is actually the first of two occasions on which Siti Maryam is brought undone by a European woman’s fear of the seductive powers of her native 56

Djola–Djali, “Siti Maryam,” Api ( 17 April 1925).

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counterpart. After she is dismissed by Nyonya de Boer, she returns to the native world, where she is no more accepted than in the world which once made her its ‘flower’. Her child dies from lack of proper care and, in her sorrow, she attracts the attention of another Dutchwoman as she travels by train to begin life again in the northern Javanese town of Pekalongan. Nyonya de Veem offers her work as a nursemaid, and once more Siti Maryam crosses back into the privileged world where comfort and cleanliness restore her good looks and well-being. But good looks are a doubtful blessing for a native woman in her situation. In case the reader misses this point, the narrator indicates the way the world has changed: People used to say that the high and low of a woman’s position depended entirely on her looks, but a pretty face did not mean Siti Maryam was assured of a good position in life. In fact the reverse was true.57

Nyonya de Veem is a kindly woman, but noticing the attention Siti attracts from the young men in the sugar factory when she takes her mistress’s baby for a walk in its carriage, she fears that her son, aged fourteen (“already sporting a moustache”) and at school in Semarang, will find himself unable to resist her charms. Siti is dismissed, and on returning to the indigenous world this time, she falls prey to a procuress and so begins to make her way through life as the fallen woman of the story’s title. After telling her story, the narrator returns to the original frame story, in which Siti Maryam establishes a relationship with Chun Hui, the young Chinese man whose life she saves when he is near to death. They live together in a simple house as husband and wife, and it is in this man of Chinese ethnicity that Siti finds the love and respect she was denied in her life with the Dutch. Finally, though, in this elaborately crafted melodrama, Siti convinces her lover he should go in search of the girl he left long ago and whose memory still troubles him. He leaves with great sadness before dawn one morning, and his farewell note so breaks Siti’s heart that she loses the will to live. Nobody finds happiness, however. One day she receives a letter from Chun Hui, sent from Medan in North Sumatra. Unable to choose between the two women he loves, he has fled far away from Java, only to find that he worries so much about Siti Maryam that he is now close to death himself. Siti, too, dies, and it is her mother’s weeping over her grave that takes us back to the start of the story on that lazy morning in 1919 in 57

Djola–Djali, “Siti Maryam,” Api ( 22 April 1925).

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Ceribon. It was her mother’s weeping that broke the narrator’s reverie as he contemplated the freshness of the morning, the leaves still wet with dew and the last of the previous night’s rain. Siti Maryam is thus a very different type of text from Hikajat Soerja. But these two examples of late pergerakan-era literature are both texts in which (probably) male writers use realism as a rhetorical device to advance arguments about the exploitation of women in the society of their times. In Hikajat Soerja, the argument turns on the denial of human rights to women born into the confines of the courts of Central Java; in Siti Maryam, the focus is on the vulnerability to sexual exploitation and its consequences that awaits native women in the comfortable world of colonial modernity. Significantly, both women find their happiness in inter-racial or inter-ethnic relationships, Ida Sumerakhati with her ‘good Dutchman’ and Siti Maryam with her respectful and over-sensitive young Chinese gentleman. It would be a long time before such relationships would ever be envisaged again in the literature of colonial and postcolonial Indonesia.

Conclusion Domesticated Marxism and the Triumph of Associationism The radical impulse which underlies the literature written in colonial Malay and published in Api in the mid-1920s had its source in an indigenous appropriation of ideas and attitudes derived from Western Marxism in the age of pergerakan politics. The radical wing of the pergerakan propagated the notion that class exploitation, which rested on the power of capital, was the basis of the colonial system and the source of the misery and backwardness of the Javanese people. This lesson was fundamental, and its elaboration through example and direct political education was never far from the plots hatched in the imagination of pergerakan-era writers. However, more pervasive of the literature as a whole, and more formative of the cultural attitudes and identities which the literature records, are the ramifications of two aspects of the broader Marxist world-view. These are historical materialism, on the one hand, and its more idealist counterpart, the belief in the equality of human beings and the ideal of a civilized humanity, on the other. Historical materialism, the interpretation of human society as a structure undergoing change as it moves through linear time, was a radical worldview in late colonial Java, because it ran counter to Javanese notions of

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order, hierarchy, and cyclical time. In the age of the pergerakan, it produced an entirely new way of apprehending life in the observable world. Since, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, the Marxist interpretation of society saw the present “not as a point of arrival”58 but as a particular moment in a process of evolution and change, observed reality emerged as both unique and ephemeral, a particular configuration of possibilities already moving towards its transformation into something new. The imagination of pergerakan-era writers was the product of this way of conceiving reality as a particular moment in the flow of historical time. It accounts for the particularities of character and individual difference that determine both plotdesign and narrative detail in this literature. It is also the source of the characteristically modern attention to measurement, the calculations of time, money, and distance which often seems to be given disproportionate attention in the description of actions and events in these stories. Everyone and everything is on the move, physically, socially, and culturally. Characters move through urban space as they enjoy and learn valuable lessons from the attractions of big-city life; they are constantly relocating between the cities of Java and beyond; they move in and out of new social relationships and they are constantly trying out new ideas and cultural outlooks. All this movement is the subject of precise calculation and detailed observation. The belief in the equality and shared future for humanity is the second appropriation of the Marxist world-view that determines much of the literary imagination represented in these stories. It is the source of the confident assertion of the right of the Javanese people to be free of the suffering, oppression, and dispossession they endure under conditions of colonial expansion. This assertion emerges through the observations of characters and narrators and the use of realistic descriptions and plots as rhetorical devices to engage the sympathies of their readers. In most cases, late pergerakan–era writers do not attempt to make this assertion through the voice of the kromo, the term which was commonly used in this period to refer to the Javanese ’worker’, because this is not a literature of proletarian heroes in the manner of more orthodox forms of ‘socialist realism’. Rather, the spokespeople for the ideological viewpoints which the texts express are mostly young men and women of sufficient education and opportunity to be citizens of the modern world of the colonial city. This means that their 58

Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century (London: Abacus, 2000): 6.

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political consciousness is awakened by their experience of the many petty humiliations of life as ‘natives’ in colonial society, as much as by the education they undergo through participation in organizational politics. At the same time, however, these young people are also in rebellion against the oppressive aspects of indigenous society. In effect, this means they oppose the exercise of power by the Javanese nobility, which exploits the poor to serve colonial interests, and – as Hikajat Soerja sets out to expose – rigidly enforce a gender inequality under a rhetoric of ‘difference’. The characters who people these stories are uncompromisingly modern, in the sense that their attitudes and outlooks are based on notions of a common humanity and relationships between them value the qualities of love, mutual respect, and responsible behaviour above all considerations of inherited social practice. As such, there is an underlying rhetoric of antiessentialism in this literature, a rejection of the notion that people are divided by inherent racial or cultural characteristics. In these stories, people meet as equals, regardless of race, ethnicity or class, and cultural difference, where it appears, is likely to be a justification for some form of oppression rather than a protected space of dignity and identity. This represents a literary expression of the confident border-crossing which permeates the cultural world of the pergerakan in general. There are no boundaries, because the attributes of modernity are the rightful inheritance of the young citizens of the Indies, as much as they represent the cultural capital of the colonial power. Sama rata sama rasa – equality and solidarity – was intended to efface difference in the name of the common cause of humanity. Yet it seems there is still much more that could be said. Sama rata sama rasa is, in fact, a much more culturally specific formulation than the translation ‘equality and solidarity’ might suggest, because it literally conveys the sense of a commonality of status and a commonality of feeling (rasa) which the more programmatic ‘solidarity’ tends to obscure. As the plots and extracts from the texts quoted above serve to indicate, pergerakan-era writers saw an undefined area of ‘feeling’, rather than a commonality of political or ideological outlook, as the basis of the border-crossing relationships and identities which their writing celebrated. In Hikajat Soerja, Mustafa and Van de Goedezij taught each other many useful things, but the real and on-going connection between the two men is seen to rest not on their common political convictions but on their compatibility of feeling. Similarly, Van de Goedezij and Ida share a common struggle, but they

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“meet inwardly,” and this is the basis for their ongoing relationship. It is as though the writer of the story – and the same could be said for Siti Maryam – saw the affective relationship as the key to the successful negotiation of the material world where the political struggle takes place. It is possible, of course, that European notions of ‘sentiment’ are making themselves felt here, as part of the domestication of the materialist world-view. However, it seems undeniable that sentiment is being framed in terms of SoutheastAsian notions of the ‘inner plane’, which exists in a complementary relationship to the material world. Other writers have also noted the significance of ‘feeling’ in the imaginative world of pergerakan literature. In Matahariah, the 1918–19 text studied by Tickell,59 it is a European woman who asserts her solidarity with her Javanese student lover and his friends by her claim to possess an “Asian sensibility” (berperasaan Azië). This affective sympathy with Asia gives her her taste for Javanese food as much, it would seem, as for Javanese men, and allows her to enter into the border-crossing relationship which is such an affront to colonial systems of control.60 Siegel, in his study of a text which originally appeared in Api in the period under discussion here, ingeniously shows how the ‘feeling’ which the protagonist discovers in himself can only be expressed in a foreign language, and suggests that the role of nationalism, and the nationalist leader, is to provide assurance that “what he feels to be foreign is knowable and sayable.”61 The story is called Rasa Merdeka (The feeling of freedom), a title which in itself represents a revealing juxtaposition of the words that embody the inner and outer, the world of desire and the world of political action. This early association of the two terms anticipates the later trajectory by which words like ‘awareness’ and ‘spirit’ came to be indelibly associated with nationalist politics, and asserted the non-materialist, even quasi-religious, dimensions of participation in the nationalist struggle. The sense of youthful adventure, the confident participation in the making of a new world of intermingled cultures and political struggle which these late pergerakan-era stories enjoin, looks historically distant but also strangely touching in the light of early-twenty-first century sensibilities. There is an innocent assuredness about them which looks set for 59 60 61

Marco Kartodikromo, “Matahariah,” Sinar Hindia ( 7 August 1918– 11 January 1919). Paul Tickell, “Love in a Time of Colonialism,” 56–57. Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution, 114.

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disappointment when it is viewed in the light of the contested modernities and exclusionary nationalisms of a post-Marxist world. Yet, in many ways, the literature discussed here was, even in its own time, innocent of the gathering clouds of its imminent destruction. At the time these stories were being published in Api, the scene was being set for the final showdown between the pergerakan and the full force of colonial authority. Between late 1924 and mid-1925, pressure was building on the pergerakan-led union movement for a show of force in the face of worsening living conditions in industrial sector of the colonial economy. The P K I (Indonesian Communist Party) called on its union factions to strengthen discipline, but as involvement in the unions began to transform the party from a cadre-based organization into a mass-based political party, it found discipline increasingly hard to maintain. Finally, the party was forced into participation in a series of wildcat strikes across Java in the second half of 1925 which provoked a wave of government repression. The right of assembly was suspended, striking workers were dismissed, and party leaders and propagandists were arrested. By the end of 1925, the P K I found itself denied access to all the organizational means by which the pergerakan had been growing in Java for more than a decade. Strikes, rallies, meetings, and newspapers – including Api – all ceased to exist. Nevertheless, precisely at this moment when it lost the means of organizing an effective mass-based politics, the P K I chose to move in the direction of insurrection. In December 1925, the decision was taken to begin the planning of an anti-government uprising; rebellions broke out in Java in November of the following year, and in West Sumatra in January 1927. They were quickly suppressed and, in their wake, the P K I and the pergerakan itself were destroyed. Mass arrests were followed by imprisonments and internal exile to a specially prepared site in the far reaches of the West New Guinea jungle. Mas Marco Kartodikromo, the most famous of the pergerakan writers, died there of malaria in 1932.62 We may assume that the same fate, imprisonment and, in many cases, death also befell those unknown writers whose identities we know only through their pseudonyms, but whose youthful voices still speak through the stories they wrote and published at the time of this approaching storm.

62

Shiraishi, An Age in Motion, 312–38. On the rebellions of 1926–27, their origins and aftermath, see McVey, The Rise of Indonesian Communism, 290–346.

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The collapse of the pergerakan at the end of 1926 had far-reaching implications for the development and nature of what came to be seen as ‘modern Indonesian literature’ during the remainder of the colonial period. Already at the height of the pergerakan’s activity and influence, government officials who shared something of the associationist approach to cultural modernity in the Indies had been moving to establish the institutions of a modern indigenous-language literature which would be carefully guided and monitored by Dutch-controlled hands. In 1917, the scholar– administrator D.A. Rinkes achieved his ambition of transforming the earlier-established Commission for Popular Literature into a government publishing and distribution bureau for a wide range of different types of literature in indigenous languages.63 This institution, which came to be known by its Malay/Indonesian name, Balai Pustaka, recruited Indonesian employees to work under the guidance of Dutch ‘language officials’ to produce, publish, and distribute reading material in indigenous languages that was intended to educate native readers in attitudes to modernity that were not inconsistent with the politics of colonial control. Occasionally, this meant that attributes of modernity familiar in pergerakan literature received the imprimatur of the government printing house. Jedamski has noted how Western understandings of time and money were superimposed on traditional perceptions.64 As was the case in pergerakan-era literature, independent-minded youth asserting modern attitudes in the face of unenlightened social practices like arranged marriage became familiar characters in the modern novels by indigenous writers which Balai Pustaka fostered. In the main, however, the associationist model of cultural interaction on which Balai Pustaka was based ensured that there was a world of difference between the literature it promoted as ‘modern’ and the imaginative world of the pergerakan writers. In Balai Pustaka literature, a completely different type of political education contested the lessons which the pergerakan sought to impart.65 Urban

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Jedamski, “Balai Pustaka,” 27–30. Jedamski, “Balai Pustaka,” 40–41. 65 Doris Jedamski notes that the founding director of Balai Pustaka, Rinkes, held firm views on the potential of literature to influence political developments. However, his views were not taken seriously by the colonial administration during his time. His successor, T.J. Lekkerkerker, took over the institution just after the suppression of the Communist rebellions in 1927. At this time, the administration was far more amenable to his claim that “communism and communistic propaganda has to be fought actively and (Balai Pustaka) has the 64

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settings gave way to more ‘authentically’ traditional environments, and in place of the urban Malay lingua franca interspersed with Dutch as a language of narration came the standardized ‘high’ Malay of the colonial school system as a language of literature removed from everyday life. Most significantly, if also predictably, there is none of the confident bordercrossing that pervades the pergerakan literary imagination. In Balai Pustaka novels, there are almost no characters who are not of purely indigenous ethnicity, which means that there is no miscegenation, no affective relationships which cut across the colonial divide. The ex-pergerakan journalist Abdoel Moeis unwittingly became the illustration of how absolute this unwritten rule was when he submitted his novel, significantly titled Salah Asuhan or “Wrong Upbringing”, for publication by Balai Pustaka at just about the time the pergerakan was facing its demise. The novel warned against the dangers of a Western education that alienated its antihero from his indigenous roots, and led him into a failed marriage with a Eurasian woman. But so sensitive was the portrayal of a Eurasian (Dutch) woman in this literature that Moeis was finally forced to declare himself ready to accept whatever editorial interventions were necessary to see his novel in print. It appeared from the Balai Pustaka press in 1928, and symbolically marked the end of the age of the pergerakan in Indonesian literature. After the demise of the pergerakan, the next independent expression of modern Indonesian literature and culture was the periodical Poedjangga Baroe, which appeared in 1933. This was the cultural voice of the nationalist movement which succeeded the age of pergerakan politics, and it represented what had become of associationist ideals once they had been filtered through Balai Pustaka and the post-1926 nationalist movement. In Rudolf Mrázek’s words, the ‘humour’ was now gone, swept away with the demise of the radical imagination. For the remainder of the colonial era, until the Second World War, the unruly appropriations of the West during the pergerakan gave way to the neatness of colonial control. Mrázek, who records this process in great detail and with great sympathy, is uncompromising in his assertion of the defeat which it represents: “With most of the radical leaders away or silent, the rest of the era […] was murky, muffled,

purpose of serving this aim in an indirect way” (Jedamski, “Balai Pustaka,” 30, emphasis in the original).

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hopeless, flat and drab.”66 These are dismal words, but they are worth thinking about, for their reversal produces the qualities of clarity, assertiveness, confidence, and colour, words that perfectly characterize the moving cultural adventure which was literature during the age of the pergerakan in early-twentieth-century Indonesia.

WORKS CITED Adam, Ahmat B. The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of the Modern Indonesian Consciousness (1855–1913) (Ithaca N Y : Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1995). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). “Associatie,” in Encyclopædie van Nederlandsch-Indië (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff & Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1917), vol. 1: 67. Chambert–Loir, Henri. “Mas Marco Kartodikromo (c.1890–1932) ou l’éducation politique,” in Littératures Contemporaines de L’Asie du Sud-Est, ed. Pierre–Bernard Lafont & Denys Lombard (Paris: L’Asiathèque, 1974): 203–14. Djajadiningrat–Nieuwenhuis, Madelon. “Noto Soeroto, Aristo-demokrat Tanpa Pendukung” (Noto Soeroto, Aristo-democrat without supporters), Kalam 16 (2000): 30– 76. Djola-Djali. “Siti Maryam, Perempoean Djalang Jang Berboedi” (Siti Maryam, a fallen woman of noble character), Api (20 March–12 May 1925). Hatley, Barbara. “Postcoloniality and the Feminine in Modern Indonesian Literature,” in Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, ed. Keith Foulcher & Tony Day (Leiden: K I T L V , 2002): 145–82. Hobsbawm, Eric. The New Century (London: Abacus, 2000). Jedamski, Doris. “Balai Pustaka, A Colonial Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” Archipel 44 (1992): 23–46. ——. “Genres of Crime Fiction in Indonesia,” in Pramoedya Ananta Toer 70 Tahun, Essays to Honour Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s 70th Year, ed. Bob Hering (Stein: Yayasan Kabar Seberang. 1995): 167–89. Kartodikromo, Marco. “Matahariah,” Sinar Hindia (7 August 1918–11 January 1919). McVey, Ruth. The Rise of Indonesian Communism (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1965). Maier, H.M.J. “Written in the Prison’s Light: The Hikajat Kadiroen by Semaoen,” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (R I M A ) 30.1–2 (1996): 1–18. “Mas Marco,” De Indische Gids 39.2 (1917): 1079–83. Mrázek, Rudolf. Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton N J & Oxford: Princeton U P , 2002).

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Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land, 150.

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——. “Indonesian Dandy: The Politics of Clothes in the Late Colonial Period, 1893– 1942,” in Outward Appearances, Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: K I T L V , 1997): 117–50. Nugroho, Iskandar P. “The Theosophical Educational Movement in Colonial Indonesia (1900–1947)” (M.A. (Hons) thesis, University of New South Wales, 1995). Shiraishi, Takashi. An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java 1912–1926 (Ithaca NY & London: Cornell U P , 1990). ——. “The Disputes between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soetatmo Soeriokoesoemo: Satria vs. Pandita,” Indonesia 32 (1981): 93–108. Siegel, James. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997). Soliskson, “Membangoenkan atau Hikajat Soerja Seorang Intelekt” (Awakening or The story of Surya, a man of intellect), Api (8 October –6 November 1924). Taylor, Jean Gelman. “Kartini in her Historical Context,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 145.2–3 (1989): 295–307. Tickell, Paul. “Love in a Time of Colonialism: Race and Romance in an Early Indonesian Novel,” in Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, ed. Keith Foulcher & Tony Day (Leiden: K I T L V , 2002): 49–60. ——. “Novels, Politics and Values: Political Discourse and Modern Identities in Semaoen’s Hikajat Kadiroen,” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (R I M A ) 30.1–2 (1996): 141–53. ——. Three Early Indonesian Short Stories by Mas Marco Kartodikromo (c. 1890– 1932), tr. & intro. Paul Tickell (Clayton: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1981). Tjempaka–Pasoeroean. “Aliran Djaman atau Seorang Gadis jang Sengsara” (The current of the age or A girl who suffered hardship), Api (6 August–10 September 1925). Tollenaere, H.A.O. de. The Politics of Divine Wisdom: Theosophy and Labour, National and Women’s Movements in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875–1947 (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Katholieke University Nijmegen, 1996). Tsuchiya, Kenji. Democracy and Leadership: The Rise of the Taman Siswa Movement in Indonesia, tr. Peter Hawks (Monographs of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies Kyoto University, English language series, no. 18; Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 1987).

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Mother Tongues with a Western Accent — Indigenous Negotiations with English Language and Narratives in Kenyan Art

E VAN M WANGI

M

K E N Y A N C U L T U R A L G R O U P Chelewa Ufike promote their local culture by fusing their messages with signatures of modernity.1 The name of the group, Chelewa Ufike, is the Swahili expression for ‘better late than never’ or ‘slow but sure’; and, true to their name, Chelewa Ufike seem to be determinedly but cautiously singing and dancing themselves to a global space by nourishing themselves on cultural practices seemingly foreign and antagonistic to local culture. In its performance of cultural songs in which it bemoans foreignness as its treats themes ranging from love and A I D S to cross-border trade, Chelewa Ufike members play drums with inscriptions of the Nike swoosh on them. Embedded in the group’s critique of loss of values due to crossborder trading with Tanzania would be expected a critique of the very global corporate culture that the Nike swoosh represents. Borrowed from a local proverbial expression that at once warns against hasty projects and vindicates steady progress, Chelewa Ufike’s name is not an endorsement of the Enlightenment notion of linear progress in which the African village would view its present condition as ‘backward’ and its desired destination to be unqualified westernization. Rather, it articulates the need for nourish-

1

EMBERS OF THE

Chelewa Ufike comes from the Tsimba Village, Mwambara Location, near the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya. I am grateful to Dan Teng’o and his colleagues at the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi, for sharing with me their oral literature fieldwork reports on this group.

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ment between the local and the foreign for the society to achieve desired development without losing its cherished practices. The ambiguity that informs Chelewa Ufike’s articulation of cultural values using trendy symbols of globalization pervades cultural art-forms in Kenya in a way that calls for critical examination to correct the antagonistic politics that takes sway in the discussions of decolonization. This article reads the ways in which various Kenyan texts in indigenous languages nourish themselves on English, even when they disagree with imperialism and colonialism that English cultural texts and language are seen in postcolonial discourse to promote. The discussion examines how Kenyan cultural expression exploits the tragedy of colonialism as a discursive organizing point around which cultural freedom is articulated. We particularly reject the popular notion of local articulation as necessarily being adversarial to foreign expression by demonstrating that local African desires – including anti-Western gestures – are expressed through creations that exploit Western narratives. Promotion of African languages should not be accompanied by the suppression of English language; both sets of languages should be developed for mutual enhancement. The analysis presented in this article is guided by Arjun Appadurai’s view that even in the smallest of societies, with the humblest of technologies and in the most desolate of ecological contexts, the relationship between the production of local subjects and the neighborhoods in which such subjects can be produced, named, and empowered to act socially is a historical and dialectical relationship.2

In postcolonial Kenya, the impact of colonialism as an historical event cannot be ignored in the understanding of contemporary culture. Although Kenyan cultural practices are not completely delimitated by colonialism and Western cultures, they are informed by some of the values and narratives that interaction with the West has brought in its train since the infiltration of British missionaries and colonialists in the late-nineteenth century. English language and narratives haunt African discourses, including those that overtly oppose English language and culture. Acceptance of the centrality of English language and narratives does not mean celebration of colonialism and the exploitation that the local communities suffered under 2

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): 181.

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imperialism. Here, I am only acknowledging a fact that engenders more dialogue and cross-cultural negotiation, rather than engaging in the ideological posturing that dominates African cultural studies regarding the language issue. I am in favour of the argument put forward by Kwame Anthony Appiah that in postcolonial Africa the colonizer and the formerly colonized “are already contaminated with each other.”3 Then, English as used in African societies is already affected by Africa’s indigenous languages and the local languages have been inflected with English expression. Attempts to vacuum-pack indigenous languages against ‘contamination’ by foreignness are a futile exercise. Colonialism, unfair a system as it was, made cultural boundaries more porous, so that even artistic renditions criticizing imperialism and its consequences exploit European texts and language to express the local opposition to colonialism. The use of English or anglicized indigenous languages does not necessarily enhance colonialism but, depending on the artist’s ideology, it subverts unfair power hierarchies. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o4 salutes the way local communities, especially peasants and urban workers, resisted colonial languages by either using their mother tongues or forging new creoles “that owed their identities to the syntax and rhythms of African languages.”5 Ngũgĩ sees the use of languages other than English as a form of protest against British colonialism. I would like to see this intervention slightly differently, because the local languages and new creoles are not necessarily antagonistic to English or trying to define themselves against English. To be sure, the people Ngũgĩ credits 3

Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House (New York: Oxford U P , 1992): 155. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a prominent African novelist, playwright, political activist, and cultural theorist. One of the continent’s most famous writers, Ngũgĩ articulately advocates the use of African indigenous languages in cultural and political discourses. He views European languages as vehicles of cultural imperialism and economic domination of African nations by the capitalist West. He started his literary career in the 1960s with the publication of remarkable novels and plays in English, but since he was detained without trial by the Kenyan government for his involvement in indigenous community theatre in 1977, Ngũgĩ has been using his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ, as his medium of creative writing. As he powerfully outlines in his Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 1986), he hopes by writing in an indigenous African language to reach wider local audience and to decolonize African letters. I am in total support of Ngugi’s promotion of African languages and cultures. But he seems to suggest in his polemic a dichotomy between Western and African languages, such that the use of English is colonial and the use of indigenous languages anti-colonial. 5 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, 23. 4

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with subversion of English could not speak the language, and their use of another language or corrupted forms of English is not out of a politically conscious programme. It is idealistic to assume that the peasants would not speak Standard English if they had the command of the language. Further, to assume that local languages in themselves are decolonizing and opposed to non-African cultures is to fail to recognize that indigenous languages in their purest, archaic, and precolonial form have been exploited through their use in the Bible to spread Christianity in Africa, a religion Ngũgĩ sees as having been used to spread colonialism and neocolonialism on the continent. Thus, contrary to the view that a language necessarily expresses a people’s culture, African languages are – like the European languages they are counterpoised against in a binary split – an arbitrary system defined by creativity; they can express even anti-African beliefs and Western ideologies if the artist chooses to do that. Equally significant is the fact that Western cultural expression can be used in a radically new way to initiate liberatory art. For instance, some of the Gĩkũyũ-language nationalist Mau Mau songs of the 1950s, transcribed by Maina wa Kinyatti in his book Thunder from the Mountain (1980),6 appropriate Christian hymns, change their content, and deploy them against English colonialism. The centrality of English-language studies in the Kenyan school curriculum has engendered the presence of cultural forms which nourish themselves from English texts studied in the classroom but which are localized to conform to economic and cultural realities of the societies. Some of the texts do not necessarily engage in the adversarial deconstruction of English that Ngũgĩ envisages, for those communities that create them seem to understand that, despite the brutality of colonialism, not all aspects of English culture are negative. Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira, for example, presents instances in which Western oral narratives appear outside schools and even among the peasant workers in her Gĩkũyũ community: New stories have also made their way into the culture of the Agĩkũyũ. Muthoni, a woman who works on Kĩamara estate, tells a Gĩkũyũ version of “Snow White,” translated as “White Flower.” “Cinderella” is another story frequently told.7

6

Maina wa Kinyatti, Thunder from the Mountain: Mau Mau Patriotic Songs (London: Zed, 1980). 7 Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira, The Oral Artist (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1983): 9.

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Geographically located near the equator, the Gĩkũyũ society does not experience snow; it changes ‘snow white’ into a ‘white flower’ to localize the narrative. “Cinderella,” the Western narrative about a poor girl who eventually marries a prince, is popular in Kenya. It has, however, to be changed to generate the desired meanings, especially in orally transmitted versions of the narrative. The printed mode is much more rigid in adapting the European texts to the African contexts. For instance, as kids, reading the illustrated versions of “Cinderella” in the 1980s we could not understand why the Cinderella was characterized as a poor girl when she was illustrated on the printed page as white and wearing shoes.8 To us, any white person would have to be rich because whiteness stood for colonial privilege; and shoes were symbols of wealth because none of us could afford even a torn pair. But oral narratives are more dynamic than an imported textbook, and an English narrative is easily re-created using local environments as its background to express the fears and aspirations of the local populations. For example, in her rendition of the “Cinderella” narrative, Mweni Johnson, a fourteen-year-old class six pupil at Kinango Primary School of Kwale District, gives her oral version of the story in the Kiswahili language. She supplies an indigenous opening and closing formula to the story and presents Cinderella as coming from a polygamous family, a traditional African phenomenon also found among the Muslims who form a considerable proportion of the community in the Kenyan coastal region where the story is retold.9 The music played at Cinderella’s wedding is rumba, an African dance, and the flora and fauna are changed dramatically to give the story a Kwale flavor. In her loneliness, for example, Cinderella sits “chini ya mti, mti wenyewe ulikuwa mti wa mzambarau” (under a tree; speci-

8

The Disney editions of the children’s books were imported or donated to Kenyan schools. They were glossier and visually more attractive than locally produced books. The target audience was the European child, but because of shortage of quality local texts, we read anything that came our way. Although Cinderella would ordinarily attract girl readers in the target communities, in Kenya we were more interested in the language of the text and the formal features, not the content. This hunger for books that was satisfied by reading any Western narratives, regardless of contents of texts or ideological orientation, is discussed in detail in an autobiographical essay in Ngũgĩ, Moving the Centre (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1993): 141. Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind, 17, sees the narratives as a colonial strategy to brainwash African children. 9 Jairus Omuteche of the University of Nairobi collected this narrative in December 2003. I am grateful to Larry Ndivo for drawing my attention to the story.

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fically the tree was a plum tree).10 The narrator does not just tell us that Cinderella sat under a tree but, almost superfluously and as an afterthought, qualifies the species of the tree. As a fruit-tree, mzambarau is a symbol of nurture; the underprivileged Cinderella rests under the generous tree that would provide her with free fruit. Universally, children appreciate narratives with the food motif. The narrator understands that her audience comes from an underprivileged background and introduces food into the story not only to sympathetically portray Cinderella as the beloved of nature but also to sustain the audience’s attention through the mention of a fruit tree they know and would identify with. The changes that the narrator introduces into the narrative are not necessarily a ‘writing-back’ protest against English; she is just telling a good story in the best way she knows how, injecting into the narrative the concerns of a young adult in a poor rural community. Similarly, when the pop musician Wahu Kagwi invokes the Cinderella motif in her Kiswahili and English calypso song entitled Liar (2003),11 it is not in opposition to the English narrative; rather, she uses the Cinderella motif to decry the fate of the city woman who might think her male counterpart is a prince, ready to save her from her troubles. In the song, the persona encounters a handsome man and falls head over heels in love with him. She says that the man makes her “feel like Cinderella.” But when she tells the “prince” the doctor’s good news that “hakuna matata” (all is okay) because she is pregnant and he’ll soon be a “papa” (father), the man deserts her. The climax of the song comes when she realizes that “the prince” was just a liar and that “the fool had a wife at home.” The song calls for more bonding between women, as the persona ‘Cinderella’ turns to “mama” for advice on what to do next as a single mother, now that “the prince” was just a liar. Wahu’s song manifests how local arts may use an English narrative not in a grand nationalist gesture but to present women’s dilemmas, especially young single mothers who are cheated into conception by rich males who promise to lift them out of the poverty that generally defines the majority of women’s lot in postcolonial Africa. Ngũgĩ claims that indigenous communities resisted the English language because, unlike the petty bourgeoisie, the peasant majority “had no com10 Jairus Omuteche, Oral Literature Field Work Report: Research Findings from among the Nduruma of Kinango Division, Kwale District (Term Project, University of Nairobi): 4. 11 The song on C D and cassette is produced by the Nairobi-based Ogopa Deejays.

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plexes about their languages and the cultures they carried.”12 However, it is the elites with a Western education who militantly advocate the use of the local languages, because they are more ideologically aware of what the death of indigenous languages would do to the African cultural heritage. However, local communities are least interested in any opposition to the English language. If British colonialism forced its language down the throats of the colonized, and students were punished for speaking an African language in schools,13 the postcolonial situation presents a more complex scenario in which resistance to English is left to those who have mastered the language and its narratives. Kembo–Sure has shown that in Kenya the use of English has more support from the majority who do not speak a word of it. They are the ones who push their children to learn the language: Those who do not speak English at all or just have a smattering of it would like their children to grow up speaking it, even at the risk of forgetting their native languages. For them English represents the gateway to prosperity and cultural refinement.14

This support of the English language and its narratives could well stem from the local populations’ ideological naivety. However, the fact about the majority’s support for English should be recognized, instead of advocates of indigenous languages adopting an idealized position where the majority is presented as antagonistic to the implied colonialism of the English language. Indeed, so strong is the appreciation of the English language and narratives that stories in indigenous languages underline the primacy of Englishness in postcolonial Kenya. In one Gĩkũyũ oral narrative, darkness catches up with a girl in the fictional Mutitu wa Ngai Ndeithia (The forest of God-help-me). A kind grandmother from a foreign community (Turkana) finally escorts the girl, but the girl’s greatest anxiety is that on arrival at school the following morning the English lesson would have been taught 12

Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind, 23. The punishment of students for speaking in their mother–tongue is documented in various studies, for instance, in Ireli Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective (Nairobi: Educational Research & Publication, 1996): 6. See also Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind, 11. 14 Kembo-Sure, “The Democratisation of Language Policy: A Cultural Linguistic Analysis of the Status of English in Kenya,” in The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed. Christian Mair (Cross / Cultures 65, A S N E L Papers 7; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 247. 13

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and her father would kill her for missing it.15 Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira notes that this narrative, also sometimes presented in the form of a ballad, teaches the young girl to respect members of other ethnic communities, in the sense that it is the foreign and marginalized cucu wa Turukana (grandmother from Turkana),16 as opposed to privileged members of the girl’s own community, who helps her out of the dangerous forest. The grandmother, in both the song and the narrative, is figured as strange; her breasts make a kororokoro noise as she walks, a point foregrounded in the narration because of the humour the idiophone entails. The narrative underlines the dangers of insularity not only to other Kenyan communities, but also to cultural practices from other parts of the world. The narrative, although in Gĩkũyũ, promotes acquisition of the English language and other aspects of formal education. It underscores the importance of English in the curriculum and the value ordinary people like the girl’s father have invested in the English language and its narratives. Ironically, even those texts that are most vocal in their opposition to the use of European languages and narratives as a means of cultural production in Africa nourish themselves with European languages and cultural activities. For example, despite Ngũgĩ’s radical and articulate support for writing in African languages, his Gĩkũyũ texts seem to presume an ideal reader immersed in Englishness and English narratives. Ngũgĩ’s novels in Gĩkũyũ feed themselves on English narratives and language to make their statements against English. This is because the Gĩkũyũ language in postcolonial Kenya is affected by English, and Ngũgĩ’s very use of the language as it is spoken in society engenders hybrid texts that are inevitably anglophone even if they use a local language as their medium of communication. The novels further mix African folklore with European modes of self-expression to decolonize the novel as an elitist Western form. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that Ngũgĩ’s novels speak their artistic Gĩkũyũ with a strong English accent, indicating how strongly the European language haunts artistic production in Kenyan local expression. His first novel in Gĩkũyũ, Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ (Devil on the Cross), first published in 1980, demonstrates the importance of dialogue as opposed to closure in negotiating experience in postcolonial Africa. In the novel, it is Gatuĩria, a westernized 15

Kabira, The Oral Artist, 10. Turkana people are from Northern Kenya, while the Gĩkũyũ community is predominantly in central Kenya. The two communities belong to different ethnicities and linguistic groups. 16

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character who speaks his mother tongue with an English inflection, who becomes the self–conscious voice of the narrative. The novel not only invokes the Western musical practices that Gatuĩria was studying in a Western academy before his return to Kenya, but it also meta-fictionally replicates that practice alongside the local Gĩcaandĩ musical tradition as the ideal that the nation should aspire to. Gatuĩria aspires to create what he calls in the Gĩkũyũ text “harmony in polyphony,” without translating this concept.17 The many-voicedness of Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ anticipates the fictional oratorio that Gaturia intends to create to celebrate Kenyan nationhood and cultural diversity. The new song of the nation that Gatuĩria – and to a large extent Ngũgĩ – envisions would be “played by an orchestra of hundreds of instruments and sung by hundreds of human voices.”18 It would be a song nourished by traditions of Western music that Gatuĩria has studied in Western cultural institutions. It is because African languages are dynamic and borrow heavily from one other and from European languages to articulate the people’s view that even Ngũgĩ’s own Gĩkũyũ-language terminology is interspersed with English expression. For example, he calls the ideal Gĩkũyũ form of government riikakiraci, forming a new Gĩkũyũ word from the Gĩkũyũ word riika (ageset) and the last part of the word democracy.19 This signals the inevitability of English, in the sense of a radical writer’s nourishment of a local language with the productivity and discreteness of English. Even when Ngũgĩ’s creative works denigrate African users of English, it is in contexts where one would have to understand English to comprehend Ngũgĩ’s anger at Africans who employ English in their daily communication as opposed to indigenous languages, as in Matigari, when he makes English-speaking Kenyans call themselves “anglophile.”20 When, in the novel, the powerful minister and the neocolonial John Boy declare in unison “I am an Anglo-

17 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1980): 55. 18 Ngũgĩ, Devil on the Cross (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1982): 226. 19 Ngũgĩ is examining forms of popular control of power in African traditional society. Here he proposes a form of government in which an age-set (riika) is in charge of power in society. He views the traditional African democratic model to be better than most Western paradigms, as the latter “have negated the concept of the people because they have all been dependent on slavery: direct, plantation, colonial, wage, domestic, and gender slavery”; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (London: Oxford U P , 1998): 92. 20 Ngũgĩ, Matigari ma Njirũũngi (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986): 92

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phile and Proud of it,”21 they do so in English in a Gĩkũyũ text that does not translate the statement from its English original. Similarly, Kabuuru (‘settler’) William and Njooni Mbooi are presented speaking English in a fairly long and intense dialogue scene: “Bob, the fellow now claims to know your dad.” “My father? He disappeared in the forest years ago… fate unknown… but presumed dead…” “Yes…together with my old man… don’t I know?” “Ask him what happened to them. This play is more exciting than our evening rides.”22

The text intends to show English as the language of colonialism, but it seems to forget that its audience is the Gĩkũyũ reader. It assumes that the actual readers understand English, and would be able to comprehend what the white man and his lackey are saying. Later on, the text assumes that the Gĩkũyũ readers not only understand fundamental English but also that they have the capacity to decode the register in English colloquialisms. The European and the African collaborator in the Gĩkũyũ text speak in English whose coded ironical humour only a reader with a fairly good command of English would be able to appreciate: “Insulting the memory of my father…in my eyes…oh the cheek…” “Does he know him also? Didn’t he disappear at the same time as my dad?” “Cool it…Remember you are playing a comic role, the tragic was played by my father…Question him more. Maybe he’ll provide the missing link in my theory about the fate of my father….”23

Notable is the fact that the playful colloquialism between the African and European exploiters underlines their friendly relationship with each other against the interests of local populations. However, this closeness registered in the Gĩkũyũ text in English speech cannot be appreciated by a person who does not understand everyday colloquial English expression. Ngũgĩ’s children’s stories, written in the 1980s at the height of his preoccupation with the mother-tongue debate, are imbued with English lan-

21

Ngũgĩ, Matigari, 92. Ngũgĩ, Matigari, 42. Hesitation markers are left out in the English editions published by Heinemann in 1988 and Africa World Press in 1998. 23 Ngũgĩ, Matigari, 42. 22

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guage and narratives.24 The narratives seek to impart a sense of cultural nationalism and patriotism to its young readers. Referring to the guerrilla fight for Kenyan independence, the texts see nationalism in terms of taking up arms against an oppressive political order. The texts advocate cultural renaissance, and make fun of those who uncritically embrace a Western value-system. The stories involve a politically skewed portrayal of Njamba Nene in a heroic role, fighting a guerrilla war against the British colonizers and their African cronies. Njamba Nene is a staunch believer in the traditional culture and advocates the use of the mother tongue and local knowledge in the modern cultural production. The stories are contained in Njamba Nene na Mbaathi ĩ Mathagu, first published in 1982 and published in English translation as Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus; Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene, first published in 1984 and translated into Njamba Nene’s Pistol;25 and Njamba Nene na Cibu Kĩng’ang’i, first published in 1986, but a translation in English is yet to be published. In these texts, Ngũgĩ captures realistically the ubiquity of English in Kenyan classrooms as the society goes through a neocolonial phase. He uses the texts to try to reverse the situation by instilling in children an interest in literatures in local languages as opposed to the unabashed admiration of discourses in English. But even in these texts, the writer seems to assume a child readership that is already steeped in the very Englishness that the texts attempt to dismantle. For instance, Ngũgĩ criticizes the use of English language in schools through his eponymous hero, Njamba Nene. John Bull, Njamba Nene’s brainwashed African teacher, leads the African children in a song in English which yields absurd meanings when sung as a Gĩkũyũ song by learners without the necessary level of proficiency in English. The song London’s burning London’s burning Look for water Look for water Fire, fire Fire, fire Pour on water Pour on water 24 The stories form a trilogy depicting the adventures of a boy by the name Njamba Nene (Gĩkũyũ for ‘great hero’). The three children’s books echo the themes in Ngũgĩ’s adult fiction and touch on the issues he raises in his literary essays, such as the centrality of African languages and cultures in African schools. 25 Both the translations by Wangui wa Goro came out in 1986.

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is here transformed into: Raandanĩci Mbaana Raandanĩci Mbaana Ruku rwa nda Ruku rwa nda Baaya nĩ baya Baaya nĩ baya Boro nĩ wota Boro nĩ wota

London’s burner London’s burner Firewood in the belly Firewood in the belly Fire, fire Fire, fire Boro, warm yourself Boro, warm yourself.26

The Gĩkũyũ song is incomprehensible and meaningless because it is an empty imitation of the English song “London’s Burning,” which commemorates the Great Fire of London in 1666. The irony lies in the fact that while the children think they are culturally superior in singing this song, instead of the Gĩkũyũ children’s poetry that Njamba Nene presents, they are uttering nonsense. Further, while London is ‘dispossessed’ by the great fire, the kids present it as ‘possessing’ the burner. As if this is not enough, Boro is called upon to enjoy (ota) the fire. These stylistic features would be lost without the reader’s knowledge of the original song; the child needs to know the palimpsest to appreciate Ngũgĩ’s humour and irony. Ngũgĩ’s text does not provide the English nursery rhyme that it is mimicking but seems to assume the child reader is able to grasp the humour of the parodied text. In the novel, Njamba Nene confesses that he does not understand what the song means, but the readers (most probably Njamba Nene’s school-going age-mates) are expected by the author to know the original song to appreciate the parody and the absurdity of the teacher’s wrong use of English texts in an African class.27

26 Ngũgĩ, Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus, tr. Wangui wa Goro (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986): 12. The ‘translation’ of the song is left out in the Gĩkũyũ edition (1982) but the English edition explains in a footnote: “The song they are singing is London’s Burning. They sing the English words as if they are Gĩkũyũ words and reduce the song to utter nonsense.” 27 The teacher’s name, John Bull, is probably an anglicized version of John Mburu or John Ndegwa and demonstrates his mentally colonized status in the neocolonial Kenya. Notably, Ngũgĩ’s latest novel, Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the crow) displays the similar assumption that its readers, although consuming the story in Gĩkũyũ, do understand English. The narrator uses a lot of expressions borrowed from the English language. Words that could just as well have been borrowed from Kiswahili, such as msikiti (mosque), are borrowed directly from English, indicating the pervasiveness of English language in daily communication that the novel attempts to approximate.

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W⏐X The presence of English narrative as an enriching linguistic element in indigenous languages can be seen in almost all Kenyan languages, Kiswahili being just one more among other possible examples. Written in the Kenyan national language, itself a creole formed from Bantu, Persian, Arabic, European, and Indian languages, Kiswahili stories are an aesthetic meeting-point of languages whose disparate elements are sutured together by recourse to Englishness. Rose Shake’s story “Mwendawazimu” (The madman)28 is one of those narratives that display not only the interaction of Kiswahili with English but also the role of English in establishing an intertextual network of narratives done in different local languages. Shake’s narrative feeds on other African narratives available in English translation – for instance, Ngũgĩ’s Matigari. This Gĩkũyũ-language narrative in English translation is itself a mosaic of narratives in English, such as Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” in which the main character, like Matigari in Ngũgĩ’s story, returns to the society, only to find it completely changed.29 While suggesting the English translation of Matigari, Shake’s Kiswahili narrative thematizes the high crime level in Kenyan urban centres, the breakdown of the traditional respect for the old in urban spaces, and the marginalization of women, both in modern and in traditional Kenya. The narrative dramatizes the experiences of Mzee Katona (Old man Katona) at the hands of urban criminals who, claiming to be his children, frame him with madness so as to eject him out of a public transport vehicle in order to seclude and rob him near Mathare.30 Notably, when readers first meet 28

Rose Shake, “Mwendawazimu” (The madman), in Mwendawazimu na Hadidhi Nyingine (The madman and other stories), ed. Mwenda Mbatiah (Nairobi: Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, 2001): 1–10. 29 Published in 1819, Irving Washington’s “Rip Van Winkle” is an American tale about Dutch immigrants in New York, presented as the posthumous documents of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker about the province before the American Revolutions. Rip Van Winkle runs away from his nagging wife and falls into a twenty-year sleep under a tree. When he awakens and returns to his village, he cannot recognize the people and neither can they tell who he is. Stuck in time, he hails an already ousted political figure, the Hanoverian King George I I I . Matigari, emerging from the bush war for independence to find a society in which he does not fit in, is dismissed by the authorities as a ‘Rip Van Winkle’. 30 The Mathare Mental Hospital, which the story refers to, is located on the outskirts of Nairobi. It is one of the real locations that the metafictional story mentions. Its name changed officially to Upper Muthaiga Hospital in 2003; it retained its name well afterwards, including on its signboard at the gate.

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Katona, he is reading a paper in Kiswahili which tells of an incident similar to what he is about to experience, indicating the fact that such robberies are commonplace in Nairobi. The space where this metafictional foreshadowing of the robbery is staged bears a name that combines the English and Gĩkũyũ languages: N E W M A T I G A R I B U T C H E R Y . The heteroglossia of the name is foregrounded on the printed page by capitalization, which creates the impression that Shake’s story is reproducing the signboard the way it appears in the referential world. The name also stands out because it partly marks a dramatic opening of the narrative. Remarkably, the author assumes that both the implied reader and the actual reader understand both English and Gĩkũyũ; for no translation is given in the Kiswahili narration.31 In the story, the characters’ speech contains loanwords from English, but which have been changed considerably in the course of their passage into the new language.32 More aesthetically striking is the way the story uses English to link Kamba, Gĩkũyũ, and Kiswahili narratives. The narrative refers to Ngũgĩ’s Gĩkũyũ novel Matigari in a way that creates a network between other local languages. While the Western and elitist hotels it is counterpoised against are real places in the extra-textual, referential, world, the ‘New Matigari Butchery’ does not exist outside the author’s imagination. The name of the place is thus a signifier without a referential signified. It suggests Ngũgi’s novel not only by the reference of the title Matigari, but also in the setting, themes, and characterization. The butchery where the reader first meets Katona is like the bar where Matigari in Ngũgĩ’s novel first meets Gũthera, a prostitute who is later to turn into a key revolutionary figure in the narrative. In both texts, it is in such spaces that the degradation of the nation is clearly inscribed. The character Katona (whose name in Kikamba, a language spoken in the Eastern Province of Kenya, suggests ‘one who cannot see’) reminds the reader of Matigari’s initial alienation from the mundane realities of post-independence Kenya.33 True to his

31 By the implied reader we mean the one assumed to be listening to the story as told by the narrator. The actual reader is the one who gets to read the story. 32 The words include freshi (fresh), weita (waiter), glasi (glass) and Krismasi (Christmas). 33 Katona, the main protagonist in Shake’s story, stems from Kangundo, one of the Kenyan districts occupied by the Kamba ethnic community. Kiswahili, spoken primarily by the Swahili ethnic community on the Indian Ocean coast, is also Kenya’s national language and therefore utilised by non-ethnic Swahili writers or those who choose mainland Kenya as their setting for their stories. It is, in fact, rather common that names and concepts are borrowed from various other ethnic communities. In Shake’s story, the name of the main character,

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name, Katona does not see the importance of his wife’s advice that she should accompany him to collect the money. Had he been more gendersensitive, he would have taken her advice and it would have been difficult for the criminals to convince the public that Katona was their insane father. The motif of framed madness, too, reminds the reader of Matigari in the sense that the eponymous character in Ngũgĩ’s novel is declared insane by the postcolonial government to counter his revolutionary agenda. Of crucial importance here is the fact that, in this case of intertextuality between Matigari and “Mwendawazimu,” Shake, who cannot speak Gĩkũyũ, most probably did not read Ngũgi’s novel in Gĩkũyũ but in English translation only; for the novel exists only in English and Gĩkũyũ and not in Swahili or Kamba. In this instance, then, English converts a narrative in a local language into a more widely accessible text that another African local language can take up and draw on. W⏐X Yet another way in which to appreciate how English and local languages interfructuate is to consider the emerging art in Sheng, a pidgin initially combining Swahili and English and spoken in Nairobi, but now spreading into the rest of the country and integrating itself into local languages. The growth of Sheng demonstrates the ‘slaughtering’ of English and African indigenous languages as a linguistic sacrifice to enhance modern communication. At first, Sheng was connected with Kenya’s urban youth, but different social and professional groups – mechanics, schoolmates, work mates, and street children – would develop their sub-dialect of Sheng with a distinct vocabulary. Although initially associated with the impoverished people of Nairobi’s slums and informal sector, the slang has moved upwards in the social structure, and ability to speak it manifests one’s cosmopolitan sophistication. Literary texts have started exploiting the possibilities offered by Sheng both to enhance the entertainment value of the texts and to capture an illusion of reality when depicting in dialogue scenes social groups that use the slang.34 We see this, for example, in Ken Walibora’s short story Katona, and that of the vehicle in which he travels, Kavaluku Ka City (city rabbit), are in the Kikamba language. 34 Some writers have experimented with code-switching in Sheng-speaking narrators. A case in point is David G. Maillu, Without Kiinua Mgongo (Without gratuity) (Nairobi: Maillu, 1989). For a discussion of this novel’s deployment of Sheng, see Thomas Geider, “Code-

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“Kipara-Ngoto,” in which the unnamed narrator in the story laughs at himself for his limited vocabulary in the newfangled language of the city. The story begins with the narrator, a village boy, confessing his lack of knowledge of Sheng: “My vocabulary hadn’t had words like ‘maze huyo dem ni kiboko yao!’ until my cousin, Matata, came to stay with us in the village of Sangura.”35 He is advised to buy “kamusi ya Sheng” (a Sheng dictionary),36 but he seems to assume that his listeners understand Sheng; for words like dem (dame), pampu (pump) and mathri (matatu, a public transport cab; tatu is Swahili for three) are not translated into Standard Swahili supposedly because the addressees are better placed to understand Sheng than he is. The implied reader and perhaps the actual reader too are, thus, urbanized polyglots who, unlike the narrator, understand the language of the city and its borrowings from the English language. To conclude: it is apparent from the above that in the postcolonial era, the English language and its narratives haunt Kenyan cultural expressions, including some of the most avowedly anti-English artistic works. Contrary to the view that English suppresses local languages, a study of cultural products in African languages in Kenya reveals that the English language and its narratives enrich local cultural expression. In the texts, ignorance of English and the local hybrid languages that its interaction with indigenous languages has produced comes through as a staged act; in reality, everyone is assumed to be able to speak English and understand its narratives. Local languages use English to feed one another with narratives and to clarify themselves, while English narratives are modified to reflect local realities and anxieties. The dominant view that indigenous literatures are necessarily ‘writing back’ militantly to English narratives is erroneous, because much Switching Between Swahili and English in East African Popular Culture: David Maillu’s Without Kiinua Mgongo and Other Cases,” in Versions and Subversions in African Literatures, vol. 2: Interfaces Between the Oral and the Written/Interfaces entre l’écrit et l’oral, ed. Alain Ricard & Flora Veit–Wild (Matatu 31–32; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 115. 35 Ken Walibora, “Kipara-Ngoto” (Bald head), in Mwendawazimu na Hadidhi Nyingine (The madman and other stories), ed. Mwenda Mbatiah (Nairobi: Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, 2001): 61. In the original the passage reads as “Msamiati wangu haukuwa na maneno kama vile: ‘maze huyo dem ni kiboko yao!’ hadi binamu yangu, Matata, alipokuja kuishi kwetu Sangura kijijini.” The expression ‘Maze huyo dem ni kiboko yao!’ is Sheng for ‘man, that girl (dame) is cute’. 36 Walibora, “Kipara-Ngoto,” 64.

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of the literature negotiates with English as a tool for fighting colonialism and other oppressive practices from within and beyond the communities. It thus behooves students of culture to think of ways of conserving African languages without trying to suppress English and its narratives.

WORKS CITED Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: Minnesota U P , 1996). Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House (New York: Oxford UP, 1992). Geider, Thomas. “Code-Switching Between Swahili and English in East African Popular Culture: David Maillu’s Without Kiinua Mgongo and Other Cases,” in Versions and Subversions in African Literatures, vol. 2: Interfaces Between the Oral and the Written/Interfaces entre l’écrit et l’oral, ed. Alain Ricard & Flora Veit–Wild (Matatu 31–32; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 115–31. Kabira, Wanjiku Mukabi. The Oral Artist (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1983). Kagwe, Wahu Rosemary. “Liar” (Nairobi: Ogopa DJs, 2002): http://museke.com/en /node/2005 Kembo–Sure. “The Democratisation of Language Policy: A Cultural Linguistic Analysis of the Status of English in Kenya,” in The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed. Christian Mair (Cross / Cultures 65, A S N E L Papers 7; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 247–60. Kinyatti, Maina wa. Thunder from the Mountain: Mau Mau Patriotic Songs (London: Zed, 1980). Maillu, David. Without Kiinua Mgongo (Nairobi: Maillu, 1989). Mbaabu, Ireri. Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective. (Nairobi: Educational Research & Publication, 1996). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene (Njamba Nene’s pistol) (East African Educational Publishers, 1984). ——. Caitani Mũtharaba-ini (Devil on the cross) (Nairobi: East African Educational Publisher, 1980). ——. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 1986). ——. Devil on the Cross (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1982). ——. Njamba Nene na Cibũ Kĩng’ang’i (Njamba Nene and the cruel chief) (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986). ——. Njamba Nene na Mbaathi ĩ Mathagu (Njamba Nene and the flying bus) (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1982). ——. Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus. tr. Wangui Goro (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986).

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——. Matigari, tr. Wangui Goro (Matigari ma Njirũũngi (Those who survived the bullets), Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986; tr. 1988, London: Heinemann & tr. 1998, Trenton NJ: Africa World Press). ——. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1993). ——. Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the crow) (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2004). ——. Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (London: Oxford UP, 1998). ——. Writers in Politics: Essays (Oxford: James Currey, 1981). Omuteche, Jairus. “Oral Literature Field Work Report: Research Findings from among the Nduruma of Kinango Division, Kwale District” (unpublished manuscript, University of Nairobi, 2003). Shake, Rose. “Mwendawazimu” (The madman), in Mwendawazimu na Hadidhi Nyingine (The madman and other stories), ed. Mwenda Mbatiah (Nairobi: Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, 2001): 1–10. Walibora, Ken. “Kipara-Ngoto” (Bald head), in Mwendawazimu na Hadidhi Nyingine (The madman and other stories), ed. Mwenda Mbatiah (Nairobi: Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, 2001): 61–64.

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The Development of Modern Burmese Theatre and Literature Under Western Influence U W IN P E (M AUNG S WAN Y I )

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C H I N A A N D I N D I A , the two cultural giants, from the beginning of its history, Burma has adopted foreign cultural elements into its own culture. Burmese literature came into existence in the eleventh century, almost a thousand years ago. In Burma, as in other Asian countries, Buddhism had a great impact on the development of written narrative. In fact, Burmese literature grew on the basis of Buddhism and was semi-religious. Even today, some elderly people wonder how modern stories could possibly outdo Jataka tales. When novels and plays appeared in print, young people began reading them for their Buddhist lessons. Older people certainly did not encourage the younger generation to read the new books, which they called ‘Bo-oks’ – for them, those things were ‘mere idle talk’ that only encouraged ta-nha (Pali for ‘lust’); they considered reading these new books to be immoral. Most of the Burmese traditional literature was written by Buddhist monks in long verse (Pyo), similar to Western epics. During the Konbaung Dynasty (1752–1885), the prince, princess, and ministers wrote most of the traditional novels and dramas, which were composed in rhymed prose. The characters of the court novels and plays were princes and princesses, devils and demons. During that period, Burma also had contacts with other Southeast Asian countries, and non-Jataka stories such as the I-nao and the Ramayana were said to be brought in from Cambodia and Thailand. Burmese court literature came to an end when the British army moved the royal family to India. In 1824, 1852, and 1885 respectively, the three ITUATED BETWEEN

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Anglo-Burmese wars took place. After the first war, Burma lost two coastal regions; after the second, lower Burma became a British colony; finally, after the third war the whole country was subjected to British rule. Colonialism brought modern trade, communications, education, and the Christian faith to Burmese society. During precolonial times, the only schools were monastic, teaching Burmese children Buddhist literature in Pali. Some monks taught astrology, indigenous medicine, martial arts, and various other subjects. Soon after the first Anglo-Burmese war, the British government opened Western schools in Arakan and Moulmein; in 1837 schools followed in Kyauk Phyu and Akyab (now Sittwe); and in 1886 in Prome (now Pyi). The Burmese called the Western-type schools ‘the science schools’ or ‘man schools’, distinguishing them from the ‘monk schools’. At the Western schools, Burmese children were taught many subjects, including English, geography, geometry, general science, arithmetic, and British history for the purpose of preparing them for clerical jobs, especially in the department of land records. Following the path of the Government schools, Christian missionary schools emerged in the larger cities throughout the country. The missionaries and merchants brought in printing machines to publish newspapers, and later to publish magazines and books. With a broader variety of reading material available, Burmese intellectual horizons were widened and people were encouraged to accept ‘new cultural ideas.’

The Transitional Phase With the introduction of the printing press, newspapers began to appear. In 1836, the Moulmein Chronicle began its circulation in English, and in 1841, the Morning Star appeared in print in Karen State. Three years later, in 1874, the Dhamma Thadin-za (‘dharma’ in Pali; ‘newspaper’ in Burmese) started up, likewise in English. The first Burmese newspaper in Mandalay, upper Burma, was the Yadanabon Thadin-za (Mandalay Gazette), which was published by King Mindon in 1874. All of these press institutions also published drama books, which would remain very popular for about another fifty years. Unlike the older court dramas, which were performed and read before the King, the new puppet plays were acted for a general public. The literary standard of most of these plays was quite low. Accordingly, reading non-religious books and watching ‘modern drama’ became popular largely among common people.

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After 1886, almost every puppet ensemble in the country went to Lower Burma, which had also been annexed and was now governed as a province of British India. The Rangoon–Mandalay railway line was completed in 1888, and the opening of the Suez Canal brought to the region a period of rapid economic growth and an increase in East–West trading activity. There was an abundance of opportunities for theatre troupes. Stage-plays were printed, published, and widely read by a general Burmese public. Between 1872 and 1922, approximately 600 drama books were published. The plots of these popular plays were still concerned with traditional themes, such as the Jataka tales and the local history of cities and pagodas. The style of writing was mixed prose and poetry, interspersed with love songs and ‘weeping songs’ that were to be sung by the actors and actresses. Peasants would sing those play-songs in the paddy fields, and eventually they became real hits. Most of the drama books were about eighty pages long, although a few of them were as long as 500 pages and yet others ran to no more than fifteen pages. At a later stage, when readers apparently got tired of the long stories, they were shortened to around fifteen pages. Most of the playwrights were either former theatre actors or puppet masters. Later, journalists, too, began to write plays. The most famous among them was Shwedaung Saya Lun (1875–1964).1 He wrote about eighty dramas and is now celebrated as the greatest national poet and politician of modern Burma. With the rise of modern fiction and drama, however, the popularity of the traditional plays declined.

The Rise of Modern Drama The Burmese who studied at the Christian schools acquired a better knowledge of English literature than those who studied at the Anglo-vernacular schools. At first, it was literary-minded young Burmese who read English literature who would try their hand at translating English books. U Shwe Kyu (1874–1928) translated Shakespeare’s plays into Burmese, using rhymed prose. In 1913, for instance, he translated the Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and ‘Rosalind and Orlando’. A translation of Love’s Labours Lost was provided by Maung Cham Baw. But, as it turned out, direct translations were not very popular among Burmese readers. 1

Shwedaung Saya Lun wrote under the pseudonym of Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing.

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In the 1930s, the first modern literary movement in the history of Burmese literature sprung up on Rangoon University campus. This literary movement came to be known as the Khit-san Sar pay (time–testing literary movement). The platform of the movement was the Ganda Lawka (World of Books) magazine, brought out by the retired commissioner J.S. Furnivall (1878–1960), beginning in 1924. He had established a bookshop on campus and published his magazine in the hope of encouraging young writers. The slogan of the magazine was “with the bricks fallen, we shall rebuild with stones.” Furnivall also held a translation competition in his magazine. In the third contest, in April 1927, Maung Ba Thaung, a high-school student from Mandalay, Upper Burma, won first prize – and did so again consecutively for another five years. To discourage him from participating in the contest again, Furnivall finally made him the editor of his magazine. On one assignment, Furnivall urged Maung Ba Thaung to translate a Western play – an English translation of Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui (1666) – into Burmese. Maung Ba Thaung changed all of the French names to Burmese names and all of the French verses to Burmese songs. His adapted translation, Saya-wun Ba Be (The Doctor In Spite of Himself), was published in 1928 and was well received in the literary community. Today this translation of his is considered to be the prelude to modern Burmese drama. Furnivall wrote an introduction to Maung Ba Thaung’s rendition, remarking that it was very close to the original. J.A. Stewart reviewed the play for the Journal of the Burma Research Society,2 also saying that although it was an adaptation it was still close to the original. However, he mentioned that he disliked some of the words and phrases used in the dialogues, in particular those between father and daughter, because they sounded impolite and un-Burmese. He gave the example of the poor wood– cutter’s song, pointing out that the use of words like ‘whisky’, brandy’, and ‘beer’ was improper.3 Following Maung Ba Thaung’s example, Zaw Gyi (i.e. U Thein Han), a poet–critic and leader of the Khit-san literary movement, translated another of Molière’s plays, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670; Ma ha san chin thu) and had it published in 1934. It was also an adaptation, and again received a warm welcome from Burmese readers. In his introduction, Zaw Gyi 2 John Alexander Stewart, ”Saya-Wun Ba Be – Review,” Journal of The Burma Research Society 19 (1929): 25–27. 3 Stewart, ”Saya-Wun Ba Be,” 25.

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wrote that the aim of his rendition was the same as that of Maung Ba Thaung’s – to borrow ideas from foreign literatures as a way of exploring new ideas in Burmese writing. Maung Ba Thaung left Moliere’s plays with Zaw Gyi and turned to the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828– 1906), translated his Ghosts in 1940 and The Enemy of the People in 1941. In the preface (by Zaw Gyi) and the introduction (by Maung Ba Thaung) to the translation of Ghosts the advice is given – with the objective of familiarizing the reader with the nature of foreign drama – to forget all about home-grown Burmese drama before reading or watching any foreign play. Book reviews of the time usually emphasized the nature of good literature in the modern sense. Minthuwun, another leading poet in the Khit-san literary movement, reviewed The Enemy of the People in Furnivall’s World of Books. While explaining the nature of ‘light’ and ‘serious’ literature, Minthuwun urges the reader to study the way Ibsen portrays the characters and to compare them with the people in his local environment. In 1930 and after translating three dramas, Maung Ba Thaung left his position as editor and organized a political party named Do Bama a-Si aYone (The We Burma Association). He added a Thakhin (Master) to his name and so created his Burmese pen-name, Thakin Ba Thaung.4 Thakin Ba Thaung, the then political leader, was sent to prison by the British government. There he wrote/adapted one novel, but when World War II broke out he was unable to continue translating plays. He did, however, write a comparative study of Western and Burmese drama in the 1957 August and September editions of Shumawa magazine.5 Here he expanded on his introduction to Ghosts (1940). In 1961, he resumed his activity as a translator of foreign plays, mostly one-acters by Chekhov, Stanley Houghton, Hugh Chesterman, Gordon Whitehead and others. But soon he turned to the translation of science and political subjects instead. As there were no cinemas in Burma immediately after World War II , writers and movie actors performed in Rangoon’s playhouses, calling their

4

It is crucial to know that at the time English officers required Burmese servants to address them with Thakhin. Maung Ba Thang refused to call any English officers Thakhin; instead, he and his party members addressed each other using this title. Hence, the politicians Maung Nu and Maung Aung San, for instance, became Thankin Nu (later Burma’s first Prime Minister) and Thakhin Aung San (later General Aung San, national hero, freedom fighter, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s father), respectively. 5 Thakhin Ba Thaung, “Tho-hsaung pya-zat hnint bama pya-zat” (Western Drama and Burmese Drama) Shumawa 11.123 (August 1957): 18–23; 11.124 (September 1957): 176–84.

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pieces ‘man-bioscopes’ – plays as a substitute for films. In the period from 6 1948 until 1968, these groups wrote and performed nearly 200 plays. To close this part of my essay: the following writers can be listed as pioneers of Western drama in Burma: Furnivall, Pe Maung Tin, J.A. Stewart, Zaw Gyi (also a poet and critic), Theikpan Maung Wa (also a short-story writer and critic, and one of the leaders of the Khit-san literary movement), Thakhin Nu (the first Prime Minister of Burma), U Thein Pe Myint (Thakhin Thein Pe, also a novelist and communist party leader), and Maung Htin (also a novelist and journalist). All are now dead. Today, the national literary prize for drama cannot be presented to anyone, for there are no playwrights left in the Burmese literary world. Although the ‘manbioscope’ plays were successful to some extent, attempts to stage European plays before the general public never met with much appreciation.

Modern Burmese Prose I: The Emergence of the Novel With the rise of nationalism in Burma, more novels in Burmese were produced, but still mostly translations and adaptations. It can generally be claimed that the first original Burmese ‘novel’ or extended work of prose fiction appeared about 1700. Yatana Kyemon (Jewelled mirror) by Shwetaung Thiha Thu was not based on the Jataka tales but on legends from neighbouring countries. In this novel, however, the prince and princess were still surrounded by nats (gods), nagas (dragons) and galouns (mythical birds) as in the traditional tales. Two hundred years later, the modern novel emerged. James Hla Gyaw (1866–1920), who was educated at St John’s Baptist School in Rangoon, adapted parts of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo into Burmese. Maung Yin Maung Ma Meh Ma came out in 1904 and was at first not considered an adaptation but an ‘authentic’ novel, a romance. It was written in modern prose without rhymes or Pali words, there were no princes or princesses, no gods or ghosts, no devils or demons, and no kinnari or kinnara (mythical birds with human head and torso). The people in the story behaved and talked like everyday people familiar to the readers; the book was clearly aiming at being true to life. Literary historians such as Pe Maung Tin and Zaw Gyi declared it to be the first Burmese novel in the modern sense. 6

Dagon Saya Tin, From Man-Bioscope to Staged Drama: Papers on Drama (Rangoon: Sa pe beik man, 1970).

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In 1902, just before James Hla Gyaw’s adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, Maung Po Zaw had translated Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from the English; but Burmese readers did not like the direct style of translation. The development of the modern Burmese novel took a quite long time; Burmese readers did not easily accept the Western model of the novel. It was repeatedly maintained that it was probably religion that delayed its appearance. The existence of Pyo (long verse-like epics) and traditional plays based on Jatakas might also have had a part in hindering its rise. Apart from which, the social conditions in which the new genre of the novel might flourish had not yet developed. New forms of literature could not alter the Burmese readers’ love of the traditional novel and short stories. Zaw Gyi made a comparative study of the line of development of Asian novels, in which context he also made some observations about the rise of the modern novel in Burmese literature: Therefore the Burmese novel when it appeared in the early 20th century is just a belated contribution to the general pattern of the rise of the novel in contemporary Asian literature because Burma was favored only in the first half of the 19th century by such conditions as the rise of a new peasant–proprietor class in Burmese society, the introduction of the printing press and western education, and these factors contributed towards the emergence of this new literary form.7

When James Hla Gyaw presented his novel, the Burmese readers seemed ready to accept the new literature, advocating the almost revolutionary idea of fiction being true to life. During his time at St John’s College, he is likely to have read Western novels in English. Probably inspired by the reading he did, he tried writing novels in emulation of the genre; the result was the above-mentioned Maung Yin Maung Ma Meh Ma. Ten years after the publication of Hla Gyaw’s novel, Pe Maung Tin wrote a review for the Journal of the Burma Research Society, saying that it was an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. The story begins in Upper Burma under a Burmese king during the period of transition before the British army annexed Upper Burma. James Hla Gyaw was born in Lower Burma but once worked as a translator for the British Army, which had marched into Upper Burma. He therefore knew well the sights around Ava and Sagaing. He apparently drew on this experience in Upper Burma for several scenes in 7 Zaw Gyi (U Thein Han), “A Study of the Rise of the Burmese Novel,” Presidential Address delivered at the Annual General Meeting of the Burma Research Society, 26 February 1968.

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his novel. Then his story moves to Lower Burma. The hero of the novel, Maung Yin Maung is the captain of a merchant boat. He is imprisoned in Ava because of a letter found on his person. While in prison, he meets his long-lost father, from whom he learns astrology and also about a treasure buried somewhere near Ava. When his father dies, he escapes by taking the place of the corpse sewn in the burial shroud, which is thrown into the river. It is obvious that James Hla Gyaw took these features from the French novel. The most important difference in James Hla Gyaw’s novel is that, unlike the French hero’s vengeful mind, his Burmese hero is forgiving and compassionate. The reason the author changed the character of his hero cannot be determined with absolute certainty, but it seems plausible that Hla Gyaw wished to make the novel palatable to Burmese Buddhist readers, who believed that revenge caused an endless cycle of vice. He succeeded; that group of readers did accept the novel. Soon after the appearance of Hla Gyaw’s novel in 1904 and at the peak of its popularity, another novel emerged, this time reflecting Mandalay society and the former capital of the Burmese kingdom. It was titled Chinbaung ywet-theh Maung Hmaing (Maung Hmaing the roselle leaf seller); its author, U Kyi, was a petty officer during the reign of King Thibaw. When Mandalay lost its king, U Kyi had moved to Rangoon to work as an editor at Hanthawaddy Press. The proprietor of the press suggested that his editors write a novel along the lines of Maung Yin Maung Ma Meh Ma. A few months after the appearance of the latter, U Kyi followed his superior’s suggestion and wrote about Maung Hmaing, a polygamist. The new genre was given the name ‘Pali wutthu’, although some Burmese scholars objected to naming the new genre in this way, as the word wutthu was used in reference to the stories of Buddha. Moreover, opponents rejected the name because they believed that the novels only encouraged tanha, ‘the craving of life’ or lust. “All these criticisms suggest the first literary battle in which the new was attacked by the old and it made no small stir in the Burmese literary circles of early twentieth century,” Zaw Gyi observed.8 Some harsh criticism was also targeted at the two novels discussed above. In a review in the Journal of the Burma Research Society, the progressive scholar Ba Han wrote: the new order that has emerged is not yet free of the crudities of a new-found art. Yet, its achievement is of positive value. Realism has invaded the romance of 8

Zaw Gyi, “Presidential Address,” 1.

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Fancy and the gray atmosphere of ordinary every day life has received at long last an artistic interpretation.9

More and more Myanmar novels followed the two afore-mentioned pioneer works – between 1904 and 1916 some fifty titles. The majority of them focused on love affairs but still wanted to show their knowledge of Buddhist prayers and directives such as the ‘Five wifely duties’ or the ‘Ten Precepts of a King’. However, U Lat’s Sabeh-bin wutthú (The story of Jasmine, 1912) and Shwe-pyi-zò (common iora, a bird, 1914), as well as Saya Lun’s Hma-daw-boun (A royal message, 1916), already demonstrate a remarkable level of craftsmanship in their character portrayals.10 In his review of the novel Shwe-pyi-zò in the Journal of the Burma Research Society, J.A. Stewart judged it to be “superior to most novels hitherto published in coherence and interest” and stated that it was “especially distinguished by a marvellous accuracy of observation and vividness of expression.”11 By this time, the Journal of the Burma Research Society had long become the leading medium in the field of scholarly reviews of Burmese fiction. As already indicated, most of the early novels were inspired by Western sources. When it came to literary adaptation and appropriation, the most important name, apart from James Hlaw Gyaw, is Shwe U Daung (1889– 1973). His famous novel Yádana-boun (1916) was an adaptation of East Lynne (1861) by Mrs. Henry Wood (= Ellen Price, 1814–87) and his Yu pá nan di, published in 1918, an adaptation of She by Rider Haggard (1856– 1925). Shwe U Daung translated fourteen novels, adapted fifteen, wrote about three hundred short stories, and wrote five authentic novels. His novels were said to be closer to the Western type than the novels of James Hla Gyaw and U Lat. Shwe U Daung was probably the first to discard the traditional parts not relevant to the plot, such as prayers or mantras, commonly found in traditional novels. However, it can be observed that, although his plots, as in his novels generally, were no longer traditional, they did not as yet reflect social life.

9

Ba Han, “Review of Maung Hmaing,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 8.2 (April

1918): 64. 10

U Lat read authors such as Sir Walter Scott and was more influenced by Western novels than Saya Lum. 11 John Alexander Stewart, “Review of ‘Shwe Pyi Zo Wuttu’,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 4.2 (August 1914): 152–54.

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His contemporary P. Monin (1883–1940) made a great effort to reflect contemporary social life in his writings. He worked together with Shwe U Daung in Thuriya for the Sun Press and translated and adapted English novels, producing successful adaptations of Just a Girl by Charles Garvice (Ne Yi Yi, 1920) and of Innocent by Marie Corelli (Ne Nyo Nyo, 1920). One might find that the influence of the English novel made him as good a prose writer as Shwe U Daung.12 Another name to mention in this context is Zayya. Like Monin, Zayya (1900–82) was born and raised in a Christian family and thus had easy access to English literature. He, too, succeeded in joining the league of well-known novelists and essayists – and ‘appropriators’; he wrote his famous novel Mya Lay Shwe Dar Bo (The Swordsman; 1920) after he had read The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by Baroness Orczy (1865–1947). Zayya wrote about 500 short stories, a number of them adaptations. Another renowned translator was Dagon Shwe Hmyar (1895–1982), whose first novel was Htù-da-dwe (Unusual/unique things, 1926), which was an adaptation of The Sign of Silence by William Le Queux (1915). He is one of the first Burmese authors to use plain prose, entirely free of prayers, mantras, or legends of pagodas interspersed in the text. He produced fifteen novels and forty translations, twenty of which were from works by Rider Haggard. He wrote innumerable short stories, mostly translations and adaptations. Thakin Ba Thaung (1901–81), who was also the first modern playwright, adapted Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. His version, Pan-tha Má Sa Ù, came out in 1936, when he was in jail. It gained fame especially for the ‘Burmeseness’ of its language. To conclude this sketchy overview, the first Burmese woman writer deserves mention: Dagon Khin Khin Lay (1904–81), born and raised in Mandalay and the granddaughter of one of the ministers of the last King. Her ‘translation’ of The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck became famous throughout Burma. Almost all of her other novels, too, were adaptations.

Modern Burmese Prose II: The Short Story The authors Shwe U Daung, P. Monin, and Dagon Khin Khin Lay, already discussed in the previous part of this essay, but also Dagon Shwe Hmyar, Zayya, and Ledipandita U Maung Gyi, were highly influential writers shap12

Both of these pioneer novelists and translators also had a name as journalists.

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ing the development of the Burmese short story. Except for U Maung Gyi (1878–1939), an ex-monk who received only monastic education, all of the above-mentioned writers entered the literary field by adapting foreign works. But even U Maung Gyi adapted some English fiction, for instance The Dreams of Maung Thaw Ka (1912), from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrims’s Progress, which appeared serialized in Pyin Nya Ahlin, and Maung Kyi hnint Maung Ngeh, from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. The first Burmese short story we know of is “Myitta hnint thuya” (Love and liquor), which appeared in Pyin Nya Ahlin in 1914. The author’s name is not mentioned, but it seems likely that the story was by Monin; not only was he familiar with English short stories but he also worked as an editor for the magazine at the time (before U Maung Gyi succeeded him). Monin made no secret of the fact that he wrote some of the stories himself. The magazine featured one short story every month, some of them reflecting contemporary social life in Burmese society.13 It was common practice that, whenever the magazine faced a shortage of stories, the editors would pick up the pen to produce one anonymously. As such a ‘fill–in’, Shwe U Daung, the editor of Thuriya Magazine, once adapted one of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes reincarnated in Rangoon as U San Sher wearing a turban and longyi (the Burmese sarong). This adaptation happens to be the first short story in that magazine and the first detective story in Burmese literature. From this time on until after the War, every magazine tried to include at least one detective story every month. Although private detectives are still an unknown quantity in the real life of Burma, in the reader’s imagination these highly popular figures already existed in those days. Up until the post-war days, Shwe U Daung adapted almost all of the Sherlock Holmes’ stories. Soun-dauk Maung San Sha í wutthú-myà (The Collected Stories About U San Sher) is reprinted even today and the Burmese Holmes, U San Sher, is still the detective most loved by Burmese readers. U San Sher’s popularity is a fascinating phenomenon. One reason for his success is the exceptional style and forceful dramatic quality of his creator’s prose. Ludu Daw Ahmar, a journalist and ardent fan of U San Sher, once commented on Shwe U Daung’s writing, in a speech commemorating his centennial, that he preferred Shwe U Daung’s U San Sher to the original 13

Later, other magazines, too, featured short stories and even organized special short-story contests – for example, the Thuriya Magazine in 1917 and Dagon Magazine in 1920.

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Sherlock Holmes stories and the direct translations of the same stories by Mya Than Tint because she felt the adaptations were much better than the original. In the adaptations, the U San Sher character is a Burmese with a clear anti-British attitude, a patriotic detective who would never help the Burmese police officers investigate or arrest the Robin Hood-style Burmese outlaws. In the story “The Outlaw San Phe’s Dead Body,” U San Sher prevents the police officer from shooting the outlaw by standing in front of the criminal, saying: According to what I’ve heard about this outlaw, he does not torture people! He does what he does for them! He’s only an outlaw because he is dissatisfied with the government – it’s they who turned him into an outlaw in the first place. I’m not a servant of the British Government but a servant of the Burmese people. I don’t need to investigate the outlaw.14

Whenever U San Sher is confronted with a British officer, he declines to cooperate with him, and whenever a British officer looks down on the Burmese, he defends them bravely. There were not many fictional heroes like U San Sher in those days, and his heroic influence still lives on today.

The Next Generation It was around 1930, at the University of Rangoon, that the first batch of Burmese B.A. honours students tried their hand in the campus magazine and the World of Books magazine established by J.S. Furnivall. Most of them came from the national schools. As young nationalists, they loved the Burmese language and literature. When they started university, the young nationalists were welcomed by U Pe Maung Tin, the first Burmese professor to teach Burmese language and literature as well as English literature there. The literary contests in World of Books encouraged them to try new forms of prose and poetry. U Pe Maung Tin selected and edited their new works, which were published by the Burma Education Extension Association, established in 1928. Three titles in particular were much welcomed by young readers: Khit-san poun-byin-mya (Time Testing Tales)15 in 1934/38 and Khit-san ka-byar-mya (Time Testing Poems) in 1934. Off-campus, the 14 Soun-dauk Maung San Sha í wutthú-myà (A Collection of Detective Maung San Sher Stories), adapted by Shwe U Daung (Rangoon: Moe Min Sar Pe, 1998). This and all the following translations from the Burmese are by the present author. 15 Khit-san poun-byin-mya (Time-testing stories / experimental stories), ed. U Pe Maung Tin, 2 vols. (Rangoon: Pagan Press, 1934–38).

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Dagon Magazine (established in 1920 and edited by the famous writer Letipandita U Maung Gyi) and the Kyi Pwa Yay magazine (established in 1933 by U Hla) became their platform. P. Monin, one of the more senior leaders of the new literary trend off-campus, soon supported and welcomed the young campus writers, who would later be called the Khit san sape: the Time Testing Movement. Supporters like U (1890–1942), a writer of short stories, a student strike leader in 1920, and later inspector of the national schools, vitalized the movement, which was still going strong in the postwar days. Other supporters were less successful in their academic career: Maung Htin (Maung Htin Fat), a failed medical student, joined the movement as a writer of satirical short stories.16 In the opinion of some young Burmese people, translation was essential for Burma. Thakhin Nu, Thakhin Than Tun, Thakhin U Win Pe (Maung Swan Yi), and other young leftists established the Nagani [red dragon] Book Club in 1937 in Rangoon to distribute anti-imperialist (Marxist) ideas. They published novels, plays, biographies of political heroes, political theories, and the like. The Nagani Book Club became the Burma Translation Society when Burma gained its independence in 1948 and was directly sponsored by Thankin Nu, the founder of the book club and Burma’s first Prime Minister. After independence, direct translations became popular, with many writers translating novels from Russian, Chinese, and Hindi – for instance, works by Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gorky, Chekhov, Lao Tze, Lushun, and Mulk Raj Anand. Leftist books were popular in Burma for about twenty years. In the postwar period, the former student writer Maung Htay Myaing (Dagon Taya) became a prominent poet and author of short stories. He also adapted Chekhov’s stories and led the ‘New Literature Movement’ under the banner of ‘Socialist Realism’. At the same time, Tint De, who had been a B B C announcer under the name U Win Sein, published adaptations of O. Henry short stories in Shumawa under various pen-names. During this period, one group of writers emulated O. Henry’s style, while the other followed Chekhov’s example. There are at least a hundred stories that were at first not recognized as adaptations. In 1957, Thuriya Kanti (Dr Sein Ban) published a book titled How to Write Stories; in this book there is a long index of 16

Later, there were university students such as Maung Htay Myaing (Dagon Taya) and Ma Ah Mar (Ludu Daw Ahmar), who followed in the path of Khit San. Among these, Maung Thein Pe (Thein Pe Myint) had his breakthrough as a short-story writer and novelist just before the war.

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adapted stories whose authors had not revealed that they were adaptations (that book was awarded the 1958 National Literary Prize for its scholarly research). Tet Toe, a translator himself, accused those older writers who had incorporated foreign texts into their own writing of plagiarism. The accused defended themselves by arguing that they used foreign literature as a way of introducing younger readers to another culture. Today, Burmese people are in even greater need of translations because of the decline of the Burmese education system since 1960; today, very few Burmese students can read English – quite unlike the situation obtaining under the old colonial system. During colonial times, even at the national schools that were established after the university student strike in 1920 against the British government, the Burmese were taught English under the banner of ‘Learn English to Attack English’. For years, Burma imported only very few foreign books, but today, young people are enthusiastically learning foreign languages again, including English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, and German – not at schools but at the embassy information centres. Their goal is to learn about the wider world in order to participate successfully in the globalization process. For well over forty years now, the censorship board under Burma’s military government has banned the original works of most of the writers of the older generation, forcing many to turn their attention once more to works in translation.17 One might say that this is a blessing for the younger generation. The older generation of veteran writers is aware of the knowledge gap that has been visited upon the young by censorship and is endeavouring to help them by making foreign books accessible in translation. In 1966, Zaw Gyi chose to translate short stories by Nobel Prize winners. Ludu Daw Ahmar was translating short stories and writing stories of her own for the Kyi-bwa-ye magazine both before and after World War II, under the pen-names Mya Myint Zu and Khin La Win; she now translates African and Asian short stories. Mya Than Tint (1929–98) translated world classics, modern classics, short stories, and essays.18 He was awarded the National Prize for Translation four times. Some young writers today are exploring new ways of thinking by reading publications 17

Maung Tha Noe, for instance, translates from English and Russian. He was the translator of, for example, both Erich Segal’s The Class – as Lwan-mo-gehya-dhaw Tekkatho nwe-nya-mya (Rangoon: Sein-pan-myain sape, 2001) – and Gabriel García Márquez’s A Chronicle of a Death Foretold – as Marana eit-met ta-khu i hmat-tan (Rangoon: Ya-pyi sa-ouk-taik, 1998). 18

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on postmodernism, but there are still only very few opportunities for them to lay their hands on more recent publications.

WORKS CITED Ba Han. “Review of Maung Hmaing,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 8.1 (April 1918): 64–67. Ba Thaung, Thakhin. “Tho-hsaung pya-zat hnint bama pya-zat” (Western Drama and Burmese Drama) Shumawa 11.123 (August 1957): 18–23; 11.124 (September 1957): 176–84. Pe Maung Tin, U, ed., Khit-san poun-byin-mya (Time-testing / experimental stories), 2 vols. (Rangoon: Pagan Press, 1934–38). Shwe U Daung, adapted. Soun-dauk Maung San Sha í wutthú-myà (A Collection of Detective Maung San Sher Stories) (Rangoon: Moe Min Sar Pe, 1998).

Stewart, John Alexander. “Review of ‘Shwe Pyi Zo Wuttu’,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 4.2 (August 1914): 152–54. ——. “Review of Saya-wun ba-be,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 19.1 (1929): 25–27. Tin, Dagon Saya. From Man-Bioscope to Staged Drama: Papers on Drama (Rangoon: Sa pe beik man, 1970). Zaw Gyi (U Thein Han). “A Study of the Rise of the Burmese Novel,” Presidential Address delivered at the Annual General Meeting of the Burma Research Society, 26 February 1968.

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Writing Against, Writing With — The Case of Algerian Literature

A MINA A ZZA –B EKKAT

Dans mon jardin J’ai semé les graines d’anis Attirés par leur odeur Les oiseaux sont venus Je les ai chassés Avec des paraboles Les oiseaux rouges et tristes N’assaillent plus mon enfant — Mohammed Dib, L’incendie, (1954; emphasis in the original)

T

A L G E R I A , at the junction of Europe and Africa, on the road to the New World, in the cradle of ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean Sea, has drawn many successive waves of invaders. A recent novel by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, Le serment des Barbares (The barbarians’ oath), has shown how this particular fate has impregnated the country, its inhabitants, and even its literary productions.1 Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, and French, one after the other, each expelling the previous invader, have built a complex nation, while the original population, the Berbers, have carefully kept their traditions and language despite these various influences. This historical complexity can still be seen in the ruins all over the country, in the monuments and buildings left as marks of the past. This complexity is still present in literature written in Arabic, French, or Berber. 1

HE LOCATION OF

Boualem Sansal, Le serment des Barbares (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).

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The Romans, who left entire towns – some of them still in good shape – were the first to exert a Western influence. They also left great names in African literature – writers like Apuleius (124–180 A D ) from Madaure (now Madaourouch, near Souk–Ahras) and St Augustine (354–430), famous as a writer and as a Father of the Catholic Church. Both of them were born in North Africa, in Roman Numidia. Augustine was a Numid and claimed proudly that he belonged to Africa: “Afer sum,” he said, ‘I am African’. Apuleius was half-Numid, half-Getule, also born in Numidia. The last colonization of Algeria to take place came in the wake of the Napoleonic period, when, in 1830, the French landed on the Algerian coast, driving out the Turks. They would stay until 1962, the year of independence, after a long and painful struggle for freedom lasting seven years. The Romans and the French were thus the two major Western influences on Algerian literature, oral and written alike. Following a survey of Algerian oral traditions, poetry, and theatre under Western influence, this essay will focus on the novel. There are two languages spoken in Algeria that are considered to be native or indigenous. The first is Berber, now called Tamazight. Through the centuries, this language has resisted all influences and is now even taught at universities. The second is Arabic, brought by the conquerors who came with Tarik Ibn Ziyad (seventh century), and after him the successive waves of Arab invaders, the famous Benu Hillal. Algerian Arabic derives from classical Arabic, whose norm is the language of the holy book, the Qur’an. One can thus find two kinds of Arabic culture in Algeria – learned culture in classical Arabic, influenced by Middle Eastern forms of expression; and popular culture, sometimes influenced by Western forms. Popular literature in Arabic is often considered a literature of resistance. After independence, as written into the nation’s constitution, classical Arabic became the official language of Algeria and is taught in schools. The younger generations speak classical Arabic at school and Algerian Arabic and/or Tamazight at home. Recently, after riots and uprisings, Tamazight was also made an official language. Thanks to the rebirth of an ancient alphabet called Tifinagh, this language now has a written form. In accordance with its complex language situation, present-day Algeria produces in literature in Arabic (dialectal and classical), in Tamazight, and in French.

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Oral Traditions: Tale, Poetry, Song, and Theatre After independence, the search for identity was so imperative and passionate (in Algeria as in the whole of Africa) that many scholars sought tirelessly for whatever fragments of tales and poetry they could find in Algerian Arabic or Berber belonging to the original substratum. Encapsulated in this particular form of cultural expression were denunciations of colonial violence and injustice as well as claims for freedom that had often passed unnoticed by the French occupiers because deemed inferior and thus harmless. Tales are deeply rooted in the oral traditions, but when researchers tried to write them down, they rediscovered hitherto ignored Western ways of telling stories. The famous Berber writer Marguerite Amrouche, for instance, whose life is considered to be an example of courage and strength of mind, tells stories very much like Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm. A long training in French schools has accustomed her to these particular forms of expression. In some cases of Tamazight oral tradition, the Western model is absorbed completely. One poem, for instance, adapts the story of Moses to the indigenous cultural context. Moses and his family are presented as Berber peasants, feeling and acting like them. The story is full of naive anachronisms; Moses himself is described as a good Muslim, faithful to his God. Even if historical truth is not respected, the appropriation of the Western model helps facilitate comprehension by illiterate peasants.2 One very early example of the Western impact on literature in indigenous languages is the Platonic myth of Psyche. The Algerian Apuleius relates this story in his novel The Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass (second century A D ), but in fact he borrowed it from a Milesian tale written by a certain Aristides.3 A young girl, married to a man she had never seen and was still not allowed to see, did not obey this latter injunction and looked at him while he was sleeping. She discovered that her husband was Eros, the god of love. But while gazing at him, she dropped some oil from her lamp, and he woke and left. The tale is still widely known and the theme has been 2

Youssef Nacib, “Les traits de la culture orale dans un poème hagiographique kabyle, Taqsit n’ Sidna Moussa,” in Algérie, ses langues, ses lettres, compiled by Afifa Bererhi & Beida Chikhi (Blida: Éditions du Tell, 2002): 37–54. 3 Milesian stories were famous and highly appreciated in the ancient world. This particular story, worth further study, is also considered to be the ‘blueprint’ progenitor of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale that is widespread in the West.

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frequently employed in tales in Arabic and Berber.4 In this context, the cycle of Psyche (the soul) has a special role in initiating the young into adult life: taboo, transgression that leads to misfortune, and, in some cases, the possibility of redemption. Tales were, however, also a very important means of communication, expressing resistance to colonial oppression. Their existence was in itself already part of the struggle for identity. Camille Lacoste–Dujardin says: Folktales are in close relationship with the structure of the society in which they are produced and if, at a special moment, this society is suffering from injustice or foreign domination, the folktale will mimic the structure of this tearing and sometimes offer a kind of solution.5

This is true with regard to poetry. The famous Berber writer Mouloud Mammeri says: “Popular poetry resisted colonial aggression better than did learned culture.”6 A community threatened in its identity will still find shelter in certain values. Popular culture more or less escaped the repression, mainly because French colonizers misjudged it, considering it to be harmless. But it was in popular culture that resistance organized itself; more than that, this culture reflected the constraints and problems associated with being torn between two cultural systems, resulting in a kind of renewal. As most of the French did not know Arabic, poetry offered an opportunity to denounce aggression and colonial rule. Poets, many of them closely attached to a tribe, found ways of expressing the sufferings of unfairly treated people compelled to obey a violent and unjust power. Sometimes the colonial power did gauge the influence of a poet on the people of the tribe as being potentially so undesirably substantial that they would decide to exile 4 This story and the influence of the Milesian tale on contemporary folktales related in Algerian rural areas in Algerian Arabic or in Tamazight are well described in Revue Africaine 89 (1945). The revue was founded in 1856 and its first issue declared its goal to be the depiction and recording for future generations of everything that seemed worth preservation, in particular cultural material and historical monuments. 5 “Les contes sont en relation étroite avec la structure de la société dans laquelle ils sont produits et si à un certain moment cette société souffre d’injustice ou d’une domination étrangère, le conte reproduira la structure de ce déchirement et quelquefois offrira une sorte de solution” ; Camille Lacoste–Dujardin, “Littérature orale et histoire, fonctions historiques d’un corpus de littérature orale paysanne algérienne,” in Littérature orale (conference papers, Algiers, June 1979; Algiers: O P U , 1982): 81–105. 6 “Devant l’agression coloniale, la culture populaire a mieux résisté que la culture savante,” in Mouloud Mammeri, Culture savante et culture vécue: Études 1938–1989 (Algiers: Tala, 1991): 71. My tr.

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him. That is what happened to Mestfa Ben Brahim, poet of the Beni Amer tribe in the nineteenth century, who was exiled to Morocco.7 It is said, however, that the tribe was so affected by his absence that the French were forced to allow him to return – such was the importance of poetry in those areas at times. Oral poetry in Arabic and Berber has a long tradition throughout Algeria. Jean–Léon L’Africain, alias El Hassan Ben Mohammed El Wazzan Ez-Zayyati, a famous African traveller and the author of La Description de l’Afrique, in which he describes the countries of the Maghreb in the sixteenth century, evokes this poetry in the following terms: One must not omit mention of the fact that the majority of Arabs in Numidia includes a great number of poets who write long poems in which they speak of their wars and their hunting expeditions, and also, with great elegance and sweetness, of amorous matters.8

Poetry contests were held, mostly in the Western part of Algeria, and the victors celebrated. This kind of poetry is called Melhoun (popular poetry) and many of those pieces of poetry are now sung by modern singers of ‘Rai’.9 In 1936, Abdelkader Khaldi, a famous poet of the Chir’el Melhoun (sung poetry with a special rhythm) from Mascara in the west of Algeria, wrote a long poem entitled “Ya touil eragba” (O, the long-necked lady; see Appendix, text 1). The title seemingly refers to a woman with whom the author was in love, but it can also refer to a long-necked glass of wine, the kind of flute-glass introduced into Algeria by the French colonizers. Those who listened carefully to the song understood that the expression was used as a metonym, borrowed from the French life-style as a tribute to wine and ‘artificial paradises’. This was, in fact, a very subtle way of denouncing colonial oppression, which caused crops to be taxed, confiscated, or simply razed, leaving starvation, disaster, and ruin everywhere. Ahmed Wahbi 7

See Abdel Kader Azza, Mestfa Ben Brahim, barde de l’Oranais et chantre des Beni– Amer (Algiers: S.N.E.D., 1979). 8 “Il ne faut pas omettre de mentionner que la majeure partie des Arabes de Numidie possède de nombreux poètes qui composent de longs poèmes où ils parlent de leurs guerres de leurs chasses et aussi de choses d’amour avec une grande élégance et une grande douceur.” El Hassan Ben Mohammaed El Wazzan Ez-Zayyati, (Jean–Léon L’Africain), Description de l’Afrique, new ed. tr. from Italian by A. Epaulard (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, Adrien Maisonneuve, 1981), my tr. 9 ‘Rai’ is an Algerian mix of rap and blues, which conveys in simple words the unsatisfactory existence and lack of hope among young Algerians. Nowadays, this music is known all over the world as an expression of despair.

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sang this poetry for the first time in 1956 (the Revolution started on 1 November 1954). Afterwards, the poet and singer received threats, but this song nevertheless came to play a great role in spreading revolt and effectively helping rewrite history; oral literature and poetry had become a vehicle of struggle and resistance. Music and song are still vital modes of expression, in a political sense as well. Singers like Hasni (Arab) or Matoub Lounès (Berber) were murdered during what critics called the black years. The songs by Hasni are characterized by an odd mixture of Arabic and French, which is typical of the particular language of Algerian youth (see Appendix, text 2, for an example). Some of the words are hybrid creations – for example, a French prefix or suffix attached to an Arabian root-word. It is not the purpose of this essay to deal with linguistic matters at any length, but this re-appropriation of French through popular expressions is proof that French culture has been ‘chewed’ in a special way before complete absorption. The song “C’est une maison bleue” (It is a blue house) by Idir (see Appendix, text 3) is a rewriting of a famous song by Maxime Le Forestier, a Canadian singer, about the hippies of the 1970s. The music and some of the words are still identifiable, but the original music is mingled with another song, one easily recognizable for Berber listeners as music by the Berber singer Matoub Lounès. The original song was modified and used as a vehicle conveying the message of the revival of Berber culture. It does not matter that the name of the Berber singer is never mentioned; the name of his native village and some fragments of his music are present as reminders of the place that he had in his own community. The closing words of the song are ambiguous. In the ‘original’ song, it is “San Francisco se lève,” meaning the beginning of the day, sunrise in the mythic city on the West coast of the U S A . In the Berber version, San Francisco is replaced by ‘Tizi Ouzou’, the main city of the Berbers. The words express rebellious hope for a future full of promise. W⏐X A very brief glance at the theatre in Algeria will conclude this part of the essay. The history of Algerian theatre is already complex despite its recent origin. “Algeria is a country of an ancient culture but without a tradition of

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theatre,” wrote the famous Algerian playwright Slimane Benaissa.10 Once again, the language issue plays a crucial role. The modern theatre in Algeria was born around 1920. Some forms like the Turkish Karagueuz were in existence before that time, but the first plays to be translated into classical Arabic were of Western origin, often French but not exclusively – for example, Molière and Victor Hugo but also García Lorca, O’Casey, Shakespeare and Beckett.11 Even now, after forty years of independence, the plays staged are translations from French or English. There was and still is no repertoire in Algerian Arabic, except for Rachid Ksentini in the 1940s and Kateb Yacine in the 1970s; the latter usually wrote in French and translated his plays into Algerian Arabic. Yet even this medium served as a vehicle for anticolonial expression. During the 1960s, as the French authorities knew no Arabic the actors took the opportunity to insert some Arabic words between the (translated) lines of Molière or Shakespeare in order to establish a bond between the actors and the public in claiming independence and human rights.

The Novel The novel in North Africa is an imported genre, though, as already mentioned, it was the Numidian Apuleius who was one of the first in the Latin world to write a book-length work of prose fiction. We can deduce that certain forms of oral compositions induced the birth of what we now call the novel. It is in the novel that Algerian writers have experimented with contrapuntal writing. The novel in Algeria is written in either Arabic or French, not in Berber. Yet this seemingly simple linguistic situation harbours some complexity. An African scholar once submitted a doctoral dissertation entitled ‘French, an African Language’; and, in fact, French as used in the works of Kateb, Djaout, Mimouni, or Boudjedra has in many ways become a new language used to translate the specificity of a separate cultural world. Many lectures have been given on this topic and many books written about it. Algerian French spoken in the streets is evolving 10 “L’Algérie est un pays de vieille culture mais sans tradition de représentation théâtrale,” Slimane Benaissa, “Le dramaturge dans la cité algérienne,” in Algérie, ses langues, ses lettres, textes réunis, ed. Afifa Bererhi & Beida Chikhi (Blida: Tell, 2002): 211–14, my tr. 11 See Nadya Bouzar–Kasbadji, L’émergence artistique algérienne au XXe siècle, contribution de la musique et du théâtre algérois à la renaissance culturelle et à la prise de conscience nationaliste (Algiers: O P U , 1988), and Mahieddine Bachetarzi, Mémoires 1919– 1939, suivi de Étude sur le théâtre dans les pays islamiques (Algiers: S.N.E.D, 1968).

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differently from, for instance, Canadian French. Specific metaphors and folk-rooted storytelling modes influence the narrative styles that have developed. As a consequence, the Algerian novel is generally complicated and well-elaborated and has, indeed, been labelled ‘difficult reading’. During the early years of independence, most novels were composed in a ‘counter-discursive’ manner; story-line and plot-structure were composed against a previously constructed (colonial) discourse, revealing the effectiveness of a resistance operating by transformation. The French scholar Bernard Mouralis speaks of “counter-literatures” (Les Contre-littératures),12 while Edward Said, himself also a music specialist, uses the term ‘contrapuntal writing’.13 This concept might seem confusing at first. Michel Foucault describes discourse as a system of social knowledge with wellbounded rules of inclusion and exclusion: one is either in the discourse or not; one either adheres to it or not.14 A powerful eurocentric discourse such as literature represents itself as natural, universal, and timeless, yet it exposes itself, by virtue of such claims, to continual resistance and contradiction. In the case of contrapuntal writing, the speaker subscribes to an opposing discourse. One famous example of this ‘writing back’ or rewriting is Aimé Césaire’s version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, entitled Une tempête, Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (1969). The relations between Prospero, Caliban, and Miranda seem to provide endlessly adaptable models for describing the relationship between Empire and settler, colonizer and indigene. In Césaire’s play, a comparatively subsidiary character in Shakespeare’s work is given a central role. Ariel, as the mestizo symbol of the reconciliation between the two communities, white and black, belongs to both worlds and, at the same time, remains different from them. Other Western novels and their theses, among them classics like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, have provoked a similar response, becoming the targets for many African authors to write back to – albeit mostly in the language of the former colonizer.15

12

Bernard Mouralis, Les contre-littératures (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975). Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994). 14 Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris, Gallimard, 1971. 15 Robinson Crusoe’s servant Friday is the colonizer’s ideal native: mute and completely passive. He is the type of black man who obeys without discussing or contesting the white man’s rule. When black writers started to publish theirs works, it was marked with the ironic 13

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W⏐X In the following, I will discuss the case of the Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra, one of the authors of the older generation. Still alive, he is already considered a classic writer. Since his first literary attempts he has been ‘writing back’ to the most famous writer of the French community born in Algeria, Albert Camus.16 Boudjedra began his writing career in French in 1965 and became famous in 1969 with his novel La Repudiation. The unfettered choice of themes and the narrative structure made the book both surprising and scandalous. This very first success is the key to all the other books that followed. Here, elements of Arab culture are interspersed in the French language, already announcing the linguistic conversion of the author in 1981. Le démantèlement was written in Arabic as Ettafakouk (the dismantling), and only later translated into French. This novel, too, is a manifestation of the resentment that this Algerian writer felt towards Camus. Why these strong feelings? Camus was born in Mondovi, near Constantine, into a poor workingclass family of Spanish origin. Despite the compassion and sympathy for the poor and unfairly treated that he showed in all of his works, he did not take part in the Algerian struggle for independence. In 1960, however, he received the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. He did not live to see Algeria become independent; in 1961 he died in a car accident. In 1947 Camus published La Peste (The Plague), set in the western Algerian coastal city of Oran. Part of the writer’s intention, just after World War II, was to denounce fascism, but he met with severe criticism for the absence of the native inhabitants, the Arabs, in his novel. In another novel of his, L’Étranger (The Stranger/The Outsider, 1942), a European named Meursault kills a nameless Arab, designated only by his ethnicity. When the murderer is tried, the judge enquires about the motives for his action. Meursault’s sole reply is ‘because of the sun’. Edward Said writes: comment ‘Vendredi s’est mis à l’écriture’: Friday has started to write. See esp. Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001) on Conrad’s novel. 16 People of European origin (mostly French, Spanish, or Italian) living in Algeria were designated by the term pieds noirs (black feet). The origin of this expression is not known; it might have been the colour of the shoes that provided the inspiration, or the fact that people prepared wine by pressing grapes with their feet. The pieds noirs chose to leave Algeria after independence in 1962, a cruel and very painful exile for most of them. A number of them tried to retrieve the lost motherland through their writings, Albert Camus being the most famous writer of this group.

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True, Meursault killed an Arab, but this Arab is not named and seems to be without a history, let alone a mother and a father, true also, Arabs die of plague in Oran, but they are not named either, whereas Rieux and Tarrou are pushed forward in the action.17

Algerian-born, Camus ought to have shown some compassion for those who shared his games when he was a young boy. Said further writes: Even though Camus grew up in Algeria as a French youth […] he was always surrounded by the signs of Franco-Algerian struggle, most of which he seems to have either evaded or, in his last years openly, translated into the language, imagery, and geographical apprehension of a singular French will contesting Algeria against his native Muslim inhabitants.18

Said quotes Camus as never having believed that an independent Algeria was possible. As far as Algeria is concerned, national independence is a formula driven by nothing other than passion. There has never yet been an Algerian Nation […]. As things stand, the Arabs alone do not comprise the whole of Algeria […]. Moreover, a purely Arab Algeria could not achieve that economic independence without which political independence is nothing but an illusion.19

Camus’ works distil the traditions, idioms, and discursive strategies of France’s appropriation of Algeria. Camus’ twentieth-century narratives express exactly the same attitude as the exclamation that Theophile Gautier made in the nineteenth century: “Que l’Algérie serait belle s’il n’y avait pas les Arabes!” (How wonderful would Algeria be without the Arabs!). It is in this context that Algerian writers have tried to stimulate a counter-discourse by way of re-interpreting Western literary models. For a long time, Algerian authors had been deprived of the right to express their feelings publicly, and when they started to write, the model established by Camus always confronted them. In 1956, during the struggle for freedom, the young writer Kateb Yacine produced an extraordinary 17

Said, Culture and Imperialism, 212. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 215–16. 19 “En ce qui concerne l’Algérie, l’indépendance nationale est une formule purement passionnelle. Il n’y a jamais eu encore de nation algérienne […]. Actuellement les Arabes ne forment pas à eux seuls toute l’Algérie […]. Il faut ajouter qu’une Algérie purement arabe ne pourrait accéder à l’indépendance économique sans laquelle l’indépendance politique n’est qu’un leurre.” Albert Camus, Essais, ed. Roger Quillot (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965): 1012–13. Quotation from Said’s English translation in “Camus and the French Imperial Experience,” in Said, Culture and Imperialism, 216–17). 18

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work, Nedjma.20 Many critics consider this book to be the starting-point of Maghrebi literature in French, and Kateb as the father (in the psychoanalytical sense of the word) of Maghrebi writers in French. In this novel, whose form is complicated and very surprising (as was Joyce’s Ulysses), four young Arabs kill a European man. Reversing the murder of an Arab on a beach by Camus’ hero Meursault, this incident forms part of the early struggle for independence. In Boudjedra’s The Dismantling, which was written in Arabic, we also find an example of echoing or, in fact, ‘re-writing’ Camus. One particular character in Camus’ novel L’étranger is an old pied noir who has an aged dog that he loves and hates at the same time and that he even habitually beats: As I climbed the dark staircase, I ran into old Salamano, my neighbour. He was with his dog. They’ve been together for eight years now [. . . ]. He beats his dog and calls him names [. . . ]. When I met him on the stairs, Salamano was cursing his dog, calling him “Scoundrel, bastard.”21

In The Dismantling we find the following passage: “He often happened to hear through the wall how the old French man cursed his dog, using all sorts of names: You’re nothing but a dirty Arab! Dirty Arab!”22 This parallel marks a counter-discourse that the Algerian writer created when reinterpreting the old man’s cruelty towards his dog. There is no implication of race in the passage from Camus’ novel, which only emphasizes the old man’s cruel despair. Boudjedra establishes an oppositional, dissident voice within the sovereign domain of the discourse of colonialism.23 In his text, race and racial discrimination are explicitly marked by the words ‘French’ and ‘Arab’, the latter unmistakably used as an insult. In the context of colonization, the gap between the two communities was total. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon noted that the colonial world is a world divided into 20

Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (Paris: Seuil, 1956). “En montant dans l’escalier noir, j’ai heurté le vieux Salamano, mon voisin de palier. Il était avec son chien. Il y a huit ans qu’on les voit ensemble [...]. Il bat son chien alors et il l’insulte [...]. Quand je l’ai rencontré dans l’escalier, Salamano était en train d’insulter son chien. Il lui disait ’Salaud! Charogne!’ ” ; Albert Camus, L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard 1957): 42–43. My tr. 22 “Il lui survenait souvent d’entendre, à travers la cloison, le vieillard français insulter la bête et la traiter de tous les noms: ‘Tu n’es qu’un sale Arabe! Sale Arabe!’ ” ; Rachid Boudjedra, Le Démantèlement, 84–85. My tr. 23 Bill Ashcroft, Post Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001): 33. 21

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two separate spheres.24 No communication is possible between them; belonging to one side is to be against the other.25 Bill Ashcroft rightly argues: Place is never simply location, nor is it static, a cultural memory which colonization buries. For, like culture itself, place is in a continued and dynamic state of formation, a process intimately bound up with the culture and the identity of its inhabitants.26

This might appear rather simplistic, but introducing this reality into the text section originally composed by Camus, Boudjedra also formulates a reproach. In Boudjedra’s eyes, Camus never defended the Algerian nationalists when he was in a perfect position to make his voice heard (as winner of the Nobel Prize), because he felt he belonged to the European community and did not want to betray it. Therefore it was impossible for him to take part in the Algerian struggle for freedom. Said confirms this assumption: The plain style of Camus and his unadorned reporting of social situations conceal rivetingly complex contradictions, contradictions unresolvable by rendering, as critics have done, his feelings of loyalty to French Algeria as a parable of the human condition […]. Yet because there was always the more difficult and challenging alternative of first judging, then refusing France’s territorial seizure and political sovereignty, blocking as it did a compassionate shared understanding of Algerian nationalism. Camus’s limitations seem unacceptably paralyzing. Counterpoised with the decolonizing literature of the time, whether French or Arab – Germaine Tilion, Kateb Yacine, Fanon or Genet – Camus’s narratives have a negative vitality, in which the tragic human seriousness of the colonial effort achieves its last great clarification before ruin overtakes it. They express a waste and sadness we have still not completely understood or recovered from.27

Nowadays, the influence of Western literature is easy to recognize. A recent novel written in Arabic by Waciny Laredj and translated into French under the title La Gardienne des ombres: Don Quichotte à Alger (2002) re-uses the famous theme of Don Quixote de la Mancha. In this appropriation, Don Quixote is a character from Spain in quest of his famous writer. Cervantes himself had been jailed in Algiers for five years and 24 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 25 The interpretation of the scene above can be taken further. The old man in the text is nearly a hundred years old, thus his life is close to its end. Reading him as the representative of European settlement in Algeria, one can see an anticipatory allegory of the imminent end of colonialism (the Europeans were compelled to leave in 1962). 26 Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 156. 27 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 224.

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escaped. He stayed for a while in a cave that one can still visit today. It is probably due to this rather long stay in the country that echoes of Cervantes’ novel are regularly found in Algerian literature. Mohammed Dib, for instance, evokes the long, skinny figure of Don Quixote in his Le désert sans détour.28 Faulkner, Beckett, Joyce, Proust, and many other great writers of the Western tradition have served as sources of inspiration for most well-known Algerian novelists. The Western narrative models are ‘chewed’ over, adjusted, and functionalized in order to appeal to Algerian readers. The Algerian novel at the crossroads of many different influences seems to bring a kind of modernity to the imported Western narrative mode. The issue of westernization is less painful now, as the past decade has pitched the Algerian people into new problems: terrorism and social conflict. Camus is increasingly less familiar to the generations born after independence. But the counter-discourse as described above was important in the process of re-establishing a national identity after the long struggle for freedom. The cultural encounter experienced by all colonized countries has stimulated storytellers and writers to appropriate and modify the culture coming from the West to serve the needs of the indigenous population. This “cultural anthropophagy”29 was the best way to resist and to imagine new forms of creation. Many writers such as Tahar Djaout or Abdelkader Alloula were killed during the ‘black decade’ when Algeria was fighting against Islamic fundamentalists. Some authors were able to escape by leaving the country. The new situation has created new problems.

Conclusion This brief survey of Algerian literature from its origins to modern times has been able to provide but a glimpse of various forms of literary expression. The purpose of this essay has been to inform the reader about the Algerian literary context, tracing the influence of Western forms and themes on some of the oral and written creations in indigenous languages and highlighting the cultural interaction involved. Constant struggles against waves of invaders, attempts to find and maintain one’s own identity by defending 28

Mohammed Dib, Le désert sans détour (Paris: Sindbad, 1992). Oswald de Andrade, “Anthropophagite Manifesto,” tr. Adriano Pedrosa & Veronica Cordeiro in Revista de Antropofagio 1.1 (May 1928); quoted from the website www.391.org /manifestos/1928anthropophagite.htm. The manifesto’s first line reads: “Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.” 29

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it with, and against, myriad forms of aggression – this has been and, in a way, continues to be, the situation of Algerian writers. Changing times bring new structures; modern Algeria, confronted with hitherto unknown problems, has responded with fresh forms of artistic expression.

WORKS CITED Andrade, Oswald de. “Anthropophagite Manifesto,” tr. Adriano Pedrosa & Veronica Cordeiro in Revista de Antropofagio 1.1 (May 1928), online: www.391.org /manifestos /1928anthropophagite.htm. Apuleius. Les Métamorphoses ou l’âne d’or (The metamorphoses or The golden ass) (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001). ——, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, ed. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Augustine, St. Confessions (Paris: Belles Lettres, n.d.). Azza, Abdel Kader. Mestfa Ben Brahim, barde de l’Oranais et chantre des Beni–Amer (Algiers: S.N.E.D., 1979). Bachetarzi, Mahieddine. Mémoires 1919–1939, suivi de Étude sur le théâtre dans les pays islamiques (Algiers: S.N.E.D, 1968). Benaissa, Slimane. “Le dramaturge dans la cité algérienne,” in Algérie, ses langues, ses lettres, compiled by Afifa Bererhi & Beida Chikhi (Blida: Éditions du Tell, 2002): 211–14. Boudjedra, Rachid. Le démantèlement (Algiers: Éditions Bouchène, 1990). Bouzar–Kasbadji, Nadya. L’émergence artistique algérienne au XXe siècle, contribution de la musique et du théâtre algérois à la renaissance culturelle et à la prise de conscience nationaliste (Algiers: O P U , 1988). Camus, Albert. L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). ——. Essais, ed. Roger Quillot (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965). ——. La Peste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Demerghem, Emile. “Psyché dans le folklore nord-africain,” Revue Africaine 89 (1945), 41–88, repr. (Algiers: O P U , 1998). Dib, Mohammed. Le désert sans détour (Paris: Sindbad, 1992). Ez-Zayyati, El Hassan Ben Mohammaed El Wazzan (Jean–Léon L’Africain). Description de l’Afrique, new ed. tr. (from the Italian) A. Epaulard (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, Adrien Maisonneuve, 1981). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 ). Foucault, Michel. L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Kateb Yacine. Nedjma (Paris: Seuil, 1956). Lacoste–Dujardin, Camille. “Littérature orale et histoire, fonctions historiques d’un corpus de littérature orale paysanne algérienne,” in Littérature orale (conference papers, Algiers, June 1979; Algiers: O P U , 1982): 81–105.

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Mammeri, Mouloud. Culture savante et culture vécue: Études 1938–1989 (Algiers: Tala, 1991). Mouralis, Bernard. Les contre-littératures (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975). Nacib, Youssef. “Les traits de la culture locale dans un poème hagiographique kabyle; Taqsit n’sidna Moussa,” in Algérie, ses langues, ses lettres, compiled by Afifa Bererhi & Beida Chikhi (Blida: Éditions du Tell, 2002): 37–54. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994). Sansal, Boualem. Le serment des Barbares (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).

Appendix Text 1: “Ya touil eragba” (O, the long-necked lady) (1936) Abdelkader Khaldi (1896–1964), in Turath 4 (Oran: Les Cahiers du Crasc, 2002) (tr. from Algerian Arabic) Ô toi au long cou, en toi j’ai vu des phénomènes, Tes péripéties sont difficiles et tu as marqué les Arabes. Tu n’as épargné ni les sages ni les nobles Ni les saints ni les scientistes de la religion. Une année de malheurs s’est écoulée, les récoltes ont été détruites. Nul n’a trouvé une graine, les fruits ont disparu. Celui qui a été content d’une récolte, l’a aussitôt perdue, Une partie en intérêts, une autre en impôts et le reste volé. Le plant bénéfique a disparu, les mûres sauvages se sont propagées. Et le mulet est sorti victorieux contre le noble cheval. Des maisons hospitalières il ne reste que le perron Et les ruines amoncelées sur tel ou tel désastres. Chaque chose à son tour, et le vainqueur sera vaincu, Le temps est à l’avenir, et est cavalier qui monte.

Text 2: “C’est pas mon habitude” (excerpt) Hasni, in Turath 3 (Oran: Les Cahiers du Crasc, 2002). (Algerian Arabic mixed with French; the latter emphasized by the present author) C’est pas mon habitude. C’est la première Hada haddi anâ âh yâ uxtî

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Kî nxallas nasfâ kî la lumière Wanâ zinak anâ gla sahtî Refrain Jamais la dert fazzîn anâ kifhâ Hsâbhâ

Text 3: “Tizi Ouzou se lève” (Tizi Ouzou wakes up) orig. Maxime Le Forestier, rewritten by the Berber singer Idir. (In the Berber version ‘San Francisco’ is replaced by ‘Tizi Ouzou’, the most important town in the part of Algeria inhabited by Berbers. The words that are literally adopted by the Berber song are emphasized. The others verses are replaced by Berber verses to commemorate the murdered Berber singer Matoub Lounès.) C’est une maison bleue Adossée à la colline On y vient à pied On ne frappe pas Ceux qui vivent là ont jeté la clé On se retrouve ensemble Après des années de route Et on vient s’asseoir Autour du repas Tout le monde est là A cinq heures du soir Quand San Francisco s’embrume Quand San Francisco s’allume San Francisco Où êtes–vous Lizard et luc Psylvia Attendez–moi Nageant dans le brouillard Enlacés roulant dans l’herbe On écoutera Tom à la guitare Phil à la kena jusqu’à la nuit noire

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Un autre arrivera Pour nous dire des nouvelles D’un qui reviendra dans un an ou deux Puisqu’il est heureux on s’endormira Quand San Francisco se lève C’est une maison bleue Accrochée à ma mémoire On y vient à pied On ne frappe pas Ceux qui vivent là Ont jeté la clé Peuplée de cheveux longs De grands lits et de musique Peuplée de lumière Et peuplée de fous Elle sera dernière A rester debout Si San Francisco s’effondre

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The Use of T.S. Eliot’s Literary Traditions in Contemporary Arabic Poetry S ADDIK M. G OHAR

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O R A V A R I E T Y O F R E A S O N S , T.S. Eliot’s theory of tradition and his modernist techniques have dominated the poetic scene in the Arab world since the Second World War. Exploring the impact of Eliot on Arabic poetry, Shmuel Moreh argues:

Shakespeare, Shelley and the Romantic poets of the West did not exert so deep an influence on Arabic poetry as did T.S. Eliot who almost cut it entirely from its roots. Eliot’s work changed the form and technique of Arabic poetry as well as its contents to an extent that has no precedent in the whole history of Arabic poetry.1

In the post-Second World War era, many Arab poets came under the sweeping influence of Eliot’s theories and modernist poetry, particularly his poem The Waste Land, which was translated into Arabic in 1947. Attracted to Eliot’s criticism of a dying civilization, Arab poets found a reflection of their own predicament in Eliot’s modernist poetry. Salma Jayyusi argues that Arab poets were attracted to Eliot basically because they found in his implicit use of the fertility myth (in The Waste Land) an expression of ultimate love and an emphasis on the potential of self-sacrifice. It was the idea of the cycle of sacrificial death that leads to rebirth which attracted them most. From the mid-fifties to the early sixties, Arab poets repeatedly drew an analogy between the aridity of Arab life after the 1948 disaster in Palestine and the

1

Shmuel Moreh, Modern Arabic Poetry (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976): 216.

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aridity of the land in the fertility myth, saved from complete waste only by death and the spilling of blood, analogous to the falling of rain over a parched land.2

The conflict between the Arabs and the Zionists over Palestine reached a tragic culmination in the 1948 war, which ended with the defeat of the Arab armies, the establishment of the state of Israel, and the displacement of the Palestinians. The war erupted when the Arab governments declared war on Israel in the aftermath of their rejection of the United Nations partition plan, which involved dividing Palestine into two states. As a result of the war, the Palestinian people, particularly the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the northern regions, turned into a nation of exiles dispersed in refugee camps throughout the West Bank, Gaza, and neighbouring Arab countries. After the Palestinian tragedy in 1948, which was followed by the rise of dictatorial regimes in the Arab world, the image of the wasteland awaiting resurrection became a reflection of the state of collapse and desolation into which the Arab world had been plunged. Owing to Eliot’s impact, Arab poets have employed myths and symbols obtained from both Eastern and Western sources, modern and ancient history, in order to express the pains and hopes of a nation shattered by recurrent defeats and dominated by political corruption. The poetic techniques used by the Arab poets who came under Eliot’s influence differ from one writer and period to another. For example, Eliot’s method of deploying speech-like language or allusions, favoured by Arab poets in the 1950s, gave way to the use of personae and masks in the 1960s, which paved the way for engagement in textual complexities that gave way in turn to subtle experimentation resulting in poems of profound structural subtlety. In a recent article, Terri DeYoung explores the impact of T.S. Eliot on major Arab poets such as Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab and Salah Abdul–Sabur, emphasizing the continuing influence of Eliot not only on the pioneering generation of Arab poets who “came to maturity directly after World War II ” but also on their successors, who “were much more concerned with engaging the transformations and assimilations of Eliot already produced by their predecessors than in grappling with the master directly.”3 One of the neglected figures of the second generation of Arab poets whose awareness 2

Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977): 724. 3 Terri DeYoung, “T.S. Eliot and Modern Arabic Literature,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 48 (2000): 16.

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of Eliot’s poetic techniques was enhanced by reading Al-Sayyab’s poetry was the dissident Iraqi poet Mudhafar Al-Nawwab.4 Using Eliot’s poetic discourse as an inter-text to articulate his revolutionary ideology, which is different from Eliot’s moral order, Al-Nawwab expresses a feeling of ambivalence toward Eliot’s Western tradition. Al-Nawwab’s ambivalent attitude, which seems to be a characteristic of postcolonial narratives, is reflected in the poet’s manipulation of Eliot’s Western heritage as a mechanism to explore the state of moral stagnation and political corruption that typifies life in the Arab world in the era of decolonization. Unlike hypocritical Arab poets who have evaded confrontation with those who inherited the imperialistic legacy in their societies, AlNawwab used Eliot’s modernist techniques to revolutionize the tradition of Arabic poetry by challenging those who are responsible for the history of catastrophe and defeat in the Arab world. Despite his high reputation among the Arab masses, Al-Nawwab was not taken up into the literary canon. For years, he has been dwelling on the periphery of the Arab literary canon as a revolutionary voice introducing a radical poetics to overcome the dehumanization resulting from policies of state hegemony that have turned Arab poets into panegyrists and beggars kissing the hand of dictatorial rulers.

4

Al-Nawwab is descended from a well-known Shiite family that emigrated to Iraq from the Arabian Peninsula. As a result of engaging in revolutionary activities against the invaders during the Turkish colonization of Iraq, Al-Nawwab’s family was banished from the country. The family settled in India, where they remained for a long time, but they were banished to Iraq by the British authorities after the British occupation of India. As a member of a revolutionary family and member of the Iraqi Marxist party, Al-Nawwab opposed the Iraqi dictatorships of the 1950s and 1960s; consequently, he was persecuted by the regime and brutalized by its agents. In 1963, Al-Nawwab, as a result of political persecution, decided to escape from Iraq to the Soviet Union via Iran. At the beginning of his journey of escape, Al-Nawwab secretly entered his hometown, Al-Ahwaz, located in the border region of Arabstan, which was annexed to Iran during the era of Western colonization. Overwhelmed by feelings of nostalgia for Al-Ahwaz, the poet stayed there for a short time before being arrested by members of the Iranian Intelligence Agency. In Iranian prisons, Al-Nawwab was subjected to various forms of torture and humiliation. After his deportation to Iraq, he was convicted of serious political crimes and was consequently given the death penalty. Fortunately he was able to escape from prison, finding sanctuary in the southern region of Iraq. But he was arrested again, in 1969, and banished from Iraq forever. As a refugee poet, Al-Nawwab has stayed in different places – Cairo, Damascus, France, Greece, Thailand, Russia, India, Algiers, Libya, Sudan, London, Chicago, Brazil and other South American countries – moving from one exile to another and carrying with him the pains of a wounded nation.

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Disappointed by the tragic consequences of the Second World War era on the Arab collective consciousness, Al-Nawwab experienced an epistemological break from the corrupt Arab regimes that participated in the loss of Palestine and the humiliating defeat of the Arab nation in the wars with Israel. Struggling against internal corruption and external dangers, represented by the imperialist/expansionist policies in the region, Al-Nawwab seeks an avant-garde poetic apparatus that can be applied to do justice to an era of great ramifications. In his political poetry, particularly in Watariyyat Layliyya,5 Al-Nawwab appropriates Eliot’s concepts of tradition and myth, using them as a dynamic for innovation and change. In his poetic discourse, Al-Nawwab compares the deplorable circumstances of the Arab world since the 1950s with the glories of early Islamic history in order to condemn the corrupt policies of contemporary Arab rulers. Nevertheless, he argues that the current state of moral stagnation and backwardness in the Arab world is the result of fossilized cultural paradigms and oppressive structures that have their roots in the core of Islamic tradition. Attempting to integrate the literary legacy of Arabic poetry with Eliot’s modernism in its Western manifestations, Al-Nawwab is engaged on different levels with tradition, an engagement that affirms the poet’s commitment to providing deeper insight into the forces that have dominated Arab destiny. Al-Nawwab’s intertextual engagement with tradition and his allusions to ancient Arab history aim at mounting a discursive struggle committed to change. Being interested in the intersectional dialectic between tradition and modernity, Al-Nawwab, due to Eliot’s influence, seeks to ground his revolutionary poetry in tradition. In his discussion of the issue of literary tradition and the interaction between authors and their precursors, Harold Bloom points out: Literary tradition begins when a fresh author is simultaneously cognizant not only of his own struggle against the forms and presence of a precursor but is compelled also to a sense of the precursor’s place in regard to what came before him.6

5

Mudhafar Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat Layliyya,” in Mudhafar Al-Nawwab, Al-Amal AlShiriyya Al-Kamela / The Complete Poetic Works (London: Dar Qonbor, 1996): 450–503. All quotations from Al-Nawwab’s poetry are taken from the above-mentioned edition, referred to throughout the notes as Al-Amal. All passages from Al-Nawwab’s works have been translated into English by the writer of this essay. 6 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1975): 32.

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Al-Nawwab’s struggle against the impact of the master involves an appropriative process in which Eliot’s forms and techniques are transformed into a profound poetic mechanism used to articulate the Arab poet’s lamentation of the loss of a heroic tradition and glorious Arab past. In his literary heritage, Eliot explores the relationship between writers and texts from different ages and cultures to illustrate his concept of tradition: the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his (the poet’s) own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order

– therefore, what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.7

In his elaboration of the concept of tradition, Eliot points out: The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are adjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.8

Apparently, Eliot is not only concerned with “what happens when a new work of art is created” but also with the relationship between texts. In other words, he implies that each text has intertextual connections with every other text written in the past or present by their simultaneous presence in “tradition,” viewed by Ezra Pound as “the beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us.”9 Eliot also argues that each writer is inherently connected to other writers from the past or present by virtue of their existence in “the ideal order” of tradition. Discussing the issue of

7

T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen,

1960): 49. 8

Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 50. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (1918; New York: New Directions, 1968): 91. 9

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tradition and its relationship to the past/present dialectic, Hugh Kenner states: All that we know of the past is part of our experience now. And it follows that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.10

Recognizing the inseparable relationship between the past and present and adapting Eliot’s Western modernism to a local context, Al-Nawwab incorporates Eliot’s theory of tradition into his political poetry, revivifying significant episodes and events from early Islamic ages in order to explore contemporary Arab issues. In other words, Eliot’s theories and poetic techniques are transformed into a local poetic engaging catastrophic events in early Islamic history and linking them with the current state of disintegration in the Arab world after the Second World War. It is through this epistemological perspective that Al-Nawwab seeks to transform Eliot’s concept of tradition, rooted in Western culture and mythology, to achieve nationalist goals. Appropriating Eliot’s theory of tradition to an Arab context, AlNawwab brings into the foreground historical figures and crucial events from the early Islamic era to articulate narratives of hegemony and oppression, sin and salvation, integral to Arab/Islamic history. By using Eliot’s technique of juxtaposition, through which two events or characters are brought together for comparative and aesthetic purposes, Al-Nawwab makes allusions to famous figures in early Islamic history in order to explore contemporary Arab issues. This also underlines Al-Nawwab’s awareness of the importance of tradition and the significance of the past, which is revealed in his employment of mythic personae from both Islamic and Western cultures, such as Ali11 and Abu Thar,12 as well as major Western 10

Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell & Obolinsky,

1959): 58. 11 Ali is the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, who volunteered to take the place of the Prophet in bed on the night in which Muhammad’s tribal enemies planned to assassinate him in order to prevent him from spreading Islam beyond the borders of Makka. Sleeping in the Prophet’s bed, Ali succeeded in deceiving Muhammad’s rivals, who laid siege to his house in an attempt to prevent him from escaping to Medina to establish an Islamic state. Thanks to Ali’s courage, self-denial, and fearlessness, the Prophet and his close friend Abu Bakr escaped from Makka to Medina, where the first Islamic community was established. 12 During the reign of Uthman (the third Caliph, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad), Abu Thar Al-Ghafari, the voice of opposition to the regime, launched a campaign against all forms of corruption practised by the governors of several provinces within the Islamic Empire. Astounded by the policies of domination and injustice advocated by

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figures such as Marx. Facing the trauma and anguish of living in an Arab world fragmented by tribal conflict, Al-Nawwab addresses his poetry to the revolutionary forces emerging from the Arab masses. Those are, according to Al-Nawwab, inspired not only by early Islamic figures but also by the revolutionary projects of Mao, Marx, and Che Guevara: “All the peasants came in great multitudes toward me / among them I recognized Ali, Abu Thar, Guevara, Marx, and Mao.”13 Hence, linking the present with the past and incorporating tradition in the core of his poetry, Al-Nawwab associates Islamic heroic figures such as Ali and Abu Thar with their revolutionary/ Marxist counterparts. By doing so, he transcends his provincial vision and invests his poetry with a universal perspective. Adapting Eliot’s devices to fit his revolutionary aesthetic, Al-Nawwab recalls these famous personages by way of innovating masks such as ‘The Bedouin’, ‘The Arab Revolutionary’, and ‘The Sailor’, who were to fulfil political and ideological purposes which are different from Eliot’s moral agenda, as will be shown in this essay. In his poetic works,14 Al-Nawwab explores the political history of the Arab world since the 1950s with an emphasis on Iraq after the collapse of the Iraqi kingdom in 1958. In this context, Al-Nawwab repudiates the postwar dictatorial regimes of Iraq responsible for the massacres and atrocities committed against the Iraqi political opposition, and aligns himself with all voices calling for freedom and reform. In “Bahar Al-Bahareen” (The Prince of Sailors), for instance, Al-Nawwab uses the word ‘sailors’ to signify the revolutionary Iraqis who challenged the tyranny of the regime in the 1950s Muawiyya, the governor of Damascus, Abu Thar urged the Muslim people to protest against the Caliph and his governor. Abu Thar rejected the luxury and extravagance of Muawiyya’s palace in Damascus, where most of the people suffered from poverty and were dominated by the sword, but his revolutionary activities prompted Muawiyya to retaliate. Through a conspiracy, Muawiyya succeeded in mobilizing the Muslim Caliph Uthman against Abu Thar, who was accused of threatening the stability of the Muslim nation. But since Abu Thar was one of the Prophet’s companions, the Caliph did not immediately punish him, attempting instead to curb his revolutionary activities. Accordingly, Abu Thar was offered a well-paid position in the Caliph’s palace, but being aware that this royal offer was basically a stratagem to undermine his revolutionary activities by isolating him from the masses, Abu Thar rejected the offer. Threatened with execution if he did not obey the Caliph’s order, Abu Thar appealed to the latter to permit him to go into voluntary exile. The Caliph accepted, stipulating that Abu Thar should go into exile alone, without farewell or company. Nevertheless, some people, including Ali, broke the Caliph’s order and gave Abu Thar a farewell as he was leaving to stay alone in his desert exile, where he later died. 13 Mudhafar Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 498. 14 Al-Nawwab, “Bahar Al-Bahareen,” in Al-Amal, 123.

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and 1960s. Using Eliot’s technique of juxtaposition, he contrasts the courage of the Iraqi revolutionaries and the cowardice of the Iraqi traitors, the advocates of Abdul–Karim Qasim’s regime who betrayed the national cause of their own people. Like Dante’s Inferno and Eliot’s unreal cities of “Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria / Vienna, London,”15 Baghdad and Tehran are depicted in Al-Nawwab’s poem as sinful cities which have became the lairs of castrated, turncoat politicians who have betrayed their people. Using binary oppositions, Al-Nawwab compares and contrasts the Iraqi rebels who rose up against the oppressive regime of President Qasim with the impotent members of his government. In Al-Nawwab’s poem, the ‘sailor’ persona takes different shapes and appears in several masks to suggest a multiplicity of meanings. For example, the sailor or the Iraqi revolutionist appears in the poem in the form of ‘the lover’, ‘the hermit’, ‘the Prophet’, ‘Jesus Christ’, and ‘the god of the night’. The sailor also assumes the shape of various Iraqi activists, particularly Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab, the revolutionary Iraqi poet who died in exile. While honouring and glorifying the revolutionary figures (the voices of the masses) represented by the sailor’s masks, Al-Nawwab depicts the Arab rulers in a derogatory manner by using terms that connote evil, dishonesty, betrayal, conspiracy, and impotence. Al-Nawwab’s engagement with Eliot’s modernist techniques enables him to expose simultaneously the sterility of Arab/Islamic traditions and subvert the worn-out structures of Arabic poetry categorized by historians as ‘the tongue of the Arabs’. Integrating Western/modernist strategies, alien to the Arabic literary context, into his poetry, Al-Nawwab moves from the Arabic monologic poem, with its fossilized forms, a manifestation of a decadent and totalitarian culture, into the poetic plethora of Watariyyat. In Al-Nawwab’s poem, Eliot’s waste land narrative, which is an indictment of Western civilization, epitomized by the unreal cities of the dead, is adapted to condemning the state of death, chaos, and defeat characterizing life in the Arab cities in the aftermath of the Arab–Israeli wars in 1948 and 1967. In Watariyyat, the poet reworks Eliot’s tragic vision of Europe in the postWorld War I era to construct a narrative of lamentation of the Arab world after World War II . Al-Nawwab utilizes Eliot’s wasteland narrative not only to explore the moral stagnation and decadence of a world dominated 15

T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace,

1980): 24.

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by ignorance and shattered by shameful defeats but also to expose the disintegration of a nation battered by catastrophe and subjugated by cruel tyrants. Since the strength of any poet lies in what Harold Bloom calls “his skills and inventiveness at substitution,”16 Al-Nawwab succeeds, to a great extent, in harnessing Eliot’s literary heritage to an articulation of ideological/ political issues alien to Eliot’s moral order with its problematization of the issues of tradition and modernism. In other words, Al-Nawwab appropriates Eliot’s poetic techniques and strategies as used in The Waste Land for the purpose of denouncing Western civilization, in a bid to serve political purposes integral to the Arab poet’s revolutionary ideology. For example, in The Waste Land, Eliot uses sterile prostitute-figures such as ‘Marie’, ‘the typist’, ‘the Hyacinth girl’, and others to condemn Western culture and underline the motif of barrenness integral to the poem’s discourse. In his turn, Al-Nawwab transforms Eliot’s narrative of sterility, rooted in Western/Christian aesthetics and mythology, into a local narrative, a denunciation of a monolithic, totalitarian culture. Thus, the Arab world, in the aftermath of its defeat by Israel, is viewed as a sterile prostitute who, despite innumerable acts of fornication, never conceives or gives birth except for tyranny, conspiracies, and political corruption. In addition to his description of the Arab world as a promiscuous female who willingly surrenders to tyrants and colonizers, Al-Nawwab targets contemporary Arab rulers through Eliotesque poetic devices and symbols. Depicting Arab rulers as replications of Eliot’s archetypal character in The Waste Land, the Fisher King, who commits the sin of adultery, thus bringing the curse of sterility upon his kingdom, Al-Nawwab underlines the crucial similarities between Eliot’s central figure and contemporary Arab rulers whose policies of hegemony and domination are responsible for the state of fragmentation and chaos in the Arab world. While the Fisher King of Eliot’s poem suffers from sexual failure, a manifestation of the spiritual collapse of Western civilization that can be redeemed through Christian rituals, the impotence of the fisher kings of Al-Nawwab’s poem is attributed to several emasculating wounds caused by certain dispositions within Arab culture and history. The impotence suffered by the Arab rulers, the inheritors of an imperialistic legacy, in Al-Nawwab’s perspective, will prevail so long as they insist on establishing reigns of terror, viewed as extensions of the despotic 16

Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 105.

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regimes of the early Islamic era. Later in this essay, the themes of the fisher king, the prostitutes, and Christian symbolism will be discussed further. Claiming that the seeds of revolution have been buried in the caves of Arab/Islamic history due to ages of tyranny and oppression, Al-Nawwab argues that his basic mission as a poet is to revive the spirit of protest in the Arab collective consciousness. As an exile and political refugee, the poet calls for the obliteration of the forces of tyranny that turned the Arab world into a wasteland dominated by corruption and sterility. In his agony, and in an attempt to evade memories of humiliation and defeats, Al-Nawwab seeks solace in the victories of Saladin over the medieval crusaders. Using Eliot’s poetic techniques of repetition and juxtaposition, alien to the Arabic poetic tradition, Al-Nawwab, in Watariyyat, creates an analogy between past and present, contemplating ancient Arab history by lamenting the failure of Arab/Islamic civilization to achieve anything positive since the time of Saladin: during such an hour of the lustful nights the sparrows on the golden thorns were invoking the glories of the ancient Arab kings during such an hour of infinite weeping during such an hour I was riding the she-camel overwhelmed with the eternal stars of the night during such an hour I embraced the spirit of the Arabian desert.17

Following Eliot’s modernist tradition, Al-Nawwab invokes the figure of Zarqa Al-Yamama, using it as a counterpart of Eliot’s Tiresias, the central narrator in The Waste Land who is aware of the past and can foresee the future.18 In the preceding verses, the poet introduces the persona of Zarqa Al-Yamama, a pre-Islamic female figure blinded by the enemies of her tribe because of the sharpness of her eyesight. While Eliot’s Tiresias denounces a civilization that isolates humanity from its spiritual and moral heritage, the Arab poet, through Zarqa Al-Yamama, laments a decadent 17

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 450. Zarqa Al-Yamama is an Arab woman, living in pre-Islamic Arabia, known for her sharp eyesight and her ability to see the invading armies of hostile tribes miles before their arrival in the territories of her own people. Under Eliot’s influence – Tiresias is the blind prophet who is assimilated from ancient Greek mythology and adapted by Eliot in The Waste Land to embody his theory of the objective correlative, which aims to make the poem impersonal – Al-Nawwab, like other Arab modernist poets, utilized Zarqa Al-Yamama as a mythic figure who can foresee the future. 18

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culture that fails to make any contribution to the modern world. Like Tiresias, the figure of Zarqa Al-Yamama is used as a dramatic voice to communicate particular emotions to the reader. Recalling the glories of ancient Arab warriors, particularly Saladin in his victory over the crusaders, the poet is overcome by a deep sense of sadness at the current condition of the Arab countries. Al-Nawwab explains in an interview the reasons for his interest in heroic figures and legendary personalities from ancient and contemporary history: The heroic figures of my poetry are bearers of historical secrets. I am interested in mythical characters who changed history through their justice and martyrdom. I am also interested in the epic personalities who challenged the forces of evil in their time. For me, all of them have the same features.19

Using Eliot’s technique of repetition, Al-Nawwab explores Arab history and culture, invoking “the glories of the ancient Arab kings.”20 The explicit references to the Arabian desert and the camel locate Al-Nawwab’s lines in their geopolitical and historical context as the poet recalls the golden days of Arab civilization. The line “during such an hour of the lustful nights” however, is an echo of Eliot’s The Waste Land: at the violent hour, when the eyes and back turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits like a taxi throbbing, waiting at the violent hour, the evening hour that strives homeward and brings the sailor home from sea the typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights her stove, and lays out food in tins.21

The reference to the “infinite weeping” of the Arabs at the loss of their glories recalls Eliot’s allusion in The Waste Land to the weeping and lamentation of the Jews in Babylon and the weeping of Eliot’s persona on the shore of Lake Geneva: by the waters of Leman I sat down and wept sweet themes, run softly till I end my song sweet themes, run softly for I speak not loud or long.22

19

Abdullah Al-Shaher, Mudhafar Al-Nawwab: Malameh wa Mumayyizat (The distinguishing features of Al-Nawwab’s poetry) (Damascus: Al-Awael Lil-nashr, 1997): 55. All quotations from this book have been translated into English by the present writer. 20 Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 450. 21 T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 45.

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The analogy between the Jews and the Arabs is an indication of Al-Nawwab’s individualistic attitude toward the Jewish people. Unlike most of the revolutionary Arab poets, who view the Zionists as Western colonizers with European features, Al-Nawwab makes a distinction between the Zionist invaders of Palestine and the Jewish people in general. In other words, Al-Nawwab, like other Arab poets dealing with the Arab–Israeli conflict, reveals no traces of antisemitism in the European sense. Drawing a line between the Jewish people and the European Zionists, the usurpers of the land, Al-Nawwab identifies the Zionists with Western/colonial powers which have historically subjugated other races in Africa and the Third World. Thus, it comes as no surprise that in Al-Nawwab’s poetry both the Zionists in Palestine and the tyrannical rulers of the Arab world are part and parcel of the same hegemonic and repressive forces that brutalize the Arab people. In Watariyyat, the poet reminds the Arab people of the fate of the Jews under Nazism and warns them of a similar end if current Arab regimes stay in power and if Arab people remain submissive and defeated: we will surely become the Jews of history howling in the deserts of Diaspora roaming the wilderness without shelter.23

The poet is clearly predicting the extermination of the Palestinian people if their country remains occupied by the Zionist invaders. who are no different from other colonial forces or tyrannical Arab rulers alike. The plight of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and refugee camps is thus equated in Al-Nawwab’s poetry with the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. Despite the great differences between the Holocaust and other catastrophes in human history, Al-Nawwab reveals his understanding of Jewish suffering by creating an analogy between the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees and the destiny of the Jews under the Nazi regime. Moreover, the poet identifies himself, as an Iraqi refugee living in exile, with the Jewish experience in Diaspora. Al-Nawwab’s recognition of Jewish suffering is born out of his exilic experience as a political refugee and outcast. He establishes a link between the diasporic persecution and dispossession of the Jews and his own persecution by the Iranian regime after losing AlAhwaz, his own Zion, and his loss of Iraqi citizenship. Regardless of his 22 23

T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 42. Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 481.

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radical political commitments and unlike other Arab poets, Al-Nawwabb does not consider the Jewish people to be responsible for the Palestinian tragedy. Instead, he condemns the Arab regimes for their failure to protect Arab territories in Arabstan and Palestine. Denouncing the fatalistically negligent policies of Arab governments towards the loss of Palestine and his birthplace, Al-Ahwaz, the poet underlines the impotence of Arab regimes and the need for political change. Imitating Eliot’s poetic style in The Waste Land, Al-Nawwab, in his lamentation over the loss of Al-Ahwaz, in Watariyyat, asks: who is the one that is shrouded with all the palm-trees of the night? who is the one holding all the rivers of Al-Ahwaz in the palm of his hand? who is the one confronting the wolves of this world?24

Thematic differences aside, these lines echo Eliot’s in The Waste Land: who is the third who walks always beside you? who is that on the other side of you? who are those hooded hordes swarming over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth.25

Criticizing the Shah of Iran, who encouraged the annexation of Al-Ahwaz during the British occupation of Iraq, Al Nawwab describes the monarch in abusive terms, calling him “the farting king”; the poet states that owing to the Shah’s policies “Al-Ahwaz was stolen from my country.”26 Experiencing the pain of dispossession, Al-Nawwab in the same poem affirms what he calls “the wolfish nature of this world” (467). Further, the displaced poet sarcastically speaks about his exilic experience as he moves from one hotel to another, hoping not to die in diaspora ‘like a ghost’. He laments with agony the loss of Al-Ahwaz, his hometown, repudiating those who smuggled Al-Ahwaz out of my country who forced its people to wear the masks of alien cultures

24 25 26

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 567. T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 48. Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 474.

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who smuggled the rivers of Al-Ahwaz embroidered with Arab palm trees.27

Affirming that the rivers and the palm trees of Al-Ahwaz are part of the ‘Arab land’, the poet puts the blame on ‘castrated’ Arab rulers who allowed ‘the farting king’ of Iran to rob their land. Apparently, the geographical and cultural references to Al-Ahwaz reveal Al-Nawwab’s nostalgia for a distant homeland which exists only in the imagination of the refugee-poet. In Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab maximizes the role of cultural myths and allusions to “the Arab palm trees” and “Al-Ahwaz rivers,” as well as other elements that shape the notions of Self, community, and culture in order to legitimize the Arab identity of Al-Ahwaz: I might admire thousands and thousands of women, but I only love a single woman, the woman who brings to me the bread and tears of my homeland.28

As mentioned earlier, Al-Nawwab did attempt to go back to his hometown, resulting in his torture by the Iranian police. In Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab recounts his experience inside a Tehran prison: “In prison, ten executioners struck me, one after the other, with their whips and heavy shoes.”29 In Iranian captivity, Al-Nawwab suffers from a painful sense of humiliation as a result of being driven out of his country, and must conceal his identity as a political activist: an executioner asks me: who are you? I was ashamed to tell him that I have been dismissed out of my country because I revolted against imperialism.30

During tortured in prison, the poet recalls “the face of Palestine,” which provided him with moral strength; consequently he “spat at the face of the executioner.”31 In response, the executioner intensified the poet’s pains by using more brutal ways of physical and psychological torture. As an Arab 27 28 29 30 31

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 471. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 473. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 501. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 498. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 499.

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revolutionary activist fighting against the hegemony, oppression, and colonization that turned the Arab/Islamic world into a slaughterhouse, the poet was brutalized by ‘the Iranian ghoul’: “on this chair we have castrated many of your comrades,” said the executioner. It is bitter for you to make a confession as I said.32

In order to be able to tolerate the physical and mental torture inflicted on him in prison, Al-Nawwab also recalled ‘the face of Abu Dhar’, glorified as a symbol of heroism and a voice of opposition against all forms of injustice. Evoking the image of this revolutionary Muslim comrade from the early Islamic era, Al-Nawwab refused to reveal the names of his Marxist friends who revolted against the agents of imperialism in Iraq. However, he was forced to sign documents agreeing not to return to his hometown. In Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab painfully depicts his exilic experience and double displacement as an outcast and political refugee by using Eliotesque repetition: my homeland has taught me how to interpret the significance of all phenomena my homeland has taught me that the alphabet of history becomes a falsification of reality if its letters are written without blood my homeland has taught me that human history without love and compassion is nothing but howling, mourning and fucking in the wildness.33

Al-Nawwab also echoes some of Eliot’s lines in The Waste Land. Capturing the painful moments when he was forced to leave his hometown forever, Al-Nawwab, in Watariyyat, says: on the tenth of April I wept at the gates of Al-Ahwaz 32 33

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 500. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 476.

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on the tenth of April I left my eyes on the gates of Al-Ahwaz.34

The negative associations of April as indicated in the opening lines of The Waste Land35 are transposed in Watariyyat, where the month symbolizes the political stagnation prevailing in the postwar Arab world. In addition to the seasonal and temporal references, once again the lines echo Eliot’s “by the waters of Leman I sat down and wept.”36 While Al-Nawab reflects the alienation and displacement after being dismissed from his homeland, Eliot evokes the Old Testament image of exiled Jews mourning their homeland after they were cut off from their roots in ancient Palestine: ‘By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down, yea, we wept when Zion is remembered.’ Ironically both the Jews and Al-Nawwab’s people were subjected to the same diasporic and exilic experience in the same geographical territory, Iraq or ancient Babylon. Developing a revolutionary aesthetic to confront the imperialistic interests in the geopolitics of the Arab nation and exploring the multinationals’ designs on the Arab world, Al-Nawwab also exploits here once again Eliot’s poetic strategies – the persona, the dramatic monologue, repetition, and paratextual devices such as dedication. I escaped from the occupied paradise like a river of sadness escaping from the dirt of the sewage like a river I carry the dirt of my world the river does not change its course the river does not where is the woman who kindles my lamps?37

Addressing the entire Arab world in Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab wonders: how long will my homeland remain a petrol tanker carrying Arab sorrows and the flags of imperialistic countries? 34

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 465. “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems, 37. 36 T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 42. 37 Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 467. 35

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how long will the Arab people die of humiliation and shame?38

Here, Al-Nawwab also laments the squandering of Arab natural resources, particularly oil, which is systematically plundered by imperialistic countries with the help of puppet Arab rulers. In a poem entitled “Fi Al-Hana AlQadeema” (At the Old Tavern), the poet says: My lady how can a person be honest while being surrounded by the regime’s secret eyes the danger is coming our homeland is nothing but a petroleum store some of them (the rulers) are ready to sell the land and the sea and since one of them pretends to defend the cause of the Arab people, I will pee on him and become drunk then I will pee on him and become drunk.39

Al-Nawwab also refers to ‘the petrol kings’ or what he calls ‘the infected Arab kings’, whom he holds responsible for moral bankruptcy and defeatism of the Arab world. He condemns the economic policies advocated by the rulers of rich Arab nations who smuggle the wealth accumulated from ‘oil contracts’ to be invested in hostile countries that support the enemies of the Arab people. Portraying the Arab world as a beautiful lady, repeatedly raped by foreign merchants, the poet seeks to expose the impotence of contemporary Arab rulers who have failed to protect natural resources from capitalistic monopoly, instead squandering Arab wealth to fulfil the interest of their imperialistic allies, who provide them with weapons to protect their regimes and tyrannize their people. According to Al-Nawwab, contemporary Arab regimes, particularly the rich ones, have turned the Arab world into ‘a great brothel’ used for the entertainment of imperialistic countries. Using angry rhetoric and obscene language, Al-Nawwab reflects his anger

38 39

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 471. Al-Nawwab, “Fi Al-Hana Al-Qadeema,” in Al-Amal, 304–305.

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and frustration as he contemplates the absurd realities of contemporary Arab life: I walked throughout the Arab flesh market overwhelmed by the tears of sorrow O my homeland, you have been regularly fucked by the Persians, the Turks and the Roman boys even the dwellers of the Zionist ghettoes masturbating with the Old Testament complexes have become part of my homeland even the nasty smelling Ethiopian king is exhibiting his dirty erected penis in the face of the Arab world.40

In an interview, Al-Nawwab admits that he uses obscenity in his poetry to reveal “an obscene reality,”41 adding that he has failed to find obscene words sufficient to match the enormity of the shameful policies of the Arab rulers who have brought disaster and chaos to their peoples. In the poem “The Prince of Sailors,”42 as mentioned earlier, the Iraqi traitors and tyrants, as well as members of Abdul–Karim Qasim’s regime, are associated with a complex pattern of symbols and images that signify treason, betrayal, conspiracy, vice, and evil. Like The Waste Land, which is populated with sinful figures representing the moral corruption of the modern metropolis, Al-Nawwab’s “The Prince of Sailors” exhibits a variety of characters embodying the political corruption of contemporary Arab regimes; using abusive and offensive language, Al-Nawwab describes the members of Qasim’s tyrannical regime. He calls them ‘the party of shits,’ ‘the rat ministers,’ ‘the dirty and vicious dwarfs,’ ‘the Republican Harem,’ ‘the Republican priests,’ ‘sons of a bitch,’ ‘sons of lairs,’ and ‘the castrated mob.’ Qasim’s government is also associated with corrupt or tyrannical figures such as ‘Judas’ and ‘Abu Al-Abbas Al-Saffah,’43 thereby enabling

40

Al-Nawwab, Watariyyat, 43. Abdulla Al-Shaher, Mudhafar Al-Nawwab: Malameh wa Mumayyizat, 46. 42 Al-Nawwab, “Bahar Al-Bahareen,” in Al-Amal, 497. 43 Abu Al-Abbas, the founder of the Abbasid Dynasty in Baghdad, is described as a diabolical and bloodthirsty character who unaccountably slaughtered his political opponents. Given the nickname of ‘Al-Safah, ‘the serial killer’, Abu Al-Abbas is identified in Al-Nawwab’s poetry with contemporary Arab rulers. Further, the poet recalls historical figures such 41

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the poet to confirm the tribal nature of Arab governments which seek to uproot Arab aspirations to freedom and reform by dragging the entire region backward into the Middle Ages. Incorporating some of Eliot’s imagery in The Waste Land, Al-Nawwab describes the Arab world as a “cactus land,” a land of corruption and hypocrisy. In his discussion of Eliot’s masterpiece, Edmund Wilson argues: The waste land of the poem is a symbol borrowed from the myth of the Holy Grail: it is a desolate and sterile country ruled by an impotent king, in which not only have the crops ceased to grow and the animals to reproduce but the very human inhabitants have become incapable of having children.44

As stated above, in Watariyyat the Arab rulers and policy-makers, like Eliot’s male figures in The Waste Land, suffer from sexual impotence and spiritual bankruptcy. In Eliot’s poem, the sexual castration is customarily associated with an emasculating wound suffered by the poem’s archetypal male, the Fisher King, who appears in different masks. In Watariyyat, the impotence of Arab rulers is associated with the wounds resulting from recurrent Arab defeats and political failures. Like Eliot’s archetypal female in The Waste Land, who is a sterile prostitute appearing in different masks, the Arab world is depicted in “Fi AlHana Al-Qadeema” as a sterile harlot regularly fornicated by foreign invaders in the presence of all Arab rulers: My lady we are all whores like you being fucked by tyranny and false religion and false news everything could be forged in the Arab World even funerals and eulogies.45

Like The Waste Land, which is about the decadence of the West and the moral depravity of humanity, Watariyyat is an exploration of the wounds and pains of a nation dominated by tyrannical regimes and impotent rulers. as Wasif and Bagha, two Turks representing Ottoman imperialism who also contributed to the backwardness of the Arab world. 44 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931; New York: W.W. Norton, 1984): 105. 45 Al-Nawwab, “Fi Al-Hana Al-Qadeema,” in Al-Amal, 304.

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Al-Nawwab not only denounces contemporary Arab regimes but expands his critique to expose the lack of manhood and prowess in their armies. In “Qul Heya Al-Bunduqiyya” (Say: It is the Rifle), Al-Nawwab sarcastically points out: they were running without legs the balls of the soldiers were dangling out of fear all the wounds were in their balls where did you learn how to castrate your armies?46

In Watariyyat, the hypocritical Arab rulers and their ‘castrated armies’ constitute part of the repressive apparatus which undermines any attempt at social and political reform in the Arab wasteland. Nevertheless, in Eliot’s The Waste Land a questing knight goes on a purgatorial journey of suffering and pain for the sake of redeeming the land, which, according to the myth, becomes barren as a result of the Fisher King’s sin: I sat upon the shore fishing with the arid plain behind me shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down.47

Consequently, The Waste Land ends with Shantih repeated three times, signifying the speaker’s completion of his spiritual journey.48 The speaker’s journey in Eliot’s poem is no longer the symbol of sadness and source of suffering but an emblem of powerful religious urges that drive him toward another existence. But in Al-Nawwab’s wasteland, there is no possibility of salvation so long as tyrannical Arab rulers and their oppressive regimes, protected by imperialistic countries, determine the fate of the Arab people.’ As mentioned earlier on, wearing the mask of Tiresias, Eliot’s blind seer, Al-Nawwab embarks on a mythical and imaginative journey through Arab history, recalling memories of Arab–Arab wars and internal conflicts. During his journey in the Arab wasteland, Al-Nawwab uses Eliot’s discourse in “What the Thunder Said,” the Fifth Section of The Waste Land, as an intertext to describe a nation that has lost hope in any potential reform. In The 46

Al-Nawwab, “Qul Heya Al-Bunduqiyya,” in Al-Amal, 353. T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 50. 48 The word ‘Shantih’ is a blessing from the Upanishads, the Hindu books of ancient wisdom, and means ‘peace, the peace that passes human understanding’. 47

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Waste Land, the poet has a vision of spring and hears an imaginary dripping of water – but there is no water, only dryness and thirst: there is no water but only rock rock and no water and the sandy road the road winding above among the mountains which are mountains of rock without water if there were water we should stop and drink amongst the rock one cannot stop or think sweat is dry and feet are in the sand if there were only water amongst the rock.49

While water which stirs “dull roots with spring rain” (37) is desired as a source of relief and fertility, the wasteland dwellers avoid water, shunning the source of life: “With a shower of rain, we stopped in the colonnade” (37). Like Eliot’s wasteland dwellers, the Arab people in Watariyyat are not yet ready for salvation because their nation is cursed with tyrannical regimes and fisher kings who have profaned the Arab land. While the journey of the speaker in Eliot’s poem ends in salvation (indications of the inevitability of rainfall in the fifth section of the poem), the Arab poet’s journey ends in the Empty Quarter, the most arid part in the Arabian desert: I was on the back of the she-camel astounded by the stars of the night you Bedouin who is interested in wandering in the Arabian desert take with you some drops of water as you continue your endless journey toward the Empty Quarter.50

The allusions to the desert and the camel in the above-cited lines are not manifestations of the poet’s pride in his traditions and Arab identity, as readers might think, but references to the state of sterility and political stagnation that jeopardize the future of the Arab nation, dragging it back to the camel era. It is thus no surprise that Al-Nawwab’s Watariyyat is basically concerned with the issue of revolution against the destructive forces that have historically attempted to keep the Arab world as a backward region. Imitating the poetic techniques of Eliot in The Waste Land and Dante in the Inferno, Al-Nawwab establishes one-sided dialogues with particular 49 50

T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 47. Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 475.

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figures and personae he identifies among the revolutionary crowds. In The Waste Land, Eliot initiates a conversation with a certain Stetson after identifying him among the crowd on London Bridge: there I saw one I knew and stopped him crying: Stetson! you who were with me in the ships at Mylae! that corpse you planted last year in your garden has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?51

Stetson, the hat manufacturer who was “with me in the ships at Mylae,” is glimpsed among the soldiers on their way to die in the First World War. Al-Nawwab’s masses in Watariyyat primarily consist of Islamic and Marxist revolutionaries who are engaged in war with the allies of imperialism in the Arab world. Overcome by anger at the current situation in the region, Al-Nawwab, in “Al-Asateel” (The Warships), urges the revolutionary masses to confront the forces of hegemony and corruption in the Arab world: be an angry nation eliminate all the ruling whores all corrupt rulers must be crushed under your feet.52

Al-Nawwab calls for revolution against a reactionary political system and endeavours to inspire the Arab masses to change the status quo and save their own nation. He involves his readers in a revolutionary quest and a state of mind expressed through anger and verbal violence. In Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab presents the consciousness of one who yearns for dramatic changes in a world fragmented by tribal hostilities and internal political conflict. Adapting Eliot’s modernist techniques of juxtaposition, Al-Nawwab evokes the painful historical consequences of the conflict between Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and his son-in-law, and Muawiyya, an influential early Islamic figure who descends from the tribal family of Abu Sofyan.53 51

T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 39. Al-Nawwab, “Al-Asateel,” in Al-Amal, 31. 53 Muawiyya was an influential figure descended from a well-known tribe in Makka. During the reign of Uthman, the third Muslim Caliph, Muawiyya was appointed governor of Damascus. When Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, was selected as the fourth Caliph, Muawiyya set out to topple the Caliphate and remove Ali from power. After the assassination of Ali, Muawiyya became Caliph and, in 632, succeeded in founding the Umayyad Dynasty 52

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The deep-rooted hostility between Ali and Muawiyya triggered a series of disastrous events leading to the massacre of Karbala, which split the Muslim nation into Shiites and Sunnis. In the battle of Karbala, the Muslim mythic hero, Al-Hussein, the son of Ali and the grandson of the Prophet, was brutally assassinated at the hands of the army of Yazid, Muawiyya’s son and successive Caliph, who was forced on the Muslim people at the time.54 Thus, Karbala is aesthetically articulated as a metaphor for contemporary Arab–Arab antagonisms. Adapting Eliot’s theory of tradition to an Islamic context, Al-Nawwab resurrects Muawiyya and his son, Yazid, as historical figures representing the powers of evil operating in the Arab world. As symbols of political corruption, Muawiyya and Yazid are associated with contemporary Arab rulers who have brought damage and chaos to the Arab world due to personal hostilities and narrow political ambitions. In Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab compares Muawiyya and his heir, Yazid, with the rulers of rich Arab countries who have thwarted all attempts to turn the Arabs into a free and civilized nation. Associating Muawiyya and Yazid with corrupt modern-day Arab rulers, Al-Nawwab strips the early Islamic rulers of the veneer of sanctity attributed to them by Arab historians. Ali is depicted by Al-Nawwab as the spiritual leader of all Arab revolutions against hegemony and oppression. In Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab addresses Ali, reflecting his own ideological commitments: “If you come back today / you will be accused of being a Marxist.”55 In a tone of regret, Al-Nawwab addresses Ali: in Damascus, thirty years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. His insistence on appointing his corrupt son Yazid as his heir resulted into a conflict between Yazid and AlHussein, the son of Ali, culminating in the battle of Karbala, which took place in the year 680, forty-eight years after the death of the Prophet. 54 When Yazid, the son of Muawiyya, became the Caliph of the Muslim people, prominent figures from Makka rose up against Yazid, along with the people of Iraq, who sent to Al-Hussein, inviting him to come from Makka to establish a separatist Islamic state in their country. When Al-Hussein and his company of thirty men arrived at Karbala, the Iraqis betrayed them and they had to fight the army of Yazid, more than 30,000 soldiers, led by Abullah Ibn Zeyyad, the governor of Iraq. Despite being besieged and prevented access to food and water, AlHussein refused to acknowledge Yazid as the Caliph of the Muslim people. Determined not to surrender, Al-Hussein bravely fought to the end. The dead bodies of Al-Hussein, his family, and his followers were mutilated, and Al-Hussein‘s head was cut off, fixed on a spear, and carried to be exhibited in Yazid’s palace in Damascus. 55 Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 453. The preceding lines also allude to the political persecution of Marxist activists, ethnic minorities, and all voices of opposition by the tyrannical regimes that dominated the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s, as will be discussed later.

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O king of rebels I have deeply wept because revolution was raped and the hopes of my heart were buried alive.56

Engaging tradition, in an Eliotesque manner, Al-Nawwab also recalls the painful antagonism between Al-Hussein, the son of Ali, and Yazid, the vicious son of Muawiyya, in order to penetrate to the core of the contemporary political scene in the Arab world. Al-Nawwab incorporates Western myths and symbols and establishes a dialogue with Eliot’s Christian traditions. Echoing other Arab poets, Al-Nawwab links Al-Hussein with Christ, deploying narratives of sacrifice and martyrdom to serve his political vision of the current situation in the Arab world. While denouncing contemporary Arab rulers57 who have betrayed the Palestinian cause, Al-Nawwab in Watariyyat honours those who have advocated armed struggle against stagnant Arab regimes. Revealing the atrocities committed against the Arab revolutionaries by dictatorial Arab rulers, the poet identifies the pain of an Iraqi Marxist in the prisons of the regime with the suffering of Christ on the cross. In his crucifixion, the Iraqi revolutionary is also associated with the martyrdom of Al-Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. By using the Bible as intertext and blending the crucifixion of Christ with the ritual murder of Al-Hussein at the battle of Karbala, Al-Nawwab aims to integrate Western/Christian traditions into the fabric of his revolutionary poetry. In modernist Arabic poetry, and due to Eliot’s influence, Al-Hussein, the grandson of prophet Muhammad and the martyr of Karbala, is constantly used as a Christ figure sacrificing his life for the sake of the Muslim people. As a result of Eliot’s impact on Arabic poetry after the Second World War, the Christian traditions of sacrifice and martyrdom prevalent in The Waste Land, Murder in the Cathedral, and other works is appropriated by Arab poets linking Al-Hussein with Western sacrificial symbols to serve local purposes. The figure of Christ is extensively used by Muslim poets not only in connection with the historical character of Al-Hussein. For example, in Al-Sayyab’s political poetry, Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s is depicted as a 56

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 458. Another example: in Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab uses the gross terms “the whores and seals of coffee shops” and “the stinky frogs” of the Arab world to describe contemporary Arab rulers. 57

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wasteland and Christ emerges as an Iraqi revolutionary whose streaming blood will bring fertility to the earth and whose sacrifices will pave the way for the redemption of the country. Further, in Shakir Al-Sayyab’s poetry, Christ and the Prophet Muhammad appear as as sacrificial figures, symbols of innocence and justice brutalized by Arab tyrants. It is also noteworthy hat Marxist Iraqi poets such as Abdul–Wahhab Al-Bayati, in the postWorld War II era, used Christ as a symbol of the Iraqi Marxists tortured to death in the prisons of the regime. The Palestinian poets also identified the event of crucifixion and its implications with the plight of the Palestinians, portraying Christ as a Palestinian refugee. However, the crucifixion of Christ is mostly linked to the brutal assassination of Al-Hussein. As in Western cultures, where Christ’s crucifixion is considered a turning-point in human history, the incident of Al-Hussein’s martyrdom is associated with a complex pattern of rituals and myths, particularly in the Shiite Muslim traditions.58 In the aftermath of the Palestinian tragedy in 1948, Arab poets such as Al-Sayyab, Ali Ahmed Said and others used Al-Hussein, in an Eliotesque manner, as a symbol of resurrection. In the poetry of Said, Al-Hussein, like Christ and Eliot’s vegetation gods, is a sacrificial figure. In other contexts, Al-Hussein is associated with the pagan gods of the East such as Tammuz and Baal, rediscovered by the Arab poets under Eliot’s influence. Thanks to this penetrating influence on Arabic poetry, Al-Hussein is thus transformed into a sacrificial figure, a fertility god whose tragic death will bring salvation to the barren land of the Arab world. Further, the Arab poets in the post-World War II era were searching for a national hero, a saviour able to rescue the Arab nation from humiliation and defeat. They used Al-Hussein as a legendary figure whose sacrificial death will inevitably bring about redemption restoring order to the Arab wasteland. Unlike Arab poets such as Al-Sayyab abd Ali Ahmed Said who used Al-Hussein as a sacrificial symbol, Al-Nawwab depicts him as a revolutionary protesting against tyranny and oppression, an eternal symbol of Arab–Arab wars and histo-

58

According to historical narratives, the sky of Iraq became red and rained blood immediately after the assassination of Al-Hussein. The land of Karbala, the battlefield that witnessed the heinous event, turned into rivers of blood, according to the myth. When the severed head of Al-Hussein was taken to his arch-enemy, Yazid, in the Umayyad palace of Damascus, it was said that the whole universe lamented the horrible crime and the angels wept the whole night through.

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rical hostilities: “The head of Al-Hussein is still / hanged on Arab spears.”59 Al-Nawwab thus views Al-Hussein as a Christ-figure brutally killed by Muslim spears and a symbol of Arab revolution and heroism. Engaging the catastrophic developments of the Palestinian tragedy, Al-Nawwab in fact developed a revolutionary poetic to express his agony over the ‘crucifixion’ of Palestine. Employing the antagonism between the families of Ali and Muawiyya as an objective correlative of Arab–Arab conflict, Al-Nawwab aims to dramatize the failure of contemporary Arab policy-makers to bridge the gap of intra-Arab intransigence. In denouncing the fragmentation and disintegration of contemporary Arab history, Al-Nawwab uses Eliot’s technique of juxtaposition to draw an analogy between present tensions and the preIslamic war between Al-Aws and Al-Khazraj, the two major tribes in Medina before the Prophet Muhammad’s migration to the region, when Muhammad succeeded in reconciling conflicting Arab tribes, but no Arab ruler in the present is able or willing to settle Arab–Arab hostilities, according to Al-Nawwab, simply because they are all pawns of imperialistic forces and, in the absence of effective political will and insight, paved the way for the Palestinian tragedy and the ‘rape’ of Jerusalem. Addressing contemporary Arab rulers, Al-Nawwab in Watariyyat says: “Jerusalem is the bride of your Arab nationalism / why did you allow all the gonorrhoeainfected invaders to enter her bedchamber?”60 Depicting Jerusalem as an Arab lady being raped by invaders in the presence of Arab rulers, Al-Nawwab argues that modern Arab rulers “have set new records in the history of treason and betrayal.” Underlining the themes of treason, betrayal, and conspiracy in contemporary Arab politicy concerning the Palestinian tragedy, the poet uses the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers to describe the massacres of the Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut in 1982. In “Qasida an Beirut” (A Poem on Beirut), he says : O Jacob the wolf is not responsible for the death of your son O Jacob the wolf does not kill Joseph but it is treason.61 59 60 61

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 456. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 483. Al-Nawwab, “Qasida an Beirut,” in Al-Amal, 343.

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Depicting the Arab world as ‘an inhuman operation theatre’ which castrates its people into insignificance, Al-Nawwab seeks salvation through the sacrifices of legendary figures such as Al-Hussein. Al-Nawwab also describes the Arab world as a ‘slaughter land’ and ‘a store for the coffins and shrouds of the dead.’ Alluding to Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which includes lines such as “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men,” “But hollow men like horses hot at hand / like deceitful jades / sink in the trail,”62 signifying pessimism and chaos, Al-Nawwab addresses his homeland: I will make you hear the sadness of my weeping soul I am hollow I am hollow the Arab night has no end like the life of the dead.63

Engaging Eliot’s concept of tradition in his treatment of the situation in the Arab world after World War II, Al-Nawwab penetrates into the core of Arab history, revising basic Islamic narratives and linking them to the Arab political scene. In this connection, the poet also uses the Karbala massacre as a central symbol in his treatment of the Black September clashes between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian militias in the early 1970s. Alluding to Karbala and to the contemporary political hostility between the P L O leaders and the Jordanian authorities, Al-Nawwab says : God’s book, the Qur’an is still hanged on the Arab spears under God’s name Muawiyya, the man with the grey beard is still involved in tribal conspiracies.64

Attributing internal Arab conflicts to tribal differences, Al-Nawwab denounces the Black September confrontations between the Palestinian forces and the Jordanian army in Amman which resulted into the death of a number of Palestinian refugees and the deportation of the P L O militias from Jordan to another exile. Tracing contemporary conflicts between the Palestinians and the Jordanians to the tribal Arab mentality, Al-Nawwab, in 62

George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

1962), 155. 63 64

Al-Nawwab, “Jozor Al-Melh” (Island of Salt), in Al-Amal, 357. Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 453.

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Watariyyat, laments what he calls ‘the historical Arab sadness’ demonstrating the catastrophic implications of internal Arab hostilities on the psyche of future Arab generations. The atrocities committed against Arabs by fellow Arabs between the Karbala massacre and Black September in the early 1970s represent a major feature of Arab–Arab relationships, which have been governed by tribal laws and personal interests. Using the historical figure of Muawiyya as a symbol of dictatorship and political corruption, Al-Nawwab associates him with contemporary Arab rulers who have brutalized their people in the Arab world from the Arabian Gulf to the Pacific Ocean. Muawiyya, identified with the parasitic middle class that seeks personal interests, is also used in Watariyyat as an embodiment of the perverted bourgeois mentality and political opportunism of Arab rulers who manipulate religion to achieve Machiavellian political ends. Like Muawiyya, who dismissed Ali as ‘the leader of the vagabonds’, contemporary Arab rulers have quashed all revolutionary opposition aimed at political reform and a change in the status quo. Alluding to the assassination of Ali, which paved the way for the Umayyad Dynasty, Al-Nawwab associates the Umayyad tyrants with contemporary Arab regimes, expressing his doubts and fears about the future of the Arab world. In Watariyyat, he addresses all Arab rulers: “Are you really Arabs? / I swear by all gods and deities that all the Arab rulers / from Baghdad to Jiddah are not Arabs / All the Arab rulers are selfish opportunists like Muawiyya.”65 He addresses them angrily for their hypocrisy and submissive policies: I am shouting at you I am spitting in your faces I challenge you to say the truth I know you won’t because there is no Arab blood in your veins I am sure you are not Arabs or human beings or even animals do you know the meaning of honour? where is your pride? where is your dignity?66

In the preceding lines Al-Nawwab once again denies the Arab identity of contemporary Arab rulers, who betray their own people with Western 65 66

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 457. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 483.

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weaponry for the sake of imperialist protectors of Arab dictatorships. For example, Al-Nawwab dismisses the Arab rulers who “opened the doors of Palestine” to the invaders as “cuckolds” and “cowards” who failed to confront a well-trained Zionist army. Recalling the scandalous defeat of Arab armies in the war with Israel, Al-Nawwab affirms that contemporary Arab rulers are puppets who “speak too much” and “dance like bears.”67 He points out that contemporary Arab rulers are only interested in signing submissive peace treaties that would lead to “the marriage of Jerusalem, the bride of the Arab world,” to “the Zionist invader.”68 Using Eliot’s The Waste Land rhetoric, Al-Nawwab, appeals to the Palestinians to refuse this illegitimate marriage: be sterile O land of Palestine be sterile O mother of martyrs this pregnancy is horrifying be sterile, and do not give birth to an ugly and deformed offspring our Palestinian land can only be fertilized by Arabic language.69

Eliot’s rhetoric of death, sterility, and Western moral paralysis in The Waste Land is applied to the Arab world and Palestine under occupation. Eliot’s references to “the dead land,” ‘the dull roots,” “the stony rubbish,” “the dead tree” and “the dry stone” which recur in the first part of The Waste Land and cast dark shadows on the poem inspire Al-Nawwab’s narrative about Palestine and the Arab world after the Second World War. In poems such as The Waste Land, “Prufrock,” and “Gerontion,” Eliot uses a poetic strategy whereby the poet’s feelings and attitudes are transferred by means of the dramatic voice of one of his narrators. In other words, the poet wears the mask of a specific character or persona in order to achieve objectivity and impersonality. Employing the same technique in Watariyyat, Al-Nawwab projects the persona of an Arab soldier on the front lines of the battlefield to reveal the suspicions of the Arab armies about the future of the Arab–Israeli conflict. The Arab soldier is convinced that the conflict with Israel will be settled neither through war nor through 67 68 69

Al-Nawwab, “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 485. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 485. “Watariyyat,” in Al-Amal, 485.

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submissive peace treaties, but only when the Palestinian refugees have a homeland of their own. The speaker blames Arab rulers who are engaged in peace treaties with Israel before the final settlement of the Middle East conflict. He underlines the damaging impact on the psyche of Arab soldiers of signing peace treaties with the invaders. In “Qeraa Fi Daftar Al-Matar” (Reading in the Notebook of the Rain), the poet says: I am a soldier in a defeated army our rulers shake hands with the enemy while we are still in the battlefield during fighting, our leaders are sleeping in the beds of the enemy Generals I am going to leave the battle and look for a brothel.70

Created by pro-Israeli American policy-makers, all the American peace initiatives, according to the poet, end up consolidating the imperialistic and expansionist policies of the invaders at the expense of the historical rights of the Palestinian people. Within the context of this study, it is relevant to argue that the conflict over power between Arab families and tribes in the early Islamic era is used, in an Eliotesque manner, as an objective correlative to explore the policies of tyranny, corruption, and opportunism that have characterized internal Arab relationships from the Umayyad Dynasty to the present time. In Al-Nawwab’s poetry, the voice of the poet is blended with, for instance, the voice of Abu Dhar, and together they become a revolutionary scream of anger in the face of all forms of oppression and injustice practised by contemporary Arab regimes against their own peoples. The scream in Al-Nawwab’s poetry is emblematic of the suppression of positive impulses, which turn into rage, violence, and terror in a world dominated by dictatorial and tribal regimes. Al-Nawwab’s scream of poetic rebellion is also a reflection of the anger of the oppressed and displaced that have been brutalized by the forces of tyranny in the Arab world.

Conclusion Confronting the deplorable situation in the Middle East during the postWorld War II era, characterized by the emergence of Arab regimes that 70

Al-Nawwab, “Qeraa Fi Daftar Al-Matar,” in Al-Amal, 308.

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have inherited the colonial legacy, Al-Nawwab uses Eliot’s narrative about a declining civilization to explore the historical and cultural roots of Arab corruption and backwardness. In other words, The poet adapts Eliot’s paradigms and theories, integrated in Christian and Western traditions, to link the past and the present, emphasizing the destructive ramifications of hegemonic Arab politics and culture ever since the early Islamic age. Linking the past and the present and navigating within myths and symbols, AlNawwab aims to reconstruct a fossilized tradition and rebuild a world fragmented by internal disputes and threatened by external interferences. In his poetry, particularly in Watariyyat Layliyya, Al-Nawwab integrates his poetic vision into Islamic traditions engaging in intertextual dialogue with Eliot’s The Waste Land as well as with sources in ancient Arab culture and history. Al-Nawwab’s intertextual engagement with Eliot enables him to make use of the master’s modernist theories and techniques by incorporating his allusions, juxtapositions, masks, and objective correlatives, likewise transforming language and myth and yoking feeling and thought in the manner of metaphysical poetry. Exploring a world traumatized by defeat and heading into profound political corruption, Al-Nawwab adapts Eliot’s poetic techniques to reveal the absurd realities of the Arab nation in the post-World War II era. Incorporating modernist devices derived from Eliot such as juxtaposition, repetition, allusion, dramatic/interior monologue, and the objective correlative, Al-Nawwab reveals an awareness of the poetic possibilities, themes, and moods available in Western culture. Consequently, the deep interest in the poetic heritage of the West reinforces the language of modernist Arabic poetry and allows the revolutionary Arab poet to make a new contribution to tradition. Furthermore, Al-Nawwab’s interest in Eliot’s tradition is reflected in his poetry throughout the echoes, scraps of poetic utterance, and familiar-sounding phrases that enrich the resonance of his poetry, providing it with more insight and depth. Fusing his revolutionary ideology with Eliot’s modernist techniques, Al-Nawwab created an Arab odyssey that includes memorable lines sounding in the ears of a nation seeking salvation and deliverance from oppression and tyranny. Intricately crafted to dramatize emotions that make its political objectives convincing and appealing to readers who long for freedom, Al-Nawwab’s poetry reveals an immense ability to bring together complex and fragmented poetic elements and subordinate them to a greater purpose: the poet’s revolutionary vision. Despite using modernist devices, disconnected scenes, and bizarre images adapted

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from Eliot, Al-Nawwab remains committed to what Adel Al-Usta in his study of the poet calls “Social Realism”71 and to a functional literature reflective of the pain and yearnings of the inhabitants of the Arab wasteland. Under the impact of Eliot, Watariyyat becomes a manifestation of AlNawwab’s shift from the rhetorical tradition of Arabic poetry to the soliloquy and dramatic monologue characteristic of Western modernism. AlNawwab’s experimentation with Western techniques and forms provides more insight into Watariyyat, liberating the poet from the exhausted traditions of the classical Arabic poem. In order to render the crippling impact of the Palestinian tragedy on the psyche of the Arab people, Al-Nawwab used political rhetoric that intertextualizes his revolutionary poetry with Eliot’s modernist discourse in The Waste Land. While engaging with the Arabic cultural heritage, Al-Nawwab’s poetry seeks emancipation from hegemonic discourses and conventional poetic traditions, the castrated poetry of clichés serving authoritarian culture. Like Eliot’s poetry, which is integrated into cyclical regeneration and rebirth, Al-Nawwab’s Watariyyat aims at providing the impetus for the birth of a new generation of Arab revolutionaries able to confront the tyranny of Arab rulers and the corruption of their governments.

WORKS CITED Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1975). DeYoung, Terri. “T.S. Eliot and Modern Arabic Literature,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 48 (2000): 3–21. Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980). ——. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960). Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977). Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell & Obolinsky, 1959). Moreh, Shmuel. Modern Arabic Poetry 1800–1970 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976). Al-Nawwab, Mudhafar. Al-Amal Al-Shiriyya Al-Kamela / The Complete Poetic Works (London: Dar Qonbor, 1996). ——. Watariyyat Layliyya (London: Dar Sahari, 1985).

71 Adel Al-Usta, Mudhafar Al-Nawwab: Al-Sawt wa Al-Sada (Mudhafar Al-Nawwab: The sound and the echo) (Cairo: Madbouli, 2002): 28; citation tr. into English by the present author.

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Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot (1918; New York: New Directions, 1968). Al-Shaher, Abdullah. Mudhafar Al-Nawwab: Malameh wa Mumayyizat (The distinguishing features of Al-Nawwab’s poetry) (Damascus: Al-Awael Lil-nashr, 1997). Al-Usta, Adel. Mudhafar Al-Nawwab: Al-Sawt wa Al-Sada (Mudhafar Al-Nawwab: The sound and the echo) (Cairo: Madbouli, 2002). Williamson, George. A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1962). Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931; New York: W.W. Norton, 1984).

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War and Ideology — Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and the Vietnamese Novel Without a Name by Duong Thu Huong

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who, at first sight, have nothing in common. Yet, originating from different generations and very different cultures, they do share the same harrowing experience of war. The male German writer Erich Maria Remarque, born in 1889, lived to see two world wars before he died in 1970.1 The female writer Duong Thu Huong was born in 1947 in Northern Vietnam, became actively involved in the second Vietnam War, and now lives in Hanoi.2 Both authors form a bridge between German and Vietnamese culture, Occident and Orient. In an interview, Duong Thu Huong revealed that German poets and writers in general, and Remarque in particular, inspired her work deeply. She has read whatever Vietnamese translations she was able to obtain of Remarque’s books.3 The present essay aims to demon-

1

HIS ESSAY DISCUSSES TWO AUTHORS

Born as Erich Paul Remark, the author changed his name to Erich Maria Remarque in

1923. 2

Duong Thu Huong went to Hanoi in 1977 where she worked in the feature film production for ten years, among others for the Vietnamese Feature Film Association and the Department of Feature Film at the Hanoi T V station (Ursula Lies, “Ich bin gezwungenermaßen Schriftstellerin: Ein Gespräch mit Duong Thu Huong,” Südostasieninformation 9.4 (December 1993): 44. 3 Interview with the author of this essay, Hanoi, 19 March 1993, translation from the Vietnamese also by the author. The interview has appeared in part in Lies, “Ich bin gezwungenermaßen Schriftstellerin,” 44.

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strate how a Vietnamese writer appropriated the work of a Western writer to convey a message to her own people, in opposition to the government.

I Erich Maria Remarque and Duong Thu Huong both grew up in a pettybourgeois environment. Duong Thu Huong’s father was a soldier in the first Vietnam War. After the war, he worked as a civil servant; her mother was a teacher. Remarque’s father worked as a bookbinder. Remarque wrote about his childhood: My parents were Catholics, as a chorister I often sang in the church. I did not meet with any understanding for my dreams about a world outside of this circle [. . . ], neither at home nor in church. One could not imagine a future other than as a postmaster perhaps, a teacher, or a pharmacist.4

It is striking that both writers volunteered as soldiers, and both would never be able to put that experience behind them – as is impressively documented by their works. Remarque, then still Remark, reported to the Imperial Army (Kaiserliches Heer) in 1916. Only a year later he was wounded on the Western front and was sent home. In 1929, he recapitulates in a brief remark: “I went into the field when I was eighteen, I was only a plain soldier at the Western front and wounded several times, once so severely that I am still suffering from the injuries.”5 Duong Thu Huong joined the army in 1968. During the second Vietnam War she was an organizer for cultural events and an agitator and propagandist, and, as such, she spent about seven years at the front. In an interview conducted almost twenty years later, she says: “You asked me to comment on the last Vietnam War. Time goes by, but the wounds which that war inflicted on me are far from diminishing, they only hurt more.”6 4

This and all following translations from German or Vietnamese are by the present author unless marked otherwise. Quoted according to Alfred Antkowiak, Schriftsteller der Gegenwart: Erich Maria Remarque, ed. Kollektiv für Literaturgeschichte im Volkseigenen Verlag Volk und Wissen, dir. Kurt Böttcher (Berlin: Volk & Wissen, 1977): 7. 5 Quoted according to Alfred Antkowiak, “Erich Maria Remarque,” in Lexikon Deutschsprachiger Schriftsteller, vol. 2, ed. Autorenkollektiv, dir. Kurt Böttcher (Leipzig: V E B Bibliographisches Institut, 1975): 7. 6 Interview with Duong Thu Huong for the San Francisco Examiner (typescript M S , five pages), interview & tr. from the Vietnamese Phan Huy Duong & Nina McPherson (Hanoi: 23 March 1993): 2.

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As to their literary careers, it can be noted that both writers had their first success as writers in their early thirties – and that they were both subjected to censorship. In 1928, Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was published as a pre-print in a German newspaper.7 The book edition followed in 1929 – a best-seller that made Remarque world-famous.8 It has been translated into thirty-two languages and has also been adapted to film. In 1933, the German government banned Remarque’s books, among them All Quiet on the Western Front, which had caused a sensation and scandal alike. In the foreword to the novel, the author wrote: “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession.”9 The eponymous film version, directed by the American Lewis Milestone in 1930, was shown for the first time to a German audience in Berlin in December, the fourth of the same year. Six thousand fascists, among them the minister of propaganda, Goebbels, started an inflammatory campaign against the film, which was consequently banned a few days after starting. Only by cutting important scenes did the film manage to return to German cinemas in 1931. In 1938, Erich Maria Remarque was stripped of his citizenship. After the war, he maintained that he was not a political person. I do not want to convince my readers nor persuade or educate them. I am describing what touches me and, considering myself an average person, I know that others will be moved by what has moved me.10

When Duong Thu Huong was in her thirties, she won her first literary award with a collection of short stories.11 In 1992, she received the 7 Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (preprint Vossische Zeitung: November – December 1928), copyright Ullstein. 8 Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen / Ullstein, 1929). The English translation All Quiet on the Western Front, copyright 1929, first appeared in 1930 with Little, Brown. See also Hans Joachim Bernhard, “Nachwort,” in Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau, 1989): 182–205. Remarque was to produce many more novels, among them Arc de Triomphe (1946) – the story of a German emigrant in Paris in the years 1938 and 1939 – and Der schwarze Obelisk (The black obelisk, 1956), a novel about the onset of the Weimar economic crisis and the rise of fascism in Germany in 1923. 9 Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, tr. A.W. Wheen (New York: Ballantine, 1982). 10 Quoted from Reiner Poppe, Erich Maria Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues (Hollfeld: Joachim Beyer, 2nd ed. 2000): 50. See also Heinz Liepman, “Remarque und die Deutschen: Ein Gespräch mit Erich Maria Remarque (1962),” in Ein militanter Pazifist, ed. Thomas F. Schneider (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994): 110–14. 11 The award was granted by the Vietnamese literary journal Van Nghe in 1980.

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U N E S C O ‘Writer for Democracy’ award and the French literary prize

‘Prix Femina Étranger.’12 Some of her novels, among them Chuyen tinh ke truoc luc rang dong (Love story told before dawn, 1983), Nhung thien duong mu (Paradise of the blind, 1988), and, in particular, Tieu thuyet vo de (Novel without a name, 1990) won fame abroad.13 From the very beginning of her writing career, Duong Thu Huong maintained in 1993, all she ever aspired to was to tell simple stories about common people in communist Vietnam. “Writing is the way I liberate myself, the way I make myself a free woman.”14 She had expected that being a member of the Communist Party would facilitate her endeavours to participate in the rebuilding of her country. However, the more she wrote the more party members and functionaries reproached her for her writing. Her novel Paradise of the Blind came out in 1988 but was banned shortly thereafter and removed from the bookstores.15 She immediately became a suspect person, for her book openly criticized the Vietnam land reform conducted during the 1950s and the leading party members involved in it. From this time on, she was to encounter manifold and serious problems with the Communist Party and her colleagues in the Vietnamese Writers Union.16 Years later, her novel was still treated with suspicion: In Vietnam, my novel was the first work of fiction to tell the truth about the Land Reform Campaign. Although I was only nine years old at the time of the campaign (1953–1956), I remember seeing the decapitated bodies of the socalled “landlords” lying by the side of the road, left to rot there – It was a memory that would haunt me for many years. Later, as an adult, it was this disaster that helped me understand that the end – the ideal society we had been promised – could never be achieved by such barbaric means.17 12

See also Ursula Nguyen, “Duong Thu Huong: Eine literaturtheoretische Untersuchung” (M A thesis, Humboldt University, Berlin, 1994): 3–4. 13 Duong Thu Huong, Tieu thuyet vo de (Novel without a name) (Stanton C A : Van Nghe, 1991). The novel has been translated into several Western languages The German translation appeared under the title Roman ohne Titel, tr. Ursula Lies (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1995); the English translation is entitled Novel Without a Name, tr. Phan Huy Duong & Nina McPherson (New York: Penguin, 1996). 14 Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 4. 15 Duong Thu Huong, Nhung thien duong mu (Houston T X : Da Nguyen, 1990). This novel, too, has been translated into English and German: Paradise of the Blind, tr. Phan Huy Duong & Nina McPherson (New York: Penguin, 1993); Bitterer Reis, tr. from the French by S. Lohmann (Munich: Goldmann, 1993). 16 Interview with the author of this essay, 19 March 1993. 17 Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 1.

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However, the final break-up with state and party was brought about by the manuscript of her novel Tieu thuyet vo de (Novel without a name). She comments: “When I sent the manuscript […] to publishers in Hanoi, it was rejected. Then I decided to defy the law and send the manuscript to France.”18 As a consequence, Duong Thu Huong was expelled from the Communist Party and the Vietnamese Writers Union. She was formally accused of having passed internal political papers to foreign journalists with the intention of harming the people of Vietnam. In 1991, she was taken into custody for spreading antisocialist propaganda.19 Only under pressure from writers world-wide and eventually from the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas was she released, after seven months in prison.20 Novel Without a Name was finally published abroad, but remains banned in Vietnam. From the late 1980s onwards, Duong Thu Huong has been a highly critical writer who deploys her literary skills to denounce the political system in Vietnam. She also points out mistakes made by its politicians, blaming both the system and its representatives for the relatively undeveloped political and economic condition of her country.21 W⏐X Remarque chose to write on political themes, but never meant to be political. Accordingly, he never made any political statements. Rather unpopular in his own country, he became more widely accepted abroad, particu-

18

Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 4. Astrid Joosten, “Herbstparfüm bleibt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung 138 (18–19 June 1994): 38. 20 See also Heinz Kotte, Petition an die Regierung der SR Vietnam (Bochum: Südostasien – Informationsstelle, 11 September 1991). 21 During the past hundred years alone, Vietnam has undergone a very intricate historical development. Much more could be said about this complex aspect of Vietnamese history but limitations of space permit only a few brief remarks here. Until 1945, French colonialism put its stamp on both social development and cultural life. Despite colonial rule, the Vietnamese people unceasingly attempted to preserve their national culture, including their literature, whereas the French were merely interested in implementing their own mission civilatrice. See esp. D.G.E. Hall, “French Administration and Nationalism in Indo-China,” in A History of South–East Asia (London: Macmillan, 1964): 716–17. Two wars (1946–54; 1964–75) followed independence in 1945. In 1975, Vietnam was united militarily, but the land was in turmoil, contaminated, and in a desolate economic state (due to the Western embargoes, there was no foreign exchange). In addition, both the military intervention of Vietnam in Cambodia and the Chinese attack on Vietnam put additional strain on the economy. 19

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larly in the U S A .22 Duong Thu Huong finds herself in a similar situation, with most of her books not accepted, or even banned, in her own country but well-received abroad. In contrast to Remarque, however, she endures this alienation and restriction because of her strong political commitment. There is no obvious reason why a politically active Vietnamese author such as Duong Thu Huong should come in contact with the books of a selfdeclared apolitical German author like Remarque. His popularity may have attracted her attention and probably his subject-matter, war, as well; perhaps she saw a kindred soul in this German author. There is, however, no express proof of her motives in adapting this particular novel. At any rate, despite the writers’ dissimilar historical backgrounds, it was war and its consequences that played the central role in the lives of both authors. War always entails suffering and death on both sides, no matter whether one is looking at World War I or the Second Vietnam War, or any other war, for that matter. This is the clear message that the woman writer Duong Thu Huong conveys in her novel, and that continues to make it so very different from other Vietnamese war novels. She may well have been inspired by Remarque’s novel All Quiet On the Western Front when capturing the perspective of the opposing parties in the Vietnam War.23 The question why Duong Thu Huong chose a Western genre in the first place, however, has not yet been satisfactorily answered. When asked about this in an interview, she seemed at a loss for an answer, but finally replied that it was a spontaneous and emotional decision. A more rational explanation for Duong Thu Huong’s choice could lie in the general development of modern Vietnamese literature. Upon entering the twentieth century, Vietnamese literature strove to rid itself of feudal norms and emancipate itself from Confucianism. The Western novel in general and the French in particular played an important role in this process of modernization.24 Through the modern novel, writers and readers alike experienced a hitherto unknown sense of freedom. The strict 22

Reiner Poppe, Erich Maria Remarque, 49–50. It is noteworthy, that the cover of the English edition, Novel Without a Name (1996), quotes from the San Francisco Chronicle as pointing to Remarque’s novel: “Reminiscent of All Quiet on the Western Front.” 24 In the early-twentieth century, a couple of Vietnamese publishers translated nineteenthcentury French novels into Vietnamese, bringing them out in serialized form in magazine format. Vietnamese intellectuals loved this modern prose and were as impressed with the modern use of their language as they were with the presentation of social themes. Ursula Lies, Literaturakademie der 28 Sterne (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1991): 125–30. 23

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rules concerning the rhythm and rhyme of the traditional verse novel and its typical ambiguity and symbolism no longer appealed to a modern readership. By contrast, the modern novel allowed for clear and straightforward language.25 In addition, the modern novel did not necessarily demand a happy ending, a must in the Vietnamese verse novel and again later in socialist-realist literature.26 With regard to dialogue and characterization in particular, the genre of the novel provided authors with new narrative strategies, among them the interior monologue, shifting narrative perspectives, and a more differentiated handling of time (renouncing strict chronological narrative). The Western genre of the novel thus offered Duong Thu Huong new and creative ways with which to express her ideas. Remarque, for his part, probably impressed her with his remarkably clear and simple language and uncluttered narrative structure. This might have been reason enough for her to choose the modern novel over the prevailing Vietnamese genres, with their avoidance of social or personal issues.

II The novel All Quiet on the Western Front is set during World War I and covers the period from spring 1917 to October 1918. It relates the story of a group of young German men, boys almost, who voluntarily join the army. They are sent to the Western front; after only a short while, the main character, Paul Bäumer, and his classmates are entirely disillusioned, having lost their faith in the ‘fatherland’, their ‘holy duty’, and the much-vaunted ideals of military heroism. They experience the hell of war, helplessly facing barbarous slaughter on the battlefield. During a brief period of leave from the front, Paul Bäumer has to listen to remarks by both his father and his former headmaster about his sudden lack of patriotism. They do not understand why Paul falls silent when asked about his experiences at the front. During the summer months of 1918, most of Paul’s comrades are seriously wounded or killed, leaving him in desperation. In October 1918, he, too, is killed in action. But the death of a soldier does not seem worth a mention; that very same day, the daily report declares: ‘All Quiet On the Western Front’. Duong Thu Huong’s novel starts off with a description of the main protagonist’s happy childhood in a Northern Vietnamese village, his time at 25 26

On the Vietnamese verse novel, see Lies, Literaturakademie der 28 Sterne: 104–13. Duong Thu Huong was the first to breach this tradition. See also fn 51 below.

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school among friends, and his first experiences with love. A year after the outbreak of the Second Vietnam War, Quan takes what is considered the most natural decision: he volunteers. But actually fighting as a soldier at the front forces him to see the real nature of war: hunger, pain, bloodshed, destruction, horrific death, and loss of innocent lives. Quan, now a commanding officer of the Vietnamese People’s Army, loses most of his comrades on the battlefield, including one of his best friends. His mother dies of a fever and his younger brother, too, becomes a ‘war casualty’. While on leave from the front, he blames his father for both these tragic losses and breaks off contact with him. In addition, his first love is pregnant by another man, who has abandoned her, so that she is living as an outcast away from the village. On his return to the front, all of his grief locked up inside, Quan overhears a conversation between two Vietnamese intellectuals. They are making fun of Marx, socialism, and the so-called little people of Vietnam, whom they call the losers of history. His personal pain, the loss of close friends and family, but also the sarcasm of the two unknown men, and, finally, the unofficial news that a party official has embezzled party donations to enrich himself – all this plunges him into despair. When his unit marches victoriously to Saigon, he is unable to celebrate. He feels disillusioned, aimless, and lost. The author and soldier Duong Thu Huong herself marched on Saigon. She recollects: I was among the first to enter the city of Saigon after April 30th, 1975. Yet, as everyone around me turned to congratulate each other, I somehow felt no joy, only vague, sinister premonitions. For me, this glory was an illusion; only happiness was real to me.27

War and ideology and their explicit and implicit interplay are the core issues of both novels – and the reason for the great attention they have attracted from opponents and supporters alike. Debate on All Quiet on the Western Front became polarized between the progressive intelligentsia and the representatives of fascist ideology. The defenders of Remarque and his novel “saw in the book the conscience of time speaking out against war. [...]. Instinctively, one could not but sense that the notion of peace was the sharpest weapon against fascism.”28 On the opposite side,

27 28

Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 3. Antkowiak, Schriftsteller der Gegenwart, 26.

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fascism and its ideological fellow travellers saw in the novel a danger for their aggressive and belligerent politics [. . . ] From a historical point of view, the campaign against the novel constitutes a rather vital element in paving the way for the fascist dictatorship in Germany.29

The Nazis publicly burned Remarque’s books on 11 May 1933. In her novel, Duong Thu Huong makes a point of allowing the issues of war and ideology to intertwine. In real life, however, she has never given in to the ideological demands of her government. Nor did she consent to having her country sacrifice itself in a war fought on ideological grounds and in the name of foreign powers. I wrote my second novel, ‘Novel without a Name’, as a farewell to the past. With my people at heart, I rummaged through the memory of the war, tried to hold it up to the light of day, expose its atrocities and hatreds for all to see. Whether we were conquerors or conquered, we are all children of the same country, all victims of the same cruel fate. I wrote this novel to express my outrage over the last war. I refuse to accept a war in which the two halves of Vietnam, one fed on Russian rice and Russian weapons, supported by a country in the thrall of a Marxist ideology, and the other, fed on American rice and armed with American weapons and the support of their allies, fought until their death. The land of our ancestors was made into a combat zone where man and women of the same blood of the same race were pitted against each other, transformed into enemies.30

Evidently, the Vietnam War had everything to do with ideology; Duong Thu Huong’s novel shows this, but takes the issue further by adopting a highly differentiated and political standpoint. With the East defending socialism and the West fighting for freedom and democracy, Duong Thu Huong takes a mediating position. Americans may someday understand that in the war they confronted both a political power – its apparatus, its ideology, and its lies – and a nation of peasants who had survived and defined their existence, their identity, through their devotion to a millennial tradition of struggle against foreign invasion. This people had no understanding of Western ideologies – of socialism, or communism. However, they did understand the meaning of human dignity and national independence. I was one of these people.31

29 30 31

Schriftsteller der Gegenwart, 25. Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 3. Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 2.

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An important aspect of the discourse on war and ideology is the ‘lost generation’, a presence echoing through both novels.32 Remarque’s main protagonist laments: I am young; I am 20 years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, [. . . ]. I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. […]. Through the years our business has been killing; – it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us? 33

It is not known whether Duong Thu Huong was familiar with the postWorld War I notion of the ‘lost generation’ as discussed in numerous Western novels of the 1920s. It is, in fact, doubtful, although her main character does show a number of features that qualify him as belonging to such a generation. It seems safe to assume that Duong Thu Huong found inspiration for her main character in All Quiet on the Western Front, but she kept her reflections on the ‘lost generation’ rather general, emphasizing mostly the material loss incurred and deprivation of hope and any sense of perspective. Naturally, Duong Thu Huong focuses on Vietnam and the nation’s very own problems, one of them the sensitive topic of the winners and losers in the war. Her novel suggests that, although Vietnam was the ostensible victor, the common people of Vietnam came out as the losers and that the real winner was a minority of officials and rulers. She writes: When they [the rulers and officials] need rice, the people are the buffalo that pulls the plow. When they need soldiers, they cover the people with armor, put guns in the people’s hands. When all is said and done, at the festivals, when it comes time for banquets, they put the people on an altar, and feed them incense and ashes. But the real food, that’s always for them [the officials].34

32

It was the American writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) who coined this expression to characterize young American intellectuals born around the turn of the century who, in her understanding, did not act but only re-acted, did not actively undergo any development but passively allowed things to happen to them. Disregarding the past and the future, only the present seemed to count for them, while reality was reduced to subjective feelings. In Italy, this generation was called the generazione bruciata (burnt generation). See Antkowiak, Schriftsteller der Gegenwart, 36–41. 33 Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 263–64. 34 Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name, tr. from Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong & Nina McPherson (Tieu thuyet vo de; New York: Penguin, 1996): 275. Further page references are in the main text.

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A similar message is conveyed elsewhere in the book when a political ruler (and a professor of Marxism) comments: “Well? Did you see that? A nation of imbeciles. They need a religion to guide them and a whip to educate them” (167). While Remarque centred his narrative exclusively on the issue of war and, in his effort to evade the subject of ideology, left it to the reader to speculate on his personal ideological standing, Duong Thu Huong’s novel clearly displays and questions the interplay of war and ideology. She not only criticizes Marxist and socialist ideology but acts in open disagreement with it. Her main protagonist may not have the psychological depth to be the spokesman for her personal views of the ruling ideology, but by applying the literary tool of an ironic dialogue between two nameless characters – one of them the above-mentioned professor, the other his stupid friend – she can confront her main protagonist with her ideas of Marxism after all (159–66). The dialogue turns on the difference between East and West, the former being represented by Vietnam. The professor explains to his feebleminded friend why not everyone can grasp the difference between civilization and leading a civilized life. Western countries have created civilization, but Vietnam is, with the help of Marxism, building a civilized life exclusively for a small group of people. Like I say, civilization is a long, hard road, and – on top of it all – at the end you have to share power. For people as primitive as ours, using a religion to guide them through some shortcuts to glory is a hundred times easier than trying to civilize them. (162)

Although the intelligentsia no longer believes in the idea of Marxism, which came to them from the West, some of them do know how to make it work to their personal advantage. To “enthrone a new divinity for the masses” (163) is the best way to manipulate masses into following an idea that in fact serves only for a small group to create a life-style endowed with all kinds of privileges.35 Thus, one of the central messages of the book is that the Vietnamese victory has brought glory to the common people, all right, but no improvement in their daily life: they still have to live under very modest, even impoverished conditions. At the same time, the elite lead an extremely good life.

35

Access to diplomatic passports, equivalent to the right of unrestricted travel, is just one of the many privileges of that group.

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As a logical result of their critical view on war, both novels under discussion also question the prevailing image of ‘the enemy’. In these narratives, the opposing parties do not necessarily identify negatively with each other; rather, it is war itself that is the actual and sole enemy. Various passages in All Quiet on the Western Front support this reading. Remarque’s Paul Bäumer, for example, feels pity for the Russian prisoners of war he is ordered to guard, and who look hungry, anxious, dirty, and ill. Bäumer is convinced that the Russians are being used and abused just like he is. He behaves in a friendly way towards them, shares cigarettes with them, and listens to their music and sad songs.36 A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. […] Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. (193–94)

Another passage describes vividly how Paul has to hide for almost two days in a bomb-crater – sharing his shelter with the corpse of a French soldier he has bayonetted to death. Disregarding the fact that the Frenchman is dead, Paul talks to him. Forgive me, comrade. […] Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just anxious as ours? […] Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother. […] I will write to your wife. (223–24)

In another part of the story, set in a military hospital, Paul is overcome by a sense of helplessness. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out. […] A hospital alone shows what war is. (263)

In Novel Without a Name, the redefinition of the enemy shines through various descriptions of incidents concerning prisoners of war. In one case, the main protagonist, Quan, ponders on the fact that his comrade Hung37 36

Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, tr. A.W. Wheen (Im Westen nichts Neues; Berlin: Propyläen / Ullstein, 1929; tr. New York: Ballantine, 1982): 192–94. Further page references are in the main text. 37 Hung in Vietnamese means ‘brutal’.

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shot three South Vietnamese prisoners of war – but he did not dare reprimand him, let alone stop him (223–25). Novel Without a Name is the first novel in the history of Vietnamese war literature to treat prisoners of war as a literary topic. And a delicate topic it was and still is, certainly when represented by a scene that depicts the shooting of prisoners of war by a soldier of the Vietnamese People’s Army for no other reason than that he found them moving too slowly during the retreat. Such textual elements impart authenticity to the novel. At the same time, it is understood that such incidents are not at all typical of army life, as other scenes indicate. For instance, Quan is personally made responsible for four prisoners: “The order was firm: Don’t lose them [the prisoners], don’t let them escape, fall sick, or die under any circumstances. Luong himself had signed the order in the name of the commander-in-chief” (238). In another scene, Quan interrogates a South Vietnamese prisoner of war, asking him why he joined the army to fight in this war. The prisoner’s reply echoes Quan’s own thoughts: “‘For an ideal?’ […] ‘To defend the beloved motherland? […] To fulfil the patriot’s duties?’” (243). He, too, had sworn to serve his country, shedding his last drop of blood if necessary (243). His answer not only confuses the prisoner himself but also Quan, who, in spite of being a soldier on the opposite side, would have given exactly the same answers. This scene makes it clear that neither of the two soldiers has ever perceived the enemy as a person of flesh and blood but that the fighting and killing have been veiled by ideology.38 Quan cannot understand how a Vietnamese can fight another Vietnamese: On both sides you screamed, you killed in mad, frenzied bursts, shrieking for joy when blood gushed, the brains shattered [. . . ]. On both sides you died believing that you had attained your ideal. We had forgotten everything: mother Au Co, father Lac Long Quan, the shared womb from which we had sprung. A more beautiful legend had never been told.39

In most the works of Vietnamese war literature, the tragedy of civil war is perceived as an inevitable fact. Never has the conflict been so pointedly described as the result of two opposing ideologies as in this part of Duong Thu Huong’s novel. But it takes the critical stance towards ‘the enemy’ 38

See Nguyen, Duong Thu Huong: Eine literaturtheoretische Untersuchung, 46–47. Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name, 247. ‘Au Co’ and ‘Lac Lac Long Quan’ translate as ‘goddess of the mountain’ and ‘god of the water’ (= dragon) respectively, and refer to the ancestry of the Vietnamese. 39

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even further. Finally, Quan is confronted with the ultimate enemy: an American soldier. But instead of blindly hating him as the enemy, Quan sees in him first and foremost a human being – and treats him accordingly. He concludes that the American soldier, too, is fighting for an ideal, doing his duty by serving his country. Quan decides to take him to a military court instead of shooting him on the spot, as some comrades would have preferred to do out of fear of unpleasant complications with this special prisoner of war (285–86). The understanding that Duong Thu Huong displays for American soldiers and the fact that she dares consider, and even respect, their motivation was (and remains) a novelty in Vietnamese literature. From the observations above, it should already be apparent that Duong Thu Huong has emulated the model she found in Remarque’s novel.40 Indissolubly linked to the central theme of war and ideology, both novels highlight the same issues: camaraderie, desertion, fear, hunger, death, destructiveness, humanity and inhumanity, compassion, and alienation. In this context, it is noteworthy that desertion was and is as sensitive an issue as it is unpopular, no matter whether in the form of a literary rendering or in the real-life army. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the deserter is Detering, a farmer, who, tired of fighting, decides to go home. He is found – and never heard of again (275–77). In Duong Thu Huong’s novel, the motif of desertion is found in various situations. When instructed to move to another war zone, for instance, Quan’s divisional commander gently asks him not to desert. Quan laughs: “‘No problem. They’ll always be able to use my manpower in some camp’” (32). No further allusions are made to the ‘recycling camps’ – which is what the Vietnamese ironically called the re-education camps. In another scene, a Vietnamese officer, more than a decade Quan’s senior, light-heartedly tells how he crippled a deserting soldier by shooting him in both kneecaps. He concludes: “‘I haven’t shot that accurately since I enlisted’” (249). This episode as well as the one mentioned earlier (the unauthorized execution of prisoners of war) constitute serious charges against cruelty committed in military action by some soldiers of the Vietnamese People’s Army. The author let them stand without comment.41 W⏐X 40

Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 1–5. Beside actual desertion, the author also describes how soldiers become inventive in their endeavour to avoid going to the front. The soldier Bien, for instance, one of Quan’s best friends, simulates insanity for more than six years. 41

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The character Quan does not draw on the socialist literary tradition. Compared to other soldiers populating Vietnam War literature, Quan is no hero of socialist realism and no winner-type, either, but is apparently still rooted in the Confucian tradition.42 In Confucian literature, the main characters – in most cases women – are passive figures that resign themselves to fate. So does Quan (as mentioned earlier on, Quan in many ways resembles a figure from a traditional verse novel). The ambiguity of his name underlines this reading; ‘Quan’ has two meanings, ‘army’ and ‘pawn’. They symbolize the conflictual situation he is facing; serving in the army contradicts his ‘pawn’-nature of passivity and shyness. He allows others, be it his superior Luong, the state, or his own father, to use him to pursue their own objectives. Significantly, his reaction to all of them is not objection or rebellion but helplessness, alienation, and eventually total resignation. He loves his mother and his younger brother deeply and their deaths make him withdraw even more. Such are his feelings for his first girlfriend that he cuts off all contact with her after joining the army, in order to spare her possible sorrow and pain. When the woman soldier Vieng tries to seduce him, but without wanting a serious relationship, he is unable to make love to her.43 Seeking the cause of his impotency, he ponders: This woman was born of the war. She belonged to it, had been forged by it. It wasn’t just because she was ugly that I had rejected her. I had been afraid to face myself, scarred of the truth. I was a coward. Ten years of war had gone by. I had known both glory and humiliation. […] I had needed to meet her to finally see myself clearly. […] The eighteen-year-old boy who had thrown himself into army life was still just a boy. […] I had never really committed myself to war. (49)

As shown above, in significant points Quan resembles Paul, the main character of Remarque‘s novel, and it seems safe to conclude that he has indeed been modelled on him. Both Paul and Quan report to the front voluntarily, cherishing the same feelings and high hopes that are to serve their Fatherland for fame and honour. After a short while at the front, they both lose 42

Endorsing an anti-hero is one of the reasons, among others, why the book has met with official disapproval. Duong Thu Huong has been criticized many times for populating her stories and novels with so-called passive or negative main characters. In a novel concerning the Vietnam War in particular, such an anti-hero counts as a severe flaw: any such book was considered antisocialist and had no chance of being published. 43 Worth mentioning is the fact that Remarque’s Paul Bäumer, too, experiences a disappointing night of love with a French girl. He does not ‘fail’ like Quan but is too depressed because of the war. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 151.

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faith and no longer believe in ‘heroism’, ‘holy duty’, and ‘Fatherland’, and the more they grasp the brutality of war the more they feel helpless and lost instead. Both show compassion for the victims, whether ally or enemy. They are anti-heroes, struggling to survive but always trying to help their comrades the best they can. When returning to their home villages for a short leave from the front, it is not the ideal world of their childhood and youth they come back to, but, instead, they experience an emotional void and eventually fall silent. The most relevant similarity between the two characters, however, is the abuse endured by the individual, an innocent young man, at the hand of a collective: the authority of the state.44 Both books are anti-war novels advocating similar, critical ideas, having their main characters come to the same conclusions – only, Paul does not live to see them have any further consequences: “Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more” (294). This is an apt summary of both the character’s fates; Quan does survive but is a broken man.

III Many of the literary motifs and themes of All Quiet on the Western Front reappear in Novel Without a Name. And the parallels between the two novels under discussion can be traced to such details as the motif of the coffin. During a gas attack – a breach of the Conventions of War at the time – Remarque’s main character, seeking shelter between corpses and open coffins in a cemetery, climbs into a coffin hoping to survive the horrific attack (66–70). Duong Thu Huong’s main character also seeks shelter in a (newly made) coffin, but in this case he seeks shelter from the hungry tigers that come by night. In both the German and the Vietnamese cultural context, a coffin symbolizes death. In Remarque’s novel, however, the coffin saves the man’s life; he survives the gas attack. This reversal of a culturally implied symbolic connotation might have impressed Duong Thu Huong to such an extent that she adopted the coffin motif in the same way: her main character, too, owes his life to the shelter of a coffin. She even extends the motif in an ironical way when describing a special unit of soldiers in the hinterland whose task it is to build coffins for the front (167–89). Despite their hard labour day and night, the coffin builders cannot meet the quota: 44

See also Franz Baumer, Erich Maria Remarque: Köpfe des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Morgenbuch, 1994): 72.

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too many casualties (184). But in the middle of the jungle, they are safe and far away from the front, hence the coffins protect them not only against the wild animals but also against enemy fire at the front. Apart from similarities with regard to content, both novels correspond in their structural design. In both cases, the main character also functions as the first-person narrator. The choice of first-person narration can be seen as the “renunciation of an omniscient epic poet in preference for the limited perspective of a narrator [...] as well as a stronger and more direct authenticity.”45 One can assume that Remarque chose the first-person perspective with the intention of rendering autobiographical experiences.46 In Vietnamese literature, narration in the first person is highly uncommon and only began to develop under the impact of the modern Western novel, mostly of French origin. In an interview, Duong Thu Huong has said that it was this specific literary mode that she encountered in Remarque’s novel and which she deemed the most efficient vehicle for bringing out her own feelings.47 Both novels owe their authenticity and also their vulnerability to this choice of a first-person narrator. Also remarkable is the episodic nature of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. It does not follow a ‘proper’ epic plot but, instead, presents numerous interchangeable episodes covering a narrated time of about one and a half year. The book is rather thin in comparison to Novel Without a Name, which fills nearly double as many pages with the fictitious events of a twenty-two-year time-span. Duong Thu Huong’s novel, too, contains numerous interchangeable episodes. Among them, there are six extensive flashbacks to Quan’s childhood as well as various dream scenes (including scenes where Quan speaks to his ancestors). One of these episodes in particular seems out of place and forced upon the plot; it is the discussion about civilization and Marxism mentioned earlier on.48 The episodic character of the texts does not make it easy to outline their plots. Concluding this part of the essay, one last parallel deserves brief mention. Both novels bear peculiar titles that have provoked some speculation about their genesis. Brian Murdoch, translator of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, wrote: 45

Gero von Wilpert, Sachwörterbuch der Literatur (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 7th ed.

1989): 399. 46 47 48

See also Antkowiak, Schriftsteller der Gegenwart, 74. Interview with the author of the present essay, 19 March 1993. See also Nguyen, Duong Thu Huong: Eine literaturtheoretische Untersuchung, 33–34.

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The title, by the way, was a problem. The German has the pun and the double negative at the start – “nothing new (or no news) on the Western Front”; the English title makes it positive – stressing the quiet. In my Erich Maria Remarque lecture [. . . ] last summer I commented on the difference of attitude this implied (resignation, even irony, in German, relief at the quiet, or Bäumer’s relief in death in English). I also speculated on where the title came from. It was used as a headline in newspapers [. . . ], it was the title of a poem by Catherine Renshaw in 1916, and it recalls the Civil War song ‘All Quiet along the Potomac’ (which has the same ironic plot in a way – an ordinary soldier killed is not newsworthy). Any family intelligence where the title came from?49

The last page of the novel suggests that the title derived from the daily report of the Supreme Command of the Deutsches Kaiserliches Heer (296). As to the title of Duong Thu Huong’s novel, a press commentary announcing the German edition remarks: On the one hand, the non-title “Novel Without a Name” refers to the speechlessness in the face of the catastrophe: the sufferings caused by war are impossible to name, there is no term imaginable for it. On the other hand, the non-title of the book is used as a pretext for banning the book in her country.50

In both cases, the title continues to invite speculation.

IV I wish, in conclusion, to underscore a couple of aspects that have not as yet found due consideration in the publications on modern Vietnamese literature, and, in particular, on war literature. The author Duong Thu Huong was the first writer in Vietnam to give a critical description of and perspective on the Vietnam War. That makes her novel unique, but the author and her novel deserve acknowledgement for more than this one reason. She was also the first writer in socialist Vietnam to end the long tradition of happy endings in modern prose and to introduce the anti-hero to Vietnamese war literature.51 She also set a precedent by elevating prisoners of war to valid 49 Brian Murdoch, professor in the German Department, University of Stirling, Scotland. Personal letter to Ian Campbell, 27 i (sic) 1997: 2. Campbell is a relative of the first translator of the book. 50 Announcement of the publishing house for Roman ohne Titel, the German edition of Novel Without a Name (Unkel: Horlemann, 1995): 3. 51 As mentioned earlier, one characteristic feature of the traditional verse novel is the happy ending. The modern novel no longer required this, but in socialist literature the happy ending made a comeback. With her novelette Chuyen tinh ke truoc luc rang dong (Love-story told before dawn), written in 1983 and published in 1986 by Nha Xuat Ban in Hanoi, Duong Thu

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subject-matter in war literature. No other Vietnamese novelist had ever portrayed American soldiers as ordinary human beings before. But, first and foremost, she was the first to question Vietnam’s ideological position and the immaculate nature of its victory, although others were soon enough to follow suit.52 For Duong Thu Huong, Remarque functioned as a kind of role model, although he never saw himself as a political person. But he certainly had been controversial in his own country, and in his writings he often criticized the social and political situation in Germany. Duong Thu Huong is far more critical and politically outspoken, and more of a public person than Remarque ever was. In 1993, she described her role as a writer as follows: “I am the writer for the oppressed and miserable. I struggle for these people and for those, crushed by their own misery, who will perhaps never have the chance to hold a book in their hands.”53 She offers advice on political, social, and cultural matters to whomever is willing to listen, aiming to contribute her share to the process of building a better and more democratic society. Of one thing she is firmly convinced: Vietnamese people are just beginning to question their past and the ‘American war’, the price we all paid for it and continue to pay. As a people, I think we are finally beginning to question our own tradition of heroism and self-sacrifice, the fact that for thousands of years the Vietnamese people have known how to die, but have never really learned how to live. That is the main tragedy of our nation, our people.54

The present essay has endeavoured to show that in Novel Without a Name Duong Thu Huong adopted and appropriated from Erich Maria Remarque’s Huong broke with almost forty years of socialist ‘happy-ending tradition’ in Vietnam. German tr. by Ursula Lies, Liebesgeschichte vor der Morgendämmerung erzählt (Unkel / Rhein & Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1992). 52 Like Dana Healy’s article “Literature in Transition: An Overview of Vietnamese Writing of the Renovation Period,” in The Canon in Southeast Asian Literature, ed. David Smyth (London: Curzon, 2000): 41–50, most publications on Vietnamese literature choose to praise the novel The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh as the more important contribution to the development of Vietnamese literature, while marginalizing or completely ignoring Duong Thu Huong’s literary work. Comparable in its choice of topic, Bao Ninh’s novel appeared one year after Novel Without a Name. While the latter was banned, Bao’s novel won the prize for literature in Vietnam. During a conference on Vietnamese literature in Copenhagen in 1992, the Vietnamese (male) author Le Luu commented on this point laconically: “female authors should not write about war”; no further explanation given. 53 Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 4. 54 Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 2–3.

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All Quiet on the Western Front not only the main theme but also the main protagonist and numerous literary motifs. Denouncing war in general, her story still depicts the Vietnamese case and, of course, also assumes the Vietnamese standpoint. When it comes to nation-building, however, she clearly repudiates any Western influence: no socialism, no Marxism, and nothing else from abroad either. In various dream scenes in the novel, she has a wraith address Quan with the advice to turn to the ancestors, the great culture of Cham, for instance, in order to find his own history and possible models for a future Vietnamese society in bliss and welfare (71, 254–58, 263–65). Duong Thu Huong once commented: “No one can bring back the dead, but the time has come to question the focus of our spiritual energies, to muster the courage to take a hard look at our past, to draw lessons for life.”55 She does not entirely reject the West, but apparently picks whatever seems useful to her while aspiring to equality, independence, and integrity for her nation.

WORKS CITED Announcement of the publishing house for the German edition of Novel Without a Name – “Roman ohne Titel” (Unkel: Horlemann, 1995). Antkowiak, Alfred. ”Erich Maria Remarque,“ in Lexikon deutschsprachiger Schriftsteller, vol. 2, ed. Autorenkollektiv, dir. Kurt Böttcher (Leipzig: V E B Bibliographisches Institut, 1975): 205–206. ——. Schriftsteller der Gegenwart: Erich Maria Remarque, ed. Kollektiv für Literaturgeschichte im Volkseigenen Verlag Volk und Wissen, dir. Kurt Böttcher (Berlin: Volk & Wissen, 1977). Baumer, Franz. Köpfe des 20. Jahrhunderts: Erich Maria Remarque (Berlin: Morgenbuch, 3rd rev. ed. 1994). Bernhard, Hans Joachim. “Nachwort,” in Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau, 1989): 182–205. Duong Thu Huong. Bitterer Reis, tr. S. Lohmann (Les paradis aveugles, tr. from the Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong; Paris: Des femmes, 1991; tr. Munich: Goldmann, 1993). ——. Chuyen tinh ke truoc luc rang dong (1983) (Love-story told before dawn), tr. Ursula Lies (Liebesgeschichte vor der Morgendämmerung erzählt; Unkel / Rhein & Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1992). ——. Nhung thien duong mu (Houston T X : Da Nguyen, 1990). ——. Novel Without a Name, tr. from Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong & Nina McPherson (Tieu thuyet vo de; New York: Penguin, 1996).

55

Duong Thu Huong, San Francisco Examiner, 3.

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——. Paradise of the Blind, tr. Phan Huy Duong & Nina McPherson (Nhung thien duong mu; New York: Penguin, 1993). ——. Roman ohne Titel, tr. from Vietnamese Ursula Lies (Tieu thuyet vo de; Stanton C A : Van Nghe, 1991; Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1995). Hall, D.G.E. ”French Administration and Nationalism in Indo-China,” in Hall, A History of South-East Asia (London: Macmillan, 1964): 714–20. Healy, Dana. “Literature in Transition: an Overview of Vietnamese Writing of the Renovation Period,” in The Canon in Southeast Asian Literatures, ed. David Smyth (London: Curzon Press, 2000): 41–50. Interview with Duong Thu Huong for The San Francisco Examiner (typescript M S , five pages), interview & tr. from the Vietnamese Phan Huy Duong & Nina McPherson (Hanoi, 23 March 1993). Joosten, Asrtrid. “Herbstparfüm bleibt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung 138 (18–19 June 1994): 38. Kotte, Heinz. Petition an die Regierung der S R Vietnam zur Freilassung von Pater Chan Tin und Frau Duong Thu Huong (Bochum: Südostasien-Informationsstelle, 11 September 1991). Liepman, Heinz. “Remarque und die Deutschen: Ein Gespräch mit Erich Maria Remarque (1962),” in Ein militanter Pazifist, ed. Thomas F. Schneider (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994): 110–14. Lies, Ursula. “Ich bin gezwungenermaßen Schriftstellerin: Ein Gespräch mit Duong Thu Huong,“ Südostasieninformation 9.4 (December 1993): 44. ——. Interview with Duong Thu Huong, Hanoi, 19 March 1993. Unpublished notes by the present author. ——. Literaturakademie der 28 Sterne (Unkel / Rhein & Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1991). Murdoch, Brian, German Department, University of Stirling, Scotland (personal letter to Ian Campbell, 27 i (sic) 1997). Nguyen, Ursula. “Duong Thu Huong: Eine literaturtheoretische Untersuchung” (M A thesis, Humboldt University, Berlin, 1994). Poppe, Reiner. Erich Maria Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues (Hollfeld: Joachim Beyer, second ed. 2000). Remarque, Erich Maria. Im Westen nichts Neues, preprint in Vossische Zeitung (November & December 1928), copyright Ullstein. ——. Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen/Ullstein, 1929). ——. Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau, 1989). ——. All Quiet on the Western Front, tr. A.W. Wheen (Im Westen nichts Neues; Berlin: Propyläen / Ullstein, 1929; tr. New York: Ballantine, 1982). Wilpert, Gero von. Sachwörterbuch der Literatur (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 7th ed. 1989).

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Under Indian Eyes — Characterization and Dialogism in Modern Hindi Fiction

T HOMAS

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discussed in this volume, modern Indian fiction in Indian languages, too, had an extraordinarily high degree of interaction with Western influences. During a long and gradual process of acculturation, Indian writing has processed Western literary forms into various forms of cultural chutneys, achieving spectacular heights with the Nobel prizes won by Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 and by V.S. Naipaul in 2001. Eventually, it threw them back into the face of English literature in the form of postcolonial writing that took off in a grand way with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980). Although the success of South Asian writers in the field of English literature has put India on the map of world literature, this has been only a partial acknowledgement of the subcontinent’s literary potential. So far, the bulk of the production of literature in modern Indian languages other than English has not reached a significant audience outside India. There is a strong irony in this, as the novels, short stories, and plays in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and other vernaculars are products of the same long and pervasive digestion of Western literature that produced Indian writing in English. Just as the latter retained a distinct Indian ‘flavour’ – one of its most effective selling points for Western publishers – writing in the vernaculars of India also consists of a mix of Western forms and aesthetic programmes that belong to India’s many cultural traditions. MONG THE MANY LITERATURES

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Modern Hindi writing was exposed to Western influences almost from its earliest beginnings and developed in constant reaction to and interaction with the presence of modern Western literature and culture. These influences came to South Asia with colonial rule and, what is probably more important, as a by-product of the rise of modernity in this part of the world. Modernity brought a range of phenomena, such as print capitalism; a public sphere in which religious and political communities started to assert themselves, and, eventually, the formation of the independent nations of India and Pakistan. Print capitalism took literary texts in the Indian vernaculars out of the context of patronage and a privileged readership and brought them to a large, urban middle-class audience. Modern Indian fiction found its first outlet in the new journals and magazines in the vernaculars, which soon became an important platform for political discussion and the formation of new communal, political identities. From the end of the nineteenth century, language and literature became involved in the growing polarization between Hindus and Muslims, which eventually led up to the violent partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Hindi became the icon of the Hindu nationalist movement, and literary writing was thrust into a prominent place in the newly established political arena. Modernity in South Asia was a polyphonic phenomenon, in which English as the language of the colonizer constituted a dominant presence but was not the only Western influence on Indian fiction. Literature in various European languages and in Russian was well known among (English-) educated Indian readers. Instead of passively adopting and reproducing literary forms from the West, Indian writing absorbed the new stylistic possibilities and merged them with local, premodern forms and styles in a process that was not dissimilar to the way earlier foreign influences, such as that of Persian and Arabic literature, were integrated in Indian literature. It was, therefore, less the use of Western literary forms such as the novel and short story that made early Hindi fiction ‘modern’ than its position in the public sphere and in the political arena. In this respect, modernity had changed the literary field in which modern Indian fiction developed. This varied background means that any description of the digestion of Western influences in modern Indian fiction has to take into account both the formal and the aesthetic side of this process as well as the state of the literary field in which it took place. This article will argue that the stylistic development of modern Indian fiction was closely related to, or was even

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induced by, the prominent position this writing had in communal and language politics. The essay will illustrate this with an analysis of one particular but very important element of modern literature: the representation of fictional characters, tracking its development in modern Hindi writing during the twentieth century. As this element is treated with considerable difference in Western and Indian fiction, it offers interesting possibilities for comparison of the two traditions and for a discussion of the hybridity of modern Indian writing in this respect. A close reading of two stories from different periods of Hindi writing will show the nature and functionality of the combination of modern Western forms and premodern Indian aesthetic and semantic structures.1 The focus will be on modern Hindi writing, as this is the area of the present author’s expertise, but that does not preclude the arguments put forward from also being of relevance to fictional writing in other modern Indian languages.

The Literary Field of Hindi Writing in History The first instance of the adoption of forms of Western literature (novels, short stories, and drama) in modern Indian writing takes place around the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the westernized Indian elite of Calcutta start to experiment with the new forms in Bengali. During this period, Calcutta was the cultural capital of the British Raj and the place where an upper-middle class involved in or employed by the colonial government had adopted many aspects of a Western life-style, including a taste for modern literature in both English and Bengali. Fictional writing in Hindi developed slightly later, initially by appropriating early Bengali models. Throughout this initial phase, journals and newspapers in the Indian languages, set up by missionaries and Indian entrepreneurs, remained the major medium for publication of the new writing based on Western for1 In a certain way, this essay tries to give a more precise description of the ‘difference’ of Indian fiction that is noted by several scholars such as Peter Gaeffke, “Hindiromane in der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts,” in Handbuch der Orientalistik (Zweite Abteilung, supplement 1; Leiden & Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1966), and, more recently, Harish Trivedi, “The Progress of Hindi, part 2: Hindi and the Nation,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: U of California P , 2003): 1006. Trivedi states: “The early Hindi novel is thus undeniably the result of the intervention of a Western genre, and yet, in its form as in its substance, it is far from convincingly Western.”

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mats. Interest in British literature came with the growing influence of English-based education among the emerging middle class of the large urban centres such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Among the first promoters of this new writing was the prolific author, publisher, poet, and literary critic Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–85). His journal Harishcandra’s Magazine, which was first published in 1837, featured literary writing in Hindi and English, translations of foreign novels, and essays on literature. The experiment with modern forms in Hindi took place in literary milieux that were also active in writing prose and poetry in the dialect of Brajbhasha, a language that was an important medium of premodern traditions of poetry that continued to be used well into the nineteenth century. Although the activities of Bharatendu Harishchandra were very important for positioning Hindi in modern Indian culture, they did not lead to a breakthrough in the use of Hindi for literary writing. It was only later in the nineteenth century that developments outside the scope of literature gave a strong impulse to the use of Hindi.2 An important impetus for the development of modern Indian languages came from a British initiative in 1801 – the foundation of Fort William College in Calcutta. This institution was set up by the colonial government to instruct civil servants in the languages of the Raj. It was more or less the birthplace of modern Hindi, as it recruited Indian pundits and writers to create prose texts in modern Hindi, mainly by translating from examples in Persian, Sanskrit, and English. The languages that were taught at Fort William College were Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and Marathi, which were also the first languages in which some early form of modern literature emerged. Similar developments in the southern languages followed shortly after. The Hindi that was taught at Fort William College was a common form of Urdu that was later labelled ‘Hindustani’ and was characterized by a mixed vocabulary of both Persian and Indian (Sanskrit-based) words. It was based on a lingua franca that was spoken and understood in large parts of Northern India.3 2

The activities of Bharatendu Harishchandra and their impact on the position of Hindi are described in detail in Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997). 3 At Fort William College, scholars already made an effort to ‘clean’ the language of its Persian vocabulary in order to make it more attractive for Hindus. The language that was to become modern standard Hindi was based on Khari Boli, the dialect that was spoken in the region around Delhi. For examples of early Hindi and Urdu texts, see “Part III : The Texts,” in the anthology Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader, ed. & intro. Christopher

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In its early phase, until the turn of the twentieth century, literary writing in Hindi remained stylistically very close to premodern forms and aesthetics, such as that of Brajbhasha poetry. Romances, religious tales, and historical novels were produced, together with early attempts at novels based on contemporary British models.4 Despite this production, the use of Hindi as a literary medium did not have a flying start. One reason for this was that neither Hindi nor the Khari Boli dialect that it was associated with had a high reputation as a literary medium or could boast of a tradition of fictional writing in prose alongside extensive oral storytelling traditions. Hindustani was mainly a spoken language that was hardly formalized as a medium for prose. This was in sharp contrast to the strong position of Urdu, the language of culture for the Muslim elite, which could muster a long and serious pedigree in both poetry and prose written in Persian script and with a highly persianized vocabulary. Besides its literary use, it had also become the language of administration and the legal system. Until the first decades of the twentieth century, Urdu maintained its dominant position as the major literary medium, only to be replaced by Hindi with the growing promotion of this language through political activism. At the end of the nineteenth century, a campaign started to have Hindi, written in Devanagari script and with a sanskritized vocabulary, officially accepted in the courts of law in Northern India. The motives behind the campaign, however, reached further. Through their education in Urdu and Persian, the old Muslim elite had a virtual monopoly on high administrative positions. This frustrated the ambitions of middle-class Hindus who had been educated in English or Hindi at the rising number of Indian universities. The campaign was successful, as the colonial government decided in 1900 to allow Hindi in the courts of law, thus opening up new career opportunities for Hindus. It marked the first attempt by the Hindu middle-

Shackle & Rupert Snell (South Asian Texts 1; London: University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1990). See also, for the role of Fort William College, Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000): 20–23. 4 The earliest attempt at a modern Hindi romance is Rani Ketaki ki Kahani (The story of Princess Ketaki, ca. 1800) by the Urdu poet Insha Allah Khan. The work relies heavily on the Urdu model Bagh-o Bahar (The garden and spring). A very successful romance was Candrakanta (1892) by Devaki Nandan Khatri, which was followed by two sequels: Candrakanta santati (The family of Candrakanta, 1896) and Bhutnath (1908), named after the major character in the novel.

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class majority to assert itself and was a model for the political mobilization of Hindu organizations to come.5 Another important impetus for the spread of Hindi was the activity of the Arya Samaj, a religious reform movement that propagated the return to classical Hindu tradition. It promoted the use of sanskritized Hindi by Hindus all over northern India – even in Bengal, where the local Bengali had a high prestige. The promotion of Hindi by the Arya Samaj inspired a large number of magazines, newspaper, and other small-scale localized publications. These developments gave writing in Hindi an important place in the growing cultural self-awareness of the Hindu community. This trend is reflected in the didacticism and social commitment of early Hindi novels such as Pariksha Guru (The exam as teacher) by Shrinivas Das (1882). Although the new Hindi writing relied heavily on the Western genre of the novel as its major vehicle, ideologically it argued against adoption of a westernized lifestyle and promoted traditional ‘Hindu’ values. The criticism of westernization and the praise of Indian cultural roots that is prominent in early didactic literary works in Hindi continued to be an important element in the rhetorical register of modern Hindi writing and literary criticism right up to the present day. There has always been a paradox in this situation, as the middle-class milieux that were interested in modern Hindi fiction and that produced the new authors were mostly English-educated and involved with the colonial administration or British mercantile enterprises.6

The ‘Nationalization’ of Hindi Literature The increasing involvement of language and literature in communal politics affected the formation of modern literary culture in all modern Indian literatures, but had a particularly deep impact on the development of modern Hindi writing. When the Hindu nationalist movement adopted Hindi as a medium for the Hindu cause and as the projected national tongue for a future independent India, a split occurred between the literary fields of Hindi and Urdu. This forced the latter into the limited position of the language of the Indian Muslims, which severely restricted its significance as 5 This campaign is well-documented in studies on the divide between Hindi and Urdu, see, for example, Rai, Hindi Nationalism. 6 See, for an overview of the development of novelistic writing in various modern Indian languages, The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development, ed. T.W. Clark (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970).

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the language of urban high culture and as the primary literary medium, a setback from which it never recovered. The Indian National Congress, which was founded in 1885 to represent both communities, increasingly became the representative of the Hindu community, prompting the Muslims to found their own Muslim League. The political polarization, as mentioned earlier, found its sad climax in the violent partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. After independence, Hindi maintained its prominent position and developed into the most prestigious literary medium, relegating Urdu literature to a marginal role, despite the fact that the first Constitution of India gave a range of Indian languages equal status. The formation of political communities along religious and linguistic lines furnished the ideological context in the period when modern Indian fiction developed into a fully-fledged literary tradition. The ideologies of this period determined to a large extent the tone and direction of the debate on the relation between nation, language, and cultural identity in India, and their influence can still be found in the present-day Hindu nationalist movement. In this political polarization, language and literature became ideological tools. Through language politics, the concept of a single communal or even national language was imposed on a society that was basically multilingual and in many respects multicultural. The premodern situation knew its conflicts and communal tension, but these were not based on exclusive, and to a large extent ‘imagined’, cultural identities based on a single religion or language. The awakening of nationalist ideologies created such exclusivist, monologic identities, in which there was no place for the cultural exchange and hybridity that characterized most premodern religious traditions. This nationalization affected the form of the language, the perception of its history, and the aesthetic paradigms used in modern Hindi writing. The promoters of the Hindi language tried to reform the language by replacing all Urdu and Persian words with Sanskrit equivalents or neologisms. They also developed an aesthetic model based on a reconstruction of classical Indian literary aesthetics by drawing on the concepts of rasa and dhvani.7 An important force behind this was the critic and editor Mahavirprasad Dvivedi, who, in his journal Sarasvati, presented a model for the use of

7

These concepts will be explained in detail below.

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Hindi in prose and poetry, imposing a regulated grammar and a stylistic framework that was based on Sanskrit aesthetic theories. In the growing polarization between Hindus and Muslims, Western influence on literature was filtered through nationalist ideology. A good example is the construction of a literary history for modern Hindi, modelled on the historiography of European literatures. Literary specialists such as Ramcandra Shukla (1884–1941) compiled a literary history for Hindi by connecting modern literature to the medieval religious poetry in Braj and Avadhi. The important contribution to the formation of medieval Hindi poetry by Sufi poets and ascetic traditions that claimed independence from institutionalized religion and rejected the caste-system was made more palatable to a modern Hindu audience by presenting these traditions as ‘syncretic’. This label kept intact the notion that the medieval situation knew a similar polarization between Hindu and Muslim culture to that of the modern period. It masked the truly hybrid and complementary nature of the medieval traditions, which did not fit the nationalist ideologies of the twentieth century. From the 1920s onwards, Hindi gained momentum, and the number of publications in this language surpassed that in Urdu, replacing the latter as the primary literary medium. Indicative of this rapid rise was Premchand’s switch from Urdu to Hindi.8 He translated his earlier novels into Hindi and then wrote a series of novels and short stories that were the first truly mature examples of modern Hindi fiction in Western forms. The political climate of Hindu activism and the struggle for independence was a nourishing context for Hindi writing; the rise of a westernized urban middle class provided it with a large readership. Ironically, a major theme in Hindi literature of this period was the disorientation that resulted from adopting Western life-styles. It insisted on adhering to or returning to ‘Indian’ values. As the struggle for independence progressed, the critique of Western influence on Indian society in Hindi fiction that had been present from its early days acquired sharp political overtones.9 In many ways, 8

Premchand, pseudonym of Dhanpat Rai, 1880–1936, is regarded as the most influential Hindi writer of the twentieth century. Although he started writing in Urdu, he later became the first author to truly develop the forms and styles of Hindi writing. 9 The influence of nationalism on the formation of Hindi literature during the early half of the twentieth century is described comprehensively by Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002). Recently, the history of the separation of the linguistic and cultural traditions of Urdu and Hindi has been depicted in great detail in Literary Cultures in History, ed. Pollock,

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the didacticism in the works of Premchand led the way, professing as it did the author’s adherence to Gandhi’s political and ethical ideals. It was hard for authors to stay aloof from the political debate in this period as the discussions on literary aesthetics became increasingly politicized. Nationalist idealism was equated with a choice in favour of a purely ‘Indian’ form of art and culture. While modern fiction was basically looked upon positively, as it expressed social progress, the adoption of Western stylistics was deemed ‘non-Indian’ and judged very negatively. This coincided with the idea, developed by nationalist critics, that writers had a function in the struggle for independence and in the achievement of social progress: they should educate people through art and literature by presenting in their work examples of proper ‘Indian’ attitudes and social commitment. Purely artistic writing or too much personal introspection without social awareness was seen as a Western infatuation and as dodging the moral obligations of the Indian author. The pressure of the nationalist movement on all aspects of modern Indian culture, especially Hindi writing, made for a complex reception of Western influences. The commercial publication system favoured the Western forms of both novelistic writing and the literary or political essay, very much the genres that still dominate the scene of Hindi writing today. It was ideologically not opposed to Western writing as such, as there was a lively interest in new developments in European and American literature. In the development of modern Hindi fiction, however, writers and critics were more concerned with its responsibilities toward the Indian audience and its position vis-à-vis other Indian literatures. The modernity of the Western forms was widely accepted, but the nationalist ideologies dictated that Western influence was to be kept to a minimum; a new Indian literature should be forged on the model of modern Western writing but aimed at local political priorities. As a result, the opposition Western vs. indigenous, or Indian, became an important antagonism in the process of ‘digesting’ foreign influences, but it never stood apart from the cultural and political divisions in Indian society. It is therefore appropriate to think of the formation of modern Indian fiction as a complex encounter of Western forms and models with both premodern traditions and the aesthetic programmes that were the result of the ‘nationalization’ of Indian language and literature. and in Rai, Hindi Nationalism. These works show the intensity and political overtones of the language debate in modern Indian culture.

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The Development of Modern Literary Aesthetics in Hindi Writing The push and pull of ideological forces had a great influence on the stylistic development of Hindi writing. In its early phase, Hindi writing was searching for a way to incorporate the functionality of Western literary forms into existing Indian literary models. The result was a range of hybrid novels or short stories that tried to emulate English models in the vernacular languages but remained close to the ornate narrative style of Urdu prose tales and romances, such as the very popular dastan (folk epic), narrative poetry in Braj, and oral storytelling traditions. Given the nature of these works, characterization was very sketchy and stereotyped – and it was a long time before this aspect of fiction found its own place in Hindi writing. Almost single-handedly, Premchand set the example by forging a style of writing that exploited to the full the stylistic characteristics of the novel and short story while retaining enough Indian stylistic idiom to appeal to a large audience. His realist novels have a strong didactic, moralizing tendency, exposing social problems such as the low status of women and the appalling inequalities in Indian society. Premchand’s characters are never isolated but always embedded in their social context of village, family, or caste. The descriptions of these social frameworks are evocative and lend the novels and short stories their strong and convincing imaginative qualities. In his later works, Premchand abandoned the Gandhian political perspective which he had professed in his earlier writing, adopting instead a socialist outlook and becoming the founder and first president of the All India Progressive Writers Association in 1936, shortly before his death. Although ideology was dominant in early Hindi writing, there were other movements that explored a more introspective and psychological style of writing, of which Ajneya (pseudonym of Satchidananda Hiranand Vatsyayana, 1911–87) and Jainendra Kumar (1904–88) were the most prominent representatives. Their innovative and expressive style of writing was often criticized as being too westernized. These two poles, social commitment and artistic self-reflection, became the most prominent ideological positions in the field within which the critical discourse and the taste of the readership developed. There are two ways of looking at the stylistic development of early modern writing in Indian languages. It can be seen either as a struggle to emulate and master Western literary formats and styles, viewing the hybridity of the early-nineteenth-century attempts at novel writing in Hindi as an immature imitation of an implicit norm in the form of Western literary

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stylistics. This perspective is present in McGregor’s account of this period, though it did not adversely affect the description of early works in Hindi.10 The alternative perspective understands the development as an adaptation and development of existing Indian stylistic modes to new circumstances and influences. It considers the specimens of early Hindi writing as one instance of the process of digesting foreign influences in Indian literary culture, rather than as deficient novels. India’s cultural history is full of the adoption of elements that foreign cultures brought to the subcontinent. The inherent hybridity of modern Indian writing is a token of Indian culture’s ability to absorb foreign influences without losing its own identity, even if these influences occurred in a setting of colonial domination. The later development of modern Indian writing, especially of Anglo-Indian fiction, would seem to confirm this aspect of Indian literary culture. Seeing the stylistic modes of modern Indian fiction as a transformation within Indian literary culture permits a better understanding of the changes in the literary field of Hindi writing in its transition to modernity. As mentioned earlier, new conditions for writing arose with the rise of commercial publishing, which involved a new and larger middle-class readership and replaced the practice of literary patronage. This change coincided with the presence of Western literary forms in the westernized milieux of colonial India, but was not induced by it. The Indian commercial publishers responded to a demand for a wide range of material, of which Hindi fiction was only a minor part.11 For the printed publication of devotional poetry and other traditional genres, the premodern practices of distribution still applied, but on a larger scale and reaching a larger audience, thus having a larger impact on the formation of modern cultural identities. Authors of literature in prose, however, explored new ground, simply because fictional writing in Western formats had no premodern traditions that could claim recognition and thereby obstruct new developments. Yet the strong presence of the premodern forms in commercial publishing reduced the relative distance from earlier literary practices. Premodern patronage of literature emphasized the skilful but not necessarily innovative application of aesthetic 10

R.S. McGregor, “The Rise of Standard Hindi and Early Hindi Prose Fiction,” in The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development, ed. T.W. Clark (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970): 142–78. 11 The proportion of Hindi fictional or literary publications has been well described in Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, a study of the rise of Hindi publishing during the first half of the twentieth century.

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models. Some of this craftsmanship never left Indian writing completely, despite its new ventures and social functions. Since many authors had a very good knowledge of Urdu poetry, Sanskrit or other classical traditions, premodern aesthetic models were never far away in modern Hindi writing. When publication in periodicals put literary writing more prominently in the public sphere, especially during the first half of the twentieth century, it also drew debate on its aesthetic principles into the political domain. This process seems to have reinforced adherence to what was believed to be constructed as – or, indeed, to be – ‘Indian’ traditions and favoured a hybridity that had been there from the earliest periods. It is only after Indian independence that authors experiment with a ‘double distancing’: they reject the idealist programmes of previous writing and absorb this into their work by demonstrating the loss of meaning of the traditional models.

Characterization and Dialogism: Aesthetic Models in Western and Modern Indian Fiction The outline given above can only be a compressed account of the trajectory of Hindi fiction through modern Indian history. For an illustration of the hybrid formation of modern Indian fiction, this essay will now look at two key elements of fictional writing: characterization and dialogic narration. In the present context, characterization is understood as the representation of realistic characters that are activated by their own personal drives and emotions, instead of by any ideological programme imposed on them by the author. In fictional writing, this autonomy of the characters is represented through the inclusion of their individual speech and language in the narration, replacing the voice of an authoritative narrator. Among Western literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin has been most convincing in arguing for the importance of characterization through what he calls ‘dialogic’ narration in the development of the (Western) novel. He describes how the representation of the speech and language of characters has led to an alternation of linguistic registers and created heteroglossia. Bakhtin defines the two interrelated concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia as follows: Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its incorporation), is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double–voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character

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who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions. And all the while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they – as it were – know about each other (just as two exchanges in a dialogue know of each other and are structured in this mutual knowledge of each other); it is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other.12

Bakhtin emphasizes the ‘dialogue’ created by the juxtaposition of the narrator’s voice and the speech and thoughts of the characters, which brings together different views and ideological ‘languages’. He holds that the openness of the novel, which allows it to evolve continuously into new styles and include new contents, could only develop when monologic, authorial narration was replaced by dialogic narration which allowed the depiction of independent and psychologically convincing characters.13 Dorrit Cohn describes the history and workings of the representation of character’s thoughts in Western fiction and comes up with various categories of ‘psycho-narration’.14 Cohn points out how the distance between the point of view of the narrator and the world-view of the characters is an important stylistic element, indicating the author’s criticism or approval of the character’s thoughts or behaviour. Bakhtin notes that heteroglossia and dialogism bring different ideologies into the narrative, which prevents the dominance of any auctorial authority.15 Dialogic narration, heteroglossia, and the representation of the inner thoughts and drives of fictional characters are relatively new inventions in Western writing. They started to appear in early-nineteenth-century fiction, 12 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981): 324, emphasis in the original. 13 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 37–38. 14 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1978). 15 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, (333–34): The speaking person and his discourse is, as we have said, what makes a novel a novel, the thing responsible for the uniqueness of the genre. But in a novel, of course, the speaking person is not all that is represented, and people themselves need not be represented only as speakers. No less than a person in drama or in epic, the person in a novel may act – but such action is always highlighted by ideology, is always harnessed to the character’s discourse (even if that discourse is as yet only a potential discourse), is associated with an ideological motif and occupies a definite ideological position. The action and individual act of a character in a novel are essential in order to expose – as well as to test – his ideological position, his discourse.

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but developed more rapidly when Freud’s vision of the human psyche established new models for depicting characters. Novels began to pay more attention to psychological insight and to the representation of the character’s thoughts rather than his or her deeds. They represent the development of an individual concept of personality that is relatively independent of any programming by social class or gender. The novel became the medium par excellence for expressing modern individuality. As indicated above, modern Indian fiction developed in a context that emphasized the ideological aspects of the representation of characters, leaving little room for the development of individual characteristics. This does not mean that Indian fiction pays no attention to characterization; it only deals with it in a different manner, based on a different perception of the role of characterization in literary aesthetics. This difference complicates any analysis of modern Indian writing. Elements that may look similar to concepts in Western writing have a history of their own in Indian cultural history. Any application of the toolbox of modern Western literary theory is likely to miss some crucial elements of Indian fiction. Thus very important elements in this context are the concepts of rasa (emotion, mood, taste) and dhvani (suggestion), the expression of which classical Indian aesthetic theory places at the core of any form of art. Drama or stories are supposed to be based on a single emotion; other emotions are only displayed temporarily to reinforce the dominant rasa. Acts and speech are only there to help convey emotion in its abstract, purified form which transcends representation through a particular actor or fictional character. The aesthetic theories are part of a separate tradition of manuals in the classical tradition, the rasashastras, which began with a manual on dance, Bharata’s Natyashastra (c.400 B C ). The system was later enhanced with speculations on the resemblance between the psychology of the aesthetic experience and the religious experience of liberation (mukti). Other commentaries added the concept of dhvani (suggestion) or the principle of transferring emotion through art, which lends itself better to the explanation of literary aesthetics. The rasashastras are descriptive rather than prescriptive, the manuals consisting of long lists of verses that exemplify how certain rasa are evoked. They deal primarily with the mechanics of the most effective conveyance of emotion, without going deeper into theoretical explanations of its nature or causes. The rasa paradigm has been a continuous presence in modern Indian culture, either as direct inspiration or through its revival by early Hindi

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authors and critics, such as Mahavirprasad Dvivedi, who attempted to transfer the prestige of the Sanskrit tradition to modern writing in Hindi. Authors use its idiom when describing their work in critical essays and reviews.16 The preference for the representation of impersonal, abstract emotions rather than the particularities of individual experience fitted the onedimensional heroes or villains of early didactic Hindi writing. Characterization is mostly external, through references to cultural archetypes that a literate Hindi reader will pick up without explicit indication. This characterization complies with the view of the position and role of the individual in Indian society. Indian culture emphasizes conformity to social roles rather than development of a personal identity. Indian authors, especially in earlier literature, depict their characters according to these roles. The only characters that develop an individual identity are those who are on the margin of, or outside of, the social framework. Characterization through representation of individual psychology is, in this setting, only possible in characters that stand at some distance from mainstream society. The outsider as protagonist is an important feature of Hindi novels and short stories written in the late-1930s and 1940s. Following a trend that also included Premchand, writers such as Upendranath Ashk (1910–96) and Yashpal (1903–76) centre their works on these outsider characters and pave the way for the more developed protagonists of post-Independence Hindi fiction.17 The individualized protagonists of later Hindi writing still follow the pattern of rasa aesthetics when representing emotions associated with being on the margins of society. The original Sanskrit manuals constitute a sophisticated systematization of an aesthetic sensibility that is generally present in Indian culture. There is, however, an opposition between the aesthetic of abstract emotion and Western novelistic writing, which is so firmly based on the representation 16 The most important collections of essays on the aesthetics of the Nayi Kahani group are written by the authors themselves: Kamleshvar, Nayi Kahani ki bhumika (Introduction to Nayi Kahani) (New Delhi: Akshar Prakashan, 1966); Rajendra Yadav, Eka duniya samanantar (A parallel world) (New Delhi: Akshar Prakashan, 1968); Mohan Rakesh, Mohan Rakesh: sahityika aura sanskirtika drishti (Mohan Rakesh: his views on literature and culture) (New Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 1975). These essays are remarkable for their broad outlook, but also for their dense and difficult style using a highly sankritized vocabulary that is filled with technical terms from rasa theory. 17 Examples are the novels Dada Kamred (Father Comrade, 1941) by Yashpal, and Upendranath Ashk’s Girti Divarem (Collapsing walls, 1947). See also Peter Gaeffke, “Hindiromane in der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts,” 99–126.

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of individuals and their idiosyncrasies. The analysis of Indian literary works presented in the following readings will try to demonstrate how this tension manifests itself in the development of modern Indian fiction.

Readings from Modern Hindi Fiction: Premchand and Mannu Bhandari The emphasis on the ideological and political use of Hindi literature and the characteristics of aesthetic and psychological paradigms in Indian culture has led to a specific stylistic development in Hindi fiction, as will be demonstrated by the example of the two stories “Yahi sac hai” (This here is the truth, 1966) by the female writer Mannu Bhandari (born 1931), and “Kafan” (The shroud, 1935) by Premchand. These stories date from different periods in Hindi literature and are chosen here because they mark both the beginning and the full development of heteroglossia and dialogism in modern Hindi writing. Premchand’s “Kafan” is typical of the later period in his writing. Premchand started, as mentioned earlier, as an Urdu writer who later turned to Hindi to become not only the first great novelist and story writer of Hindi literature but also the most eloquent literary spokesman for social reform and Gandhian political idealism. His early work is remarkable for its vivid portrayal of characters and their social framework. The author’s commitment to social progress and didacticism often stands in the way of individual characterization in his works. “Kafan” dates from a later period, when the idealist tone had disappeared from his writing. His outlook became more influenced by socialism and he set out to expose the exploitation and despair of the destitute classes in Indian society through a grim, socialrealist style of writing. The later work of Premchand was a source of inspiration for the generation of writers that rose to prominence after Indian independence in 1947. These new authors rejected the nationalist idealism and romanticism of the earlier Hindi works and promoted a more realistic style of narration which they believed to be better suited to depict the depressing mood of the 1950s and 1960s. In these days, the traumatic bloodshed of Partition was still a fresh memory, destroying the hopes invested in the struggle for independence. Freedom of the nation had not brought the expected welfare and happiness, as life in the urban middle-class milieux was alienating and depressing. The traditional cultural framework of family life and religion had

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lost its meaning; young people were well-educated but unemployed. The young nation also had many political problems and was involved in military conflicts with Pakistan and China. The writing of the authors of the Nayi Kahani (New Short Story) movement of the 1950s and 1960s expressed this cultural disorientation. These authors, among them Mannu Bhandari, continued where Premchand and other writers of the 1940s left off; they introduced stylistic innovations from contemporary Western literary currents such as the American New Short Story, the French nouveau roman, and the Existentialists. Instead of well-developed plots, the stories depicted ‘slices of life’. Action became secondary as the narration took the perspective of the characters and closely followed their emotional reaction to situations. The new approach of the Nayi Kahani group favoured more developed and ‘round’ characters and dialogic narration, as it rejected the ideological outlook of earlier Indian fiction. Much of this style of writing was already present in Hindi fiction, but was marginalized by conservative and nationalist literary critics, who did not consider its individualist, somber tone suitable for ‘Indian’ literature. The innovations of Nayi Kahani were important and led to a new style of fictional writing. It did not do away with the existing aesthetic of Hindi fiction as this had been developed in the works of Premchand and other pre-Independence authors, but put it into a different perspective. Nayi Kahani anxiously defended itself against criticism that it had taken over Western stylistic modes unquestioningly. It explicitly claimed to present the ‘Indian character in its Indian environment’, adhering to a representation that was recognizable to an Indian readership. This meant that a lot of the hybridity of earlier Hindi fiction remained intact but was given a new dimension, now that the cultural types and signs that were used for characterization in earlier fiction had lost their positive polarity. Again, new stylistic elements were absorbed into the existing paradigm. The examples described below, of stories by Premchand and by Mannu Bhandari, stand at two different ends of the evolution of characterization and the use of a dialogic form of narration and thereby show the integration of a modernist outlook into Hindi fiction.

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Premchand’s “Kafan” (The Shroud)18 Premchand’s story depicts two low-caste villagers (chamar), father Ghisu and son Madhav, and the way they deal with the death of the latter’s wife. The author portrays the two men as lazy bums who refuse to do decent work. They live by stealing food and abusing other people’s generosity. Instead of getting a doctor to look after the woman who is about to die in childbirth, they just wait for her to die without doing anything. When she finally expires, they put on a show of grief and beg the village landlord to give them some money to buy a shroud (kafan) for a proper burial. Instead of buying the shroud and wood for the funeral pyre, they spend the money on drink and food, gradually discarding the whole project of buying the shroud, cynically scorning the practice of wrapping the body in a cloth that will burn anyway: Madhav said – “Yes, there is plenty of wood around, we only need a shroud.” “Come on, let’s find a light shroud.” “Yes, but what is the use of it. When the body will be placed on the pyre, it will be dark already. Who will see the shroud at night?” “What a stupid custom is this that someone who did not have a rag to cover her body when she was alive, should have a new shroud when she dies!” “The shroud burns with the body anyway.” “And what remains? If we had gotten these five rupees earlier, then we could have bought drugs for her.”19

In their drunkenness, they start to dance and sing. Suddenly, they became aware of their grief and the miserable state they were in. Their misery turns into elation, however, as they convince themselves that life is not worth living anyway; the poor woman should be glad she is released from the vale of tears sooner than they are. Finally, they fall down drunk and the story ends on this grim denunciation of life in this world. Madhav said – “But father, the wretch had a miserable life, how much did she not suffer before she died?” He held his hands before his eyes and started to sob, letting out cries of grief. Ghisu said to him – “Why are you crying, son, be glad that she is freed from this net of illusion. She has escaped from this pool of misery. She was very lucky that the shackles that tied her to this illusory world were broken so soon.” 18

Premchand, “Kafan” (The shroud) (1935), repr. in 23 Hindi Kahaniyam (23 Hindi stories), ed. Jainendra Kumar (Delhi: Lokabharati Prakashan, 1969). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Hindi are by the present author. 19 Premchand, “Kafan,” 14.

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The two stood up and started to sing: “Oh, temptress, why do you make my eyes shine; oh temptress!” The eyes of all the drunkards were fixed on them as they sang, drunken in their hearts. They even tried to leap and jump but they stumbled and fell. They pulled faces, made gestures even, but finally they fell down on the spot, overcome by their drunkenness.20

The focus on the low-caste men shows Premchand’s involvement with socialism in his later years. The two protagonists are almost the opposites of earlier Premchand characters, who were honest, simple people cornered by poverty or injustice, but who overcome the corruption and indifference of their social surroundings. Unlike the two chamar, they maintain their ethical integrity and are presented as examples for a new Indian citizen. The grim tone of Kafan marks a change in Premchand’s writing in the direction of a more somber view of society and the fate of the downtrodden. The negative message of the story made a great impression on Indian readers and with conservative, nationalist critics, as it defied earlier Hindi writing’s idealist optimism. Thus, Premchand opened the way for a realist account of the disillusion of life on the margins of society in Indian fiction. The story of Kafan is presented primarily through a description of the situation and the character’s reaction to it, not through a depiction of the characters’ inner thoughts. Their action seems to take an inevitable course, as the narrator provides hardly any clues to the motivation or background of the two men. In this respect, the story resembles Premchand’s earlier works, in which characters were defined, to a great extent, by the ideology they were supposed to represent and by their social environment, which imposed certain roles upon them. The story starts with a dialogue between the two chamar, who belong to the low caste of leatherworkers. The dialogue is in standard Hindi, whereas it is more likely that they will have spoken some kind of dialect. Nevertheless, it marks a very intimate moment in which the narrator gives ample room to the words and views of the characters. Then the narration is taken over by an auctorial narrator who assumes some distance from the men’s cynical world-view and their uncaring manner. There is definitely a judgment involved in the distance that the narrator takes from the speech and actions of the two men. Premchand denounces their behaviour, but the ambivalence in the way he presents them makes for 20

Premchand, “Kafan,” 19.

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a nuanced judgment: not only the chamar are to blame but also the society that keeps them in hopeless poverty and dejection. After the initial scene, the narrator’s voice and viewpoint become more prominent in the narration, judging the actions and the character of the two men. The focus of the story shifts from the psychological development of the characters to the establishing of a somber mood, using images that conform to this emotional register (rasa). These images refer to cultural paradigms associated with a withdrawal from society and religious renunciation, which add a specific meaning to the outcaste status of the two men, their abuse of the obligation to buy a shroud for the funeral, their banal behaviour, and the ‘philosophical’ tone of their dismissal of life. In this depiction one can recognize the image of the pious drunk, the antisocial saint or mystic who has forgone worldly existence and can thereby ‘see’ another reality that is more ‘true’. One could also see it as a reference to the conventional image of the Sufi mystic of Urdu and Persian mystical poetry. His piety is inward, hence of greater purity than that of a believer who flaunts his piety; it allows him to ignore the external signs of Islam, such as the prohibition on drinking. Rather than the depiction of the psychological stimuli of the characters, the specific cultural embedding of their acts gives them a well-developed meaning. It lends an unsettling authority to the sacrilegious behaviour of the drunken chamar and the existential ‘truth’ uttered by them. For a Western reader used to the psychological development of characters, framing the characterization of the two protagonists within a cultural stereotype may seem a reduction or ‘flattening’ of their development. In the Indian context, the cultural paradigm Premchand refers to in his depiction of the characters in “Kafan” – that of the outcaste who flouts social obligations – is not necessarily at odds with an increased sense of individuality. Leaving the social framework and the role defined by dharma, the religious order of things, constitutes a culturally accepted form of individualization. The roles and obligations that the order of dharma places upon a person, defining individuals within a framework of duties toward family, clan, and society, emphasize conformity rather than individual development. Religious renunciation through tyaga (renunciation) or sanyasa (asceticism) is a radical break with society, allowing a person to become an individual by ‘dying’ as a member of the social framework. This idealized image is a strong cultural pattern that gives meaning to all sorts of rituals, periodical fasts, or pilgrimage.

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In the case of the two chamar in “Kafan,” their outrageous behavior depicted through the register of renunciation and defiance of social rules defines them as individuals and extends their development as fictional characters. The contrast between the cultural register of religious renunciation and the behaviour of the two chamar marks a reversal of values. Presenting the alienation of the chamar from society and their unremitting and hopeless poverty in a positive and even sanctified register underscores the cultural disorientation that Premchand saw in Indian society. Against this background, the description of the characters in Kafan makes perfect sense and is far from one-dimensional. The use of cultural signs and paradigms establishes a dialogism that operates with tools other than Western writing, which would tend, rather, to focus on the internal characterization of the protagonists. Premchand chose an aesthetic framework that was recognizable to an Indian readership, and which added considerable rhetorical impact to his serious message. This may explain the strong reactions of Indian readers to his somber vision. Premchand’s story is an interesting example of how modern Hindi fiction used the form and structure of Western fiction but developed its own strategies for characterization and dialogism. Instead of the psychological development that characterizes modern Western fiction since Freud, establishing a mood and external characterization are the most important tools for the Hindi author. This builds on the preference in Indian aesthetics for the representation of depersonalized, ‘pure’, emotion and on the association of individualization with a withdrawal from society. It makes action less important, as it is mostly intimated by the setting. Suspense comes from uncertainty about how the characters are going to fulfil their given roles. The importance of Premchand’s experiment with more ambivalent ideological registers was that it opened up the way for a more individualized kind of characters. It made it possible to create literature that was not bound by the ideology of nationalist idealism and that stood closer to Western representations of the disorientation of modern living. Premchand’s approach demonstrated how the exigencies of modernist writing could be merged with Indian aesthetic modes to produce a result that had a strong impact on the Indian readership. W⏐X

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New Paradigms: Mannu Bhandari’s “Yahi sac hai” (This Here is the Truth) The style of Premchand’s later writing was an inspiration for other authors, such as those of the Nayi Kahani movement, who wanted to shift the perspective of narration away from the external social roles of the protagonists to their inner drives and doubts. Mannu Bhandari was attached to the Nayi Kahani movement and among the most prominent female authors in the group. Together with her husband Rajendra Yadava – editor of Hindi’s most prestigious literary magazine Hans and a prominent figure on the Hindi literature scene – she owns the publishing house Akshar Prakashan. “Yahi sac hai” describes a short but significant period in the life of a young woman called Dipa, who is well-educated and working on her doctoral dissertation. She is unmarried but has a relationship with Sanjay, to whom she plans to get married as soon as she can find a job. Previously, she had a very intense relationship with Nishith which he broke off, leaving her angry and disappointed. Dipa lives in Kanpur and applies for a position in Calcutta. When she goes there for the interview, she runs into Nishith. They spend a lot of time together and he helps her prepare for the interview. Dipa feels her affection for Nishith returning. From his behaviour, she concludes that he is about to apologize for having left her earlier and to admit that he still desires her. Nishith looks worried but does not show his feelings. Dipa hesitates to tell him about her planned marriage to Sanjay. Dipa is offered the job and returns to Kanpur. While Sanjay is away for a few days, she writes Nishith a letter asking him to declare his love and letting him know that she is willing to live with him in Calcutta. There is no reply from Nishith, and now Dipa starts to doubt her perception of Nishith’s feelings as well as her own emotions. Finally, a letter from Nishith arrives which contains nothing but a formal congratulation with the job. When Dipa then meets Sanjay again, she realizes that her true feelings are for him. “Yahi sac hai” bears many of the hallmarks of Nayi Kahani writing. The story is told through the eyes of Dipa and depicts her reactions and feelings in great detail. The setting is a young urban middle-class milieu during the 1960s and it is obvious that Dipa’s family has not arranged a marriage for her. The story shows a new era in Indian society: a woman in a job, highly educated, living alone, and having an open relationship before her marriage. The new situation is not a blessing for those involved, as it brings emotional turmoil, alienation, and uncertainty. The absence of parents and

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other relatives in the story who take over the decisions is conspicuous in this respect. The narration in the story mainly shows the perspective of Dipa and closely registers her thoughts and feelings in direct or indirect speech, often in the form of interior monologue. The picture we get of Dipa is surprisingly complete and rounded, considering the limited space for the description. The reader follows her confusion as her feelings for Nishith resurface and her doubts about the truth of her love for Sanjay arise. As the title of the story indicates, Dipa is looking for ‘truth’, which seems to have a strong existential connotation here: it seems that Dipa’s confusion is not only about the choice between two future husbands, but also concerns her own identity, her own perception of the world.21 For her, both men remain enigmatic and closed, as they do not reveal their emotions. This conundrum symbolizes the alienation of the typical young urban middle-class intellectuals that feature in Nayi Kahani stories. On the one hand, the protagonists in Bhandari’s story are much more developed than the characters in Premcand’s story. The characterization of Dipa is based mainly on a detailed description of her inner thoughts and there is also a dialogic quality in the narration, as it remains an open question for the narrator whether or not she has found her ‘truth’. On the other hand, it is as if the events in the story and the subsequent emotions do not originate in the characters’ initiative but that they overcome the characters. Their emotions come to them through influences from outside rather than emerging from their own psychology. There is little direct action on the part of Dipa or of the men around her: the events in the story consist mainly of reactions to the situation that besets the characters, leaving them unable to take conscious steps to change it, except perhaps for the letter Dipa writes to Nishith – but that, too, only serves to confirm yet again the lack of possibilities to take direct action. It seems that the message of the story lies in the detailed exposition of the mood, or rasa, of confusion rather than in the account of the actions or reactions of the characters. The existential angst induced by the choice between Sanjay or Nishith creates an emotional setting that determines every aspect of Dipa’s dilemma. 21 The existential dimension of the concept of truth is present in the word sac itself: it is derived from Sanskrit satya, which has the double meaning of ‘truth’ and ‘existence’, as it is based on the verb root ‘sat’, ‘to be’.

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The focus on the mood of the story severely restricts the characterization through psychological development or conscious action by the characters. However, as in Premcand’s story, references to cultural paradigms that conform to this mood add meaning to the tale, mixing Western and Indian stylistic modes. One example is the scene in which Dipa lies in bed after returning from Calcutta, letting her thoughts wander off. She used to look at a vase with flowers brought by Sanjay before falling asleep. With Sanjay’s absence, the flowerpot is empty, and triggers an image in her mind. She remembers a visit to a lake with Nishith: The emptiness of the vase increased the emptiness of my mind. I shut my eyes tight … in a moment the loose, blue water of the lake appears before my eyes, in which tiny waves occur. While I am looking at the water, an image of Nishith rises from the water. No matter how much I try to look at the water, I sense the unrest of his mind that is imprinted on his face, even when I am so far removed from him. His inability to speak out, his helplessness, his suffocation are with me even today. Slowly the surface of the lake becomes smooth and changes into a small writing table and I see Nishith sitting there, with a pen in one hand and his other hand entangled in his hair … the same inability, the same helplessness, the same suffocation… he wants to, but does not find, a way to write it down. He makes an effort, his hand shakes heavily, then stops … oh, it seems as if his suffocation will strangle my breath – I open my eyes immediately. The same vase, the same curtains, the same table, the same clock.22

The scene is a mirror of the opening scene, where Dipa sits in the same room looking at the same vase, clock, etc., waiting for Sanjay to come and visit her. The image of the surface of the water is a successful depiction of the mental process within her, but it leaves her almost completely passive; the vision happens to her and it is almost as if her sympathy with Nishith’s suffering also comes to her from the outside, not from her own feelings and passions. This dream-like scene marks a pivotal point in the story. After this vision, Dipa gets the letter from Nishith and immediately realizes that her perception was false. The realization that Sanjay is the one she loves takes hold of her as suddenly and externally as the initial doubts and affection for Nishith came to her. Whereas the externalization of emotion prevents characterization via psychological development, the scene nevertheless provides a large number of clues to the characters’ values and emotional involvement. Although the 22

Mannu Bhandari, “Yahi sac hai” (This here is the truth), in Bhandari, Shreshta Kahaniyam (My best stories) (Delhi: Akshar Prakashan, 1969): 138.

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opening scene shows a modern setting, typical of Nayi Kahani’s social environment, the scene evokes a well-known and powerful traditional image: that of the virahini, the woman waiting for her husband who is far from home as a soldier or merchant. The image is often used in medieval religious poetry in which the woman symbolizes the longing for reunion with the divine, with a strong connotation of unfulfilled love and sexual desire.23 The tension between this connotation and the modern setting of the opening scene sets the emotional register for the story. Other key scenes further establish the development of this register in the story, such as the meeting of Dipa and Nishith on a lakeshore, when Dipa waits for him to speak his heart. The scene has many elements that make it resemble the meetings of mythical lovers whose love is of a mystical, existential quality, such as Krishna and Radha, the stock lovers of devotional poetry. The theme of sacred, existential love is also alluded to in the names of the characters. Dipa (lamp/light) can refer to purity and the divine essence, which in Muslim imagery is symbolized in the ‘Light of God’ (nur-i allah). In a Hindu context, a lamp is associated with the home and various household rituals. A well-known image of existential love is that of the moth and the flame. Nishith means ‘night’, the opposite of light, the time of illicit love, of mystical contemplation and existential truth, which makes the resonances in the name of Dipa even more relevant. Dipa’s vision of Nishith’s face in agony appearing in the water of the lake echoes the poetic image of the dream-vision (khyal) in Persian and Urdu poetry. The meeting of the lovers in a dream as a sign of the ‘truth’ is a stock image in that context and adds a layer of meaning to Dipa’s vision. The vision of Nishith’s face in the water belongs to the same emotional register, as it evokes the riverbank, the favourite place for illicit meetings and one laden with erotic overtones. The water is also the place where identity is being won or lost; it is the place of death, as the body is cremated near the water and the ashes merge with the stream. It is also a place beyond the shelter of orderly society, where ‘true’ identity – to be obtained only through a trial like Dipa’s – can be found.24 23

The traditional image of the virahini is in many cases linked to the rainy season which causes her husband’s absence, as one cannot travel during the rains. This heightens the feelings of sexual frustration, as the rainy season is associated with sexual enjoyment, not least because the rain prevents other women’s husbands from returning home. 24 The association of love and renunciation is a very vivid image in medieval Indian Sufi poetry, where the lover is a yogi of love who goes through an initiation to find his divine

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The references to conventional images are essential to setting the emotional mood of the story and determine the extent and significance of Dipa’s predicament. They constitute an external characterization that is only partly reflected in the internal development of the characters. This kind of characterization may seem to lead to stereotypical stories with characters that cannot escape from their conventional roles, but in the context of Nayi Kahani, these images are highly significant, allowing the author to depict Dipa’s problem with great precision and sophistication. On the one hand, the images referred to lend Dipa’s choice between the two men an existential dimension: it is about who she is and with whom she feels complete. The images indicate that the passionate love for Nishith has a special quality, as it takes place outside the social framework and allows Dipa to explore her own identity. Marriage to Sanjay is embedded in the social setting of Kanpur and is a much safer bet. The love for Nishith, which turns out to remain elusive, gives her a brush with reality and truth that makes her accept the marriage with Sanjay. On the other hand, the perspective of Nayi Kahani is that of disillusionment with the validity of traditional cultural patterns. The cultural signs that give Dipa’s love for Nishith its existential quality also cause anxiety and confusion in the mind of this young woman, who embodies a new generation of young urban middle-class Indians. For them, the choices in life are no longer obvious or dictated by convention. The cultural signs they were brought up to recognize and accept as the ‘truth’ are no longer of eternal and absolute value. Mannu Bhandari plays very subtly with the ambivalence that these signs produce in Dipa’s mind by alternating between the conventional significance and modern ambiguities. Thus, Dipa’s doubt increases and leads her to a choice that is perhaps not that of her heart, but at least not one based on a false belief in the ‘old’ romantic values. This ‘double distancing’ – being suspended between rejection of the old values and the lack of new ones to replace them – forms the kernel of the conundrum depicted in “Yahi sac hai” and is typical of Nayi Kahani literature. It relies on the device of external characterization that is such a familiar feature of Indian fictional writing, but is applied with a dialogic ambivalence beloved. The image of love as a purifying renunciation is also well-known in Indian mythology, such as that of the love of the goddess Parvati, who performed a long penance to win the love of the god Shiva. Overall, the process of love outside the social framework of the arranged marriage involves a kind of withdrawal or refusal of social ties. Often it can be interpreted as a struggle to obtain an individual identity that is not dependent on social codes.

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that makes it effective in a modern literary context. Bhandari takes this technique a considerable step further than Premchand, but the principle is the same.

Conclusion The Nayi Kahani group was very influential in the development of postIndependence Hindi fiction. It developed a blueprint for the representation of the loss of identity and the existential angst of a generation that, like Mannu Bhandari herself, did not feel at home in the idealist world of their elders, but that also found little wholesomeness in modernized India. This dialogic tension between the cultural signs of the past and its disturbing meaninglessness in modern society is typical of the characterization applied by the Nayi Kahani authors. Mannu Bhandari’s story is a good example of the stylistic innovations of Nayi Kahani prose that changed Hindi writing after Independence. Western forms and styles were adopted, but at the heart of the narration and its aesthetic so many elements of Indian origin remain that they should be taken into account in any hermeneutics of modern Indian fiction. Especially characterization and dialogic narration in Hindi fiction are of a special, hybrid quality that has proven to be highly effective in the writing of modern authors. The argument of conservative critics against Nayi Kahani fiction was that it was not ‘Indian’ enough, for it parted with nationalist idealism and focused on the feelings of alienated urban youths, thus indicating the hold of political ideology over language and literature. ‘Indianness’ is an important qualification in the critical debate on modern Indian culture and lies at the heart of the political debate about establishing an Indian self-image in modern culture. In this debate, Indianness often stands for a monologic nationalism, which ignores the inherent hybridity of modern Indian culture. Indian writing assimilated Western literary forms in the same way as it digested earlier foreign influences. As with films, it used Western literary forms but filled these with content based on Indian imagery and symbolism. The stories by Premchand and Mannu Bhandari mark important points in this process within modern Indian writing. Characterization and dialogism in Hindi fiction employ a form of psycho-realism that is highly effective in a cultural context that places individualization at a distance from the world of social relations. Analyzing

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Hindi fiction through the theoretical perspective of Western literary theory and the concept of psycho-realism based on a highly developed individualism as it is known in Western societies fails to take due account of the intricate play with the emotional setting of the story and the references to cultural paradigms that determine the characters’ reactions to a dilemma or crisis. This effect is refined and flexible, allowing full expression of the themes of modern fictional writing in the Indian context, but requires a receptive or analytical perspective that is attuned to the aesthetic history of Indian writing. This difference shows that novel-writing is not bound exclusively to the aesthetic and rhetorical framework we know from Western writing, but that it seems to possess a functional autonomy that can be reproduced in various cultural settings. The work of Premchand, Bhandari, and other authors reflects the intense creative dialogue that was the result of the confrontation with Western culture during the last two centuries, in which modernity established itself in Indian society. In a new literary field, Hindi authors forged a new aesthetic model in which Western influence was added to the many imagined or real literary identities absorbed by Indian culture in the course of its long history.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981). Bhandari, Mannu. “Yahi sac hai” (This here is the truth) in Mannu Bhandari, Shreshta Kahaniyam (My best stories) (Delhi: Akshar Prakashan, 1969): 114–39. Clark, T.W., ed. The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970). Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1978). Dalmia, Vasudha. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997). Gaeffke, Peter. Hindiromane in der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Handbuch der Orientalistik, Zweite Abteilung, supplement 1; Leiden & Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1966). Kamleshvar. Nayi Kahani ki bhumika (Introduction to Nayi Kahani) (New Delhi: Akshar Prakashan, 1966). McGregor, R.S. “The Rise of Standard Hindi and Early Hindi Prose Fiction” (1970), in The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development, ed. Clark, 142–78. Orsini, Francesca. The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002).

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Premchand. “Kafan” (The shroud) (1935), repr. in 23 Hindi Kahaniyam (23 Hindi stories), ed. Jainendra Kumar (Delhi: Lokabharati Prakashan, 1969). Pollock, Sheldon, ed. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003). Rai, Alok. Hindi Nationalism (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000). Rakesh, Mohan. Mohan Rakesh: Sahityika aura sanskirtika drishti (Mohan Rakesh: his views on literature and culture) (New Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 1975). Shackle, Christopher, & Rupert Snell, ed. & intro. Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader (South Asian Texts 1; London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1990). Trivedi, Harish. “The Progress of Hindi, Part 2: Hindi and the Nation,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003): 952–1022. Yadav, Rajendra. Eka duniya samanantar (A parallel world) (New Delhi: Akshar Prakashan, 1968).

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In Search of a New Image — An Indian Madame Bovary?

G UZEL V. S TRELKOVA

Introduction: The Emergence of Modern Hindi Literature

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reaching far back into the past, Indian literature continued to be ‘traditional’ up until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Changes in traditional Indian society occurred much earlier than they were actually felt or reflected in literature, which was even more conservative than Indian society itself. Only gradually did Indians come into contact with the West. This process can best be described in terms of the image of a growing tree whose main branches represent the two major parts of India: the one that came in direct contact with the West (Calcutta/Bengal and Bombay/Maharashtra), and the other, which did not (Delhi, Benares, Prayag), hence remaining the ‘Hindi-speaking region’ for a rather long time. The first, however, influenced the latter and indirectly exposed it to Western, mainly British, culture. Through these contacts, especially under the influence of nineteenth-century Western literature, Indian literature underwent a transformation from traditional to modern writing, not only in poetry and drama but also in prose fiction.1

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See The Novel in Modern India, ed. I. Bakhtiyar (New Delhi: Sahitya Academi, 1964): 2. Here, the Indian scholar K.R. Shrinivasa Iyengar, in his introductory chapter, “A General Survey,” offers a helpful scheme mapping out the development of the novel in India from the first translations of the Bible to translations and adaptations of classic Western novels. See also Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition: Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997).

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The first Indian novels in the modern sense of the word were written in the Bengali and Marathi languages in the nineteenth century.2 Only later did novels in Hindi appear, becoming, by the early twentieth century, quite a popular genre, mainly consisting of mystic romances, tales of adventure, or detective stories.3 Often, they were translations or adaptations from Bengali, Marathi, or English.4 Premchand, later known as the ‘king of the Hindi novel’, in fact started his literary career by writing in Urdu and only later translated his novels into Hindi. It is with the appearance of writers like Premchand, Jayashankar Prasad, and Jainendra Kumar during the late1920s that the Hindi novel began to gain recognition as ‘proper’ literature – literature that advocated modern ideas, applied artistic techniques, and presented modern plots, themes, and heroes. Among the new heroes, there was also a growing number of heroines, and gender-oriented themes were not uncommon in modern Hindi literature. The chief characteristic of the new Hindi novel was their authors’ concern with ‘real life’, their preoccupation with the ongoing changes in society and potential ways to improve that society. Accordingly, many of the new novels took on the label sāmajik upanyās (‘social novel’). In order to emphasize the fact that they were no longer translations or adaptations, the expression maulik upanyās (‘original novel’) was increasingly added. In this article I shall focus on the aspect of gender, discussing a variety of heroines encountered in Hindi novels of the first half of the twentieth century. I set out to shed light on the process that brought forth, under the influence of English, French, and Russian literature, a new type of female protagonist. Specifically illustrated is the appropriation and integration of Western sources into Hindi literature, resulting in the introduction of the ‘modern heroine’. It will be shown, however, that this ‘modern heroine’ not only provided a gendered model for the modern Indian woman but, in fact,

2 The narratives Dashakumaracharita by Dandin, Vasavadatta by Subandhu, and Kadambari by Bana, all written in Sanskrit during the seventh century, are the earliest Indian ‘novels’ in a more general sense. 3 Peter Gaeffke, Hindi Literature in the Twentieth Century (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1978): 25. 4 See R.S. McGregor, “The Rise of Standard Hindi, and Early Hindi Prose Fiction,” in The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development, ed. & intro. T.W. Clark (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976): 142–81; Gopalray, Hindi upanyās kosh, 2 vols. (Patna: Granth Niketan, 1968– 69); Krishna Kripalani, Literature of Modern India: Panoramic Glimpse (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1982).

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also helped define a new sense of identity for the upper class and educated urban society as a whole.5

The Impact of European Literature It is a widely acknowledged fact that the modern Indian novel originated and developed under the influence of European literature.6 One of the pioneers of the modern novel was Ram Mohan Ray. In 1828, he founded the religious but progressive and Western-oriented society Brahmosamaj, with members of which he translated English literature into Bengali and wrote articles for periodicals on modern topics. Together they created a new literary language. This sphere of enlightenment initiated by Ram Mohan Roy later facilitated the emergence of a number of Bengali novels, including works by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay.7 Both the English language and literature in English played a crucial role in this process. India’s first generation novelists had hardly any access to Tolstoy, Melville or Flaubert. With total servility they imitated mediocre English novels, often devaluating their own talents in the process.8

Gradually, the situation changed. As Humayun Kabir writes,

5

In her study Mahadevi Varma and The Chayavad Age of Modern Hindi Poetry (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1983), Karine Schomer vividly shows the difficulties educated and independent women encountered when they aspired to actively participate in the various spheres of the ‘real world’. Hence, the new heroine, so often described in Hindi novels since the late 1920s, was still rarely found in the Indian educated urban society of the time. 6 See The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development, ed. & intro. T.C. Clark (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976); Gaeffke, Hindi Literature; and Hindi upanyās: samkalin paridrishya, ed. Mahip Sinh (New Delhi: Lipi Prakashan, 1980): 9; 49. 7 The first secular school in Calcutta, Hindu College, was founded on the initiative of Ram Mohan Roy in 1817. Later, Calcutta University was established and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, the future ‘Indian Walter Scott’ and ‘father of the Bengali historical novel’, was one of the first graduates. Rabindranath Tagore grew up in the atmosphere of Brahmosamaj, because both his father and his grandfather functioned as heads of this society. Tagore himself regarded Ram Mohan Roy as the founder of Bengali prose; Elizaveta Payevskaya, “Bengal’skaya literature,” Literatura Vostoka v Novoe vremja (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1975): 278. 8 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1985): 17.

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[Tagore] laid greater stress on feelings than on events. This was helped by his growing acquaintance with French, Russian and other European literatures […]. Gora is very different from any work of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and yet the vast canvas of the novel and its interminable debates remind of Russian masters. After Gora, the French influence became stronger and Tagore steadily moved towards the dominance of theme over plot and simultaneously of the mind over the heart.” 9

It is not uncommon for Indian writers to juxtapose Russian and French literature. An admirer of English and French literature, especially in terms of style, Jainendra Kumar (his novels will be analyzed in this essay) was also deeply impressed with the moral and ethical power of Russian literature, which, as he understood it, was not only concerned with entertaining or demonstrating stylistic beauty but had a purpose: to make the world a better place. In 1936, Jainendra expertly compared Russian and French novels and stories, emphasizing the major difference between them as follows. The Russian novel, he contends, has force, feelings, passion and knowledge, a purpose, but there is no individual felicity or happiness. There is an aim also in a Russian story, but its method is not to entertain. In a French story, the mode of presentation is quite the opposite, its forms of expression are beautiful, pleasant. We flow with it – but where? We cannot know, because it does not have any aim.10

Jainendra Kumar concludes by stressing the distinctiveness of Russian novels. One of his favourite writers was Leo Tolstoy – such was his admiration that, when editing a collection of tales in Hindi, he included a story by him.11 In fact, translation and adaptation played a significant role in the early period of the Hindi novel, but neither the title of the source text nor the name of its author was usually mentioned. The dictionary of Hindi novels contains numerous entries for works originally authored by Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Victor Hugo, or Anatole France – alongside many other novels translated into Hindi from European and Indian languages.12

9

Humayun Kabir, The Bengali Novel (Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1968): 47. Jainendra ke vichar, ed. Prabhakar Machve (Delhi: Purvooday Prakashan, 1986): 167; my tr. from Hindi. 11 Jainendra Kumar, Sahitya Chayan (Hindi gadya aur padya ka samgrah) (Delhi: Rajpal, 195-): 23. 12 Gopalray, Hindi upanyās kosh (Patna: Granth Niketan, 1968–69). 10

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Only, they are listed without mention of an author’s name and/or under completely altered and unrecognizable titles.13 Although we cannot deny the influence of Urdu or Bengali literary traditions, as shown above, European literature – mostly English, some French (usually through English translation), and partly Russian – also contributed significantly to the development of the Hindi novel as a genre.14 One of the most important contributions of Western literature was the psychological approach to characterization and the realism thereby achieved. In the late1920s and 1930s the ‘modern heroine’ appeared in Hindi novels in two variations that, for the sake of simplicity, will be called the ‘émancipée’ and the ‘Madame Bovary’ type, for she is a blend of a variety of modern Western heroines (including a number of Russian ones), the most prominent among them being Madame Bovary. This article aims to show the generic and primarily typological similarities between this twentieth-century Indian ‘modern heroine’ and those Western heroines described at least half a century earlier in European literature.

The Émancipée Type and the Indian Madame Bovary This article takes as its starting-point the premise that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – which is deemed to be the pioneer of a modernist European literature, if not the peak of French critical (or social) realism – has indeed affected Indian literature.15 The plot of this world-renowned novel is, in a 13 Gopalray, Hindi upanyās kosh, vol. 1. The author of the dictionary notes that “often neither the author’s name nor the original title were given on the cover page” (285). The dictionary includes, for example, ‘Uthelo’, 1894, translated from Bengali by an unknown author and referred to on the cover as “a novel of a Greece country” (ek Unan desh ka upanyās). Gopalray (Hindi upanyās kosh, 276) concludes: “Obviously, a novel in Bengali, based on Othello by Shakespeare, was translated into Hindi.” As for Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the dictionary indicates the novel Anna, translated into Hindi by Chhavinath Pandey in 1933 (Hindi upanyās kosh, 215). 14 For the impact of English literature in this context, see Natalya Vishnevskaya & Ekaterina Zykova, Zapad est’ Zapad, Vostok est’ Vostok? Iz istorii anglo-indiyskih literaturnyh svyazej v Novoe vremya (Moscow: Nasledie, 1996): 236. Using an English translation, Premchand translated Anatole France’s Thaïs in 1923 under the title Ahamkar (Egoism); Gopalray, Hindi upanyās kosh, vol. 2: 198. 15 Published in 1856 and the subject of a court hearing, Madame Bovary was highly appreciated by Zola and other French writers, as also by Russians, preeminently Ivan Turgenev. The first translation into Russian was published in 1858 – only two years after the publication of Flaubert’s novel. See also Henry James’s critical introduction to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, tr. W. Blaydes (New York: P.F. Collier, 1902): viii.

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nutshell, the story of a provincial girl who is brought up in a monastery and inclines to romanticism. After getting married to a mediocre doctor, Emma finds herself trapped in a life so dull that the only way to make it beautiful and meaningful is to fall in love. After having committed adultery twice, she can no longer bear the contrast between her dream and the reality she lives in: she ends her life. It was not so much the plot itself that was novel or strikingly original as the literary presentation of the heroine, Emma, and the world around her. Flaubert created a new type of literary heroine, to be adopted and developed further not only in French literature. The American Slavist Thomas Winner writes: We know that Chekhov was well acquainted with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and, of course, with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina […]. In Anna Karenina, as in Madame Bovary, unequal marriage and adultery bring tragedy. But “Anna on the neck” is ironic rather than tragic, as a superficial version of Tolstoy’s Anna wins in the end by conquering her husband’s world.16

In his study, Winner shows the impact that Flaubert’s novel had on Russian literature. Ivan Turgenev appreciated Madame Bovary highly, and Leo Tolstoy kept a copy in his Yasnaya Polyana library.17 If we accept the premise that Russian literature influenced Indian literature, then it seems only logical to expect to find traces of Flaubert’s novel in modern Indian prose as well. This great novel was indeed translated/adapted into Hindi twice, but only in recent years.18 It remains difficult to prove whether and to what extent Flaubert’s novel exerted an impact on Hindi writers, some of whom might have read the novel in the original version. It is a well-known fact, however, that English literature had a much greater impact on Indian literature. Hence, any direct influence of Flaubert’s novel is difficult to trace.19 16

Thomas Winner, Chekhov and His Prose (New York, Chicago & San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966): 178. 17 Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Andreevna, listened to a reading of Madame Bovary in 1919, several years after Leo Tolstoy’s death and in the first years after the October Revolution; Sofia Tolstaya, Dnevniki (Moscow: Hudojestvennaya literatura, 1978), vol. 2: 470. 18 Prem ki pyasi (Gastav Flaber ka upanyās) (Thirsty for love. Novel by Gustav Flaubert), tr. Amritlal Nagar (Delhi: Rajpal, 1988), and Madam Bovari, tr. Yugank Dhir (Meerat: Samvat Prakashan, 2004). 19 Some Hindi writers, among them the prominent author K.B. Vaid and the nativespeaking specialists in Hindi literature Harish Trivedi and Anil Janvijay, are hesitant to confirm the French novel’s influence on the development of Hindi literature, but would not deny, either, that Madame Bovary might well have inspired Hindi writers via Russian literature. More research is still needed here.

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This article therefore does not look at one ‘true adaptation’ of that particular novel and its heroine but, rather, discusses the adoption of the concept of a heroine and investigates the typological similarity reached in the process of appropriation. The literary model likely to be introduced by Flaubert through Russian literature enabless a better understanding of the modern heroines in Hindi novels from the 1920s through the 1950s. Female protagonists in Indian literature often represent types, mainly traditional ones associated with epic or Pauranic heroines – for instance, the ideal wife and mother (Sita/Sati or Pativratta) or the devoted lover (Radha).20 In nineteenth-century Bengali literature, Bonkimchondro introduced a type of divine–mythic persona, the goddess Devi, who was taken to be the personification of the Motherland. Later, Bharatendu Harishchandra developed this image in Hindi drama. Another type, also very popular in the ‘social’ novels of the first half of the twentieth century, is the prostitute (veshya), a fallen heroine in agony who deserves to be protected and ‘reformed’ by the ideal hero and with the help of society.21 It is interesting to note that it took only a rather short period of time for the ‘new heroine’ to develop into a fully-fledged literary character in Hindi literature. By the 1930s, when the Hindi novel as a genre was nearly fully established, the ‘new heroine’ to be discussed in the following had already been introduced. Within the span of only a few years, three heroines of the new type appeared in Hindi novels (now classics): Miss Anvari in Jayshankar Prasad’s Titli (1934), Miss Malati in Premchand’s Godan (1936), and Kalyani – later Mrs Asrani – in Jainendra Kumar’s Kalyani (1938–39). It is theoretically possible that this new type of heroine was randomly picked from a contemporary Western source without any corresponding image in real life. I am convinced, however, that a real-life role model of some sort first had to emerge outside the literary world before the fictional image could develop and undergo its transformation, acquiring specific features in the process of its literary evolution. Prasad’s Miss Anvary, for instance, is still presented as a negative personage, even approaching the veshya-type, while Miss

20

Such classifications have a very long history, starting with classical Sanskrit literature and medieval Indian literature. See also Usha Saxena Nelson, “A Woman’s Experience: Three Novels in Hindi,” Journal of South Asian Literature 12.3–4 (1977): 11. 21 For recent studies of some examples of this type, see Heroes and Heritage: The Protagonist in Indian Literature and Film, ed. Theo Damsteegt (Leiden: C N W S , 2003): 51–53, 66, 79.

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Malaty shows a combination of positive and negative features.22 In the end, however, she is classified as a positive heroine. Finally, Kalyani (to be discussed in more detail later) is the tragic heroine closest to the ‘Madame Bovary’ type. The Indian Madame Bovary is – as the French model – practically a tragic figure because, being still trapped in custom, she endeavours to break free from tradition to change her life but fails. Society’s disapproval drives her to commit suicide (in some of the Indian examples, the heroine falls ill and dies). The émancipée is a more optimistic variant of the Indian Madame Bovary. She pushes further than ‘Madame Bovary’ and could be perceived as the logical next step in the development of the ‘modern heroine’. She is associated with a westernized way of life and is equipped with a standard set of signifying features. In contrast to the Madame Bovary type, she is not only young and Western-educated, but also professionally employed (mostly in a medical profession, as either a doctor, a nurse, or a pharmaceutical chemist), and sometimes she even enjoys complete financial independence. Her independence, modernity, and sportive style are underlined by the fact that she not only usually owns a car but that she even drives it herself.23 Like her European literary gender mates of the time, she struggles for her rights but at the same time can be very romantic (the last feature also being a main characteristic of the Madame Bovary type). Still combining contradictory features, the émancipée type sometimes falls back into behavioural patterns more typical of Madame Bovary. Then the heroine is described as an enthusiastic or even gushing young lady who experiences her life as banal while dreaming about another, less ordinary existence. She may be an unfaithful spouse who experiences her husband’s mediocrity as a burden. (This feature is present in later Hindi novels, as will be shown in due course below.) Some of the émancipée heroines, however, also meet a tragic end. This happens rather rarely, and hardly ever does she commit suicide, for Hindi 22 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1985): 151, considers Malaty to be “a stock character: the bad westernised woman, a stereotype that persists in Indian culture as a vamp of the commercial Hindi film.” In my view, it was Premchand who, in his novel, created this specific type, which later indeed became a “stock character.” 23 Here, an analogue to the traditional horse–woman can be seen. Heroic female characters and perfect warriors like Rani of Jhansi Lakshmi Bai, a national heroine who participated in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, are known from historical novels in Bengali by Bonkimchondro (Devi Chaudhurani) and in Hindi by Vrindavan Lal Varma (Rani of Jhansi Lakshmi Bai).

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writers of the time, at least to some extent, still adhere to Indian classical poetics, which do not allow for a dukhant or tragic ending. The literary option of a tragic ending was introduced to modern Indian literature in the nineteenth century under the influence of European literature. Moreover, within Indian cultures and traditions, suicide has an entirely different valency than within the Western European context. This shows, for example, in the early novel Kankal (Skeleton) by Jayashankar Prasad, where the main heroine attempts to take her life several times, as she wants to punish herself for improper, unrighteous (adhārmik) doings.24 But she fails, because her dharma can be improved in a different way.25 However ‘modern’ she is, the new heroine of Hindi prose also inherited a number of features typical of the ‘ideal’ Indian heroine, and some rudimentary traditionalism can be traced. She is confronted with specifically Indian problems such as the prohibition on re-marriage by a widow or the condemnation of the custom of sati.26 Hence, discussing and analysing the new heroine of Hindi novels, what also needs to be investigated is the extent to which such a character presents a harmonious synthesis of ideological Eastern and Western models or, rather, an imposition of different ideological models.

Women in Male Perspective Almost as a rule, both female independent behaviour and romanticism find their way into the early-twentieth-century Indian novel through an educated male personage (a husband, father, or enlightened progressive ‘guru’) who realizes that the independence of women does not automatically entails infidelity but that it is one possible way of creating the ‘modern woman’ adequate to the demands of the new age. We find initial reflections and 24

Jayashankar Prasad, Kankal (1929; Illahabad: Bharati Bhandar, 1958). By committing suicide, the heroine of another novel, Apne apne ajnabi (To each his stranger) by Ajneya, impersonates the author’s approach to the discrepancy between Existentialism and traditional Indian religious thought and philosophy. See also Tatyana Dubianskaya, “Romanistika Dj. Prasada v literaturnom i ideologicheskom kontexte” (The Novels of J. Prasad in its Contemporary Literary and Ideological Context) (M.A. thesis, ISAA, Moscow University, 1998): 54. 26 Sati (in ‘colonial’spelling, ‘suttee’) is the tradition of a widow’s self-immolation on the cremation pyre of her husband. The tradition goes back to ancient times and was later observed mainly by the high castes. It is supposed to be voluntary, but in practice women were put under much pressure by relatives fearing public opinion. The tradition was prohibited by law in 1829. 25

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descriptions of this new approach in Bengali novels written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. Representing the rather long period from the 1870s to the late 1930s, they “were essentially women-centred stories in which women had been imagined from a great diversity of backgrounds, characters, moods as well as patterns of behaviour, so as to defy the stereotypical woman.”27 As will be shown below, these novels, mainly The House and the World by Tagore and Sarat Chandra’s A Parched House, created the new type of heroine that I define here as the émancipée or the Indian Madame Bovary. The ‘new heroines’ in Bengali, Marathi, and, later, Hindi novels were thus all created by male writers. In a patriarchal society, albeit one that was undergoing a process of modernization, men would, of course, foster their own conceptions of womanhood, traditional or modern. Often enough, the traditional patterns and literary types were still so powerful that the writers, in the process of creating the modern heroine, occasionally failed to overcome the prevailing paradigms. As a result, it could happen that readers perceived the émancipée type of heroine, for instance, as the more customary veshya type.28 Yayshankar Prasad’s Miss Anvari, a secondary figure in his novel Titli, displays features of an émancipée: education, a profession, and both social and economic independence. However, she comes across as a caricature – perhaps understandably so, as the “western woman, however rare, posed a threat to the traditional concept of womanhood – which had to be reaffirmed through contrast.”29 The assumed superiority of India (the East) over Europe (the West) is a determining element in the attitude of Indian writers – and, undoubtedly, it is crucial for Prasad. In his play Chandragupta (the name of a Hindu king who fought Alexander the Great), one of the heroines, Cornelia, is a Greek gentlewoman who is impressed by Indian

27

Banani Mukhia, Women’s Images, Men’s Imagination: Female Characters in Bengali Fiction in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002): 9. Mukhia analyzes various social roles and gender relations, applying different methodologies, in particular historical and sociological approaches, whereby philological analysis is not the author’s prime objective. 28 Even the Indian progressive scholar Nirupama Pota, in Content Analysis of Hindi Literature (Delhi: Himalaya, 1987): 373, labels the educated lady Miss Anvary in the novel Titli by Jayashankar Prasad “a prostitute.” 29 Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, 152.

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culture and wisdom.30 She does not reject her own culture but instead accepts Indian cultural values alongside her own.31 After reading a selection of male-authored Bengali and Hindi novels, one can easily come to the conclusion that, by the 1930s, male heroes had completed the basic process of consumption and appropriation of Western modernity. They had adopted Western culture to such an extent that they were now setting out to help their female literary partners to do the same, transforming them into modern women and ushering in the new type of heroine in the process. As a rule, this ‘new heroine’ in Hindi literature is presented in juxtaposition with a traditional Indian woman, a woman portrayed as the embodiment of traditional womanhood as propagated, for instance, in the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata or as prescribed by dharmashastras.32 The new heroine, however, emerges from a layer of traditional Indian society that has been coming into contact with the West, accepting its ways or even attempting to absorb them.33 Comparing the modern and the traditional woman, most of the male writers, interestingly enough, tried to convince their readers that ‘the new heroine’ was only ostensibly westernized, but that she, in fact, represented the new, the modern Indian woman who was to be seen as the logical continuation of the heroine to be found in Indian literature up until then. Depending on whether a heroine’s ‘modern’ way of behaviour is condemned or justified by society – through the voice of the male author/narrator – she would develop into an émancipée or an Indian Madame Bovary.34 30

Jayshankar Prasad, Chandragupta (Illahabad: Bharati Bhandar, 1949). Interestingly, Indians regard the Greeks as barbarians in this drama, which is based on the historical sources of Buddhist times – an attitude characteristic of Indian Brahmans up until the early nineteenth century. See Gerasim Lebedev, Istoriya Vsemirnoj literatury (Moscow: Nauka, 1988): 522–23. 32 Dharma (law, order); dharmashastras and dharmasutras are ancient works of religious commandments and jurisprudence attributed to various founders of the Vedic schools. On traditional heroines in Indian literature, see Indiyskaya jena, ed. Irina Glushkova (Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura, 1996). 33 As mentioned earlier, one part of Indian society accepted the behaviour of the English in terms of tolerating it; the other part adopted it – sometimes in ridiculous and, with regard to tradition, forbidden ways: taboos were broken – for example, meat and alcohol were consumed and the sea was crossed, entailing the loss of caste. 34 The ‘new heroine’ does not necessarily have to be Indian; she can also be English, as an example will illustrate later. In such cases, the perspective taken is that of the Indian side and, quite naturally, in a Hindi novel, India is presented as being superior. Accordingly, the European heroine adopts Indian traditions while continuing to be ‘modern’. 31

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During the period under discussion we can hardly find a single woman writer of novels in Hindi literature. There were a few women poets, such as Mahadevi Varma and Subhadra Chauhan, but the time for women writers in Indian literature was still to come.35 Since the 1950s the Indian woman has lifted up the Romantic polyana patch-work of a purdah to have a hard look at society’s injustices towards her. Hence she reads about Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Gauri, Rukmani and Manisha and keeps her eyes open. She has to see the new dawn through her own eyes.” 36

Besides confirming the Western influence on Indian literature (and on its readers), Krishnaswami also shows that female notions of a modern heroine could differ from the male perspective, stressing “the woman’s awakening consciousness in her confrontation against a male-dominated, traditionaloriented society.”37

The Novels by Jainendra Kumar The novels by Jainendra Kumar (1905–88), one of the most prominent Hindi writers, vividly illustrate the evolution of literary presentation and perception of the ‘new heroine’. The novels also give proof of the author’s maturing process, which, on the other hand, could not be appropriately understood in isolation from the general literary process in India. I will therefore discuss Jainendra’s heroines in relation to others featuring in novels by famous contemporary Hindi writers like Premchand, Jayshankar Prasad, Yashpal, and Ajneya. Noteworthy is the fact that three out of the five novels to be discussed here feature an eponymous heroine.38 All of the heroines’ names are significant and ‘speaking’: The name Katto evokes an association with the word katta ‘healthy and strong’. Kalyani means ‘doing well or doing good 35

Schomer, Mahadevi Varma, 176. Shantha Krishnaswamy, Glimpses of Women in India (New Delhi: Ashish, 1983): 21. The 1950s saw an increasing number of women writers. There are 101 names of Indian women writers included in the reference book Hindi ki mahila sahityakar, ed. Milinda Satyaprakash (Delhi: Roopkamal prakashan, 1960). 37 Krishnaswamy, Glimpses of Women, 21. 38 Generally speaking, it is a rather common feature that Indian writers choose for an eponymous heroine; two of the three novels by Jayshankar Prasad, Titli and Iravati, for instance, are titled after their heroine. Even the generic term in Marathi for the novel, Kadambari, goes back to such an eponymous heroine: it is the title of a classical Sanskrit novel by Bana (seventh century A D ). 36

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things’. In Sanskrit, Sukhada means ‘a feminine giver of happiness and/or pleasure’. The full form of the name is Sukhadevi, goddess of happiness. So both the names translate as ‘giving happiness and being happy’. Sunita stands for a good upbringing, for reason and discipline; the heroine knows how to conduct herself. The name Mrinal refers to a holy flower in the Hindu tradition: Mrinali is the ‘stem of a lotus’, which is also the symbol of another goddess of happiness, Lakshmi. The heroines’ fate, however, contradicts the meaning implied by their names. Herein resides some concealed irony: the titles indicate how the plot is supposed to develop, but the fate of the heroines turns out the opposite way, contradicting the meanings of their names. Jainendra had a long and successful creative career, interrupted only by the Second World War (which was a most drastic socio-historical way for Europe to exert influence on Indian writers). He produced many short stories and numerous novels, five of which will be discussed in this essay. Four of his novels came out during the colonial period; only the last one, Sukhada, was written after India obtained independence but is logically connected to the previous four novels.39 In a nutshell, here first the plots of all five novels. Parakh (A trail, 1929) describes the relations of four characters. After obtaining his degree, a young lawyer named Satyadhan returns to his estate in a village and continues his friendly relations with the girl, Katto, whom he used to teach during his home leaves. Katto is fourteen years old but already a bal-vidhva – a child-widow (married at the age of four and widowed at five). She loves Satyadhan, but his marriage to the rich girl Garima – the sister of his friend Bihari – is already arranged. It is, in fact, Katto who persuades Satyadhan to agree to that marriage. Satyadhan, in turn, arranges the marriage between Katto and his friend Bihari. The latter is the typical ideal hero of Hindi novels of that period, eager to serve his Motherland and help the poor, but also living in accordance with his progressive ideas – for instance, by marrying a widow. At the end of the novel, Bihari sends his wife Katto to her village to teach children. He himself plans to be a farmer and to distribute all his money among the poor. The

39

Jainendra stopped work on his novel Sukhada after the first two chapters. Years later, his son came across these two chapters, and on his initiative they were published in a literary periodical. Readers then asked for them to be continued, so that Jainendra finally took up writing again and successfully continued until his last days.

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novel ends with the words: “And they both made a fresh start in their own different ways. Who knows when they will meet again!”40 Sunita (1934/36) depicts the relation between Sunita, her husband Shrikanta – a lawyer – and his friend Hariprasanna, who is an artist (abstract painting) and a revolutionary. Sunita’s husband works in Delhi; she, the beautiful and perfect Indian wife, stays at home and runs the household; the only distraction is an occasional evening at the movies. Their life is far from exciting but still uncommon when compared to the usual traditional patriarchal life of an Indian family. It is when Hariprasanna enters their life that it takes on a quality of extraordinariness. However, Sunita’s and her husband’s world might appear to be artificial, a ‘distillate creation’, but the starting point of the novel is not atypical: Shrikanta meets his friend, whom he has known since college, and invites him to his house, asking Sunita to look after their guest.41 He does not merely act out of friendship for Hariprasanna but also in order to break the monotony in the daily existence of his wife, whom he wants to help leave the antahpur – the closed part of the traditional Indian home where women spent most of their lives, deprived of the right to participate in the world outside, the playing field of men. With Hariprasanna, change enters their lives, which take a new turn. The housewife slowly transforms into the muse of the revolutionary painter who takes part in conspiratorial political activities. In fact, Sunita is described as a source of inspiration for male protagonists, while she herself is inspired by Hariprasanna most of all. She is ready to ‘belong’ to him – a scandalous twist for a Hindi novel of the time.42 Hariprasanna leaves, disappearing from the life of his friends, and Sunita returns to the confined world of her former life. Tyag-patr (Letter of resignation, 1937) relates the story of the lawyer Pramod and his aunt Mrinal.43 After getting the news of Mrinal’s death, Pramod gives notice and devotes his time to the remembrance of his nice and charming aunt, who lost her parents and was brought up by her elder 40

Jainendra Kumar, Parakh (1929; Bombay: Hindi granth ratnakar, 1956): 142. This and all of the other translations from Hindi are by the present author. 41 We find comparable pairs of college friends in novels by Jayshankar Prasad, Premchand, Ajneya, Nirala, Yashpal, and other Hindi writers. Sometimes they are designed as protagonist and antagonist, but more often they complementing each other, helping the author to express different influences on the heroine. 42 “Don’t you love me? I do not resist! Take me!” Jainendra Kumar, Sunita (Delhi: Purvoday Prakashan, 2000): 188. 43 Jainendra Kumar, Tyag patr (Delhi:Purvoday prakashan, 1956).

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brother – Pramod’s father. The novel presents Pramod’s memories of her. In her youth, Mrinal falls in love with the brother of her school girlfriend. When Pramod’s mother finds out, she quickly arranges Mrinal’s marriage to someone else. As a joyful and naive girl, Mrinal mentions that innocent love to her husband, who thereupon throws her out of the house.44 Practically without any resistance, Mrinal fades away and dies. Pramod met Mrinal several times, initially as the pregnant mistress of a charcoal-burner. He then found out that she had tried to become a nurse in a missionary hospital, wanting to keep her baby daughter there. But the plan failed because Mrinal refused to be baptized. Unexpectedly, Pramod met her again in the house of his fiancée, where she worked as the governess. He informed his future parents-in-law about his family connection to Mrinal. As a result, the wedding was cancelled and Mrinal dismissed. For the last time, Pramod met Mrinal when she was very ill and living in dire poverty, but she refused to accept his help. After her death, he resigns from his job, wishing to withdraw from a society that ruins good, innocent people.45 Kalyani (1939) is the story of a talented, English-educated rich woman.46 She is simultaneously a poet, a social worker, a practising doctor who opens a drug-store, and a religious activist (even establishing a temple in her home where representatives of different beliefs are welcome). Despite all her professional activities, Kalyani also wants to be a housewife. She is married to a doctor, a very greedy and jealous man who even beats her. At the end of the novel, she dies giving birth to a son. Her neighbour, a lawyer who sympathizes with her but who is unable to help, recounts her story. At her request, however, he promises to take care of the child she was expecting and that was the reason for her not taking her own life. Sukhada (1952) is the story of a young woman of the same name who is happily married with a son.47 When her husband brings home, as a servant, a young boy who also happens to be a revolutionary, she gradually becomes involved in the nationalist movement and the struggle for India’s independence. The boy and his friends end up in prison while Sukhada is active as a women’s representative in a political organization. She finally 44 This is a typical twist, also to be found in other Hindi novels; see, for instance, Kankal by Prasad or Sevasadan by Premchand. 45 This character – practically Jainendra’s alter ego – reappears in the novel Anam Svami (A nameless Svami- saint), written in 1974. 46 Jainendra Kumar, Kalyani (Bombay: Hindi granth ratnakar, 1953). 47 Jainendra Kumar, Sukhada (Delhi: Hindi Pocket Books, 1970).

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leaves her home and devotes herself completely to her political work. In her mid-thirties, Sukhada writes down her story; very ill and sensing her imminent death, she is hospitalized. She is happy when, after a long time, she receives a letter from her husband, who has forgiven her at last. Apologetically, she addresses the reader: “Now I am ill, then I was young … Oh, my kind reader, forgive me that in the middle of the story I am stepping out it. But look how weak I am….”48

Literary Patterns and the Psychological Approach The synopses of Jainendra’s novels given above reveal a certain literary pattern: an educated man helps or tries to help the heroine to leave the restricted world she lives in to enter the ‘outside world’, where she struggles to find her own way but eventually fails, in that she meets an untimely death (Sukhada, Mrinal, and Kalyani) or returns to her former ‘ordinary’ life (Sunita).49 Only Jainendra’s first and most idealistic novel has an open ending, and still, the reader is not sure if the road that lies ahead of Katto will lead to happiness. The fate of Jainendra’s heroines reflects their life in a hierarchical social structure where, as Peter Gaeffke rightly noted with regard to Ajneya’s novel Shekhar, “the individual has only the options of adjustment or expulsion.”50 Although Hindi authors do their best to place their protagonists in a new and modernizing world, the anachronistic reality still prevails in the world of fiction. A triangle – and a quadrangle in the case of Parakh – could schematically present the relations of the Jainendra’s characters, who are always few in number, as are the events in the narrative.51 Possibly due to Western influence, emphasis is placed on the relation between the sexes as approached from a psychological perspective. Modern Indian literature before 48

Jainendra Kumar, Sukhada, 168. That male protagonist can be a home teacher, as in Parakh and Tyag-patr, or the husband, as in Sunita and Sukhada. In the latter novel, Jainendra has his heroine utter the following words: “The husband is a door, through him we are connected with the world of people” (23). Only Kalyani has already received an education abroad when she gets married. As was rather common at the time, most of Jainendra’s male heroes are lawyers and doctors. A lawyer was the ideal hero: he could help change the principles of justice regulating Indian society, evoking associations with the national leader Mahatma Gandhi. 50 Gaeffke, Hindi Literature, 51. 51 See also Annie Montaut, “A Story of Tyag. Coping with Liminality,” in Narrative Strategies. Essays on South Asian Literature and Films, ed. Vasudha Dalmia & Theo Damsteegt (New Delhi: Manzar Khan, Oxford UP, 1998): 136–49. 49

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Jainendra was, as a rule, either socially oriented or depicted the life of large patriarchal families. Most Indian scholars find that the chief traits of Jainendra’s writing are his psychological approach to character and his religious–philosophical ideas. 52 Gaeffke contends that “the more Jainendra grew as a writer, the more he felt himself an interpreter of Gandhism in Hindi literature.”53 However, without the European influence, particularly that of Freud and Nietzsche, the psychological side of Jainendra’s talent would not have blossomed in the way it did.54 Jainendra started off as a follower of Premchand, whose works are now considered classics of Hindi literature. Jainendra is praised for going further than Premchand in the analysis of human character and relationships. In his novels he aims at investigating the ‘life of a soul’. In the preface to his first novel, Parakh, he wrote that to “all characters I gave the compassion [sahānubhūti] of my heart [...] There is no deity or animal in this world, all are human beings [ādmī], lower than a deity and higher than an animal. So who can refuse compassion?”55 We can still hear the Indian tone, but at the same time Jainendra’s novels show his European psychological approach to the relation between man and woman.56 In Tyag-patr, for instance, he alludes to a possible love relationship between Mrinal and her nephew, who followed and observed his aunt’s love life – an aunt who was not much older than he and to whom he felt strongly attracted. As a boy, he could not understand the contradiction between what is said and what is done, but he did his best to understand the feelings of a young girl fallen in love. It is in Jainendra’s style that the influence of the European tradition becomes obvious; rejecting the typically over-romanticized and openly sentimental scenes of mediocre Hindi novels, he here prefers the style of Tolstoy or Chekhov. 52

Jainendra, vyaktitv aur krititva, ed. Milinda Satyaprakash (Delhi: Suryaprakashan,

1963). Jainendra was a devoted Jain and some of his critics are of the opinion that he was

more of a philosopher and religious figure than he was a writer; Rama Darasa Misra, Modern Hindi Fiction (New Delhi: Sahitya Academi, 1983): 151–53; Chandrakant Bandivadekar, Jaynendra ke upanyās: Marm ki talash mein (New Delhi: Purvoday prakashan, 1984). 53 Gaeffke, Hindi Literature, 45. 54 Freud’s works were translated into Hindi as early as 1910 and quickly gained popularity in intellectual circles. Shekhar by Ajneya is considered to be one of the first novels written under Freudian influence. See also Annie Montaut, “Western Influence on Hindi Literature: A Dialogical Process (Agyeya’s Apne-apne ajnabi),” in Literature, Language and the Media in India, ed. Mariola Offredi (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992): 143–45. 55 Jainendra Kumar, Parakh, 3. 56 See also Lidia Ginzburg, O psihologicheskoj proze (1971; Moscow: Intrada, 1999).

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Jainendra often constructs an ideal situation for his heroine – for ‘the purity of the experiment’, detached from any real-life environment. She appears cut off from all family relations or social structures other than those of the triangle/quadrangle scheme. At the same time, the author aims to make the setting plausible and close enough to real life. In this context, preface and conclusion play important roles, appearing as they do in each of the novels under discussion. Prefaces and conclusions were typical features of nineteenth-century European literature. With their help, the author introduced the main characters, provided plausible explanations for the existence of certain written sources, such as memoirs handed over by a friend or a manuscript found by chance, and he directly commented on both his protagonists and the main issues of his novel. This literary strategy still lives on in Indian literature today, sometimes giving the impression of the novel’s being a pastiche of a bygone age. In Jainendra’s work, this link with European literature is of great importance. The preface to Tyag-patr (Letter of resignation) informs the reader that this ‘life-story’ was initially written in English and only afterwards translated into Hindi.57

The Intertextual Dialogue of Indian Writers and the Spread of New Literary Models A direct European impact injected a strong psychological element into Jainendra’s writing, as was shown above. Other aspects of Jainendra’s novels point to an indirect Western influence through literary dialogue with his contemporaries, such as the Indian writers Premchand and Tagore. The plot and central ideas of Sunita, for example, immediately remind an Indian reader of a well-known novel by Tagore, Ghaire Baire (The Home and The World, 1916). The triangle central to the plot of Sunita is reminiscent of what we find in Tagore’s novel: the husband (Nikhilesh) introduces a revolutionary friend (Shondip) to his wife (Bimala). Both husbands want their wives to become more independent, educated, and acquainted with the outside world. Tagore’s revolutionary aspires to turn the rather shy housewife into a revolutionary and an inspiration for other revolutionaries.58 Some scholars see Nietzschean traits in Shondip as well as some resemblance to 57

Jainendra Kumar, Tyag patr, 7. Tagore describes the period of the Svadeshi andolan (native; made at home) movement of 1905–06. Jainendra stories are set in a later period, but the core of the historical approach is the same: the struggle for India’s independence. 58

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the characters of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed: they consider themselves to be superior to others and are willing to sacrifice anybody in order to reach their goal.59 Tagore’s novel and its heroes, in their turn, were compared to the Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chottopadhay’s Grihadaha (A parched house). The tragedy of human emotions is seen in its most acute form in Grihadaha [… and] may be regarded as Chatterji’s reply to the problem which Tagore had posed in his “The House and the World”. Bimola in Tagore’s novel was in love with her husband Nikhil till Sandip burst into her love. It seems for a while as if the impact would dislodge her from her orbit, but very soon she discovers the inadequacies in Sandip. The tragedy was averted but only because Sandip was an unequal rival. In Grihadaha, Achola is torn between her love for Mahim and Suresh […] One of Chatterji’s favourite themes is the clash between womanly feelings and social sanctions. Her traditional beliefs are however equally strong and often make her resist the call of love.60

Jainendra did not conceal the fact that his novel Sunita was very closely connected with those two Bengali novels. He even discussed with Tagore some of these similarities, stressing the challenging necessity of maintaining the distance between an inner and outer world.61 It is important to note that those two Bengali novels – which are the most popular and most translated novels in India – were also influenced by the Russian literary tradition, most clearly by Tolstoy. The Russian Indologist Serebryany has shown how Sarat Chandra adapted ideas and images from Russian literature.62 In the process, they took on entirely Indian meanings, despite their 59

Lyudmila Saraskina & Sergey Serebryany, “F.M. Dostoyevskij i R. Tagor,” in Istoricheskaya tipologiya, literaturnye vliyaniya / Vostok–Zapad ed. Leonid Alaev, Mikhail Gasparov, Alexandr Kudelin & Elizar Meletinsky (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), 129–69. 60 Kabir Humayun, The Bengali Novel, 76, 80. Here the title of the novel Grihadaha is translated as ‘The House Aflame’ and the author’s name is given in its Bengali pronunciation (Shorotchondro) or as Chatterji. 61 See Jainendra Kumar, Ye aur ve (Delhi: Purvoday Prakashan, 1954): 9. This book contains the writer’s memoirs, partly in interview form. The book starts off with the recollection of Jainendra’s acquaintance with Tagore (which underlines the importance of this legendary literary figure for Jainendra.). But the dialogue between the two writers hardly has the quality of a proper discussion, first, because Jainendra did not speak Bengali, and secondly, because he felt and behaved like a shishya (a pupil) interacting with a guru – the world-famous poet Rabindranath Tagore. 62 Sergey Serebryany, “Indiyskoe perevoploschenie Anny Kareninoy (roman ‘Sojjenie doma’ Sh. Chottopadhaya)” (An Indian transformation of Anna Karenina [The novel ‘A parched house’ by Sh. Chottopadhaya]), Na semi yazykah Indostana (Moscow: I V R A N , 2002): 124–63. Sarat Chandra was a very keen reader and, according to his own words, he

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persistent closeness to the Russian source of inspiration. Sarat Chandra not only accepted the ideas of Leo Tolstoy but also opposed some of them, ‘arguing’ with Tolstoy and Tagore through his fiction and thereby creating a so-called parampara or silsila (tradition, chain), a dialogue between French-influenced Russian literature and Indian literature (via English, Bengali to Hindi). The list of novels featuring an Indian Madame Bovary or émancipée can easily be extended.63 After Jainendra’s heroes of the 1930s came the ‘terrorists’ described by Ajneya and Yashpal in the 1940s. In their youth, the two writers belonged to anticolonial groups fighting for freedom; they started writing in prison.64 Later they became prominent and respected writers – and very much influenced by modern European literature. Their modern protagonists seem far removed from normal Indian life, yet they also resemble the well-known Bengali literary heroes created by Tagore and Sarat Chandra. Yashpal’s first and controversial novel Dada Kamred (Elder Brother–Comrade, 1941), a novel that was very much influenced by Marxist ideology, can indeed be read as a literary reply to Jainendra’s Sunita. Yashpal remodels a scene between Sunita and Hariprasanna and introduces a new type of revolutionary, one who does not run away as Jainendra’s character does. Yashpal’s hero even asks his future lover, the rich and westernized Shaila, to perform a kind of striptease for him. Ajneya became one of the most interesting Hindi writers and is also considered ‘the most westernized’ among the Hindi writers between the 1940s and the 1960s. In three of his novels we encounter a ‘modern heroine’. There is Shashi (Shekhar: ek jivani [Shekhar: a life], 1942–44), who is ready to leave her husband after her beloved Shekhar is released from prison, and Rekha (Nadi ke dvip [Islands of the river], 1952), who wants to be married to the man she loves but he is too selfish and egocentric to see

read Anna Karenina more than ten times and Tagore’s novels even more frequently (cited from Serebryany, “Indiyskoe perevoploschenie Anny Kareninoy,” 135). 63 See, in this connection, Theo Damsteegt, “Female Protagonists and the Struggle for Independence,” in Heroes and Heritage, ed. Theo Damsteegt, 94–111. 64 Yashpal was sentenced to fourteen years of solitary imprisonment. He wrote a handbook on Marxism, studied foreign languages, and even got married in prison; with the help of his wife, who was also a political prisoner, he was released. Ajneya (a pseudonym meaning ‘unknowable’) projected his own biographical features onto his protagonist Shekhar, who relates Ajneya’s life after his release from prison.

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her love.65 The two heroines of his last and most ‘Western’ novel (influenced by French Existentialism and written almost as though in dialogue with novels by Camus and Sartre) are not Indian but most likely Scandinavian. Independent and living on their own, Yoke and Selma could be classified as belonging to the émancipée type. But both are also preoccupied with Indian religious philosophy, and they both leave the material world for good as virtuous Indian women do, finding peace in God. Hence, in the end, Indian spirituality overcomes Western practicality and pragmatism.66

Jainendra’s Novels and the Indian Madame Bovary Returning to Jainendra, it is interesting to trace the similarity between the plots and characters of his well-known novels and those created by Flaubert, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. As was noted earlier, Jainendra follows a certain pattern. A love triangle is central to the plot and all his heroines are, at least to some extent, romantic and idealistic young women, imagining better worlds outside their ordinary, dull lives. They are gifted and beautiful but do not know how to use their god-given talents. Typically, it is their husbands who make them see the necessity for change – and alter their life is what they try to do, with infidelity as one possible avenue. As with Madame Bovary, they are defeated in the end, with death resulting for some.67 There is no evidence that Jainendra consciously used the plot of Flaubert’s world-famous novel. But as stated earlier, not so much the plot itself 65

Ajneya, Shekhar: ek jivani (Shekhar: a life) (1942–44; Benares: Sarasvati, 1955) and Nadi ke dvip (Delhi: Sarasvati, 1952). It is worth noticing that the Indian scholar Suresh Sinha has found many correspondences between Shekhar:ek jivani and Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe (see Gaeffke, Hindi Literature, 50). 66 Ajneya, Apne apne ajnabi (To each his stranger) (Delhi: Bharatij Gyanpith, 2001). 67 It is obvious that in Jainendra’s novels only the female protagonists die – most probably due to Indian mentality and literary tradition that does not allow for a novel to end with the death of a male hero. It is therefore remarkable that Sarat Chandra’s hero Suresh from the novel Grihadaha does perish in the end. According to Serebryany (“Indiyskoe perevoploschenie Anny Kareninoy,” 146), this manifests the friction between Indian literary traditions and Tolstoy. Disillusioned with his love-relation, Suresh, a doctor, knowingly exposes himself to a fatal disease to meet his certain death. Readers familiar with the classics of Russian literature are likely to associate Suresh with Doctor Dymov from Chekhov’s “Poprygunya.” Serebryny (“Indiyskoe perevoploschenie Anny Kareninoy,” 143) furthermore points to an analogy with the Russian hero Bazarov from Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

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is relevant here as the many similarities in the character-traits of his heroines, each of whom descriptively resembles Madame Bovary, so much so that it almost rings in the reader’s ear: ‘Katto/Sunita/Mrinal/Kalyani/ Sukhada, c’est moi’. With its distanced narrator and the attempt to undertand its heroine’s inner world without imposing the author’s views on the reader, Jainendra’s style can be compared to that of Flaubert. There are other features they have in common, and the textual similarities permit the assumption that Jainendra was indeed acquainted with Flaubert’s novel.68 A possible indirect link with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is the well-known short story “Fidget Lady” by Chekhov.69 Jainendra knew and read Russian literature; his favourite writers were Dostoyevsky and Chekhov and it is undisputed that they had some influence on his writing.70 So it seems most probable that Jainendra was also acquainted with the story “Poprygunya,” although the resemblance of this story to Flaubert’s novel might not have struck him.71 Chekhov tells the story of a young, joyful, and happily married woman, Olga, whose husband – Doctor Dymov – does not object to her leading an out-of-the-ordinary life.72 While he is consumed by his work, she meets up with artists, and soon she even joins some of them for a couple of months to study painting. Olga attracts and easily become friends with all kind of extraordinary and talented people; one among them, a 68 Jainendra also interweaves in the plot passages of a publicist or religious–philosophical nature – for instance, articles on women’s liberation or a detailed report on a visit to a temple with an equally detailed discussion of religious aspects. 69 Anton Chekhov, “Poprygunya” (1892), in Rasskazy i povesti (Collection of short stories and novels), ed. N.A. Presnova & N.N. Akopova (Moscow: izd.Pravda, 1981): 322–47. Thomas Winner’s translation of the title is “Grasshopper,” Chekhov and His Prose (New York, Chicago & San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966): 69. Sometimes the title is also translated as ‘A Butterfly’, but that does not reproduce the condemnation and irony of the Russian title “Poprygunya.” 70 The heroine Mrinal from Jaiendra’s novel Tyag-patr, for instance, shows a striking resemblance to Sonechka Marmeladova in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. 71 Taking the basic pattern, even Anna Karenina by Tolstoy could be compared to Madame Bovary, although the writers obviously focus on different problems. It is generally accepted that Tolstoy in his novel tackles family dynamics, and that passion, in contrast to dissatisfaction, is more important than the romantic nature of Emma that moves the plot of Flaubert’s novel. But it is precisely the romantic nature which the protagonists have in common that allows for a comparison between Jainendra’s heroines and Chekhov’s Olga from “Poprygunya.” 72 Dymov falls in love with Olga while taking care of her ill father, this being just one of the many parallels with Flaubert’s novel. Here Doctor Charles Bovary meets Emma for the first time when treating her father’s broken leg. This meeting results in their marriage.

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painter, becomes her lover. But her attempt to start a new life in the ‘outside world’ fails miserably and she returns home. Aware of his wife’s infidelity, Dymov suffers. In the end, he dies aiding a sick child.73 By the end of the story, Olga realizes that she has failed to notice the most extraordinary and talented person in her life: her own husband. In Jainendra’s Kalyani and Sunita we find practically all of the abovedescribed text elements, and in Tyag-patr some of them. At the same time, many features are remodelled – Madame Bovary’s talent for painting, for instance, becomes the poetry writing of Kalyani.74 Emotions are sometimes reversed (for instance, jealousy and indulgence, laughter and tearfulness), or elements are emphasized and intensified (two doctors instead of one). The parallels and similarities are too manifold to list them all here, but they support the supposition that not only a vague inspiration but a direct influence and intertextual relations were at play between the Hindi novel under discussion and the chief works of Russian literature. More importantly, the ‘adopted elements’ were all re-interpreted and presented in new ways, something that makes Jainendra’s novels Indian, not European. Despite the fact that Jainendra is generally regarded as a psychological writer and not an author of pure ‘social novels’ (saamajik upanyās), he still cannot avoid voicing the conventional reactions of Indian society to such unconventional characters as his heroines. And as the time had not come yet for the modern women, reactions were negative. The books appeared ‘bookish’, not realistic, for their number was still too small – in both the real world and the fictional.75

73 In contrast to later Hindi novels, male heroes of nineteenth-century Russian literature do have to face death once in a while. 74 In this context, one may also compare the poetry of Kalyani with the music lessons that serve as a pretext for Emma Bovary to meet her love. But for Kalyani, writing poetry is not primarily a means of establishing relations with the other sex but a way of expressing herself. Moreover, her love-affair with a Premier (only casually mentioned in the novel) took place before her marriage and therefore does not constitute a breach of fidelity. 75 Tribhuvan Sinh, “Yatharth aur upanyāskar Jainendra Kumar,” in Jainendr Vyaktitv aur kritritv, in Satyaprakash, ed., 80. A more determined type of heroine appears in Hindi novels during the 1940s and 1950s; authors like Yashpal, Amritlal Nagar, Phanishvarnath Renu, or Ilachandra Joshi began writing about active and successful women; they were ready to fight for their Motherland at least as resolutely as for their personal rights as women.

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What’s in a Name? More Heroines in Hindi Novels It is no coincidence that, roughly between 1930 and 1960, the most popular literary genre in India was the ‘social novel’, for literature was supposed to help reform and improve society. It was meant to be neither ‘just entertainment’ nor ‘pure art’. Jainendra Kumar, a talented and original writer, expressed in his novels ideas that were of great importance for Indian society at the time. Other prominent Hindi writers (for example, Jayshankar Prasad and Premchand) also moved in this ‘mainstream’. In this context and with a focus on the new heroines’ names, I propose in the following to look at a number of contemporary novels not written by Jainendra. One name in particular deserves some attention. In English-speaking countries, Sheila or the variations Sheilah, Shelagh, Shelia, or Celia are popular names, as is Shila (or Sheela; Shaila) in India.76 Generally, a negative connotation (‘dissipated woman’) is attributed to the English version of the name, while the Indian author with this choice of name and the crossreferences to other writers indicates how modern his heroine is and how far removed from traditional society. The Sheilas in modern Hindi literature are numerous. In Dada Kamred (Elder Brother–Comrade, 1941) by Yashpal, for instance, we meet a young Indian woman named Shailabala, shortened to Shail.77 She succeeds in seducing the hero (a scene reminiscent of one in Jainendra’s novel Sunita), but the Indian ‘Sheila’ is no ‘femme fatale’. In Jainendra’s Tyag-patr, Sheela is a marginal character, a friend of the protagonist Mrinal, who falls in love with Sheela’s brother; from that point on her life turns tragic – or, one might say, from that moment on Mrinal turns into an Indian Madame Bovary. In the Urdu novel London ki ek raat (One night in London) by Sajjad Zahir, another Shaila inspires an English-educated Indian revolutionary to fight for his country’s freedom.78 Naming one of his ‘new heroines’ Shaila, Prasad plays on different connotations and meanings of the name. It helps him, for example, to express 76 It is noteworthy that Indians are convinced that the English adopted the name from India. Other variations of the name are possible: see Alexandr Rybakin, Slovar’ angliyskih lichnyh imen (Moscow: Russkij Yazyk, 1989): 177. In India, the name Shila (with short | H | ) means ‘stone’ or ‘rock’, while Sheela (with long | i : | ) means ‘morality, virtue, modesty’. Shaila is a derivative of both names, also meaning ‘morality, virtue, modesty’ or ‘mountain’ – with a reference to the goddess Parvati, the daughter of Himalaya, and the divine consort of Shiva. 77 Yashpal, Dada Kamred (Elder Brother–Comrade) (1941; Lukhnow: Viplav Karyalay, 1953). 78 This prominent Urdu writer (fl.1930–60) was one of the organizers of the Association of Progressive Writers of India and later a Communist leader in Pakistan.

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his conviction that Indian spirituality surpasses Western pragmatism and rationality. In his novel Titli, the English girl Shaila, a derelict from the streets of London, comes to Dhampur (the ‘City of virtue’), where the villagers initially treat her as ‘a fallen woman’.79 But soon she adopts Hinduism and, in due course, finds virtue and morality, even in the eyes of the Indians. She, in fact, becomes the role model for Titli. Prasad describes Titli as a playful little girl who grows and matures into a beautiful, educated woman who, despite all changes, stays close to nature and traditional society.80 She constantly aspires to perfect herself and her family life – in this yearning she remains unshakable. Titli, educated and influenced by the independent Shaila, develops into a role model for the other protagonists in the novel. Hence, Western influence is presented here as a prerequisite for the metamorphosis of a traditional Indian girl into a ‘new heroine’. Influence exerted and benefit received is, however, mutual; Titli symbolizes Indian spirituality while Shaila stands for Western rationality – their encounter enriches both of their lives and brings them happiness. In the beginning, Shaila’s name still answers to the negative connotation it bears (the ‘tramp’ from the streets of London), but in the end it corresponds entirely to the Indian meaning: ‘morality’, ‘virtue’, and ‘modesty’, alluding to the inner concordance between and compatibility of the two traditions.

Conclusion The discussion of selected modern Hindi novels from the 1930s to the 1960s has shown the search for and the development of a new type of heroine, the modern Indian woman. This process was set in motion by the realities of contemporary Indian life itself, rather than by Western models transported by European literature. Only later and after a phase of translation and adaptation was the development of modern Indian literature dynamized by impulses coming chiefly from Russian and French literature, 79 Jayashankar Prasad, Titli (1934; Illahabad: Bharati Bhandar, 1945). Titli means ‘butterfly’ and it is possibly a coincidence that her name is reminiscent of Chekhov’s “Poprygunya”, sometimes translated as ‘A Butterfly’. It is, in any case, symptomatic of the male’s perception of women to label them; or, as Winner noted (actually referring to Chekov’s Olga from “Poprygunya”), “these women whose self-love and hypocrisy can lead only to emptiness, if not to personal distraction, are often metaphorically likened to little birds” (Winner, Chekhov and His Prose, 69). 80 Titli bears a strong resemblance to Katto from Jainendra’s first novel Parakh, but there is also some resemblance to Mrinal in Tyagpatr.

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which indeed left a deep mark. Bengali literature was the first to appropriate European literary traditions to accommodate them to the Indian cultural context. Calcutta and Bengali literature (with novels by Bonkimchondro, Sarat Chandra, and Rabindranath Tagore) then functioned as agents and representatives of modern Indian culture and literature, exerting considerable influence on other Indian literatures. There followed a period of mutual inspiration and exchange among the various writers and literatures. In the process of creating a new national identity, Indian writers appropriated elements from European culture, but as India has such rich and ancient cultural traditions itself, the incoming Western influence was balanced and never dominant. The Hindi novels discussed in this essay deal with the changing and challenging interaction between individual and society, man and woman, East and West, and with the opposition between tradition and modernity. With progressing literary and cultural discourses, reality was viewed from various perspectives – but still the male view (be it progressive or traditional) would dominate. From the late 1920s through the 1950s, Indian society underwent drastic changes, as did the literary heroes and heroines and their attitudes. Behaviour that, in compliance with traditional morality, would have been sanctioned as ‘shameful’ and ‘degrading’ not only became acceptable in the modern view but was also positively perceived as a departure from the old, stagnant, and limited world towards a broader and better one. The writer’s social standing as well as (of course) political tendencies and religious convictions very much determined the perspective conveyed in the novels. Some of the authors felt that a ‘new heroine’ was needed, and with the passage of time this new heroine of Hindi literature would undergo various transformations. In the early stages of this literary development, the number of westernized and emancipated women in real life was still extremely small, hence they constituted an exceptional phenomenon, and it was as such that they had attracted the writers’ attention in the first place. But literature can also influence social life, and that was the objective of many Indian writers, preeminently Premchand, ‘the king’ of the modern Hindi novel, who aspired to create an ideal model in order to improve society. And, in fact, it almost seems as if some of the ‘new heroines’ described by the progressive male authors between 1920 and 1960 actually stepped out of their novels to materialize in real life. Whatever their agenda was, by propagating the ‘new heroine’ in their novels, the male writers did help the

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modern Indian woman to become an accepted part of society. The Indian Madame Bovary or even the émancipée type never lost the characteristics of a modern educated woman, but the author’s nostalgia for the ‘typical’ Indian woman would only grow in the course of time. In today’s India, the fourth generation of women writers is now at work.81 In their writings they have re-created and re-interpreted the ‘new heroines’ and presented a new ‘new heroine’, similar in many respects to the heroines created by Jainendra, for instance, but also very different. Remarkable is not only the new mode of narration or the fact that the heroine is no longer killed by her own hand or illness but by a jealous – although educated – husband who beats them to death. The women writers have created a whole new imaginative universe, a literary world with new heroines, and they have done it in all Indian languages and in English as well. Their narratives have the power to express how women perceive and design themselves. Is the heroine of the new millennium an émancipée, an Indian Madame Bovary, or first of all a human being? What rights, ideals, beliefs, and responsibilities to this world does she have? This new heroine does not know the male restrictions personified by a certain ‘type’. She is alive and diverse, her nature is richer and deeper, and there is insufficient space for her within the frames imposed by a man – or by the traditional society that he represents, however outstanding a writer he may be.

WORKS CITED

In English Clark, T.C., ed. & intro. The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976). Dalmia,Vasudha. The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition. Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth–Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997). Damsteegt, Theo. “Female Protagonists and the Struggle for Independence,” in Heroes and Heritage: The Protagonist in Indian Literature and Film, ed. Theo Damsteegt (Leiden: C N W S , 2003). ——, ed. Heroes and Heritage. The Protagonist in Indian Literature and Film (Leiden: C N W S , 2003). Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary, tr. W. Blaydes, critical intro. Henry James (1856; New York: P.F. Collier, 1902).

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Names like Mahadevi Varma, Alka Saraoge, and Geetanjali Shree are to be mentioned

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Gaeffke, Peter. Hindi Literature in the Twentieth Century (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1978). Iyengar, K.R. Shrinivasa. “A General Survey,” in The Novel in Modern India, ed. I. Bakhtiyar (New Delhi & Bombay: Sahitya Academi, 1964): 1–24. Kabir, Humayun. The Bengali Novel (Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1968). Kripalani, Krishna. Literature of Modern India: Panoramic Glimpse (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1982). Krishnaswamy, Shanta. Glimpses of Women in India (New Delhi: Ashish, 1983). McGregor, R.S. “The Rise of Standard Hindi, and Early Hindi Prose Fiction” (1970), in The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development, ed. Clark, 142–78. Misra, Rama Darasa. Modern Hindi Fiction (New Delhi: Indraprastha, 1983). Montaut, Annie. “A Story of Tyag: Coping with Liminality,” in Narrative Strategies: Essays on South Asian Literature and Films, ed. Vasudha Dalmia & Theo Damsteegt (New Delhi: Manzar Khan / Oxford U P , 1998): 136–49. ——. “Western Influence on Hindi Literature: A Dialogical Process (Agyeya’s Apneapne ajnabi),” in Literature, Language and the Media in India, ed. Mariola Offredi (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992): 117–37. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1985). ——, ed. Early Novels in India (New Delhi: Sahitya Academi, 2002). Mukhia, Banani. Women’s Images Men’s Imagination: Female Characters in Bengali Fiction in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002). Nelson, Usha Saxena. “A Woman’s Experience: Three Novels in Hindi,” Journal of South Asian Literature 12.3–4 (1977): 11–19. Pota, Nirupama. Content Analysis of Hindi Literature (Delhi: Himalaya, 1987). Schomer, Karine. Mahadevi Varma and the Chayavad Age of Modern Hindi Poetry (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1983). Winner, Thomas. Chekhov and His Prose (New York, Chicago & San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966).

In Hindi Ajneya. Apne apne ajnabi (1961; Delhi: Bharatij Gyanpith, 2001). ——. Nadi ke dvip (Delhi: Sarasvati, 1952). ——. Shekhar: ek jivani (1941–44; Benares: Sarasvati, 5th ed. 1955). Bandivadekar, Chandrakant. Jainendra ke upanyās. Marm ki talash mein (Delhi: Purvoday prakashan, 1984). Flaubert, Gustave. Madam Bovari, tr. Yugank Dhir (Meerat: Samvat Prakashan, 2004). ——. Prem ki pyasi (Gastav Flaber ka upanyās) (Thirsty for love: Novel by Gustav Flaubert), tr. Amritlal Nagar (Delhi: Rajpal, 1988). Gopalray. Hindi upanyās kosh (Patna: Granth Niketan, 1968–1969), 2 vol. Kumar, Jainendra. Kalyani (1939; Bombay: Hindi granth ratnakar, 3rd ed. 1953). ——. Parakh (1929; Bombay: Hindi granth ratnakar, 8th ed. 1956). ——. Sahitya Chayan (Hindi gadya aur padya ka samgrah) (Delhi: Rajpal, 195–). ——. Sukhada (1952; Delhi: Hindi Pocket Books, 1970).

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——. Sunita (1934/36; Delhi: Purvoday Prakashan, 2000). ——. Tyag-patr (1937; Bombay: Hindi granth ratnakar, 6th ed. 1954). ——. Ye aur ve (Delhi: Purvoday Prakashan, 1954). Machve, Prabhakar, ed. Jaynendra ke vichar (Delhi: Purvoday Prakashan, 1986). Prasad, Jayshankar. Chandragupta (Illahabad: Bharati Bhandar, 1949). ——. Kankal (1934; Illahabad: Bharati Bhandar, 1957). Satyaprakash, Milinda, ed. Hindi ki mahila sahityakar (Delhi: Roopkamal prakashan, 1960). ——, ed. Jainendra, vyaktitv aur krititva (Delhi: Suryaprakashan, 1963). Sinh, Mahip, ed. Hindi upanyās: samkalin paridrishya (New Delhi: Lipi Prakashan, 1980). Yaspal, Dada Kamred (Elder Brother–Comrade) (1941; Lukhnow: Viplav Karyalay, 4th ed. 1953).

In Russian Chekhov, Anton. “Poprygunya” (1892), in Rasskazy i povesti, ed. N.A. Presnova & N.N. Akopova (Moscow: izd. Pravda, 1981): 322–47. Dubianskaya, Tatyana. “Romanistika Dj.Prasada v literaturnom i ideologicheskom kontexte” (M.A. thesis, I S A A , Moscow University, 1998). Flaubert, Gustave. Madam Bovari, tr. Nikolaj Ljubimov (Moscow: Troyka, 1993). Ginzburg, Lidia. O psihologicheskoj proze (1971; Moscow: Intrada, 1999). Glushkova, Irina, ed. Indiyskaya jena (Moscow:Vostochnaya literatura, 1996). Payevskaya, Elizaveta. “Bengal’skaya literature,” in Literatura Vostoka v Novoe vremja, ed. Iosif Braginsky, Vladimir Semanov, Elizaveta Payevskaya & Vera Nikitina (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo U , 1975): 273–328. Rybakin, Alexandr. Slovar’ angliyskih lichnyh imen (Moscow: Russkij Yazyk, 1989). Saraskina, Lyudmila, & Sergey Serebryany. “F.M. Dostoyevskij i R. Tagor,” in Istoricheskaya tipologiya, literaturnye vliyaniya / Vostok-Zapad, ed. Leonid Alaev, Mikhail Gasparov, Alexandr Kudelin & Elizar Meletinsky (Moscow: Nauka, 1985): 129–69. Serebryany, Sergey. “Indiyskoe perevoploschenie Anny Kareninoy (roman ‘Sojjenie doma’ Sh. Chottopadhaya ),” in Na semi yazykah Indostana, ed. Anna Suvorova (Moscow: I V R A N , 2002): 124–63. Tolstaya, Sofya. Dnevniki (Moscow: Hudojestvennaya literature, 1978). Vishnevskaya, Natalya, & Ekaterina Zykova. Zapad est’ Zapad, Vostok est’ Vostok? Iz istorii anglo-indiyskih literaturnyh svyazej v Novoe vremya (Moscow: Nasledie, 1996).

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Chewing Over Ethnographic Models — Berber Writings from Algeria

D ANIELA M EROLLA

E

U R O P E A N E X P A N S I O N A N D C O L O N I Z A T I O N as well as the phenomena more recently classed as globalization have contributed to imposing or exporting European models of thinking and writing worldwide. This, conversely, has stimulated intellectual reactions in complex waves of acquisition, interaction, denegation, and negotiation. The present essay addresses the processes of appropriating and subverting ethnographical models at the beginning of the twentieth century in a specific linguistic area located in northern Algeria. I focus on early texts (novels and short stories) written in Kabyle (Taqbaylit), one of the many local forms of the Berber language (Tamazightt) in the Maghreb. My point is that ethnographical models stimulated self-reflection and innovation in a more complex way than the concept of ‘acculturation’ might suggest. This is a crucial aspect, since the accusation of (French) acculturation has been directed at the Kabyles and their struggle for recognition as a language minority in Algeria.

Background: Kabylia and Berbers in Algeria Kabylia is a mountainous area in the north-west of Algeria. It is a quite homogeneous area linguistically and culturally: Kabyles are Muslim and they speak Taqbaylit, one of the several local forms of Tamazightt, the Berber language. In Algeria, between twenty and twenty-five percent of the population speaks Berber, while the majority speaks Arabic, the official language. The roughly four million Kabyles form the largest Berber-speak-

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ing community in Algeria. At the beginning of 2002, the Algerian President Bouteflika announced that Tamazightt would become an official language in Algeria. However, the legal and practical consequences of such recognition are not yet clear. The linguistic situation of Algeria, as is the case in other Maghrebi countries, is characterized by a power relationship that has developed between classical Arabic, dialectal Arabic, and Berber. Before colonialism, the relationships between these languages were chiefly governed by the prestige of literacy and of religion: Berber was subordinate to Arabic, the language of Islam; both Berber and dialectal Arabic were subordinate to classical Arabic, the written language of the Qur’an, of ‘high’ culture, and of the central government. During the colonial period, French was superimposed upon the previous multilingual context. Schools and administration alike asserted the prestige of the dominant language.1 Moreover, a central issue in the project of colonial conquest was the emphasis on the linguistic differentiation between Arabs and Berbers in order to divide the two groups (the ‘divide et impera’ policy).2 This colonial project failed because the Berber-speaking groups in Kabylia and in the Aurès participated fully in the struggle against France.3 However, internal conflicts within the F L N (Front de Libération National) thrust the Kabyle leaders into the margins of the revolutionary movement. The language question, although not explicitly mentioned, was probably at stake in such conflicts during the war as well as during the unrest that occurred just after Independence, ending with the military occupation of Kabylia.4 1

Daniela Merolla, Gender and Community in the Kabyle Literary Space: Cultural Strategies in the Oral and in the Written (Leiden: C N W S , 1996): 23–25. 2 Charles–Robert Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans et la France (1871–1918) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); Charles–Robert Ageron, Politiques coloniales au Maghreb (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972); Camille Lacoste–Dujardin, “Genèse et évolution d’une représentation géopolitique: L’image kabyle à travers la production bibliographique de 1840 à 1891,” in Connaissances du Maghreb (Paris: C N R S , 1984): 257– 77; Philippe Lucas & Jean–Claude Vatin, L’Algérie des anthropologues (Paris: Maspèro, 1975). 3 Ageron, Politiques coloniales au Maghreb; Salem Chaker, Berbères aujourd’hui (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989): 83–91. 4 See Omar Carlier, “La production sociale de l’image de soi: Note sur la ‘crise berbériste’ de 1949,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1984): 347–71; Salem Chaker, “Langage et identité berbère (Algérie/migration): Un enjeu de société,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1984): 174; Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1959; London: Earthscan, 1989); Hugh Roberts, “The Unforeseen Development of the Kabyle Question in Algeria,” Government and Opposition 17.3 (1982): 334.

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After the colonization period, the language policy in the Maghreb centred on the re-adoption of Arabic. With arabization, as affirmation of the Self against the Colonizer, the subordination of Berber to Arabic has acquired a political connotation. The requests for official recognition of Kabyle–Berber were interpreted as a danger to the Algerian National Self, which was represented by Arabic, and the Kabyles were accused of ‘localism’ and of French ‘acculturation’.5 Owing to the arabization policy, the languages studied at school in Algeria have been classical Arabic and French, the latter being progressively withdrawn. Dialectal Arabic and Berber did not find an institutional place in school education. As recently as 1991, the Algerian parliament forbade the use of any languages other than Arabic in public activities. Moreover, the long internal conflict between government and radical Muslim military groups has imposed a heavy burden on the process of democratization in Algeria. However, under the pressure of mass protests in Kabylia, Algerian governments became more receptive to a more flexible language policy in 1995 and in early 2002.6

Colonial School Models of Ethnographic Writing The region of Kabylia, about thirty kilometers east of Algiers, was occupied early on by the colonial forces. The military resistance encountered in this mountainous region determined a colonial interest that lasted all through the 130 years of French colonialism. In fact, Kabylia and the Kabyles became the subject of extended research and collection of materials in linguistics, archaeology, ethnography, history, geography, etc. Supported by findings in other disciplines, colonial ethnographic knowledge included a broad range of writings, from the inventory of tribes and territories to descriptions of local saints, from data and analysis concerning 5

Chaker, Berbères aujourd’hui; René Gallissot, Le Maghreb de traverse (Paris: Bouchène,

2000); Daniela Merolla, “Questioning Gender, Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Maghreb,” Gender, Race & Class 8.3 (2001): 70–101; Hugh Roberts, Algerian Socialism and the Kabyle Question (Monographs in Development Studies 8; University East Anglia, 1981), “The Kabyle Question in Contemporary Algeria,” Government and Opposition 18.2 (1983): 218– 35, and “Historical and Unhistorical Approaches to the Problem of Identity in Algeria,” Bulletin of Francophone Africa 4 (1993): 79–92. 6

Mass protests took place in favour of the Kabyle Berber language and culture both in Kabylia and in Algiers. For Kabyle demands and actions in the 1970s and 1980s, see Chaker, “Langage et identité berbère,” 175, and Hugh Roberts, “Towards an Understanding of the Kabyle Question in Contemporary Algeria,” Maghreb Review 5.5–6 (1980): 351–59.

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social relations and legal codes to the collection of what was called ‘folklore’: i.e. intellectual and material ‘popular’ productions, in particular folktales and poems. At the turn of the century, ethnography assumed a pivotal role in the French colonial school. The access of the colonized to the school system remained very limited, but the colonial system needed a number of cultural mediators – acculturated elites that could mediate between the colonizers and the colonized. Therefore, as Fanny Colonna writes, one of the tasks of the colonial school between 1900 and 1930 became the education of a few pupils and students as ethnographers of their own villages.7 Students were encouraged to regard their culture as archaic and in need of replacement by the ‘superior’ and ‘modern’ dominant culture acquired at school. The ethnographic models of writing were particularly apt to produce colonized students who were participants in the ‘modern’ culture (thanks to the acquisition of French and of school education) and at the same time were observers and mediators of a ‘dying’ world presented as both primitive and exotic. As observers, they would write in terms of ‘the villagers’, ‘the old man’, and ‘the women of the household’ even when describing their own village and family members. In this sense, the colonial school supported the objectification and ‘folklorization’ of local cultures and was a powerful means of acculturation. Such a highly mystifying form of school ethnography swamped all Algeria. This aspect is given intense expression in the works of the Kabyle writer and anthropologist Mouloud Mammeri:8 Our poems were like dead things, like subjects of discussion, in the conceptual construction that the Western society set up with the double aim of reducing us and understanding itself [. . . ]. But as for us, the subjects of this imagined objectivity, we were in the most complete distress [. . . ]. In these abstract geometries,

7

Fanny Colonna, Instituteurs algériens 1883–1939 (Algiers: O P U , 1973), and also Fanny Colonna, “Une fonction coloniale de l’ethnologie,” Libyca 20 (1972): 259–67. 8 See Pierre Bourdieu, “L’odyssée de la réappropriation,” Awal: Cahiers d’études berbères 17 (1998): 5–6. See also Mouloud Mammeri, Les Isefra, poèmes de Si Mohand-ou-Mohand (Paris: Maspèro, 1969), “Culture savante et culture vécue en Algérie,” Libyca 23 (1975): 211– 19, repr. in Culture savante, culture vécue: Études 1938–1989, ed. Mammeri (Algiers: Tala, 1991): 64–73, “Du bon usage de l’ethnologie, entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu,” Awal: Cahiers d’études berbères 1 (1985): 7–29, “Culture du peuple ou culture pour le peuple,” (1985) in Culture savante, culture vécue (1991), ed. Mammeri, 136–52, and Inna yas Ccix Muíend, Le Cheikh Mohand a dit (Algiers: Awal, 1989).

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magnetically attracted to aims unfamiliar to us, what remained for us of those things that brought meaning and joy to our existence? 9

In Kabylia the first primary schools were established in the second half of the nineteenth century. Initially, the Kabyles refused to enrol their children, but at the end of the century, they started to give weight to school education and made use of the limited possibilities offered in the colonial system. The relative high percentage of Kabyles enrolled at school is linked to the local and general context: education and extensive emigration became survival strategies in a poor and overpopulated region whose plains and more cultivable areas were progressively appropriated by the colonizers.10

Appropriation and Subversion From the situation outlined above, we understand that utilization of school models was the first and almost inevitable step for those who wanted to write in Kabyle Berber. However, in several cases such models stimulated original creations by Berber local intellectuals and prompted them to call into question the representation of Kabyle society in and by colonial ethnographic writings. Earlier studies have traced the process of consciousnessraising undergone by Kabyle intellectuals.11 It suffices for me to point out two broad lines of development, although these lines often interact and tend to converge in the course of time. The acquisition, discussion, and re-con9

Mouloud Mammeri, Poèmes kabyles anciens (Paris: Maspèro, 1980): 15. “Nos poèmes entraient comme des choses mortes, des arguments dans l’édifice conceptuel que la société d’Occident érigeait dans le double but de nous réduire et de se comprendre […] Mais nous, sujets de cette objectivité supposée, étions dans le plus complet désarroi […] Dans ces abstraites géométries, aimantées vers des visées à nous insolites […] que restait-il encore de ce qui pour nous faisait le sens et la joie de l’existence?” Unless otherwise indicated, translations from French or Berber are by the author of this essay. 10 The Algerian local population enrolled at school was about 4,5% in 1920 and 8,9% in 1930. Before World War I the Kabyles at Bouzaréah made up about 89% of the local students (Fanny Colonna, “Une fonction coloniale de l’ethnologie,” Libyca 21 (1973): 259–67; Roberts, Algerian Socialism and the Kabyle Question, 173. In connection with the family economic strategy, in which, for example, one son could study and guarantee a salary by working in the colonial system, while other males of the family would have to emigrate, see Chaker, Berbères aujourd’hui, 85, and Karima Direche–Slimani, “Histoire de l’émigration kabyle en France au X X ème siècle: réalités culturelles et réappropriations identitaires” (doctoral dissertation, Aix-en-Provence, 1992): 101. 11 A large collection of bio-bibliographical information is offered in the publications of the research group Le Dictionnaire biographique de la Kabylie, ed. Salem Chaker (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud & Algiers: Ina-Yas, 2001).

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struction of ethnographical knowledge was undertaken, on the one hand, by the Kabyle writers who produced literary works in French and, on the other, by a few professional and semi-professional linguists and a number of ‘amateurs’ who started to write in Berber. The shift to literacy had a decisive effect on the lowly status of Berber and was a main factor in raising the self-esteem of the Kabyles: Berber had finally become a member of the group of the prestigious written languages.12 In both cases, attention was paid to the collection, transcription, translation. and dissemination (by writing) of oral poetry and narratives. These activities, in synergy with the overall social changes, constituted a productive framework for the renewal of Kabyle identity.13 Looking at the discourse that gradually took shape thanks to studies of Kabyle authors and their collections and literary writings, we find that cultural confrontation and reconstruction of identity emerge again and again, whether covertly or in a spirit of open criticism. Most writings show a process taking place that begins with cultural separation, caused by education in French, and leads to the re-discovery of the self. This process involves acquisition, discussion, and re-appropriation. Elements deriving from colonial epistemology are awareness of the autonomous nature of Kabylia and the Kabyles on the basis of linguistic and ethnographic description and the concomitant awareness that Kabyle (oral) culture is at risk of dying out in the ‘modern’ world. Conversely, the ‘primitivity’ – rather, colonial primitivization – of the Kabyle language, culture, and society and the folklorization of Kabyle oral literature became central areas of contestation. More ‘positive’ interpretations were already present in colonial writings, it was claimed, as well as by means of what I have termed re-appropriation: i.e. the use of oral history and autobiographical data to revise colonial interpretations. In the long run, the process of self-reflection produced in the discussion and appropriation of ethnographic knowledge stimulated the construction of ‘Kabyliness’, a shared identity transcending the traditional limits of villages and confederations. Central to such an identity was the Kabyle language and the shift to writing.14

12

Chaker, Berbères aujourd’hui, 22. Merolla, Gender and Community, 26–29. 14 On the political level, this implied opting for ‘Algerian Algeria’ within the nationalist movement. However, this pluralistic option was dismissed by the F L N majority, which instead decided in favour of the unifying category ‘Arab Muslim Algeria’. 13

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Belaïd Ait Ali: Life and Writing The writings of Belaïd Ait Ali (1909–50), the first writer in Kabyle, reveal a specific way of appropriating and subverting school models. Ait Ali was not well known at the time he wrote, but since the 1970s his work has become a fundamental reference-point for Berber cultural associations in Algeria and in France. Belaïd Ait Ali’s mother Dahbia At Salah had studied at one of the first schools for girls established in Kabylia For several years she worked as a schoolteacher without being able to obtain a stable post, for she did not possess French nationality and her husband was opposed to her applying for it. She ceased teaching in 1915 and settled with the whole family at Azru Uqellal, her husband’s village, where they ran a café. Belaïd grew up and went to school in Azru Uqellal. His French was excellent, since he had learnt it from his mother at home. When he was eleven years old, he spent some time in France together with his oldest brother. There he came to appreciate music and literature. Back in Algeria, he resumed study but left school before graduating. He joined the French army, where he met with appreciation, attaining the rank of sergeant-in-chief. Subsequently, however, he found it difficult to cope with life as a civilian: the vicious circle began. He could not find a long-term job, his first marriage failed, and the second one broke up because of the continuous quarrels between his wife and his mother; he took to drink. In 1940 he was again called up for duty in the French army and fought in Tunisia, but he was stripped of his rank because of his drinking. After his return to Kabylia he was hunted as an army deserter. A period of poverty and homelessness followed, ending with his death in hospital at Mescara. Six years before Belaïd’s death, a crucial incident took place: he met J.L. Degezelle, a missionary of the Pères Blancs and contributor to the Fichiers de Documentations Berbères, one of the then most important publications on Berber ethnography, linguistics, and (oral) literature.15 Degezelle used to call on Belaïd’s mother to bring her medicine whenever he visited Azru Uqellal. Once Belaïd happened to be at his mother’s, so they met. Later, Degezelle would write about Belaïd’s intelligence, his perfect but ‘picturesque’ French, and his good knowledge of French literature. Appreciating 15 Les cahiers de Belaïd ou la Kabylie d’antan, I : Textes, I I : Traduction, ed. Jean–Marie Dallet & Jules–Louis Degezelle (Fort National, Algeria: Fichiers de Documentation Berbère, 1964).

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these qualities in Belaïd, Degezelle asked him whether he wanted to help write down Kabyle folktales in Kabyle. Degezelle would later also describe Belaïd’s enthusiasm over the discovery of writing in Kabyle: that it was at all possible to write in Kabyle was a revelation to him.16 Belaïd learned the writing system developed by the Fichiers within a few months, and in 1946 he transcribed numerous folktales, filling several notebooks. He also wrote several works of his own: Lexdubegg (Wedding negotiations), combining the genre of the essay and the short story; Tafunast igujilen (The orphans’ milch-cow), a traditional tale enriched with long personal commentaries; Lwali bbedrar (The saint of the mountain), a kind of novel intertwined with personal memories; and an autobiographical story entitled Jeddi (Grandfather). In the few years that followed, Belaïd continued to write, most intensively during his last months in hospital with good food and no alcohol. He wrote down personal memories as in D amezwaru unebdu (First summer days) and Mes Noëls (My Christmas days), as well as several poems, essays, and tales. Between 1946 and 1959, some of his folktales were published in the Fichiers, and in 1964 Degezelle edited and published Les Cahiers de Belaïd, ou la Kabylie d’antan (The notebooks of Belaïd, or the Kabylia of old), presenting Belaïd’s texts in Kabyle in the first volume and a translation into French in the second. In fact, Belaïd could very easily have written in French himself, but it was only when he discovered that he could write in Kabyle that he decided (or felt the urge) to write and ‘create’ at all.

Belaïd Ait Ali’s Works As indicated above, it was in the course of improving colonial school education that Belaïd Ait Ali learnt to write in French; only later, his interest awakened by the ethnographic explorations of the Fichiers de Documentation Berbère, did he also learnt to write in Kabyle. However, almost from the beginning, his writing-down of traditional folktales was a strong stimulus for personal innovation: Belaïd Ait Ali modified not only the Kabyle genre of folktale but also the genres of novel, autobiography, and ethno-

16

Jules–Louis Degezelle, “Avant-Propos” (1964), in Les cahiers de Belaïd ou la Kabylie d’antan, I, ed. Dallet & Degezelle, xi.

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graphic writing that he had become familiar with while at school.17 In the following I will discuss the fertile cross-culturation between folktale, autobiography, and ethnography as well as the subversion of ethnography through autobiographical writing in three of Belaïd’s narratives: the tale Tafunast igujilen (The orphans’ milch-cow), the last text in the collection of stories Taneggaru (Stories that people tell), and Lwali bbedrar (The saint of the mountain). Several scholars have noted that Belaïd Ait Ali’s texts present commentaries and insertions that constitute innovations of the oral style and contribute to the introspective description of the characters involved.18 In a number of cases, his commentaries develop into an autobiographical narrative as character, narrator, and author merge into one.19 Belaïd’s later texts, such as Jeddi (Grandfather) and D amezwaru unebdu (First summer days), contain explicit autobiographic elements – for instance, when the grandfather and a cousin address the character–narrator–author by the name Belaïd. In earlier texts, the union of narrator and author is usually implicit, although a resemblance to the author’s biography shines through. In all cases, it is the themes concerning the interaction between culture and the individual that serve most to stimulate the interplay between reminiscence and models of literary genres. Proverbs and individual characters or episodes are only the starting-point for general reflections on social practices and specific situations, exceptional and individual experience. This is particularly evident in the re-writing of Tafunast igujilen, a wellknown tale endlessly recounted in Kabylia and all over the Maghreb. The core story, or fabula in narratological terms, can be summarized as follows: a stepmother is jealous of the children of her husband’s first wife and tries to starve the two young orphans, a girl and a boy. The first wife’s cow supplies the children with milk and kicks the stepmother’s daughter away, but the stepmother incites the father to sell and/or kill the cow. The orphans can still miraculously drink from their mother’s grave, until the stepmother desecrates the grave and the orphans have to leave their father’s house. 17

For comparison, see Marie Louise Pratt, “Transculturation and Autoethnography: Peru

1615/1980,” in Colonial Discourse / Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iverton (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1994): 24–46. 18

Paulette Galand–Pernet, “Tradition et modernisme dans les littératures berbères,” in Actes du I congrès d’études des cultures méditerranéennes d’influence arabo-berbère (Algiers: S N E D , 1975): 318–19. 19 See Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1996).

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After many adventures they find a new house and a rich husband for the orphan girl. In most versions, they are reconciled with their father, and they always take revenge on their stepmother and stepsister. The version written by Belaïd Ait Ali starts off quite unusually for the tamacahuţ genre20 – with a proverbial expression (‘Oh, were it possible to take one’s loved ones along when one dies!’) and a gloss on it. Commentaries and digressions indeed profoundly mark the first part of this tale, a sort of introduction to the preliminary elements of the actual story – the marriage and the first signs of jealousy in the stepmother. Social customs and individual feelings concerning spouses, stepmothers, and stepdaughters are presented, discussed, and established as the basis for the ensuing events. Presenting the stepmother’s feelings and how she speaks about her stepchildren with her husband, Ait Ali introduces the issue of the marriage relationship. This matter is illustrated by a story and commentary, both interpolated in the main narrative line as follows: But, excuse me, will you? . . . he who tells this story cannot narrate it too well; his mind is not very clear, he is confused . . . But the night is long: so let him digress for a moment. In the country of the Igawawen, there was a man who we’ll call . . . Him, – let us call him so, because we have forgotten his name. When he was a child, his parents wanted him to study the French language and culture. When he was able to manage, he left for France. He knew the language of that country; he started to know the people and to read their books. He thereby discovered something in the life of French people: love [love–friendship] between husband and wife. It is not a question of friendship only, because this word evokes many things.21

The passage opens with a narrator addressing the reader. The narrator relates the events and thoughts of a man “of the Igawawen” (the people and villages of Belaïd Ait Ali), who is named ‘He’ because – we read – the narrator “has forgotten his name.” This appears to be a transparent strategy to establish some distance from the autobiographical writing that – conversely – is progressively constructed in the narration of ‘His’ life experiences and discovery (love between husband and wife) in France and of what happens when ‘He’ is back in Kabylia. The narrator goes on to recount the scan20

On genre description, see Daniela Merolla, “Le conte kabyle,” in Encyclopédie Berbère (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1994), vol. 14: 2084–88. 21 Les cahiers de Belaïd ou la Kabylie d’antan, II (1964), ed. Dallet & Degezelle, 118. The French translation of this passage implies a judgment on Kabyle culture versus French culture (“la vrai culture”) that is not present in the original text. See the Kabyle text in Les Cahiers de Belaïd, I, 118.

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dalous events that take place between ‘He’ and ‘She’ during their wedding night, when ‘He’ wants to explain his ‘discovery’ to his bride. He speaks for a long time in order to convince her that even if they do not know each other, as the village customs requires, she does not have to be afraid of him because he is a ‘different kind’ of man. The narrator reflects on this approach and explains that it added incomprehension to the socially expected anguish that took hold of the bride when ‘He’ kept talking with the lights on during their ‘first night’ instead of just doing ‘his duty’ in the dark. The consequences of ‘His’ behaviour become clear as the narrator proceeds, relating that after one year the young bride decides to go back to her parents’ house. She starts to ridicule her husband in public by revealing all the details of her wedding night to the village women, with the result that they would constantly laugh about ‘Him’. When we turn to the textual interplay between the tale Tafunast igujilen and the essay Lexdubegga (Wedding negotiations), we understand the extravagance of the husband’s behaviour in all its – culturally determined – detail. In the essay Lexdubegga, the wedding night does not concern love between two people; rather, the narrator presents it as the sealing of a social pact; the male part, who “only thinks to his things,” is compared to a bull.22 In both texts, the narrative concerns personal experience, although this is narrated in the fictional mode in the tale and as generalizing reflections in the essay. Further, in the tale the acquisition of the French concept of love reveals itself as a Trojan horse in the deepest and most lacerating way, destabilizing the author–narrator–character both in his intimate relationships and in his public life. Concluding the digression with an invocation to God, the narrator reenters the main narrative line. But […] we involve ourselves in stories which we will not leave anymore, . . . enough digression! Why have we reached such a point, why? And now, where have we left Saadi and Fadhma? Because, it is now, I believe, that their history becomes pitiful, since from now on they are in the hands of their stepmother.23

From this point on, the tale resumes the classic recounting of the story until it reaches the expected ending with the formula Tamacahuţ – iw tfukk: ‘and my story ends here’. 22 23

Les cahiers de Belaïd, I (1964), ed. Dallet & Degezelle, 312–13. Les cahiers de Belaïd, II (1964), ed. Dallet & Degezelle, 121.

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As mentioned earlier on, Belaïd Ait Ali started writing at the request of the missionary Degezelle, who showed an interest in collecting and transcribing folktales – as was common practice at the time. The working of personal recollections, however, created a living text instead of the record of a folktale ‘fixed in the past’ and representing unchanging traditional lore typical of the ethnographic models that were still predominant in the 1940s. This narrative mechanism is even more explicit in the writings of Belaïd’s second creative phase – for instance, in the collection Taneggaru (Stories that people tell). Here the autobiographical element takes a distinct form. There is a proverb in Kabylia [. . . ] and there is a story around it. I do not know whether this story really happened; this is how people tell it. A long time ago, there was a man who lived with his mother and his wife. The young woman detested her mother-in-law and the latter reciprocated. (If a mother-in-law tells this story, she will not say that the mother-in-law reciprocated that feeling. But I am telling the truth when I say: had she been kinder to her daughter-in-law, the young woman would not have detested her; because I, I testify that I have tender feelings for those who show me affection… But let me stop: if my old mother saw me writing such things, I would be lost. Fortunately, however, I believe she has lost her glasses!). Well, I said that the two women hated each other. 24

It is notewothy that the beginning of this passage is ‘impersonal’ or, in narratological terms: the narrator is external to the story: “There is a proverb in Kabylia [...] and there is a story around it [...] this is how people tell it” (ata wakken ţ-id ekkun). Quoting and/or explaining a proverb by way of a correlated story may be regarded as a kind of ‘ethnographic strategy’ deployed in innumerable texts written by colonial authors, some actually using almost the same opening phrase. In this case, however, the narrator speaks in the personal “I” form by means of an initial insertion: “I do not know” (Ur e riy teḑra). At the same time, this personalized or internal narrator assumes a distance from ‘what people tell’ by wondering about the veracity of the narrated story (“I do not know whether this story really happened”). The story itself is introduced like a classic folktale by the phrase “There was a man” (Yella zik yiwen wergaz). Here the narration is taken up by the external narrator. The subsequent presentation of the situation (“he was with his mother and his wife. The young wife detested her mother-in-law”) contains a first variation on the classic story: the phrase “and the latter 24

Les cahiers de Belaïd, I (1964), ed. Dallet & Degezelle, 265.

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reciprocated.” A second insertion by the internal narrator follows (“if a mother-in-law tells this story, she will not say that the mother-in-law reciprocated that feeling”). He adds a personal comment (“But I am telling the truth when I say: had she been kinder to her daughter-in-law, the young woman would not have detested her”) and even makes an autobiographical reference (“if my old mother saw me writing such things, I would be lost”). Then the external narrator takes over again and renders the story in a traditional manner almost until the end. Before the story actually closes, the internal narrator re-enters the text (speaking as “I”), giving it an unexpected twist: he confesses that the old woman who told him this story was his own mother. The successive positions that the internal and external narrator assume enable the reader to move from the external view of (colonial) ethnography to the discourse of the colonized and his personal reflections.25 That discourse is reflected, for instance, in the internal narrator’s questioning of the story’s veracity (“I do not know whether this story really happened”). His remark, possibly indicating doubt, marks a first crucial move: the acquisition of the ethnographic, external view on folktales. This position, however, is agilely subverted by the internal narrator’s second insertion, causing a shift from the level of ‘historical’ (or ethnographic) veracity to the level of the truthfulness of narrated family relations. It is true that the one woman hates the other, and it is also true that the feeling is reciprocated. At the end of the story, another level of veracity is reached, determined by the autobiographical element: the internal narrator confesses that the narrative was actually attributable to his mother. It can be assumed that she told her son this story, using it as a moral tool or possible means of exerting pressure (from external sources it is known, as mentioned above, that the second wife of Belaïd Ait Ali left him because of the constant quarrelling with his mother). Another function of the narratorial shifts lies in the autobiographical element in the narration. The reader moves from an impersonally told story to the story of some mother-in-law, and finally to the story told by the narrator‘s old mother – the mother-in-law to his wife. Although already implicitly present at the very beginning (“If my old mother saw me writing 25 In this sense, the successive positions assumed by the narrator take on the function of the opening and closing formulas. This enables storyteller and the reader to cross from their world to the world of the tale.

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such things”), this autobiographic element comes as a revelatory twist only at the end of the story. And not only is it his own mother’s position that the story describes, he also contradicts it. All in all, this is a well-balanced composition which approaches the proverb and the ‘story as people tell it’, as well as their veracity, by deploying different genres, primarily both general and ‘personalized’ ethnography and autobiography, the latter eventually subverting the external view and the (un)truthfulness of the folktale asserted by the ethnographic approach. A similar strategy is found in the longer, more elaborate Lwali bbedrar (The saint of the mountain). The story of the saint is embedded in another story, the latter demonstrating the author’s knowledge of the ethnographic fieldwork model. This frame story gives an account of the internal narrator’s arrival in the village (during a ritual celebration that he describes in all its detail) and of how he actually collected the story of the saint. At a certain moment, he began taking notes in Kabyle, and one of the men of the village saw what he was doing. At first the man did not believe what he saw, then he decided to speak and related the story of the saint. The narrator thus creates a kind of ‘dialogic’ text in which the villager’s voice telling the story interacts with the narrator’s voice. As in many ethnographic texts, the logic of the composition and the way in which the words of the Other are included in the text remain the domain of the narrator. Moreover, the dialogue is not a reproduction but a literary rendering of the other man’s voice. However, it should be kept in mind that Belaïd Ait Ali’s texts, in general, are autobiographical and that such a dialogue is not likely to be mere fiction but also personal memory. Passages like the following support such an assumption: Then! How do I have to continue this story if I am passing from one topic to the other like that? The point is, every time I start, I cannot stop myself: the point is, every time I remember.26

Conclusion On the level of narrative analysis, the examples discussed in this essay have shown that the shift from the external third-person narrator (“when one sees the Kabyle village”) to the internal first-person narrator (“when I see my village”) tends to subvert the objectifying and mystifying models of French 26

Les cahiers de Belaïd, II (1964), ed. Dallet & Degezelle, 13.

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school ethnography. The narrator’s comments relate to folktales that are not presented as fixed documents of the past testifying to an almost extinct past of local populations, as is the case in many ethnographic writings. Quite the contrary: the process of intellectual acquisition and reflection stimulated by the folktales is made explicit. Writing leads the narrator to reflect on forms of behavioue and ways of thinking that are recounted as being fully representative of social life. At the same time, the story stimulates personal recollection. In this way, the writer goes beyond the exoticism, the ‘picturesque’, of Kabyle tales and society; the writing-down of oral productions itself becomes a sign and, indeed, exemplar of cultural vitality. The narrative dynamic with its shifts from external to internal narrators, and the autobiographical elements in Ait Ali’s texts, refashion anew the style of classic oral folktales as well as subverting the (previously acquired) ethnographic models of collecting and presenting folktales.

WORKS CITED Ageron, Charles–Robert. Les Algériens musulmans et la France (1871–1918) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). ——. Politiques coloniales au Maghreb (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). Bourdieu, Pierre. “L’Odyssée de la réappropriation,” Awal: Cahiers d’études berbères 17 (1998): 5–6. Carlier, Omar. “La production sociale de l’image de soi: Note sur la ‘crise berbériste’ de 1949,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1984): 347–71. Chaker, Salem. Berbères aujourd’hui (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989). ——. “Langage et identité berbère (Algérie/migration): Un enjeu de société,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1984): 173–80. ——, ed. Le Dictionnaire biographique de la Kabylie (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud & Algiers: Ina-Yas, 2001).

Colonna, Fanny. “Une fonction coloniale de l’ethnologie,” Libyca 20 (1972): 259–67. ——. Instituteurs algériens 1883–1939 (Algiers: O P U , 1973). Dallet, Jean–Marie, & Jules–Louis Degezelle, ed. Les cahiers de Belaïd ou la Kabylie d’antan, I , Textes, I I : Traduction (Fort National, Algeria: Fichiers de Documentation Berbère, 1964). Degezelle, Jules–Louis. “Avant–Propos” (1964), in Les cahiers de Belaïd ou la Kabylie d’antan, I, ed. Dallet & Degezelle, xi. Direche–Slimani, Karima. “Histoire de l’émigration kabyle en France au XXème siècle: Réalités culturelles et réappropriations identitaires” (doctoral dissertation, Aix-enProvence, 1992). Fanon, Frantz. Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1959; London: Earthscan, 1989).

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Galand–Pernet, Paulette. “Tradition et modernisme dans les littératures berbères,“ Actes du I congrès d’études des cultures méditerranéennes d’influence arabo-berbère (Algiers: S N E D , 1975): 312–25. Gallissot, René. Le Maghreb de traverse (Paris: Bouchène, 2000). Lacoste–Dujardin, C. “Genèse et évolution d’une représentation géopolitique: L’image kabyle à travers la production bibliographique de 1840 à 1891,” Connaissances du Maghreb (Paris: C N R S , 1984): 257–77. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1996). Lucas, Philippe, & Jean–Claude Vatin, ed. L’Algérie des anthropologues (Paris: Maspèro, 1975). Mammeri, Mouloud. “Culture du peuple ou culture pour le peuple,” Awal: Cahiers d’études berbères 1 (1985): 30–57, repr. (1991) in Culture savante, culture vécue, ed. Mammeri, 136–52. ——. “Culture savante et culture vécue en Algérie,” Libyca (1975): 211–19, repr. (1991) in Culture savante, culture vécue, ed. Mammeri, 64–73. ——. “Du bon usage de l’ethnologie, entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu,” Awal: Cahiers d’études berbères 1 (1985): 7–29. ——. Inna yas Ccix Muíend. Le Cheikh Mohand a dit (Algiers: Awal, 1989). ——. Les Isefra, poèmes de Si Mohand-ou-Mohand (Paris: Maspèro, 1969). ——. Poèmes kabyles anciens (Paris: Maspéro, 1980). ——, ed. Culture savante, culture vécue: Études 1938–1989 (Algiers: Tala, 1991). Merolla, Daniela. “Le conte kabyle,” in Encyclopédie Berbère 14 (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1994): 2084–88. ——. Gender and Community in the Kabyle Literary Space: Cultural Strategies in the Oral and in the Written (Leiden: C N W S , 1996). ——. “Questioning Gender, Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Maghreb,” Gender, Race & Class 8.3 (2001): 70–101. Pratt, Marie Louise. “Transculturation and Autoethnography: Peru 1615/1980,” in Colonial Discourse / Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iverson (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1994): 24–46. Roberts, Hugh. Algerian Socialism and the Kabyle Question (Monographs in Development Studies 8; University of East Anglia, 1981). ——. “Historical and Unhistorical Approaches to the Problem of Identity in Algeria,” Bulletin of Francophone Africa 4 (1993): 79–92. ——. “The Kabyle Question in Contemporary Algeria,” Government and Opposition 18.2 (1983): 218–35. ——. “Towards an Understanding of the Kabyle Question in Contemporary Algeria,” Maghreb Review 5.5–6 (1980): 115–24. ——. “The Unforeseen Development of the Kabyle Question in Algeria,” Government and Opposition 17.3 (1982): 312–34.

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The naya drama in India — Rediscovering the Self in the Western Mirror

A NNA S UVOROVA

And you seriously ask us to admit that we prefer a dull and mechanical theatre such as we have today to one where all the gayest, freshest theatrical art flourishes? It is preposterous! — Gordon Craig (1928)

T

H E E N C O U N T E R O F I N D I A with the West during the nineteenth century had wide-ranging political, economic, social, and cultural consequences. In the field of theatre, this encounter changed almost everything – its form, direction, and pace. This new Indian theatre, which emerged under the impact of the West, was totally different from the ancient and medieval performing arts. It had taken shape in imitation of an alien theatre, fundamentally opposite to the Indian in its worldview and aesthetic approach. According to the Indian view of life, the purpose of drama and theatre was to create a sense of bliss and equilibrium (shanti rasa) by delineating different human situations, mental states, and emotions, whereas the purpose of the Western drama and theatre “was to reveal struggle and conflicts of life in their various forms.”1 The new theatre that emerged in India in the mid-nineteenth century was, if not the imposition, then almost entirely an imitation of the Western stage. It was practised and accepted by the newly educated urban Indians in cities founded by the English or where their industrial and administrative 1

Kapila Vatsyayan, Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1980): 11.

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centres were located – cities such as Calcutta or Bombay, and, to some extent, Madras. Its patrons and practitioners were those Indians who had enthusiastically embraced not only the political domination of the British but also their social and cultural superiority, but it did not reach the rural population residing in the various regions. Here the traditional theatre – folk and semi-folk – continued to be active and popular. Initially, and in accordance with its background, the new theatre started staging the English plays in English (first and foremost Shakespeare). Their translations and adaptations into vernaculars followed only later, culminating in plays inspired by Indian themes but written and staged with Western techniques and devices. With the spread and consolidation of British rule, this theatre reached almost all parts of the country, but its achievement reached different levels in different indigenous languages. In Bengali and Marathi, the new theatre became the most active, prosperous, and popular. The Bengalis were the first to be given access to English education and to be influenced by Western culture. In many aspects, the new Bengali theatre became the most advanced and powerful stage in India. Only in Calcutta, however, did an urban residential theatre modelled on those of London come into existence with enough staying-power that it has survived to this day. Many talented Bengali actors and playwrights emerged who were often also directors and managers of the companies. Within a period of a hundred years, highly gifted actors like Girish Chanra Ghosh, Amritlal Basu, and Shishir Bhaduri carried the Bengali stage to the peak of its glory. In Bengali theatre, the written text and dramaturgy were central. From the very beginning, Bengali poets and prose writers were drawn to playwriting. Dramatists such as Michael Madhu Shudan Dotto, Deenabondhu Mitro, Rabindranath Tagore, and many others wrote hundreds of plays modelled on plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw. The stories of those plays were drawn from Indian epics, folktales, and history as well as from contemporary social events. The structure, however, was Shakespearean or, later, that of the naturalistic drama of the West. The plays attempted to present the conflict of an individual with his environment, with social conditions, or with his inner self. Stage characters were developed according to Western patterns. Generically, almost all of these plays were melodramas, lacking psychological insight. The only exception is Tagore, who, in his plays Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders), Raja (King of the Dark Chamber), and Dakghar (Post Office), with unusual symbolic vision gave form to what theatre critics call the ‘poetry of life’. Many

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critics regarded the plays of Tagore as mere dramatic poems, or poetic dramas. They were rarely performed on the Bengali stage and had little impact. It was only after the production of Raktakarabi by Shombhu Mitro in the 1960s that Tagore’s plays gained recognition as valid drama.2 Unlike the Bengali stage, the Marathi theatre initially drew its inspiration from more or less traditional sources with elements of music and dance drama (sangeet nataka). The Dashavatara stage form of Maharashtra inspired the first Marathi play, Seeta Swayamvara (Seeta’s wedding) by Vishudas Bhave. The role of music persisted in the later development of the Marathi theatre, despite its imitation of Western playwrights. Many famous singers and musicians came to act in the Marathi plays, to which audiences flocked more to hear the music than to see the play. While the Bengali theatre was residential and Calcutta-based, the Marathi theatre went on the road. Because of its itinerant character, it reached the newly educated middle classes in provincial towns and was more directly related to the movements for social reform and political independence. Top-ranking political leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak took an interest in the theatre and considered it an important political tool. Later, plays by authors like Annasahib Kirloskar, Govind Ballal Deval, and Kakasaheb Khadilkar would have a more or less Shakespearean structure. But although Khadilkar had accepted the English model for his plays, he supported the national freedom movement. His plays were considered anti-government, and the colonial rulers banned the performance of his Keechakavadha (Murder of Keechaka, 1907) as a polemical attack on Lord Curzon’s harsh policy in India ‘veiled’ by the epic allegory, reminding the spectators of the infamous end of the cruel demon-king Keechaka.3 In Gujerati, another language of the western region, Western theatre had an even greater and more pervasive impact from the very beginning, when the highly influential and enterprising community of the Parsis, who had readily accepted Western education and culture, took the initiative. The Parsis set up many professional theatre companies (natak mandalis) of the Western type, which staged plays in Gujerati and Urdu, the North Indian lingua franca. Their main area of activity was Bombay, but they likewise performed itinerantly. Except for the Bengali- and Marathi-speaking 2

Sukumar Sen, History of Bengali Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1960): 123. Dhyaneshwar Nadkarni, The New Directions in the Marathi Theatre (New Delhi: Abhinaya Prakashan, 1967): 53. 3

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regions, the Parsi theatre companies, which completely dominated the scene from the late-nineteenth century until the 1930s, met the needs for entertainment or theatrical experience throughout India. They travelled not only all over the country, but also through neighbouring states like Ceylon, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Out of commercial considerations, melodrama, spectacle, and exaggeration dominated in Parsi4 theatre productions. Plays written for this theatre were based on the Muslim and Indian romantic tales. In most of them, the dramatic structure was marked by sensation generated by a clash of situations and character, mistaken identity, and romantic adventures. The Parsis, in a sense, reduced European theatrical culture to the ‘three whales’ of spectacle: the proscenium, which divided the space of the performance into a larger stage and a smaller one; the scenery; and histrionic tricks. The stage, illuminated by gas-lamps, was provided with a falling curtain. The painted backdrops represented, among others, a court, a forest, a market or a palace and were raised and lowered with the help of pulleys. Diverse theatrical devices facilitated the generation of fabulous ‘wonders’: demons or jinns fell through the traps and appeared from the jugs, a faqir froze in the air without touching the floor with his feet, a mountain of glass fell into pieces, the nymphs (pari) flew on the rope, and a rain of flowers showered onto the stage.5 Muslim intellectuals had nothing but contempt for the Parsi theatre, treating it as notorious popular entertainment using the language of ‘the Bombay fish-market’, although it was, in fact, rooted in the Indian theatrical tradition. Its salient features had formed in the court theatre of the princely state of Awadh, a theatre which, in its turn, had resulted from a fusion of Urdu classical narrative and the Indian folk drama Rasleela. After the annexation of Awadh by the British in 1856, the new theatrical form, sometimes called Indar Sabha after its most popular play, continued its development in the Muslim capital of East Bengal, Dacca. It was, however, in Bombay that this musical theatre took its final shape, which was a fairly whimsical and eclectic combination of plots borrowed from Islamic romantic stories, stage devices from the northern Indian folk drama (Rasleela, Nautanki), the scenic machinery and scenery from the Western (particularly 4

The Parsis, the community of Zoroastrians, came in many waves to India’s western coast, particularly to Bombay, fleeing persecution in islamized Iran. 5 Nur Illahi & Muhammad Umar, Natak Sagar (The ocean of the plays) (Lucknow: Urdu Akadami, 1982): 365–66.

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the Victorian) theatre, and its music and songs from both Indian and European traditions.6 The Parsi theatre had its popular actors, such as Cowasji Khattau and Khurshidji Balliwala, as well as outstanding playwrights, including Agha Hashr Kashmiri, nicknamed the ‘Indian Shakespeare’. The majority of Kashmiri’s plays successfully combine the traditional Urdu narrative framework with the peripeteia of the Western drama, the latter hardly recognizable in its guise of Muslim names and setting. As the silent movies made their debut in the 1930s and the talkies in the 1940s, the Parsi theatre actors, directors, and playwrights gravitated towards the new medium of cinema, influencing it greatly. This shift created a vacuum in the Gujerati and Hindi–Urdu theatre world that lasted until the Second World War. The situation in the Hindi-speaking areas in the North was quite different. Widespread anti-British sentiment and agitation dominated this region, which was far from the industrial centres and foreign settlements. The big cities of this area, such as Delhi, Allahabad, and Varanasi, were the stronghold of anti-British traditionalism and Hindu/Muslim revivalism with their eschewal of Western influence. As a result, a new theatre of the Western type could not gain ground there. Bharatendu Harishchandra, in the mid-nineteenth century, had made an effort to provide this region with its own theatre, which was a sort of synthesis of the new Western-inspired theatre and Indian performance traditions. Had his efforts succeeded, the history of the Hindi theatre would have been rather different, but he died at a very early age, leaving the field open to the Parsi companies. With the collapse of the Parsi theatre, in its turn, and the decay of the Bengali and Marathi stage, which could not compete with the cinema, theatrical activity in every language had come almost to a standstill by the end of the 1930s. Before and during the Second World War, the rise of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (I P T A ) brought some life to the theatre in many regions of the country. The I P T A was part of the Marxist and leftist movement. The political line of the Communist Party of India in 1942–47 on issues such as Hindu–Muslim unity, the release of Congress leaders from jail, and the demands of the national government for national defence, formed the keynote of the I P T A programme. For its propagandist 6 Anna Suvorova, “Sources of Urdu Drama,” in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the Theoretical Problems of Asian and African Literatures, ed. Marian Galik (Bratislava: Literary Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1983): 214.

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aims, the I P T A adopted the living-newspaper technique, similar to the Russian agitprop theatre of the ‘Proletcult’ in the 1920s and the Brechtian ‘epic’ theatre. Agitprop performances served for political campaigns during the Bengal famine and the national liberation struggle to reach the people on the spot. In the early 1950s, Niranjan Sen, General Secretary of the I P T A , wrote: We want to raise the cultural level of our people; we want to root out the fatalism and superstitions implanted in their minds through ignorance and the dark, backward social system imposed on them through years of slavery to British big business and the oppressors of their own land.7

The I P T A united the most popular writers, actors, and directors of the time, for instance Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Mulk Raj Anand, Bijon Bhattacharya, Shombhu Mitro, Topil Bhasi, Prithviraj Kapur, to name a few. They presented current political events in the traditional dramatic forms. In Bombay, Sajjad Zahir’s poems on Lenin and Annabhao Sathe’s poems on the battle of Stalingrad were performed in the form of powadas, Marathi ballads; a play on the fall of Hitler (Hitler parabhavam) was staged in Andhra Pradesh in the traditional Veethinatakam street-drama style. In Malabar, a dance drama on the events of the World War performed in the age-old Kathakali tradition proved a great success.8 However, in the late 1950s, because of inner contradictions and sectarian attitudes, the I P T A lost its leading role in the theatre world. Playwrights and directors alike realized that the myth of agitprop theatre – that the theatre was created by the masses for the masses – was too simple and naive to serve as a national theatre. The Bengali dramatist and director Utpal Dutt, who had begun in a tradition of agitprop and documentary, later came to the following realization: I was becoming too involved in the fate of my proletarian fighters to attain a dialectical view of their struggle. I wanted to create a myth in all its simple brevity. I have tried mass crowd scenes in the idiotic belief that they may somehow lead me to a transcendence of the individual. I realized very late that a lone Faust is more representative of the German masses of his time than a thousand weavers in Hauptmann’s play.9

7

Niranjan Sen, “Some Issues before the People’s Theatre Movement,” Unity (October

1951): 18. 8 9

Niranjan Sen, “Theatre Arts and Present Government,” Unity (December 1954): 25. Utpal Dutt, Towards a Revolutionary Theatre (Calcutta: Sarkar, 1982): 95.

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In the 1960s, about a decade after Independence, the nature and objectives of Indian theatre began to change, entailing a many-sided adjustment of its relation to the Western theatre. Blind imitation gave way to the rediscovery of national aesthetics, albeit with the help of devices and ideas from the West. Authentic and complete translations of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov, Gorky, Sartre, Camus, Brecht, and Pirandello had made these dramatists available in Indian vernaculars. During this period, Western classics, too, experienced artistic and effective presentation. In Hindi, Shakespeare’s Macbeth as Barnam Vana by B.V. Karanth, Gogol’s Inspector General as Ala Afsar, and Ben Jonson’s Volpone as Lomadkhan ka vesh,10 in Bengali, Gorky’s The Lower Depths as Neecha Mahal by Utpal Datt, and in Tamil, Sophocles’ Antigone by Ramaswami – all “succeeded in capturing the attention of the spectators by their artistic boldness and theatrical imagination.”11 A new generation of theatre workers regarded the theatre as a means of creative expression and not primarily as a source of profit, as had previously been the case with the Parsi theatre. Directors like Shombhu Mitro, Habib Tanwir, Ebrahim Alkazi, Utpal Dutt, Satya Dev Dubey, and Dina and Shanta Gandhi drew inspiration from the most significant artistic ideas of the Western theatre, including the psychological symbolism of Strindberg and Ibsen, the Verfremdungseffekt of Brecht, and the concept of alienation of Camus and Pirandello. The result of this changing attitude towards the theatre was the development of the naya drama (new drama) of the 1960 and 1970s. It emerged in many indigenous vernaculars. Authentic plays like Evam Indrajit (And Indrajit too) and Pagla ghora (A mad horse) by Badal Sirkar in Bengali; Ghashiram Kotwal (Ghashiram Kotwal) by Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi; Tuglaq (Tuglaq) by Girish Karnad in Kannada; Andha yug (Blind age) by Dharmavir Bharati, Ashadh ka ek din (One day in the month of Ashadh), and Adhe Adhure (Half-done) by Mohan Rakesh in Hindi brought to Indian dramatic literature, for the first time since the nineteenth century, the status of creative work. These plays were proof of a serious attempt to understand and articulate the basic philosophical and moral questions, contradictions, and challenges of everyday life, the relationship between different layers of society, between individual and society, and between male and female. The naya drama explored these 10 11

Both plays were directed by Bansi Kaul. Adya Rangacharya, Indian Theatre (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1971): 108.

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areas of human concern in depth and complexity never attempted before in India, mostly through the idiom of human alienation. Some Indian and Western authors have therefore discussed the naya drama in terms of ‘Indian existentialism’.12 In dramatic form and technique, however, these plays generally show the influence of modernist and experimental Western styles like the Brechtian alienation effect, Chekhov’s ‘polyphony’, Sartre’s ‘inner soliloquy’, and Beckett’s ‘flood of consciousness’. This process whereby theatre was transformed into a mode of national creative expression made it almost inevitable that the new generation of theatre men started questioning the nature and development of the modern stage originating in the West, as well as its relevance and usefulness within the Indian context. At the same time, it was an inevitable part of this process that “the desire to come out of the desert of imitation and to seek their own fertile region should surface and become strong.”13 Som Benegal, the prominent theatre director, wrote: After a long period of frustration, searching and probing, several playwrights, like Badal Sircar, Mohan Rakesh, Dharmavir Bharati, Girish Karnad and others, had given Indian producers their first real chance to work on something truly Indian and contemporary. If these playwrights have at all been influenced by the West, it can strangely be not by their most modern counterparts but by persons like Pirandello, Sartre, Anouilh, Giraudoux and Lorca. It is perhaps a sign of national disillusionment that some of the best Indian playwrights should forsake an optimistic view of life, for which there is ample justification, and take to Pirandello’s philosophy of hopelessness or Sartre’s existentialism? 14

While the Indian theatre was turning to the West, Western theatre became increasingly disillusioned with its naturalistic and realistic styles and methods. The theatre directors and playwrights in the West, in their search for a more imaginative, ‘total’ theatre, were led to the performing arts in Asia, including India.

12

Anna Suvorova, “The Progressive Writers Movement and the Indian People’s Theatre Association,” in Commitment, ed. Sayed Ashur Kazmi (London: Institute of Third World Art & Literature, 1986): 58; Balwant Gargi, Theatre in India (New York: Theatre Arts, 1962): 95; Balwant Gargi, Folk Theatre of India (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1966): 123; Pramod Kale, The Theatric Universe (New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 1974): 68. 13 Nemichandra Jain, Indian Theatre: Tradition, Continuity and Change (New Delhi: Vikas, 1995): 81. 14 Som Benegal, “Western and Asian Influences on Modern Indian Theatre,” in The Performing Arts in Asia, ed. James Brandon (Paris: U N E S C O , 1971): 95.

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Bred on the small world of television and domestic comedy in films, we have lost touch with the vital, full-blooded total experience of great ages of theatre. We are cowardly, pampered, small-minded; too timid, too lazy, too unadventurous to give ourselves from head to guts to a theatrical performance of five or six hours. […] Perhaps there is more than a grain of truth in Artaud’s violent contention that our theatre today is a “theatre of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets and positivists, i.e. Occidentals.”15

Since the 1970s, internationally known directors, such as Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, and Richard Schechner, have been exploring the Indian traditional theatre for their own artistic objectives and have repeatedly come to India in this connection. This prompted Indian theatre people to take a fresh look at their own theatre heritage. As if through a mirror, the modern Western stage techniques, first and foremost the employment of music, song, and dance, “showed to the Indian directors their own aesthetic conventions of age-old folk and ritual drama, which they had rediscovered under the influence of the West.”16 At the same time, Western plays had been successfully performed using traditional devices. The phenomenal popularity of Bertolt Brecht in India is a vivid example; the unprecedented success of production of his plays with the devices of the Indian folk dance drama in particular led to the formation of the powerful Brechtian School among Indian directors. A great number of Brecht’s plays, produced and staged in a variety of indigenous styles, were particularly successful and popular. For instance, The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Marathi by Vijaya Mehta, in Hindi by Fritz Benewitz, and in Punjabi by M.K. Raina; Puntilla, also by Fritz Benewitz in Hindi; and The Three Penny Opera in Marathi by Jabbar Patel – these are all productions which, by way of creatively applying the conventions and devices of the traditional theatre, have become significant works of the contemporary Indian stage. Under Brechtian influence, Indian theatre directors refused the proscenium stage and made the environment and the audience play an active part in the performance. The first to stage productions in the open was Habib Tanvir, once a visiting director of the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin. His Indrasabha (God Indra’s court), a political play based on an old Parsi drama, was staged in the largest Delhi bazaar – Chandni Chouk. The production of Tuglaq by Ebrahim Alkazi took place in the natural scenery 15

Leonard Pronko, Theater East and West (Berkeley: U of California P , 1967): 24. Adya Rangacharya, “Towards a Professional Theatre,” Sangeet Natak, ed. H.K. Ranganath (Silver Jubilee Volume, 1981): 192. 16

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of the Purana Qila (Old Fort) of Delhi, while Utpal Dutt produced his Mahaviradroha (The Great Rebellion) in the Lal Qila (Red Fort) of the Great Mughals. This novel notion of play-space brought the new theatre closer to its roots, since traditional performances had been held in bazaars, at crossroads, and in temple courtyards. Brecht’s heritage became almost sacred. When, in 1976, Richard Schechner brought his production of Mother Courage to Calcutta, staged according to the concepts of his ‘environmental theatre’, the angry audience reacted with slogans such as: “Schechner Has No Right to Destroy Brecht’s Epic Theatre,” “Brecht Dealt With War, Schechner Deals With Orgasm,” “Long Live Bertolt Brecht, The Dramatist Of The People.”17 Thus, with the naya theatre an indigenous theatrical form with new possibilities had emerged, and, by the end of the 1970s, exploration of the indigenous theatrical traditions had become a main element in contemporary Indian stage productions. This was the revival and restoration of a real national theatre in which the dramatic experience was communicated not by illusive imitation of reality but by exciting the imagination of the spectators to enable them to participate in the theatrical act. Its production styles were, as described above, those of ‘total theatre’, in which poetry, dance, music, and mime were blended together and many elements of traditional performance were effectively incorporated. Most of these plays have, for instance, a flexible structure in which a narrator called Sutradhara, Bhagavata or Vachaka links various threads of the story. There is an interesting variety in the use of this device. In Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana, the Bhagavata carries out a number of functions, he is a singer–narrator who links various episodes and comments on the action. In Mahanirvana by Satish Alekar, the central character of the play himself is the Sutradhara, carrying out both these roles with ease. In Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotval, the Sutradhara is “a witty and humorous character, which underlines the meaning of the play.”18 Another important feature of the naya drama is the use of myth, legend or folktale as an allegory of the contemporary situation. Sometimes this mythical or folk plot is presented as through the mirror of Western literature. A good example of this trend is Hayavadana (With the head of a 17

Richard Schechner, Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ramlila (Calcutta: Seagull, 1983): 47. 18 Suresh Awasthi, “Traditional Theatre; Practices and Conventions,” Sangeet Natak (April–June 1971): 48.

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horse, 1970) by the Kannada playwright Girish Karnad. The plot of the play comes from Kathasaritsagara, an ancient collection of stories in Sanskrit. But Karnad, as he mentions in the preface to his play, has borrowed it through Thomas Mann’s retelling of the story in the novella The Transposed Heads (1941). The Sanskrit tale, told by the ghost Vetala to King Vikrama, gains a mock-heroic dimension in Mann’s version. The original poses the moral problem of the superiority of the head over the body, while Mann uses the fable to ridicule the mechanical concept of life, which differentiates between body and soul. The human body, Mann argues, is a fit instrument for the fulfilment of human destiny. Even the transposition of heads will not liberate the protagonists from the psychological limitations imposed by nature. Karnad’s play poses a different problem, that of human identity. When the play opens, Devadatta and Kapila are the closest of friends. The former is a man of intellect, ‘the brain’; the latter is all physical, ‘the body’. Their relation become complicated when Devadatta marries Padmini. Kapila falls in love with Padmini and she also starts drifting towards him. The friends kill themselves, and Padmini, having received instructions from the goddess Kali, transposes their heads, giving Devadatta Kapila’s body and vice versa. The result is a confusion of identities, which reveals the ambiguous nature of human personality. Initially Devadatta – actually the head of Devadatta on Kapila’s body – behaves differently from what he was before. However, he gradually changes back to his former self, as does Kapila. Padmini who, after the exchange of heads, felt that she had got the best of both men, grows disillusioned. In both Mann’s novellla and Karnad’s play, only the woman has the capacity for complete experience after the men have lost their identity. She understands but cannot control the situation in which she is placed. A duel that leaves both friends dead brings all the puzzling to an end. The death of the lovers and the subsequent self-immolation of Padmini on her husbands’ pyre (sati) serve only to emphasize the logic behind the situational absurdity of heads first lost and then transposed. The sub-plot of the play is Hayavadana himself, the fantastic man with the horse’s head, whose story deepens the significance of the main theme of self and identity by treating it on a different plane. The man–horse’s search for identity and completeness ends comically, with his becoming a complete horse. The animal body triumphs over what is considered the best in man, the human head. Karnad uses the conventions of the Kannada folk theatre, or yakshagana: masks, dolls, make-up, songs, dance, and the

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storyteller figure of Bhagavata – to create a bizarre world; “It is a world of incomplete individuals, speaking dolls and sleeping gods, a world indifferent to the desires and frustrations of human beings.”19 The ‘urban’ trend of the naya drama is represented by the plays of the eminent Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar. Over the years, he has become concerned with the machinations of power in its several interfaces. In Shantata! Court chalu ahe (Silence! The Court is in Session, tr. 1978), perhaps his best-known play, male dominant politics assume a legalistic pose in the setting of a theatrical game: a group of actors, playing a courtroom drama, turn on a fellow actress, Leela Benare, exposing her private life to their moralistic critique and tearing her down in the process. The drama lies more in the play-acting, which barely covers up the direct hits at the pregnant and abandoned woman, and the claustrophobia of a room locked up by chance from outside. The plot of Shantata appears to be borrowed from an English version of Die Panne by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1955/56) – the same game–trial, funny, innocent in the beginning, and gloomy in the end, when one of the players is found guilty and condemned. Tendulkar makes use of this plot to raise the gender question of male domination in Indian social life.20 Another ‘urban’ play that gives a most recognizable picture of the Indian middle class is Evam Indrajit (And Indrajit too) by the Bengali playwright Badal Sircar. As translator of Pirandello, it is not surprising that he wrote the above-mentioned play under the direct or indirect influence of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The play starts with the Writer in search of a play and its protagonist. The Writer turns towards the audience, calls out to four latecomers, and asks them to come on stage. At this point the Writer starts his play, probing the lives of these four figures, Amal, Vimal, Kamal, and Indrajit. The yearnings and dissatisfactions of Indrajit, in particular, are feelings that the educated middle-class mind often faced. That is why everyone in the audience identifies himself with Indrajit revolting against the rules of the social code with its inhibitions and deeprooted taboos.

19

Girish Karnad, Hayavadana, tr. Girish Karnad (Calcutta: Oxford UP, 1982 (1975)): vi. Vijay Tendulkar, Silence! The Court is in Session, tr. Priya Adarkar (Shantata Court chalu ahe, 1978; Calcutta: Oxford U P , 1982): 12. 20

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Indrajit’s love for the girl Sircar calls Manasi – “the creation of the mind” – is taboo: she is his first cousin.21 Indrajit’s desire to break the taboo and his failure to accomplish it, his anger at the general state of affairs and everyday routine, his total inability to do anything to make his life significant – these are again common experiences of the middle class in India. The play ends with an assertion that goes beyond logic but formulates a sense of the essential and inescapable sadness of life: “Forget the questions, forget the grief, and have faith in the road – the endless road.”22 What these three playwrights share is an attitude of integrity and a direct approach, the desire to explore and explain the world around them. They do not wish to flatter the audience in general or a particular section of it. They are committed to a questioning attitude. They operate very much within the framework of middle-class values, attempting also to examine, challenge, and upset them. The characters of their plays find their realization not because of psychological depth but because they ‘sound’ credible. Their voices sound real and the spectators instinctively sense the character behind the words and tones. Many playwrights of the ‘new drama’ were deeply impressed by the lively, witty dialogue with its echoes of George Bernard Shaw: The characters become real more by the way they speak and sound. One should not be misled by the popular myth that all Shavian characters speak alike. No modern playwright with the exception of Chekhov has been able to provide the variety in the tone of characters to the extent Shaw has.23

We find the Shavian influence in the above-mentioned plays by Karnad, Tendulkar, Sircar, and many others. It is because of these tonal qualities that many of Sirkar’s type of characters also acquire a unique individuality and are invested with flesh and blood on stage. It is for this reason, too, that the ancient semi-legendary poet Kalidasa, the hero of Ashadh ka ek din (One day in the month of Ashadh), has become so real for today’s audience. Mohan Rakesh has succeeded in giving Kalidasa a very credible and individual tone of voice and manner of speech.

21

Badal Sirkar, Evam Indrajit, Engl. tr. Girish Karnad (1974; Calcutta: Oxford U P , 3rd ed.

1985): 18. 22

Sirkar, Evam Indrajit, 60. Satya Dev Dubey, “Contemporary Indian Plays,” Sangeet Natak (October–December, 1971): 32. 23

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Concluding Remarks The most important contribution of Western theatre to India is that, after a gap of many ages caused by the fading of professional Sanskrit theatre and the development of many performance modes that did not have a written play as their basis, drama has once again become an indispensable element of the performing arts. In Western theatre, until very recently it was impossible to imagine a theatrical work without a pre-written play. Under Western influence, a large number of plays have been written in Indian vernaculars since the nineteenth century. Most of these plays failed to acquire a significant creative level but remained Lesedramen, plays for reading, partly because of that long gap in the tradition of written drama in India, partly because of the imitative nature of the new theatre. Still, they did help re-established the importance of written drama in theatrical creations. The majority of the most popular Indian writers and poets of the last century – Tagore and Premchand among them – tested their skill in the dramatic arts, seeking to broaden their experience by means of writing plays in prose or verse. This experience and technique they later transmitted to the younger generation of men of letters.24 Western influence also brought a kind of topicality to the content of Indian drama. It is no longer merely a narrative of epic episodes, myths, and folktales, with indirect references to contemporary life. With the naya drama, the Indian theatre has become a vehicle for presenting directly the aspirations of the common people, mostly the middle class, but not the gods and epic heroes. It also functions as a mirror of an Indian national identity or Indianness (bharatiyata) as conceived of by most contemporary writers, especially in the field of aesthetics. Contact with Western drama and stagecraft has given to the Indian playwrights and directors a new sense of contemporary life and social responsibility. As the prominent Indian critic Mohammad Hasan has stated, Perhaps the most important change brought about by the Western impact was the emergence of a new class in literature. A new middle class now became the focal point of all literature. […] Novels and plays were no longer tales of princes and kings, but chronicled events of a middle class family facing the rigors of

24

G.P. Deshpande, “Some Perspectives on the Theatre Tomorrow,” Arts and Ideas 10.4 (1982): 58.

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social change. Even versified tales changed face and princes and princesses were replaced by men and women of lower if not the lowest rungs of society.25

The contact with Western theatre broke down the isolation of Indian theatre. Today, it has become an integral part of world theatre and receives international recognition. Many eminent Western theatre people are engaged and interested in understanding the Indian theatre tradition. A number of Indian plays have been translated into European languages and presented in Western countries. In Russia, for instance, the plays of Tagore were staged many times in the Russian language, produced by Russian directors, and performed by Russian actors. A selection of plays by such naya drama authors as Dharmavir Bharati, Girish Karnad, Badal Sirkar, Habib Tanvir, Mohan Rakesh, Utpal Dutt, Chandrasekhar Kambar, and Vijay Tendulkar has been translated and published in Russian; plays that are highly appreciated both by readers and by critics.26 Similarly, the interaction between the contemporary theatres in different regions of India itself has also increased. In the process, a concept of ‘National Theatre’ is gradually emerging. This new concept differs from the one that prevailed in ancient times, of a theatre in one language: i.e. Sanskrit. Today, it is based on a symbiotic exchange of plays, styles of presentation, and performers between different regional languages. All this constitutes a distinct type of Indian theatre, multifaceted and variegated. However regional or local its separate constituents may be, they belong to a whole, unmistakably Indian in form and content.

WORKS CITED Awasthi, Suresh. “Traditional Theatre: Practices and Conventions,” Sangeet Natak (April–June 1971): 45–56. Benegal, Som. “Western and Asian Influences on Modern Indian Theatre,” in The Performing Arts in Asia, ed. James Brandon (Paris: U N E S C O , 1971): 88–97. Deshpande, G.P. “Some Perspectives on the Theatre Tomorrow,” Arts and Ideas 10.4 (1982): 23–35. Dubey, Satya Dev. “Contemporary Indian Plays,” Sangeet Natak (October–December, 1971): 30–39.

25

Mohammad Hasan, Thought Patterns of X I X Century Literature of North India (Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1990): 102. 26 Slepoy Vek: Indiyskaya Drama X X Veka, ed. Anna Suvorova (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1996).

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Dutt, Utpal. Towards a Revolutionary Theatre (Calcutta: Sarkar, 1982). Gargi, Balwant. Theatre in India (New York: Theatre Arts, 1962). ——. Folk Theatre of India (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1966). Hasan, Mohammad. Thought Patterns of X I X Century Literature of North India (Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1990). Illahi, Nur & Muhammad Umar. Natak Sagar (The ocean of the plays) (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadami, 1982). Jain, Nemichandra. Indian Theatre: Tradition, Continuity and Change (New Delhi: Vikas, 1995). Kale, Pramod. The Theatric Universe (New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 1974). Karnad, Girish. Hayavadana, tr. Girish Karnad (1975; Calcutta: Oxford U P , 3rd ed. 1982). Nadkarni, Dhyaneshwar. The New Directions in the Marathi Theatre (New Delhi: Abhinaya Prakashan, 1967). Pronko, Leonard. Theater East and West (Berkeley: U of California P , 1967). Rangacharya, Adya. Indian Theatre (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1971). ——. “Towards a Professional Theatre,” Sangeet Natak, ed. H.K. Ranganath (Silver Jubilee Volume, 1981): 190–97. Schechner, Richard. Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ramlila (Calcutta: Seagull, 1983). Sen, Nirajan. “Some Issues before the People’s Theatre Movement,” Unity (October 1951): 15–21. ——. “Theatre Arts and Present Government,” Unity (December, 1954): 19–26. Sen, Sukumar. History of Bengali Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1960). Sirkar, Badal. Evam Indrajit, tr. Girish Karnad (1974; Calcutta: Oxford U P , 3rd ed. 1985). Suvorova, Anna. “The Progressive Writers Movement and the Indian People’s Theatre Association,” in Commitment, ed. Sayed Ashur Kazmi (London: Institute of Third World Art & Literature, 1986): 55–66. ——. “Sources of Urdu Drama,” in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the Theoretical Problems of Asian and African Literatures, ed. Marian Galik (Bratislava: Literary Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1983): 212–18. ——, ed. Slepoy Vek; Indiyskaya Drama X X Veka (The Blind Age: Twentieth-Century Indian Drama) (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1996). Tendulkar, Vijay. Silence! The Court is in Session, tr. Priya Adarkar (1978; Calcutta: Oxford U P , 3rd ed. 1982). Vatsyayan, Kapila. Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1980).

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Hybridity in Komedi Stambul M ATTHEW I SAAC C OHEN

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T I S C O M M O N P L A C E in much of the colonized world that hybrid sites of art and culture initially evoke mockery and derision from European colonizers, Western-educated members of the indigenous elite, and sometimes the traditional elite as well.1 An indigenous brass band, a nativist crucifix, an adapted form of cricket – all are constituted as acts of mimicry that are potential embarrassments to both colonized and colonizer, as these genres unsettle cultural and racial boundaries. At what is usually a later stage of cultural interaction, this embarrassment fades as intellectuals begin to emphasize the local genius for appropriating and modifying the culture of the colonizer to serve the needs of the indigenous population. This requires, commonly, that postcolonial scholars go to extreme measures to explain why hybrid cultural forms have ‘in fact’ deep indigenous roots. Ghanaian scholars emphasize that the popular theatre of Concert Party originated in traditional storytelling and tales of Ananse, the spider trickster.2 Indian scholars actively seek connections with the Sanskrit theatre for their popular theatres, overlooking large historical gaps to emphasize continuity of form and idea. Malaysian scholars typically claim deep historical origins for bangsawan, highlighting traditional Malay court etiquette, costumes, dances, and music.3 These readings serve

1 Johannes Fabian, Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Culture (Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 1998). 2 Efua Sutherland, The Original Bob: The Story of Bob Johnson, Ghana’s Ace Comedian (Accra: Anowuo Educational Publications, 1970). 3 Tan Sooi Beng, Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera (Singapore: Oxford U P , 1993): 1.

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to valorize the ‘weapons of the weak’ and celebrate the survival of traditional culture forms in the face of imperialism and colonial domination. A third phase of popular cultural discourse understands popular culture as a site of interaction. Both Dutch and Indonesian contemporary cuisines are the product of mutual interaction. No good Dutch kitchen today is complete without a supply of boemboe (derived from the Indonesian word for spices), sambel (hot sauce), and kroepoek (shrimp wafers). The rijsttafel (literally Dutch for ‘rice table’; figuratively a spread of Indonesian dishes accompanied by rice) is a weekly tradition for many Dutch households. Indonesians likewise delight in bistek (beefsteak) and bregedel (Dutch frikandel) meatballs. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have interrogated their own culture and cultures of ethnic Others in terms of mutual interaction and cross-fertilization.4 This reading is not without its dangers, for, as Homi Bhabha and others have pointed out, an over-emphasis on hybridity flies in the face of efforts to consolidate forms of collectivity among culturally dispossessed and marginalized groups. The best of recent popular cultural studies have articulated a processual model of hybridity, counteracting what Pnina Werbner has characterized as “the current stress on contingent hybridity, a selfcongratulatory discourse which leads nowhere.”5 Such studies look at both hybridity and reactions against hybridity, creolization at the centre and essentialism on the margins. It is not enough simply to trace origins and influences. One must also come to terms with the anxieties and passions that drive culture workers to invent new forms of culture and maintain and revive old forms as well. This essay on komedi stambul, a theatrical genre that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in the Dutch East Indies (colonial Indonesia), is intended as such a contribution to early modern Southeast Asian cultural studies. 4 Examples of this recent scholarly trend are too numerous to mention, but for some more theoretically astute and influential examples, see Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993); Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1995); and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia U P , 1996). 5 Pnina Werbner, “Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997): 22.

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Translation Komedi stambul was a commercial musical theatre in Malay that flourished from the 1890s through the 1930s. The theatre was a platform for mimesis and translation, in which “a variety of stories were imitated/enacted” (tiroein segala roepa tjeritaan).6 The original Komedie Stamboel company was owned and founded by the Surabaya Chinese entrepreneur and impresario Yap Gwan Thay in 1891; its most famous director was the actor– manager Auguste Mahieu (1865–1903).7 Most of the original company was made up of Eurasian (‘Indo’) actors, though many komedi stambul companies founded subsequently had ethnically diverse casts. The Komedie Stamboel’s initial repertoire was composed mostly of 1001 Nights plays, which had been translated into Malay largely through Dutch and other European sources.8 This accounts for the theatre’s name – komedie was the Malay term for ‘commercial entertainment’, while in both Malay and Dutch Stamboel meant ‘Istanbul’, the capital of the Ottoman Empire and the epicentre of the Middle and Near-Eastern world in the popular 6

Pembrita Betawi (7 May 1896). This and all following translations from Malay and Dutch are by the author unless indicated otherwise. Orthography in original sources is various – for example, stamboel can also be spelled stamboul or stambool. All newspapers referred to in this essay are from the collections of the K I T L V ; the Leiden University library; the Royal Library in The Hague, and the National Library in Jakarta. I wish to thank the staff of these institutions for their good will, as well as the International Institute for Asian Studies (The Netherlands) and the University of Glasgow, which provided financial support for my archival research. 7 I shall use the lower-case and italicized komedi stambul to refer to the theatrical genre, and the capitalized Komedie Stamboel to refer to the first company founded in 1891. The origin of the Komedie Stamboel is discussed at length in Matthew Isaac Cohen, “On the Origin of the Komedie Stamboel: Popular Culture, Colonial Society, and the Parsi Theatre Movement,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 157.2 (2001): 313–57. See also Matthew Isaac Cohen, The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891– 1903 (Athens: Ohio U P , 2006). On Yap Gwan Thay, see Matthew Isaac Cohen, “A Chinese Pujangga from Surabaya? Yap Gwan Thay in an Age of Translation,” in The History of Translation in Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Henri Chambert–Loir (forthcoming). The period covered in this essay, 1891–1902, coincides with the era when komedi stambul existed as a distinct theatrical genre. In 1902, Auguste Mahieu joined the bangsawan company known to posterity as Wayang Kasim, bringing with him to this Singapore-based troupe music, stories, and presumably other komedi stambul theatrical techniques. Thereafter, komedi stambul and bangsawan were much more closely related, if not identical. See Matthew Isaac Cohen, “Border Crossings: Bangsawan in the Netherlands Indies in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Indonesia and the Malay World 30.87 (2002): 101–15. 8 Matthew Isaac Cohen, “Thousand and One Nights at the Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theatre and Travelling Stories in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Middle Eastern Literatures 7.2 (2004): 235–46.

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imagination. The need for new audiences (and larger profits) resulted in what was initially a building-based residential company becoming a touring company in 1892. Tours introduced the dramatic form to audiences throughout Indonesia and Malaysia. Such was the popularity of the first company that numerous groups were formed in imitation. Some of these companies were amateur, performing for invited audiences in private houses and clubs. Others were professional, and became competitors to Yap Goan Thay’s company. Komedi stambul subsequently became the name for a theatrical genre. The competition among the numerous komedi stambul companies, as well as competition from other forms of commercial entertainment, contributed to an expansion of the repertoire. Audiences were hungry for new theatrical techniques and new stories. Newspaper serials provided some of the latter. A large percentage of the new stories were translations from European literature, such as Bluebeard, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, as well as translations of European stage works such as Faust, The Somnambulist, and Aida. The adaptation of European plays to the Malay stage was recognized from the start as an accomplishment. One journalist observed the following about an adaptation of Genoveva, a tale perhaps best known today internationally from Robert Schumann’s 1850 opera by that title, as performed by the komedi stambul group known as the Komedi Spanjool. If one thinks about it, this play is based on a European story and had to be adapted into another language, certainly not an easy task, but stressful to one and all. Especially when one considers that this company is accustomed to performing 1001 Nights plays exclusively and that this is the first time it has attempted to perform this new play.9

Komedi stambul and the related bangsawan theatre were for many, if not most, turn-of-the-century Malay speakers the primary channel for European literature.10 The movement between page and stage tended to be one-directional, as once a tale became a core part of the komedi stambul repertoire it became so familiar to the general public that it was of little interest to readers.11 In contrast, even for those who knew the tales through other 9

Bintang Soerabaia (5 September 1893). Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Tempo Doeloe: Antologi Sastra Pra-Indonesia (Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1982): 3–5. 11 “The hikayat [Malay tale] of ‘Siti Safira’ that is now being published in that newspaper [Hoekoem Hindia] has almost no readers as this tale is adapted from the komedi stambul, 10

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modes of presentation, there was great interest in seeing stories represented in terms of the familiar Malay language and culture of the komedi stambul.12 Some of the ‘European’ plays were adapted from Malay translations of European literature, published serially in newspapers and (less frequently) as books. It is possible to trace the textual lineages of some of these plays. For example, the Malay translation of Snow White was initially published as a serial in the Surakarta newspaper Djawi Kando in April–May 1893 with the dual Dutch–Malay title Sneeuwwitje (Poetihnja Saldjoe).13 This translation was reprinted in a number of Malay papers in 1893, including Bintang Soerabaia. The tale entered the repertoire of the Komedie Stamboel, under Mahieu’s direction, the following year.14 It would be an oversimplification, however, to say that the Komedie Stamboel version of Snow White was a direct translation of a Malay serial from the newspaper page to the popular stage. Snow White was also a staple of the nineteenth-century European stage, and was performed by numerous touring and local European companies co-existing with the Komedie Stamboel.15 These most likely also had their influence on the Malay stage version. In fact, a major attraction for non-Dutch speakers was the komedi stambul’s resemblance to European popular theatre. It offered a conduit to a cultural world otherwise linguistically impenetrable. The Komedie Stamboel is excellent for Muslims and Chinese as well as Europeans [read: Eurasians] with less than perfect comprehension of Dutch. That is why they watch the Komedie Stamboel with a happy and pleased heart, for they where it is often performed. The only difference is he [the adapter] has lengthened the tale somewhat” (Bintang Betawi, 29 December 1900). 12 “Tonight it [the Komedie Stamboel] will perform the story of Faust of Arabia or Fatol Achmat. This play is quite fine and wherever it is performed it garners much praise. The story is not taken from the 1001 Nights tales, but from a play for European Opera [Opera Fransch]. There has never been another company in the world that has performed this tale in Malay. Perhaps many people already have seen this story enacted as European Opera, and know for themselves that this tale has much of merit” (Bintang Soerabaia, 2 May 1894). See Appendix 1 for a list of plays performed by the Komedie Stamboel in 1894. 13 The dates of this initial publication in Djawi Kando in 1893 are: 21, 25 and 28 April; 2, 5 and 9 May. Djawi Kando was a bilingual (Javanese and Malay) newspaper; the Snow White translation appeared in the Malay part of the paper. 14 The earliest mention is a 30 June 1894 performance in Buitenzorg (Bogor). 15 One production possibly witnessed by Mahieu was a children’s opera version with piano accompaniment performed by the Surabaya amateur company Excelsior on 19 April 1891 at the Komedie Gebouw. During the same year, the play was also performed in nearby Probolinggo by young girls at a children’s party (Soerabaya–Courant, 19 January 1891).

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truly understand what is enacted. [...] The Komedie Stamboel can be equated with the European theatre of the sort that plays in major theatres. The only difference is that it uses Malay that can be understood by one and all.16

Indeed, reviews and notices in the Dutch papers in the early 1890s often favourably liken the Komedie Stamboel to European theatrical troupes. European as well as non-European spectators seem to have taken genuine pleasure in the acting, effects, and mis-en-scène of the theatre. The theatre placed great stress on visual effects – regularly concluding performances with a wordless tableau vivant (living picture) in which appropriately costumed actors presented a series of striking images, often drawn from European history, to musical accompaniment. Comparable theatrical fare was not always so easy to come by, particularly outside major cities.

Reputation For the numerous towns and small cities of Java and other parts of the Indies, the arrival of a professional komedi stambul troupe was an event in itself. Posters went up on walls and other public spaces, circulars were distributed, people stopped to watch the touring theatre’s tent as it was erected in the town square. Audiences marvelled at many a troupe’s ethnic “mixture of actors including Chinese, Dutch, Arabs, Javanese and Indians.”17 Such mixture was rarely to be found in other sorts of enterprises in the Dutch East Indies. There was likewise a social electricity (and occasionally friction) generated from the mix of people in the auditorium, cutting across normal divides of ethnicity, class, and sex. Hosting komedi stambul troupes was represented as a part of what made a town or city ramai or rame (boisterous, lively) – a sign of prosperity and health (raharja in Javanese and Javanese Malay) of the civic body. This rame quality was also highly valued in performances of komedi stambul – it was almost as if the signs of activity and life on stage flowed into everyday life. A stage that was rame guaranteed a society that was rame as well. At the individual level, komedi stambul was understood to lift one’s spirits and allow one to forget one’s worries, the chief function of all art in traditional Malay thought. Komedi stambul, from its beginnings, had its detractors. Much debate on the troupe’s quality focused on the language used in dialogue. Historiogra16 17

Bintang Barat (21 October 1892). Bintang Barat (25 June 1895).

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phy emblematizes the komedi stambul as a ‘low Malay’ or ‘bazaar Malay’ art form. The language critique of komedi stambul often emerged in the 1890s in the form of comparisons with touring bangsawan troupes from Malaya. “The language of the bangsawan theatre is more refined than that used in the Komedie Stamboel. For bangsawan tends not to use the foul language often used in the Komedie Stamboel.”18 From the beginning, there were frequent criticisms of unruly behaviour among both spectators and actors, and calls for greater police presence and restrictions on the consumption of alcohol. Two criminal cases reported in the national press did much to associate komedi stambul in the popular imagination with illegal and immoral behaviour. In Yogyakarta in 1896, Wim Cramer, the actor–manager of the Komedi Sri Stamboul, was shot in the head by another company member named Pik Janitz because Cramer was sleeping with Janitz’s girlfriend, the actress Lien Gemser. (Cramer miraculously survived the shooting and became a recording star for the Odeon label in the first two decades of the twentieth century.) The trial did much to reveal the loose living arrangements among theatre people at the time. More serious (though less publicized) was the murder of a racketeer named J.D. Loth during an 1899 performance in Batavia. Reporters, correspondents, and readers in letters to the editor called for bans on komedi stambul, which were in fact occasionally enforced by local colonial and religious authorities, to the annoyance of performers and spectators alike. The immorality of theatre, in part perhaps a transposition to the Indies of European anti-theatrical prejudicial discourses, became a major strand in the shared topic of public culture. It provided a mode of antithetical identification. ‘Polite’ sectors of society could define who they were in terms of demonized outsiders. Anti-theatrical discourse was a topic that brought together a number of elements in the plural society of the Indies. The traditionalist noble elite (priyayi) class of Java, modernist Muslims, and others who embraced the bourgeois morality linked to Dutch Calvinism concurred that commercial culture was something to be monitored, controlled, delimited. The komedi stambul actor was held up as a negative instance of how not to behave. This discourse was hegemonic, in the sense that it was partly embraced by actors themselves, evident from an article about an anonymous komedi stambul director who offers advice that readers should “not follow my path and become an outcast from proper 18

Bintang Soerabaia (2 October 1893).

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society.”19 By the latter half of the 1890s, Europeans still came to the theatre, but they were drawn out of curiosity or a desire to mock. Many of the men were drunk, and treated the entire theatrical experience as farcical. The following report comes from Sidoarjo, an eastern Javanese town with a population of around 10,000 and a busy market. On Sunday night February 19 (1899) I went to the theatre to see the Komedie si Boenga Mawar. There were many spectators that night, as it happened, with no places left empty. About 10 p.m., eight (European) gentlemen arrived. The gentlemen then proceeded to drink beer until they were drunk, and then in their drunken state they went backstage and put on theatrical costumes and then went on stage. All the spectators laughed at how funny their costumes looked. The men played along until the show was nearly open, and came on stage again for the tableau.20

The pleasure the anonymous ‘gentlemen’ took in theatre was not derived from aesthetic appreciation, but from an entirely different mode of engagement. Komedi stambul, initially praised as a charitable venture to benefit impoverished Eurasian actors, had become the object of derision among Europeans and Muslim elites.

Criticism Malay dramatic criticism was written in tandem with social and moral criticism of the theatrical environment. The same journalists who wrote about pickpockets and roughhousing at the theatre also critiqued acting, diction, music, and sets. Dramatic criticism was a new discursive genre in the Indies. Prior to the development of komedi stambul, there were occasionally articles dealing with more regionally oriented theatre genres. But these descriptions tended to be cursory and did not concern themselves with the details of acting and scenography, nor did they offer suggestions for improvements. The emergence of komedi stambul potentiated a language of description and analysis to evaluate performance. This analytical language was in part based on European critical models, but also departed from it in many ways. It is a significant moment in the history of generic translation, as the norms of Malay-language journalistic criticism were first developed around the theatre and only subsequently applied to published texts.21 19 20 21

Pembrita Bahroe (30 November 1896). Bintang Soerabaia (27 February 1899). Pramoedya, Tempo Doeloe, 3–5.

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It is important to recall that there were no specialized theatre critics in the Dutch East Indies; there are very few even in contemporary Indonesia. But some writers clearly took a special interest in the theatre, and reported on theatrical companies with regularity and great zest, while others manifested a more disdainful attitude. People ask us whether Bintang Barat (a rival Batavia newspaper) has a double standard. Why does this question arise? Because there is no end to their writing on performances of the Komedie Stamboel. They state that spectators are incapable of being bored, with new plays every night. They say that shows are packed with spectators. But they write absolutely nothing about other companies. We cannot provide an answer to this question but we feel that perhaps the Editor is a friend or relative of the director or company members of the Komedie Stamboel, or that he receives complimentary tickets.22

There are some grounds perhaps for the accusations of nepotism – Bintang Barat was indeed overflowing with news about the Komedie Stamboel’s first Batavia engagement in 1892, while Hindia–Olanda (and other papers) paid the company less heed, favouring other sorts of news. One major theme in critical reactions was the degree to which komedi stambul performances fell short of European professional theatre. Such is a Malay newspaper editor’s reaction to the very first presentation of the Komedie Stamboel: The editor would like to say that it is best to rehearse a play many times before presentation. [. . . ] The editor warns that if you wish to use European theatrical conventions [atoeran komedi Ollanda], you need to be consistent in application. For example, when the curtain closes, don’t let it stay closed for too long. The same is true for the actors – don’t take too long for costume changes.23

Local norms began to develop, however, which demonstrated an attention to and concern for certain modes of theatricality. Costumes and drop and wing scenery were ideally new and clean. When equipment showed obvious signs of wear, this would be criticized. Musicians and the chorus needed to be well-trained and in tune. Principal actors had to be confident in their presentation, amusing, with voices that projected to the back of the auditorium. Actresses had to look physically attractive, which in the modern Malay world means in part possessing white skin. (This is part of the 22 23

Hindia–Olanda (13 October 1892). Pembrita–Bahroe (20 January 1891).

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reason why Eurasians accounted for such a large percentage of komedi stambul performers.) Clowns were appreciated for their word-play and circus-like antics. (The best clowns, in fact, were said to be good enough for international circuses.) It is perhaps most useful to look at a single newspaper that paid a great deal of attention to komedi stambul, the Batavia daily Pembrita Betawi (Batavia News). During the eight-month theatrical season of March– November 1895, for example, more than fifty news items, reviews, and letters to the editor centrally concerned this theatrical form. (There were also numerous notices.) Most of these items are unsigned but appear to have been written by the paper’s leading reporter and editor, the most acute Malay theatre critic of the 1890s. Such is his involvement in komedi stambul that he is actually listed in an advertisement as a contact person for auditioning for a newly formed komedi stambul troupe.24 But there are also occasional letters from Siti Sanimbar, one of the paper’s Batavia correspondents; ‘Siloeman Penonton’ (Ghostly Spectator) from Bogor; ‘Penonton Sri Stamboel’ (Spectator of Sri Stamboel) from Batavia; and even marginal notes from the newspaper’s typesetter. The interest shown by the newspaper’s writing staff clearly encouraged these contributors to write on komedi stambul, responding directly to articles they had read as well as presenting new information about groups performing outside of Batavia. Together, these interested writers and readers constitute what Stanley Fish would call an ‘interpretive community’, defined in part by their shared passion for theatre and bridged by a common language of representation and a discursive medium.25 An examination of what they wrote shows that their discourse was hybrid, patently informed by European aesthetics but also articulating more local concerns and preoccupations. Much criticism continues the tradition of rasa aesthetics formulated in the Sanskrit Natyashastra and transmitted to Java and other parts of the Indic world in oral form. The komedi stambul was a theatre of spectacle, in which magicians were employed to devise stage magic and great care was devoted to painted drop and wing scenery. Writers on komedi stambul perceived the moving images on stage in painterly terms. 24

Pembrita Betawi (6 November 1895). Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1980). 25

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Tingka lakoenja terlaloe manis Kami memandang tiadaken soeda Seperti tjat tersepoe pernis Trang, mengkilap semoeanja ada

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The actions were overwhelmingly sweet. We gazed without end. Like paint coated with varnish, All was clear and sparkling.26

The proscenium frame allowed audiences to cue to visual aesthetics in a way not formally possible, and theatrical producers in turn conscientiously composed stage pictures intended for visual delight. The following description of a special effect and a ‘reveal’ scene gives a sense of the importance of spectacle. Many people were horrified and there were one or two who cried when they saw Kasim’s stomach split open and his intestines spill out. The effect of the inside of the cave, where the treasures of the robber chief were stored, was very fine. At first, the curtain is open and all that is visible are the stones of the cave. The curtain is then opened a second time and one sees a skull. On the third time, one sees bones and sculls and in the centre one can see rotating light reflecting off the treasure.27

Effects such as these were heavily promoted in company publicity, as was the case in the related bangsawan theatre.28 Such was the degree of accuracy in scenic painting that artists employed by komedi stambul troupes were also capable counterfeiters.29 But, somewhat surprisingly, stage mechanisms, reveal scenes, and transformation scenes were rarely detailed in articles or letters in the newspapers. Lighting tended to be noted only when lights were accidentally jostled in performance or when illumination was overly dim. What was important was that stage action be clearly seen. As a fan poem by Siti Senimbar has it: “The stambul performs in a bright place / The eyes gaze and the heart is pleased.”30 Costumes (with rare exceptions) are also noted only briefly, with comments such as “costumes are new and well-cut.”31 Music was also a prominent feature of performances, and elicited somewhat more in the way of critical discourse. The most common complaint is lack of audibility. The poor acoustics of the tents and sheds in which most komedi stambul groups played meant that projection was of paramount im26 27 28 29 30 31

Pembrita Betawi (25 March 1895). Pembrita Betawi (5 May 1896). See Tan Sooi Beng, Bangsawan; Cohen, “Border Crossings.” Cohen, “A Chinese Pujangga from Surabaya?” Pembrita Betawi (23 March 1895). Pembrita Betawi (25 April 1896).

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portance. There are occasionally calls for supplementing the orchestra with additional players in order that the music might be heard. Individual singer–actors are singled out for voices that are merdoe (sweet) or sedep (refreshing or tasty), the latter being a gastronomic term related to rasa aesthetics. Individuals are also criticized for having voices that are “out of tune” (palsoe; koerang njata). Sometimes vocalists over-compensated for the poor acoustics of the halls, resulting in vocal shrillness.32 More than one vocalist was advised not to be “too forceful in singing, like someone shouting.”33 Very occasionally there are comments about the instrumental accompanists and their synchronization (or lack thereof) with the singers on stage. Plays (lakon) are praised for the effects they elicit in spectators, informed by the rasa aesthetic. One play is praised for being “strikingly unusual and amusing,” another for being “terrifying and heart-rending to many,” a third for being “very lively and quite fine, causing sadness in spectators.”34 There is usually little in the way of detailed textual analysis, however, to inform us of the specifics of why such audience reactions might be evoked. But the element of performances that was consistently of greatest interest to critics, both in the pages of Pembrita Betawi and elsewhere, was acting. An article that originally appeared in Bintang Soerabaia, Surabaya’s major Malay daily, and reprinted in Pembrita Betawi put it as follows: “Fine costumes have no use if performers have no comprehension of their roles or if they act as uncaring machines.”35 Many reviewers refer only to the names of characters, as actor’s names were not always public knowledge. However, this did not discourage Pembrita Betawi writers from devoting much space to the intricacies of acting, articulating a robust descriptive lexicon. Actors are praised for being “graceful” (lemes) and for their expressive capacity to communicate with audiences. An inexpressive actor is described as “acting cold and stiff, like a banana log,” another is compared to a “wooden doll” (boeneka kaijoe).36 Such critiques underline the radical incongruity with acting in traditional Javanese theatre and dance, in which lack of expression is valued in alus (refined) and alim (polite) characters. Action was not simply presented – 32 33 34 35 36

Pembrita Betawi (19 March 1895). Pembrita Betawi (18 March 1895). Pembrita Betawi (21 October 1895; 2 and 6 May 1896). Pembrita Betawi (3 September 1895). Pembrita Betawi (11 November 1895; 29 July 1895).

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gestures were actually projected or ‘thrown’ at the audiences – a key term in Pembrita Betawi and other period newspapers being boeang tingka (literally, ‘throw a movement’). This involved skills that were actively demonstrated – actors and companies alike are said to ‘make a show of their talents’ (oendjoek kebisaanja), ‘make a show of their cleverness’ (oendjoek kepandeannja), or even ‘make a show of their trained skills’ (oendjoek pladjarannja). These projected skills and talents were applied to a form of emblematic performance, in which characters stand as tokens of certain types. Actors were typecast as kings, princes, maidens, genies, clowns and the like. Komedi stambul acting shares this orientation with traditional Southeast Asian theatre and conventional melodramatic theatre of nineteenth-century Europe. T H E W I F E O F T H E F I S H E R M A N made a show of her cleverness and her abilities through all sorts of D I A L O G U E and C O M P L A I N T S , just in the way a V I S C H W I J F [fishwife] should. She showed her impudence to men and how a man has to bend and obey the wishes of a woman.37

The fishwife was a well-known character-type, of course, in nineteenthcentury European literature and theatre. But there is no clear parallel in Malay oral tradition. This foreignness is signalled by the use of the capitalized Dutch term viswijf as an internal translation for ‘the wife of the fisherman’. Her competent translation to the komedi stambul stage and her ready recognition by the reviewer as a dramatic type shows how much both producers and consumers of theatre were oriented toward such norms. Writers show the desire to participate vicariously in the emotions of characters, drawing in equal measure on rasa tradition (in which performer and spectator ideally co-emote) and emergent demands for psychological realism. “The prince played by Mr. C. performed well that night, especially when he emerged from the forest to look for thorns, he appeared most sad in his actions and his singing brought sadness to one’s heart.”38 A performance that failed to project the necessary emotional resonance would be deemed unsatisfactory. When she was reunited with her husband, whom she thought had been killed, I feel she was overly cold in balance. She should behave as expected. When a

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Pembrita Betawi (29 April 1896). (Emphases in the original.) Pembrita Betawi (18 May 1896).

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woman meets a husband who she greatly loves, she ought to show her love with a thankful heart and happiness. She ought to feel compelled to hug him.39

Emotional scenes had to be played ‘hot’; affect had to be displayed in ways contrary to public behaviour in real life. Conforming to the hybrid norms of the stage meant placing communication over propriety. Some writers found the degree of sexual openness mildly scandalous but others demanded an emotional fidelity formerly unknown on the Malay stage.40 He should behave like one would in an actual love scene, for example: either he or the girl (he loves) should approach the other and then freeze, disclose his heart’s intention with hugs and kisses, or run his fingers through her hair. If one approaches a sweet and well-presented girl with a graceful voice, one should sing and speak with a light like the morning star! But no! The two actors sat facing each other listlessly in their chairs acting as if they were talking about what’s for sale in the market.41

This call for fidelity extended to costume, make-up, and stage effects as well. The new money pouring into this commercial theatre from ticket sales and wealthy backers, as well as the increased exposure of spectators to realism in European theatre, panoramic displays, and illustrative art, increasingly pushed komedi stambul in the direction of spectacular realism.42 “The old king appeared too young; it is rare indeed that someone eighty years old has hair and a beard that are still black. This could be so only if he dyed his hair.”43 The comparison with pictorial art appears to be often on the mind of spectators and writers. It is rare among other companies to see a theatre tent so well lit, or as roomy and clean as that of the S R I S T A M B O E L ; to evoke a metaphor one might compare it to a picture frame, illustrated by a teacher at the pinnacle of his abilities.44

Komedi stambul, like the Parsi theatre which influenced it, was very much a ‘frontal’ theatre.45 The lit proscenium stage and the often elaborate tab39

Pembrita Betawi (18 March 1895). Cohen, “Thousand and One Nights at the Komedie Stamboel.” 41 Pembrita Betawi (3 August 1895). 42 On spectacular realism in French art and culture at this time, see Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: U of California P , 1998). 43 Pembrita Betawi (18 March 1895). 44 Pembrita Betawi (29 July 1895). (Emphasis in the original.) 40

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leaux vivants (living pictures) that regularly concluded performances promoted technical virtuosity in the presentation of stage images. These tableaux were noted in advertisements, and appear to have been a highlight of any evening and a major audience draw. Some perhaps were flesh-andblood realizations of book illustrations and prints much appreciated by educated elites. All made quite elaborate use of available theatrical technologies. One display of the oft-repeated eruption of Mount Krakatau featured “volcanic ash, flashes of lightening, sea tremors and earth quakes, praying country people; all appeared natural and just right.”46 These tableaux, as much as the plays, assisted in the conceptualizing of the world as a picture, one of the hallmarks of modernity.47 The reporters and correspondents who contributed their reports on theatrical performances were not under the illusion that their words would sway spectators to attend or stay away from performances. Often, in fact, reviews sent by correspondents would appear weeks after a troupe had departed to parts unknown. In any case, few spectators subscribed to newspapers, and the general public paid little heed to press notices. Rave reviews seemed not to have featured on handbills. The criticism had a more precisely targeted audience than the general public. It was intended above all for discerning fellow readers of the newspaper, and secondly (perhaps) for the theatre makers themselves. Criticism might deal openly with people, institutions, and locations of local significance, but spoke to a larger reality. By charting the course of the play’s performance in terms of the emotional effects of acting (rather than recounting special effects, audience reaction, music, or a million other things), dramatic criticism importunes us to ‘read’ the theatrical spectacle in a like way. That is to say, criticism provides something like a sentimental education, a lesson in how to be a playgoer and participate sympathetically in the on-stage action as it was ‘thrown’ to the audience. Such participation

45 See Anuradha Kapur, “The Representation of Gods and Heroes: Parsi Mythological Drama of the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 23–24 (1993): 85–107. 46 Tjerimai (18 November 1893). 47 See Appendix 2 for examples of tableaux vivants. See also Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977): 115–54; Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 2000): 1–34; Cohen, “Thousand and One Nights at the Komedie Stamboel,” 237.

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has been, in other countries at the same time, a means by which audience members can enter the public sphere.48 To draw on Raymond Williams, we can read in Malay dramatic criticism an incipient “structure of feeling.” This concept, which has gained great currency in critical theory in recent years, was originally articulated by Williams in relation to theatre, referring to “an organic connection between dramatic feeling and dramatic method” which is a sign of “a highly developed kind of drama.”49 In a ‘developed’ or ‘mature’ theatre (as opposed to the numerous transitional or ephemeral sorts of theatre that exist today and have existed in the past), speech, action, scenography, and dramaturgy are one. Meaning and moral pattern are “wholly and vitally present” and “a compelling feeling, at once individual and general” can be apprehended and appreciated by all participants in the field of theatre – players and spectators alike. As Williams explains, a structure of feeling involves “meaning and values as they are actively lived and felt.” These “social experiences [are] in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available.”50 Komedi stambul was still a new theatrical genre at the time that it was being reviewed in Pembrita Betawi. But it is evident in this context that it would have an important role to play in the future in the development of an Indonesian public sphere through providing modes for picturing the world and representing and apprehending human action.

The Indies League and Shakespeare Between 1899 and 1901, perhaps as a response to European antipathy to komedi stambul, Auguste Mahieu turned his attention to the earliest form of Eurasian cultural politics, allying himself with the Indies League (Indische Bond). The League was established in 1898 at the urging of the Eurasian journalist G.J. Andriesse. Andriesse was passionate that the permanent ‘European’ residents of the Indies (the so-called blijvers or ‘stayers’) – the vast majority of whom were in fact Eurasian – were entitled to more power 48 This point is indebted to a recent account of Victorian sensation theatre. See Lynn M. Voskuil, “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Victorian Studies 44.2 (2002): 245–74. See also Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities. 49 Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance (New York: Basic Books, 1968): 51–52. 50 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1977): 132–34.

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than the temporary residents (trekkers). The former considered the Indies their permanent home, while the latter were essentially adventurers, who wished to exploit the riches of the Indies and then return to the Netherlands. As Andriesse often railed, Indië voor de Indiërs.51 The Indies League proved to have substantial appeal, attracting more than 4,000 members by 1900. Its central function was to improve the economic betterment of Eurasians, but discussions in League circles often brought up issues of political equality as well. Mahieu became a member of the League in Feburary 1900. Remarkably, he joined along with his entire company – or at least all the male actors in it. The link between the komedi stambul and the social welfare of Eurasians had been a selling-point since the earliest Surabaya days, when the city’s Dutch newspapers promoted the group as a charity effort for poor Eurasian performers. Mahieu was mindful to keep the troupes he directed allEurasian. This suggests that there is some truth in the portrait of Mahieu offered by Otto Knaap, which depicts Mahieu as being motivated by a populist idealism as a socialist democrat to create a “harmonious union” of European and Asian art out of well-known tales, performed in the archipelago’s major lingua franca, that could appeal to a broad public including Javanese, Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and (above all) Eurasians.52 Mahieu’s membership in the League brought him into direct contact with Eurasian intellectuals, including the aforementioned music critic Otto Knaap as well as the famed writer Hans van de Wall (who wrote novels and plays under the nom de plume of Victor Ido). Mahieu’s personality was magnetic enough to inspire Knaap to write his portrait of him for the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad. Social exchange with Mahieu prompted van de Wall to feature him pseudonymously as the character Reumer in his novel of Eurasian life, De Paupers.53 It appears to be around the time that Mahieu joined the League that his troupe began to perform Malay versions of Shakespeare’s plays, including possibly The Merchant of Venice and

51 Ulbe Bosma & Gijsbert Oonk, “Bombay Batavia: Parsi and Eurasian Variations on the Middlemen Theme,” in Mediators Between State and Society, ed. Nico Randeraad (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998): 37. 52 Otto Knaap, “De Indische Antoine,” Bondsblad (18 and 25 July 1903). 53 Victor Ido, De Paupers: Roman uit de Indo-Europeesche Samenleving (Amersfoort: Valkhoff, 1912).

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Romeo and Juliet.54 Dutch elites who chanced upon these performances found their anachronisms ludicrous, the liberties taken with the plot excessive, and their pace numbingly slow. They balked at expanding, contracting, or fabricating roles to fit actors, and laughed at the indiscriminate appropriation of popular tunes – such as the use of “Silent Night” for the famed three-casket scene in a komedi stambul version of Merchant, as recalled by Jan Fabricius in a 1949 collection of nostalgic essays.55 But less puritan spectators were swayed by the range of passions released on stage by way of Shakespeare’s stirring tales and vividly realized characters. There seems to be more than a bit of pride in the voice of Reumer in De Paupers when he invites Eurasians to see his version of Shakespeare. “We are doing ‘Romeo and Juliet’,” he tells them. “I have adapted myself a bit of Shakespeare into High Malay and we have had much success with it.”56 The symbolic capital attached to the Bard, regardless of liberties taken with the text, provided cultural validation for Mahieu’s enterprise. There are two interlinked, pressing questions to consider in relation to Mahieu’s Shakespeare. The first is why Mahieu would have been interested in adapting Shakespeare if it left his troupe so vulnerable to charges of cultural vandalism. The second is why someone like Jan Fabricius would trouble himself to write about a komedi stambul version of The Merchant of Venice. Any answers one might propose must be somewhat speculative, but I believe there are some cues to pick up on. One possible partial answer to the first question is that Mahieu simply did not care if he offended cultural purists. Shakespeare offered good yarns, with action and drama galore, plain and simple. The European trekkers who took offence were not part of the audience to which the komedi stambul catered and there was no need to placate them. This, indeed, seems to have been the attitude of some of Mahieu’s successors, but I do not believe it entirely captures his own sensibility. A second answer is that appropriating Shakespeare and other Occidental sources (e.g., Faust) allowed an exploration of emotional depths and alien sensibilities not otherwise possible under the generic limitations of Arabian Nights tales and Malay legends. This is borne out in the Romeo and Juliet post-discussion dialogues in De Paupers, which centre on 54

At this time, Mahieu’s troupe was known officially as Sinar India (Light of the Indies) but was still commonly referred to unofficially as the Komedie Stamboel. 55 Jan Fabricius, “Verguld Goud,” in Tempo Doeloe: Uit de Goeie Ouwe Tijd (The Hague: Leopolds, 1949): 74–82. 56 Ido, De Paupers, 226–27.

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romantic love. Nini, sitting in the audience and romantically interested in Reumer – who is playing Romeo – had been overwhelmed by the staged passions to the point of being jealous of Reumer’s Juliet. The central postperformance question is whether a love-unto-death like that of Romeo and Juliet is possible in the real world; Reumer states that he has never experienced anything like it in actual life, but Nini is convinced of its possibility. A third, and more complex, answer lies in problems of hybridity. Again, I turn to De Paupers. Prior to the Romeo and Juliet performance, when Reumer engages in dialogue with the Eurasian protagonists, the contrast between the place of Eurasians in the Netherlands Indies and British India is explicated by Reumer. They say: you are a full-blooded Englishman or you are not. There is no middle way. If you are not an Englishman, you are coloured. They don’t consider you as being at all like themselves. And at least you know how you are perceived. But here, for us, our legal position is equivalent to that of the Europeans. In theory, we are equal to the Europeans. But in practice, they consider you inferior and exclude you from many positions and privileges. This is perfidy. It is grounded in a lie.57

Reumer goes on to say that it was solidarity with the “poor members of my race” that caused him to drop out of high school and establish a theatre company – thus providing work for unemployed Eurasians. Shakespeare, it is hardly necessary to say, is iconic of Englishness. Englishness, in the particular Indo reading articulated by Ido/Reumer/Mahieu, means perfect definition within racial bounds: all Shakespeare is ‘European’; there can be no ‘coloured’ Shakespeare. Enacting Shakespeare as a colonial Indo is thus not simply a ‘colourblind’ casting decision; it is an active, symbolic assertion of European privilege, and an assault on Dutch colonial perfidy. A major reason for the interest of the likes of Fabricius in writing about komedi stambul Shakespeare now emerges clearly. Recall that Fabricius published his portrait of a komedi stambul Merchant in 1949, as decolonization was underway. The focus on ‘the ridiculous’ is a staging of a classic, paternalistic retro-justification for centuries of Dutch exploitation. In contrast, ‘race men’ like Knaap and Hans van de Wall wrote about komedi stambul towards the awakening of Indo consciousness.

57

Ido, De Paupers, 225.

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Postcolonialism Komedi stambul was not a living theatrical genre when Fabricius published his account. It had been already supplanted in the theatrical economy of Indonesia by more ‘modern’ forms of theatre, including tooneel and sandiwara. But it did not disappear. It was imaginatively ‘restored’ in postcolonial Indonesia and the Netherlands in contrasting ways. In the Netherlands, komedi stambul was figured as a cultural accomplishment or ‘artistic achievement’ of the Eurasian or ‘Indo’ community in nostalgic performances, writings, and photographs by Eurasians who migrated to the Netherlands in the 1950s as ‘repatriates’ following Indonesia’s independence.58 Auguste Mahieu was represented as an ethnic hero by these Indische Nederlanders, and is commemorated by a ‘street’ named after him at the Pasar Malam Besar, the largest celebration of Eurasian culture in the world. A key figure in the restoration of komedi stambul was the Eurasian political and cultural activist Jan Boon, who organized cultural evenings and fairs under the name of Tjalie Robinson and wrote stories and novels under the pseudonym of Vincent Mahieu (in homage to Auguste Mahieu). Featured prominently in Robinson’s cultural evenings in the 1950s were nostalgic performances of komedi stambul. There was, in this effort, a highly self-conscious awareness that these performances were something significant culturally and politically. A picture of one of these performances appeared in the 1960s in Tong– Tong, a Eurasian cultural journal edited by Robinson, with a lengthy caption that reads as follows. Do you think that investigators of Indies culture and history many years from now will realize that the last “stambul performance” in the Netherlands took place in 1958 and was in fact by Tong–Tong, sponsored by the C C K P [Centraal Comité van Kerkelijk en Particulier Initiatief voor sociale zorg ten behoeve van Gerepatrieerden, a charity organization for repatriates] and the Red Cross? Proceeds were donated to repatriation work and for that reason the writers Rob Nieuwenhuys and Johan Fabricius strode the planks. Also Ben Snijders […] and Belloni pitched in. The Dutch press did not grasp a thing about this “little throwaway” and rarely saw this [kind of performance]. But all – literally all – elements of the Indo comedy of Marie Oord [a Eurasian komedi stambul

58 On komedi stambul as Eurasian “artistic achievement,” see Paul van der Veur, “Cultural Aspects of the Eurasian Community in Indonesian Colonial Society,” Indonesia 6 (1968): 38–53.

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actor–manager featured in an article in the same issue of Tong–Tong] could be recovered in it!59

It is evident from this passage that Robinson did not consider these nostalgic performances to be artistic expressions to be judged in their own terms. Robinson describes such revivalist performance with the word rommeltje, a diminutive form of the word for ‘rubbish’ or ‘jumble’ which I translate as a ‘little throwaway’. Yet at the same time it was a mode of terugvinden (restoration, recovery), a way to make the cultural past literally present. The komedi stambul performance was a means to an end in Robinson’s estimation. It was to be looked through, as a representation of past performance and the larger socio-cultural field that performance engages. The goal was to seek recognition among the broader Dutch public for the significant contribution of Eurasians to the popularization of Western culture in Asia. Robinson writes to Louis de Bourbon in 1958 regarding: My Indisch (Indies) cabaret-evening. Why does one think that it is just a portion of Indisch fun?. . . One obviously doesn’t know that the Indonesian bangsawan that dominates today over all of East Asia is of Dutch origin. That a halfblood, August Mahieu, was the founder of the so-called Opera Stamboel, from which many operas originated, which in the long run (in terms of the repertoire) became more and more Asian? That among the originally performed dramas Genoveva of Brabant [Brabant is the name of a Dutch province but also of a very old aristocratic family] was proudly staged next to Hamlet. The Two Orphans next to Macbeth, that Fairy tales from Thousand and One Nights were performed and ancient Hindu tales were prepared for the stage. That millions and millions of Asians, because of this European bangsawan, became interested in Western culture? Ah, Holland does not recognize her own sons! We just say: such a coloured person, is he Indonesian or Ambonese or Surinamese! Very, very, very stupid!60

There is no suggestion of irony in the fact that komedi stambul, an art form rooted in the mestizo cultural conditions of the Indies, was performed on behalf of the repatriation of Eurasians to the Netherlands. Robinson believed, namely, that his performances were arguments for the accomplishment of Eurasians as cultural mediators, as creators of a distinctive hybrid theatre that operated as a window to the West. It was a means by which 59

T.R. (Tjalie Robinson), “Marie Oord had een eigen Indo ‘Penny Opera’,” Tong–Tong

12.11–12 (1967): 7. 60

Robinson, cited in Winniefred Anthonio, “Tjalie Robinson: Reflections in a Brown Eye” (doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 1990): 236.

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Indische Nederlanders could take pride in their cultural distinctiveness and by which the Dutch could provide recognition for what the Eurasians gave to the Indies in the past, and could potentially give to the Netherlands in the future. In postcolonial Indonesia, by contrast, komedi stambul is remembered as what the playwright and cultural bureaucrat Saini K.M. called a “transethnic” theatre.61 The 1953 analytical description of komedi stambul by Armijn Pané in the pages of the cultural journal Indonesia has been highly influential in Indonesian discourse. Pané located komedi stambul as an ancestor to the nascent Indonesian film industry and, drawing on the work of the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, famously characterized it as a theatre of acculturation. The mixed society of the urban Indies around 1900 demanded a mixed theatre, crossing European and Asian forms. “In accord with this acculturative outlook,” writes Pané, “the actors were likewise mixed: there were Indonesians, there were people of mixed Dutch descent.”62 This approach has been amplified by scholars following in Pané’s footsteps. Building upon Pané, komedi stambul historiography has been defined in terms of Indonesian debates on cultural nationalism, as evidence, pro and contra, of the worthiness of locating/constructing a pure Indonesian subject.

Cultural Process Grappling with the past of komedi stambul compounds some of the more general problems of analysis of movements in art or cultural formations: Many of those in real contact with such formations and their work retreat to an indifferent emphasis on the complexity of cultural activity. Others altogether deny (even theoretically) the relation of such formations and such work to the social processes and especially the material social processes. Others again, when the historical reality of the formations is grasped, render this back to ideal constructions – national traditions, literary and artistic traditions, histories of ideas, psychological types, spiritual archetypes – which indeed acknowledge and define formations, often much more substantially than the usual generalizing accounts of explicit social derivation or superstructural function, but only by radically displacing them from the immediate cultural process. As a result of this 61

Saini, cited in Jorgen Hellman, Performing the Nation: Cultural Politics in New Order Indonesia (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2003): 70. 62 Armijn Pané, “Produksi Film Tjerita di Indonesia: Perkembangannja sebagai Alat Masjarakat,” Indonesia 4.1–2 (1953): 8.

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displacement, the formations and their work are not seen as the active social and cultural substance that they quite invariably are.63

Theatre is by nature ephemeral, and while it leaves traces in the form of props and costumes, reviews, and other artifacts, theatrical activity differs from literature or visual art in that it does not aim to generate products that can be consumed after the event of creation. Any retrospective understanding of theatre is thus particularly subject to displacement. It is possible, though very difficult, to grasp the historical reality or active social and cultural substance that produces theatrical work of the past. But such grasping, such positioning, necessarily means making a highly uncertain wager.64 A poem or painting can be appreciated for its omnitemporal truth (though some might think such appreciation is historically perverse). A past work of theatre must be embedded within an explicit or implicit narrative. Who can be said to be ‘in real contact’ with a theatrical formation that ceased to exist generations ago? And which cultural location should one write from? The recuperations of komedi stambul by Indonesian cultural-nationalist and Dutch-Eurasian activists are both, in different ways, positioned in narratives of hybridity of the sort typified by Werbner as “self–congratulatory discourse.”65 My attempt in this essay has been to side-step this historiographic problem by examining the way in which the work of translating European literature and culture to the komedi stambul stage was perceived by those actors and agents actually working in the field: i.e. by examining the constraints that have historically informed the ways in which the hybridity of komedi stambul has been interpreted. Many Indonesians express embarrassment at eating in public. But the act of ‘chewing over the West’ in komedi stambul performance and criticism was a public spectacle that offered not only new ways of interacting with the world but also ways of critically reflecting on processes of interaction and hybridization. It is an early-twenty-first-century conceit that our own cultural moment, dominated by internationally financed media corporations, film production in Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong, and the incandescent hyperspace of the World Wide Web and the Internet, is a unique moment in human history, without historical precedent. Earlier periods and modes of 63

Williams, Marxism and Literature, 119–20. Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 51. 65 Werbner, “Introduction,” 22. 64

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connectivity and interchange are largely forgotten, their artifacts stuffed into attics of societal imaginaries in countries around the world. A scrappy circus poster, a yellowing memoir of an itinerant puppet showman or actor– manager, a toy theatre minus its script, a scratchy gramophone recording of Tin Alley songs, a decaying pair of tap shoes, a collection of newspaper clippings using embarrassingly racist terms like ‘Coon show’, a worn-out child’s magic kit emblazoned with the name of an exotically named and turbanned magician, a trick marionette with its strings cut off, a bass drum with faded writing on it. The detritus of times past, such material artifacts are recycled as props in stories about local history (when the circus came to town), trotted out in Old-Tyme revivals, sold on eBay via the Internet, and fetishized by collectors. Fragments of the past persist, even while the social structures and cultural processes that generated them have atrophied. These fragments can be embarrassments, evoking a mixture of cultural cringe, vague nostalgia, and confusion. ‘Showbiz’ and the global entertainment industry have nineteenth–century beginnings. During the course of Alfred Russel Wallace’s “wonderful century,” cultural forms and values were propelled to the far corners of the globe by the emergent transportation technologies of railway and steamship and the communication networks of telegraph and post.66 Photographs and phonographs allowed access to sights and sounds from far away, and offered new possibilities in live and mediated art and entertainment. The creolization of cultures and the global ecumene of today emerged in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. The forms and structures studied and appreciated under the rubrics of ‘world literature’, ‘intercultural theatre’, ‘world music’, and the like are all present in different guises, in different locations, in the past. The recovery of this history by cultural historians is a way in which to gain perspective on the cultural condition of the present.

66

Alfred Russel Wallace, The Wonderful Century (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898).

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WORKS CITED

Newspapers Cited Bintang–Barat (Western Star) (Batavia) 1892, 1895 Bintang Betawi (Batavia Star) (Batavia) 1900 Bintang Soerabaia (Surabaya Star) (Surabaya) 1893–94, 1899 Djawi Kando (Java Tattler) (Surakarta) 1893 Hindia–Olanda (Netherlands Indies) (Batavia) 1892 Pembrita–Bahroe (News Bulletin) (Surabaya) 1891, 1896 Pembrita Betawi (Batavia Bulletin) (Batavia) 1895–96 Soerabaya–Courant (Surabaya News)(Surabaya) 1891 Tjerimai (Ciremai) 1893

Articles and Books Abrahams, Roger D. Singing the Master: The Emergence of African–American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992). Anthonio, Winniefred. “Tjalie Robinson: Reflections in a Brown Eye” (doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 1990). Bosma, Ulbe, & Gijsbert Oonk. “Bombay Batavia: Parsi and Eurasian Variations on the Middlemen Theme,” in Mediators Between State and Society (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998): 17–40. Breckenridge, Carol A., ed. Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995). Cohen, Matthew Isaac. “Border Crossings: Bangsawan in the Netherlands Indies in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Indonesia and the Malay World 30.87 (2002): 101–15. ——. “A Chinese Pujangga from Surabaya? Yap Gwan Thay in an Age of Translation,” in The History of Translation in Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Henri Chambert– Loir (forthcoming). ——. The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia (Athens: Ohio U P , 2006). ——. “On the Origin of the Komedie Stamboel: Popular Culture, Colonial Society, and the Parsi Theatre Movement,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 157.2 (2001): 313–57. ——. “Thousand and One Nights at the Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theatre and Travelling Stories in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Middle Eastern Literatures 7.2 (2004): 235–46. Fabian, Johannes. Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Culture (London: U P of Virginia, 1998). Fabricius, Jan. “Verguld Goud (Guilded),” in Tempo Doeloe: Uit de Goeie Ouwe Tijd (The Hague: H.P. Leopolds, 1949): 74–82. Fish, Stanley. Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1980).

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Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993). Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 41–68. Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977): 115–54. Hellman, Jorgen. Performing the Nation: Cultural Politics in New Order Indonesia (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2003). Ido, Victor. De Paupers: Roman uit de Indo–Europeesche Samenleving (The Paupers: A Novel of Indo–European Life) (Amersfoort: Valkhoff, 1912). Kapur, Anuradha. “The Representation of Gods and Heroes: Parsi Mythological Drama of the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 23–24 (1993): 85–107. Knaap, Otto. “De Indische Antoine (The Indische Antoine),” Bondsblad (18 & 25 July 1903). Mitchell, Timothy. “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 2000): 1–34. Pané, Armijn. “Produksi Film Tjerita di Indonesia: Perkembangannja sebagai Alat Masjarakat” (Fictional film production in Indonesia: its development as a tool of the masses) Indonesia 4.1–2 (1953): 5–112. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Tempo Doeloe: Antologi Sastra Pra-Indonesia (Times Past: An Anthology of Pre-Indonesian Literature) (Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1982). Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia U P , 1996). Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: U of California P , 1998). Sutherland, Efua. The Original Bob: The Story of Bob Johnson, Ghana’s Ace Comedian (Accra: Anowuo Educational Publications, 1970). T.R. (Tjalie Robinson). “Marie Oord had een eigen Indo ‘Penny Opera’ (Marie Oord had her own Indo ‘Penny Opera’),” Tong–Tong 12.11–12 (1967): 4–8. Tan Sooi Beng. Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera (Singapore: Oxford U P , 1993). Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993). Veur, Paul van der. “Cultural Aspects of the Eurasian Community in Indonesian Colonial Society,” Indonesia 6 (1968): 38–53. Voskuil, Lynn M. “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Victorian Studies 44.2 (2002): 245–74. Wallace, Alfred Russel. The Wonderful Century (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898). Werbner, Pnina. “Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997): 1–26. Williams, Raymond. Drama in Performance (New York: Basic Books, 1968). ——. Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1977).

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Appendix 1 Plays performed by the Komedie Stamboel during a 25-day run in August– September 1894 in the coastal city of Cirebon (western Java) The World Star Genoveva The Three Jealous Sisters Kamarel Zahmand and Badur The Hunch-Back and The Loquacious Barber Siti Safira Damsie, The Fallen Angel Amgiad and Assad: The Two Misidentified Princes Snow White A reprise of “Ali Baba” Love and Artifice A reprise of the “Somnambulist”

Siti Senimbar Zaheer Zaman Ali and the Magical Fiddle Sleeping Beauty Machmoed or the Fisherman and the Jinni Double-bill: “He is Not Jealous” and “He is Too Jealous” The Rok’s Egg Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves The Son of the White Tiger The Somnambulist The Punishments of Hell Bluebeard Aladdin and the Magical Lamp

Appendix 2 Examples of tableaux vivants performed in komedi stambul, 1891–1902 The beheading of Captain Henri Revière in Vietnam in 1882 The capture of Napoleon The eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii The massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem A group of sea nymphs on a golden chariot drawn by geese The 1873 fire of Paris The revolt against the British in the Transvaal Adam and Eve expelled from paradise

The sacrifice of Abraham’s son on the altar Jacob’s dream The taking of Cakranegara in the Lombok war The sea god Neptune on his throne The beheading of the Grand Pensionary Johan van Olden-Barenveldt in 1619 Jin Asudin sentenced by King Solomon to imprisonment in a copper jug The conflict between Japan and Lauw Eng Hok in Formosa

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“Elementary, My Dear Wat” — Influence and Imitation in the Early Crime Fiction of ‘Late-Victorian’ Siam1

R ACHEL H ARRISON

Introduction

I

N I T S C U L T U R A L I N T E R A C T I O N S with the outside world, Siam/ Thailand has routinely adopted, adapted, and reinvented foreign literatures and arts from abroad, as have its Southeast Asian neighbours. The practice was noted as early as the first millennium A D , during the period of so-called ‘indianization’, whereby new legends and epics, architectural and iconographic styles, and religions and models of statecraft were welcomed into the region. In several instances, moreover, these borrowings have even become emblematic of what it means to be Thai, most notable in the case of Buddhism, and of its associated statuary. It is against this background that the so-called ‘Father of Thai history’ and early propagandist of national culture, Prince Damrong Rajanuphap, saw no anomaly in making the following observation:

The Siamese do not reject the good and the beautiful just because it is of foreign origin. They borrowed the good and the beautiful features of various different styles and merged them together. In this way the characteristic style of Sukho-

1 The research for this article was conducted as part of a larger, collaborative project with Peter A. Jackson (Australian National University) on the topic of Siamese/Thai cultural relations with the West from 1850 to the present. The project has been generously funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (A H R C ), to whom I am grateful for the financial support to produce the current research.

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dayan Buddhist art was formed, whose qualities are unsurpassed by any other period.2

These patterns of imitation and modification, firmly established during the Sukhothai era (c.1238–1350), were further crucially cemented in the age of European imperial expansion on Siam’s borders, with significant political implications. Inevitably, such patterns likewise persist and proliferate in the contemporary moment of intensely globalized, post-national cultural relations. It is this cultural and geo-historical context that forms the framework for the investigation which follows into the dynamics of Western literary influence and imitation in early-twentieth-century Siam. The article bases its enquiry on a discrete collection of fifteen short detective stories penned by Crown Prince Vajiravudh (1881–1925) and commonly referred to as derivations of the British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Composed between 1904 and 1905, Vajiravudh’s Nithan Thorng-In (Tales of Mr Thorng-In) are examined here as an instance of innovative local literary production under the stimulus of intense political and cultural contact with the West.3 Focusing on the practice of selection, assimilation, and re-invention of Western literary works in ‘Late-Victorian’ Siam, the article analyzes the manner in which these foreign texts were treated as an exotic and tempting foreign dish that whetted local appetites. It examines how such faraway ‘cuisines’, having been rendered palatable to Siamese tastes with the aid of 2 Damrong Rajanuphap, Monuments of the Buddha, tr. Sulak Sivaraksa (Bangkok: Siam Society, 1962): 19. 3 Composed under the more common pseudonym Mr Kaew and Mr Khwan, the series of fifteen short stories is divided into two parts, the first consisting of eleven tales and the second of only four. According to the Thai literary critic Suchat Sawatsi, the stories were serialized in the journal Thawi panya (Enhanced knowledge) between 1904 and 1905. Wibha Senanan records, however, that they appeared between 1904 and 1907. She refers to only eleven short stories, in keeping with the selection available in book form and noted to have been drawn from editions of Thawi panya. Further inconsistency arises, however, in the case of the fifteenth story – “Soi kho roi chang” (The priceless necklace) – which is included in the book but does not appear to have been published in the journal editions of Thawi panya. While this story is definitely part of the same series, its apparent absence from volumes 1–6 of Thawi panya may indicate that it was published in a different journal. This may, in turn, account for the discrepancy in dates for the series between Suchat Sawatsi, “Dae… bida haeng rahatsakhadhi thai phu hai kamnoet Nai Thorng-In” (To the father of the Thai detective story – the creator of Mr Thorng-In), in Rahatsakhadi (mystery) 3 (April–June 2000): 184, and Wibha Senanan, The Genesis of the Novel in Thailand (Bangkok: Thai Watana Panich, 1975): 66.

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local additives and decorative garnishes, were chewed, swallowed, digested, and selectively absorbed or expelled. The process through which the Tales of Mr Thorng-In was produced accords to some degree with patterns of cross-cultural appropriation and absorption established in the region’s premodern era. Beyond this, of course, it also bears inevitable similarities to trends in cross-cultural interaction and transmission observed in other geographical locations across the world and in other historical moments. The allure of intercultural borrowing for the purpose of local cultural innovation is in no way particular to Siam/Thailand or to the Southeast Asian region as a whole. On the contrary, the adoption of external influences and ideas is a commonplace response to cultural interaction, albeit mediated by issues of power. The prevalent pattern is one of transmission from the politically dominant Other to the ‘weaker’ recipient culture, due either to enforcement or to perceived prestige. However, as the work of Homi Bhabha usefully exposes, this process is by no means a simple one, devoid of ambivalence and the scope for defensive response.4 On the contrary, this article asserts that the adoption of external cultural products is coloured as much by re-inventive agency as it is by passive assimilation. Its standpoint is supported by the broader observations of the Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul, in turn informed by the work of Mary Louise Pratt, “that transculturation is not possible without an agency that translates, interprets, adapts, modifies, and selects the elements of one culture to make them suitable for another.”5 With specific reference to processes of westernization, Thongchai goes on to argue that in the case of Thailand the ‘West’ is in fact “always the Thaiized West, and therefore the West and the Thai are not as separate or as far apart as nationalist discourses assume because so many aspects of Thai identity are transculturated, that is, originally foreign but now localized, phenomena.”6 4

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; London & New York: Routledge Classics, 2004), in particular, chapters 3 and 4. See also David Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha (London & New York: Routledge, 2006). 5 Thongchai Winichakul, “Coming to Terms with the West: Intellectual Strategies of Bifurcation and Post-Westernism in Siam,” in The Ambiguous Allure of the West, ed. Harrison & Jackson, forthcoming 2009. See also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 6 Thongchai, “Coming to Terms with the West,” in The Ambiguous Allure of the West, ed. Harrison & Jackson, forthcoming 2009. Thongchai’s perspective is lent support by Michael Herzfeld’s cautionary note that “the definition of the ‘West’ is itself problematic,” and that,

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The work of postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha has been influential in its analysis of the effects of the power differential on issues of colonial cultural influence and the response made to it by the colonized, most notably in the sphere of literary analysis. To date, however, Siam/Thailand has been excluded from this fruitful field of investigation as a result of its never having been formally colonized. Though cognizant of the arguments that Siamese relations with the West have never fitted the precise binary distinction between colonized and colonizer that underpins postcolonial theory, the present article proceeds to argue for a nuanced understanding of Thai literary interactions with the original Western source material along lines which suggest similarities with Southeast Asian neighbours that fell under formal colonial rule. It draws, in particular, on the insightful analysis by Doris Jedamski of the complexities of cultural adaptation at play in the reinterpretation and modification of the detective hero in native Indonesian fiction.7 Furthermore, it concurs with the view put forward in her study of Malay literary traditions in the colonial era, that “the copying of foreign models has always been a crucial and highly regarded form of literary endeavour.” 8 To support the comparative arguments this article suggests, it adopts the definition of Siam/Thailand as semicolonial in nature.9 With reference to with regard to the contemporary globalization of Thailand, “the assumption that adoption of multinational logos and designer goods must mean adoption of their ideological implications simply reproduces the cultural imperialism that these items so often represent” (Herzfeld, “The Conceptual Allure of the West: Dilemmas and Ambiguities of Crypto-Colonialism in Thailand,” in The Ambiguous Allure of the West, ed. Harrison & Jackson, forthcoming 2009). 7 Doris Jedamski, “Popular Literature and Postcolonial Subjectivities; Robinson Crusoe, the Count of Monte Cristo and Sherlock Holmes in Colonial Indonesia,” in Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, ed. Keith Foulcher & Tony Day (Leiden: K I T L V Press, 2002): 19–47. 8 Jedamski, “Popular Literature and Postcolonial Subjectivities,” 20. See also, by the same author, “Genres of Crime Fiction in Indonesia,” in Pramoedya Ananta Toer 70 Tahun: Essays to Honour Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s 70th Year, ed. Bob Hering (Edisi Sastra Kabar Seberang Sulating Maphilindo 24/25, 1995): 167–89; and “Mabuk Modern and Gila Barat – Progress, Modernity, and Imagination: Literary Images of City Life in Colonial Indonesia,” in Lasting Fascinations: Essays on Indonesia and the Southwest Pacific to Honour Bob Hering, ed. Harry A. Poeze & Antoinette Liem (Stein: Edisi Sastra Kabar Seberang Sulating Maphilindo 28/29, 1998): 167–86. 9 This classification originated with Thai Marxists in the 1950s, in particular with the work of Udom Srisuwan – Thai, keung meuang kheun (Thailand, a semi-colony), 1950. Taken up by the Communist Party of Thailand in the 1970s, the term was then set aside until its most recent resuscitation by Hong Lysa, Michael Herzfeld, and Peter Jackson. See, for example, Hong Lysa, “‘Stranger Within the Gates’: Knowing Semi-Colonial Siam as Extraterritorials,”

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Peter Jackson’s work on semicoloniality, the term is used as shorthand to refer to the many intersecting variations and qualifications of colonialism that different scholars have used to describe Siamese/Thai relations to the West, including expressions such as ‘internal colonialism’, ‘auto-colonialism’, ‘crypto-colonialism’, and so on.10 The article takes up Jackson’s proposition that “postcolonial studies’ nuanced accounts of agency and ambivalence in cross-cultural borrowing are too resonant of aspects of the Thai experience to be dismissed out of hand.”11 To substantiate this claim, an analysis is provided of the extent to which broader notions of literary transmission, imitation, and transformation informed by postcolonial theory might resonate for the texts under observation. As such, the article lends full support to Craig Reynolds’ reflection that, to exempt the study of Thailand from theories of postcoloniality and postmodernity has had the corrosive effect of reinforcing a “mythology of uniqueness,” one that has “seriously limited comparative work” with regard to the Thai case.12 To counter the limitations in Thai studies that Reynolds rightly exposes here, this article acknowledges the value of comparison in its aim to elucidate the processes of modern Thai literary invention in the light of the influence of the West. It is therefore contended that the Siamese re-creation of the Victorian detective story is worthy of critical attention in part because of the distinct characteristics of its hybrid content and form. The Tales of Mr Thorng-In (Nithan Thorng-In) offer literary insights into the complex and often uneasy amalgamation of Siamese responses to the West. They provide evidence of anxiety and desire, gravity and lightheartedness, self-assurance and apprehension, traditional and modern practice, drawn together at a crucial period of Siamese cultural and political engagement with powerful foreign Others. The strategy of hybridizing, supplementing, Modern Asian Studies 38.2 (2004): 327–54. See also Michael Herzfeld, “The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (Fall 2002): 899– 926. And see the following works by Peter A. Jackson: “The Ambiguities of Semicolonial Power in Thailand,” in The Ambiguous Allure of the West, ed. Harrison & Jackson, forthcoming 2009; Peter A. Jackson, “The Performative State: Semi-Coloniality and the Tyranny of Images in Modern Thailand,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in South East Asia 19 (2004); 1–39; and Peter A. Jackson, “Semicoloniality, Translation and Excess in Thai Cultural Studies,” South East Asia Research 13.1 (March 2005): 7–41. 10 Jackson, “The Ambiguities of Semicolonial Power in Thailand.” 11 Jackson, “The Ambiguities of Semicolonial Power in Thailand.” 12 Craig Reynolds, “On the Gendering of Nationalist and Postnationalist Selves in Twentieth Century Thailand,” in Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand, ed. Peter A. Jackson & Nerida M. Cook (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1999): 265.

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abbreviating, and amalgamating foreign literary sources that is at play in the compilation of the Nithan Thorng-In relates in some degree to entertainment and was adopted for the pleasurable purposes of artistic experimentation. Additionally, however, the stories shed light on a wider Siamese state project that is more broadly political, ideological, and didactic in its goals. Implicit in this assessment is an emphasis on the function of imitation in the construction of these texts. Having taken recourse to an enduring Southeast Asian predilection for the absorption and re-creation of foreign works, Crown Prince Vajiravudh’s manipulation of Western source material provides a particularly apposite case study of the association between literary endeavour and the manipulation of power through the adopted discourses of colonial regimes. His texts, penned while heir to the throne, provide in equal measure a complex commentary on Siam’s semicolonial relationship with the West and, by extension, an exploration of the closely interrelated experience of what it meant to be Thai (khwam pen thai) in the particular historico-cultural context of their day.

Issues of Anxiety and Influence in Siam’s Relations with the West: The Historical Context for the Creation of Nithan Thorng-In Siam’s earliest contacts with the West came with the arrival of Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English traders, mercenaries, and missionaries who settled in Ayutthaya between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century. A sense of cosmopolitanism marked the reign, in particular, of King Narai (1656– 88), during which time embassies were exchanged with the Netherlands, France, and Persia and dress and architectural styles borrowed from Persia, Europe, and China.13 This honeymoon period of trust in overseas powers and their influence in Siam culminated in tragedy, however, with the execution of Narai’s Greek advisor Constantin Phaulcon in 1688 and the subsequent expulsion from court of the British and the French.14 13

Chris Baker & Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand (Cambridge: Cambridge U P ,

2005): 14. 14 Baker & Pasuk, A History of Thailand, 14. For further information on the 1688 ‘revolution’, see Witnesses to a Revolution: Siam, 1688: Twelve Key Texts Describing the Events and Consequences of the Phetracha Coup d’etat and the Withdrawal of French Forces from the Country, ed. & tr. Michael Smithies (Bangkok: Siam Society, 2004). For further analysis, see also Christopher B. Allen, “The 1688 “Revolution” in Siam and Its Origins: An In Depth Examination of a Seventeenth-Century Siamese Power Struggle” (doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1991).

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Relations with the West were not re-established with any significance until the nineteenth century and the arrival in Bangkok of European and American merchants, missionaries, and envoys. Among them was the American Presbyterian Reverend Dan Beach Bradley, who brought with him in 1835 the first printing press, introducing a technology that was to have important implications for the development and expansion of journalism and modern Thai fiction. So, too, came the English governess Anna Leonowens, whose fantasies of life at the Siamese court of King Mongkut (r. 1851–68) chronicled in her ‘autobiographies’ subsequently became the basis of the Oscar-winning 1956 Hollywood musical The King and I.15 Under the reign of Mongkut, considerable moves were made towards formalizing closer relations with the West. The signing of the Bowring Treaty with Britain in 1855 increased trade between the two countries and granted British citizens extraterritorial rights in Siam. Two years later, the King dispatched an embassy to pay tribute to Queen Victoria. It marked not only the consolidation of closer ties with Europe, but also a reorientation towards the West in the stead of the traditionally dominant power in the region – China. As Thongchai Winichakul explains, the defeat of both India and China by Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century was instrumental in Siam’s reconceptualization of itself in relation to the new world order, in which Europe emerged as the new axis mundi.16 Siam reacted to this change with a far-reaching campaign of ‘modernization’, much of which was developed in direct response to criticisms of its institutions and cultures proffered by Western observers. An integral aspect of this modernization programme was the development of the notion of siwilai, or what it meant to be ‘civilized’ à l’Occident. Ideas about how to make Siam siwilai ranged, Thongchai notes, “from etiquette to material For a more detailed and thorough survey of the history of Siamese encounters with Westerners in the period up to the late-nineteenth century, see Pattana Kitiarsa, “An Ambiguous Intimacy: Farang as Siamese Occidentalism,” in The Ambiguous Allure of the West, ed. Harrison & Jackson, forthcoming 2009. 15 See Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870; Singapore: Oxford U P , 1989) and Siamese Harem Life (London: Arthur Barker, 1873). For a noteworthy discussion of the cultural significance of the interaction between Anna Leonowens and King Mongkut in terms of Siamese-Western relations, see Penny Van Esterik, “Anna and the King: Digesting Difference,” South East Asia Research 14.2 (July 2006): 289–307. See also Susan Kepner, “Anna (and Margaret) and the King of Siam,” Crossroads 10.2 (1996): 1–32. 16 Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam,” Journal of Asian Studies 59.3 (2000): 533.

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progress, including new roads, electricity, new bureaucracy, courts and judicial systems, law codes, dress codes, and white teeth.”17 As such, the country embarked upon a course that was to epitomize its strategic response to potential Western domination. It set about re-inventing and redefining itself in the mould of the West – for the purpose, at least in part, of repelling opportunistic colonial attentions and hence retaining its physical and political independence. In other words, it adopted a European veneer to better preserve an imagined ‘core’ of what it meant to be ‘essentially Siamese’. As a result, imitating the West became inextricably bound up with the act of retaining ‘Siameseness’ and the experience of being Thai. The rapid consolidation of British and French territorial gains in Southeast Asia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century unquestionably increased Siam’s sense of imperial menace at its national borders. As part of the attempt to keep the colonial threat at bay, Mongkut’s successor, Chulalongkorn (r.1868–1910), chose to arm the ruling elite with a knowledge of ‘civilized’ cultures and discourses, acquired by the extensive dispatch of its younger members for education abroad. It was in this vein that he sent one among several of his sons, Prince Vajiravudh, to England to observe and be trained in the ways of siwilai. Vajiravudh’s departure in late 1893 came at a significant moment in Siamese political history, only weeks after the humiliation caused by the intrusion of French gunboats into Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River in a successful demand for the cession of Siamese territories to the East. Nevertheless, the consequence of this episode was not primarily one of fear that the French attack constituted a preliminary move towards wider territorial acquisitions. And this is an important consideration that colours the interpretation of the literary texts Vajiravudh went on to create as a result of his subsequent Western education. For, as Thongchai indicates, the meaning of the 1893 crisis “may not have been as jeopardizing to Siam’s independence as generally thought,” despite the fact that as a result “paranoia about foreign threats to Siamese independence have been part of the Thai mentality, elitist and popular alike.”18 Instead, Thongchai convincingly redefines the 17

Thongchai, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’,” 529. Thongchai, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’,” 538. An excellent illustration of the situation Thongchai defines here is provided by the recent Thai film Thawiphop (The Siam Renaissance, dir. Surapong Pinijkhar, 2004), in which the female protagonist Manee travels in time between the present moment, Siam in the reign of King Mongkut, and the 1893 débâcle with France. In a nightmare vision that her country may fall to the French, Manee awakes to find 18

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impact of the event in terms that relate to the wider structure of Siam’s relations with the Western world in this period. The principal implication of the French débâcle was “as an affront to the royal dignity. It was a blow to the king and his royal associates that they and Siam might not be on a par with other sovereign rulers and their kingdoms.”19 This depth of psychological trauma to the monarchy evoked by the 1893 exchange is encapsulated in the observations of Noel Battye: “The king, who had been ill throughout the crisis, suffered a physical and moral collapse. He lost some forty-two pounds in weight between August and November and openly declared his loss of interest in life.”20 The Siamese response to their perceived loss of prestige in 1893 was to intensify cultural and intellectual engagement with the West in a quest for siwilai that was intended first and foremost as the acquisition of an internationally powerful discourse which would serve to re-affirm Siamese superiority in comparison to its colonized Southeast Asian neighbours. In 1897, Chulalongkorn himself undertook a lengthy tour of Europe in which he visited Russia, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria–Hungary, and Britain. Along the way, as is well-documented by Maurizio Peleggi, the royal party purchased items emblematic of European high culture – from artworks and furniture to dinner services and gramophones – in a studied display of conspicuous consumption.21 Significantly, however, as both Peleggi and Thongchai point out, this overt acquisition of the trappings of European ‘civilization’ operated only secondarily as a demonstration to Western powers that Siam was of sufficient cultural standing to hold imperial enterprise at bay. Of greater consequence, the courtship of all things farang (foreign) was intended for the purposes of domestic spectacle. The quest for siwilai served the function of local affirmation that the country and the king remained relatively superior.22

her housemaid speaking their language and to see the Eiffel Tower built on the banks of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River. 19 Thongchai, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’,” 539. 20 Noel A. Battye, “The Military, Government, and Society in Siam, 1868–1910: Politics and Military Reform During the Reign of King Chulalongkorn” (doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1974): 369. Quoted in Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Chiangmai: Silkworm, 1994): 141. 21 Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 2002). 22 Thongchai, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’,” 539.

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Viewed in this light, the strategy of absorbing ideas from and imitating the West in recognition of their expediency as a source of power was principally adopted by the Siamese elite to legitimize cultural and political control over their own territories beyond Bangkok. As Thongchai argues, Alongside the colonial enterprise, the Siamese rulers had a parallel project of their own, concerning their own subjects, a project which reaffirmed their superiority, hence justifying their rule, over the rest of the country within the emerging territorial state.23

His view is confirmed by fellow Thai historian Kasian Tejapira in his critique of Siam’s ruling dynasty: Politically, they visited and learned from the British and Dutch colonial authorities’ methods of governing India, Singapore, and Java and applied that knowledge to the administrative reform of their relatively weak and decentralized traditional patrimonial kingdom into an authoritarian and centralized modernizing auto-colonial state. And culturally, they inhabited a mental, intellectual, and discursive “civilized” world wishfully close to their sovereign counterparts in the European metropolises and far from their compatriots in the villages. Regarding themselves subjectively as almost a supra-ethnic or supranational cosmopolitan ruling caste, they lorded it over the Siamese nation-people as colonial masters with a royal Thai face .24

Kasian’s argument here regarding the auto-colonial flavour of elite-ruled Siam is consistent with definitions of Siam by Herzfeld, Hong, and Jackson as crypto- or semicolonial. Together, these perspectives provide an essential backdrop against which the political import of early-twentieth-century imitative literary creation in general and of The Tales of Mr Thorng-In in particular can be assessed. To this contextualization must be added, however, a further and significant element in the characterization of Siam’s cultural engagement with the West in this period, again uncovered in Thongchai’s analysis of the quest for siwilai: the attention to threat and anxiety has obscured another motivation for change that was not less true, namely, desire, as if the Siamese elite were forced to act for survival and the quest for siwilai were solely tactical. While they were anx23 Thongchai Winichakul, “The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-Spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects 1885–1910,” in Civility and Savagery, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000): 41. 24 Kasian Tejapira, Commodifying Marxism: The Formation of Modern Thai Radical Culture, 1927–1958 (Kyoto: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto U P , 2001): 5–6.

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ious, the Siamese elite were not hostile to Westerners. Many generations of Thai elite since the middle of the century were very fond of the farang (Westerners), and their craving for things Western was well known.25

This additional acknowledgement of the question of desire for the West at play in the processes of cultural absorption and adaptation is a crucial one, detracting attention from a dominant, hence misleading, frame of analysis that focuses on anxiety. For it is out of a complex combination of aspiration, affection, anxiety, pleasure, politics, and play that Crown Prince Vajiravudh was to compose his Tales of Mr Thorng-In in the immediate aftermath of an intensely European education. Following his arrival in England in November 1893, Vajiravudh spent his first three years at a house purchased for him in Ascot, where he was provided with private lessons by Sir Basil Thomson, son of the Archbishop of York.26 The Prince then attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, during which time he developed a keen interest in Western literature and the dramatic arts. In addition to writing and performing in plays of his own, he produced poems, short stories, and even novels in English under the pen-name Carlton H. Terris. His interest in creative writing and theatre performance was provided with a venue through his establishment of the Thai students’ organization in London, Samakhi Samakhom. Vajiravudh was appointed president of the group and helped edit its newsletter, the Looker-On, which later became Samakkhi san (Unity News).27 On leaving Sandhurst, he spent a year in the Durham Light infantry before going up to Christ Church College Oxford, where he took courses in law, civil administration, and history, wrote a book entitled The War of the Polish Succession (published by Blackwell in 1900), and made a detailed study of administration in Great Britain and of the French Revolution. Having experienced an extensive training in the English system, Vajiravudh curtailed his tertiary education at the end of his second year in order instead to undertake a series of visits to monarchs and other heads of state in Russia, Austria, 25

Thongchai, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’,” 532. Vajiravudh had no expectations that he would become heir to the throne and was only appointed Crown Prince as a result of the untimely death, in January 1895, of his elder brother, Prince Vajirunhis, in Bangkok. Upon his appointment, he was granted an audience with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in March of the same year. Stephen Lyon Wakeman Greene, Absolute Dreams: Thai Government Under Rama V I , 1910–1925 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1999): 2–3. 27 Greene, Absolute Dreams, 3. 26

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Egypt, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and Germany to promote friendly relations with Siam. At a leaving party organized for him at the Siamese Legation in January 1902, the Crown Prince made a noteworthy farewell speech in which he avowedly predicted: “I shall return to Siam more Siamese than when I left it.” 28 Vajiravudh’s calculation that he would arrive back in his homeland more Siamese than when he had left is precisely indicative of the inextricable link forged at the close of the nineteenth century between imitating the West and consolidating a sense of being Siamese. On the face of it, the Crown Prince’s claim was a questionable one, given that, from the age of twelve, he had spent a little over nine formative years of education abroad. The overdetermined timbre of his announcement can in part be seen as indicative of anxieties regarding the potential ‘contamination’ of his cultural credentials, given the length and intensity of his years in the West, anxieties mirrored in Tales of Mr Thorng-In. Vajiravudh’s statement was undoubtedly intended in some measure to reassure those at whom it was directed. Its message indicated that Siam’s close engagement with colonial powers and the imitation of their cultural values operated on the surface level alone and did not strike at the ‘core’ of what it meant to be Siamese. In this sense, it consolidated the repeated moral instructions provided by King Chulalongkorn to the young princes abroad: their mission was to learn from the West – not for the purpose of becoming little Europeans, but in order to draw on the knowledge they acquired there for the service of the Siamese state.29 Their ultimate aim was to keep Thai values intact. What Vajiravudh’s declaration inevitably also reveals, however, is that it had, by the time he terminated his British education, become increasingly difficult to separate out the strands of what it meant to be ‘westernized’ and what it meant to be Siamese. Siam had already embarked on the enduring process of incorporating elements of farang otherness into the redefinition of its cultural and political identities, a position which it has maintained up to the contemporary moment, as alluded to by the Thai anthropologist Pattana Kitiarsa: From whatever angle Thainess is now viewed farang influences are simply inevitable and contemporary forms of Thainess are incomplete without the allure of farang-ness. […] The allure of farang in shaping and reshaping Thai cultural 28

Benjamin Batson, The End of Absolute Monarchy in Siam (Singapore: Oxford U P ,

1984): 14. 29

Walter Vella, Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 1978): 3.

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identities is much more dynamic than imagined by many Thai intellectuals and scholars. I see farang as a compelling and productive site to produce meanings about and valuations of what it means to be Thai today.30

This contemporary dynamic is one that has its history in the late-nineteenth-century adoption of Western cultural influences to the certain advantage of the homeland. Evidence of it is, further, to be found in the work of later Thai authors who drew inspiration from their experiences overseas. In his articles observing life in Australia and in his novel Until We Meet Again (Jon kwa rao ja phop kan ik), Siburapha (1905–74) records a specific selection of inventions and institutions that would be of benefit to Siam – among them democracy, political transparency, freedom of the press, and the perambulator.31 And in the semi-autobiographical travel novel The Circus of Life (Lakhorn haeng chiwit), its author Prince Akatdamkoeng Raphiphat (1905–32) claims, through the voice of the narrator, Wisut: “I have written this book for the sake of the Thai nation and of her people, whom I love and wish to be happy.”32 In consequence, Akatdamkoeng confirms the nationalist function of the account he gives to Siamese readers of life in the West; a function reiterated by Wisut’s receipt, in the closing stages of the narrative, of a scholarship from the King to study in America: In Siam I was a mere simpleton, who had been forgotten as soon as he had gone abroad. […] But now, the king of Siam – my own king – believed I was an asset and was ready to accept me as yet another student under his benevolent patronage. If the king is good, who will refuse to be his servant?33

Prompted by the royal recognition of his potential, Wisut voices how the new knowledge he is to gain will be of benefit to Siam upon his inevitable return. Having been through sponsored education in the West, Wisut will be equipped to take up a post in the Siamese civil service and become of 30

Pattana, “An Ambiguous Intimacy,” forthcoming. Kulap Saipradit (Siburapha), Kulap in Oz: A Thai View of Australian Life and Society in the Late 1940s, tr. & ed. Scot Barmé (Monash Paper on Southeast Asia 36; Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, 1995). 32 Arkartdamkeung Rapheephat (Akatdamkoeng Raphiphat), The Circus of Life (Lakhorn haeng chiwit), tr. Phongdeit Jiangphattanarkit, ed. Marcel Barang (Bangkok: tmc, 1995): 254. The English translation has been released under a different transliteration system from the one used in this article, hence the alternative spelling of the author’s name in the reference. 33 Arkartdamkeung, The Circus of Life, 171. For a full discussion of this novel regarding the engagement between Thailand and the West, see Rachel Harrison, “Thailande: Between East and West,” in États et Littérature en Asie: L’Émergence des États modernes X I X –X X e siècles, ed. Monique Zaini–Lajoubert (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2003): 157–84. 31

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direct use to the state, in much the same way as the author Prince Akat was himself subsequently employed in the Ministry of Public Health.34

Modes of Production and the Significance of the Journal Thawi Panya Soon after his return from England, Crown Prince Vajiravudh began work on a series of short stories thereafter collectively known as the Nithan Thorng-In (Tales of Mr Thorng-In). These early examples of the Siamese short-story form were published over a two-year period, between 1904 and 1905, in the journal Thawi panya (literally ‘Increase your intellect’ or ‘Enhanced knowledge’), of which Vajiravudh was himself both editor and a major contributor. Together they mark a new trend in Thai literary development – the invention of detective fiction, produced at a time when the medium of prose for the creation of fictional works was still relatively new. In the most obvious sense, the ‘Tales’ are derivative of Western literature in terms of their short-story form, although they pointedly retain the reference to the local word nithan (tale). Prior to the increased contact between Siam and Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was poetry that had dominated the Siamese literary scene, as with the neighbouring countries of the region. Examples of early short stories began to appear, however, from 1874 (and novels some forty years later). They were invariably written by members of the elite, several of whom had been sent by Chulalongkorn to study abroad in the West. This first generation of overseas students returned to Siam with extensive experience of Europe’s scientific, technological, and economic achievements, together with an exposure to Western arts and literature. That Western works offered inspiration to fin-de-siècle authors throughout Southeast Asia, not simply in Siam, is beyond dispute, and, significantly, there is little distinction in certain patterns and levels of reception between the Siamese experience and that of colonized Southeast Asia. The work of similar authors and similar types of fiction held popular appeal across much of the region (and beyond), notably those which mapped most readily onto existing local literary tastes, such as tales of adventure and romance. Clear examples are provided by the ubiquitous popularity of such novels as Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–45), which was translated and adapted in Vietnam, Siam, 34

For further details, see Harrison, “Thailande: Between East and West,” 157–84.

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Indonesia, and Burma and even became, in the case of the latter, the basis of the country’s first novel, written in 1904 by James Hla Gyaw and titled Maung yin Maung Ma Meh Ma.35 The attractiveness of this novel throughout the region is elucidated by Jedamski in her study of Dumas’ Count in Malay/Indonesian literature, notably that the plot “would have been easily accommodated to the expectations of readers familiar with the existing form.” 36 However, while Jedamski makes it clear that in Indonesia local adaptations of key European texts such as The Count of Monte Cristo, Robinson Crusoe, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes constituted the basis of a counter-discourse to colonial control, the Siamese example differs to some degree.37 For, in the case of the detective hero Mr Thorng-In, created by the selectively auto-westernized heir to the Siamese throne, these tales of criminal investigation circulated among an exclusive readership with a multiple purpose and effect. On the one hand, the royal author championed Siamese independence by writing back to a Western centre that was at once daunting, esteemed, culturally prestigious, influential, and desired. At the same time, his fiction confirmed elite authority through a shrewd adoption of cultural discourses that served the purposes of a state project focused on the internal colonization of Siam’s “others within.” Additionally, the Tales of Mr Thorng-In functioned to shore up loyalty to the monarchy itself, published as they were in a journal that was the mouthpiece of the Samosorn thawi panya, or ‘Society for the Enhancement of Knowledge’, based at the Crown Prince’s palace of Saranrom. As Walter Vella describes it, Vajiravudh’s residence at Saranrom was “quite a world to itself”38 – an arguably apt reflection of the cultural eclecticism the heir apparently valued and saw fit to imitate:

35

For further details on the reception of Western literature in Southeast Asia from a comparative perspective, see Rachel Harrison, “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Towards a Comparative Study of the Interaction between the Traditional and the Modern in Contemporary South East Asian literatures,”Tenggara 42 (2000): 93–115. See also Rachel Harrison, “The Indigenous and the ‘Foreign’: The Reception, Adaptation and Reinvention of Western Literatures in South East Asia,” in France–Asie: Un siècle d’échanges littéraires, ed. Muriel Detrie (Paris: Librairie You Feng, 2001), and Jedamski, “Popular Literature and Postcolonial Subjectivities.” 36 Jedamski, “Popular Literature and Postcolonial Subjectivities,” 22. 37 Jedamski, “Popular Literature and Postcolonial Subjectivities,” 20. 38 Vella, Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism, 5.

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Located in spacious walled grounds east of the Grand Palace, the site even today preserves remnants of its former splendour – a Chinese-style pagoda tower, a Cambodian-style monument, various Victorian-style buildings elaborate with wooden Hansel-and-Gretel fretwork, walks and lanes that at one time bordered carefully laid-out gardens and forested parks. This was Vajiravudh’s domain for six years: this, his little empire, the setting of his princely court, the stage for his enterprises.39

Among the enterprises to which Vella refers were storytelling, charades, treasure hunts, theatrical performances, and war and police ‘games’. Clearly, such entertainments often had political implications, as evidenced by the mock-staging at Saranrom of police action against ‘Chinese’ strikers inspired by a general strike of Chinese merchants in Bangkok in June 40 1910. The creation of the Samosorn thawi panya was one of the Crown Prince’s first undertakings following his ensconcement at Saranrom. Acting as its principal officer, he appointed the society’s organizing committee from a selection of high-ranking princes and noblemen, all of whom had spent time overseas as either students or government officials.41 The club’s membership was not, however, solely confined to courtiers, but included individuals from outside the court. As Vella explains, by the standards of the time, Samosorn thawi panya was remarkably egalitarian: commoners far outnumbered those of princely rank, and all members were treated equally. The club had its own officers; its principal officer was elected annually (the Crown Prince always won), and he chose all the other officers. […] The club was much like a British club. Members used the club-house, in the Saranrom Gardens, to lounge about and read the foreign and domestic newspapers or to play billiards, ping pong, chess, or card games. Outdoor sports included tennis, cricket, croquet, and hockey. These games were all very new in Thailand, and their popularity rapidly grew – no doubt in large part because of the princely favour shown to them.42

Though egalitarian to some degree, Samosorn thawi panya was less an imitation of democracy at work than it was a mirror-image of the colonial gentleman’s club. And as such it served to reiterate the principles of benign 39 40 41 42

Vella, Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism, 5. Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism, 6. Greene, Absolute Dreams, 4. Vella, Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism, 7.

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yet absolute monarchy, ones that the Crown Prince, unsurprisingly, espoused. Vella’s contention that the society constituted a clear move “to build a body of loyal and like-minded retainers and to develop a spirit of camaraderie” provides an important insight, however, into the related political purpose of the club’s monthly journal, Thawi panya.43 For both club and journal arguably provided close backing for Siam’s heir to the throne and for the institution which he represented. Although this strategy of shoring up support for the monarchy was in no way new to turn-of-the-century court politics, a particular illustration of it is provided by the publication in Thawi panya of articles with political and nationalistic overtones, as well as translations, poems, and short stories. As Matthew Copeland shows, the contribution which fiction could make, for example, to the debate on the need for unity (samakhi) under the leadership of an absolute monarch had already been recognized in the reign of Chulalongkorn when the king and members of the court sought to use the newspaper as a vehicle for promoting a sense of loyalty to the throne.44 The royalist broadsheet Darunowat (Lessons for young men [1874–75]), itself something of a prototype for Thawi panya, had published a series of parables on the topic of unity, as discussed in detail by Copeland, and by Wibha Senanan.45 Though evidently captivated by discourses of siwilai, Chulalongkorn predictably rejected divisive moves among certain members of the elite for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in Siam. In this context, the King clearly viewed this ‘excessive’ Western influence in a negative light, classifying local interest in European models of statecraft as an unhelpful infatuation.46 Vajiravudh was to replicate this stance, harbouring a distinct mistrust for certain members of the elite whose education abroad and espousal of foreign values constituted a threat to what he saw as the pillars of Siamese tradition. His suspicion of the overseas educated (nakrian nork) is unmistakably evident in sections of the Nithan Thorng-In, despite the fact that both the form and the content of the tales were themselves partly Western in origin. Moreover, his misgivings are extensively supported by his non-fictional writings, as Copeland observes with refer43

Vella, Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism, 6. Matthew Copeland, “Contested Nationalism and the 1932 Overthrow of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam” (doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, 1993): 13. I would like to thank Craig Reynolds for providing me with the opportunity to read this work. 45 Copeland, “Contested Nationalism,” 13; Wibha, The Genesis of the Novel in Thailand. 46 “Contested Nationalism,” 23. 44

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ence to a series of pamphlets by Vajiravudh, published in 1914 and 1915 under the pseudonym Asvabahu. In Reuang khwam praphoet khorng khon thi riak wa samai mai (On the behaviour of those known as modernists), for example, he voiced his suspicion of those trained in the West as ethnic Thai whose desire to become “civilized” had led them to foolishly “turn their back on everything that belongs to the old order of things” and instead to “ape the ways of the Europeans.”47 In the same vein, Prayote haeng kan yu nai thamma (The benefits of living within Buddhist law) accuses the same faction of forsaking the principles of Buddhism to adopt the vulgar mannerisms of lower-class foreigners, so acknowledging a class distinction among farangs that is similarly apparent in the Tales of Mr Thorng-In.48 Drawing an analogy between Siam and a car careering along a dangerous road, Asvabahu further postulated, in Khlone tit lor (Mud on our wheels), that progress was hindered only by the “cakes of mud” on its tyres – by which he referred to the educated classes, the “half-Thais,” whose mimicry of the West led them to look up to foreigners and down on their fellow nationals.49 These negative perceptions of fellow Siamese whom Vajiravudh had come to see as ‘mimic men’ – to borrow V.S. Naipaul’s postcolonial term – are perhaps most notably expressed in his 1915 treatise Latthi ao yang (The cult of imitation). Here mimicry and imitation assume a distinctly negative association with disempowerment, oppression by and enslavement to a higher power: i.e. the West. They become a clear hindrance to what it means to be Thai in the dual denotation of that term – ‘Siamese’ and ‘free’.50 Nevertheless, in a perhaps inadvertent revelation of the strength of imitation’s grip as a paradigm, Vajiravudh is unable to shake free of it, even in a text such as Latthi ao yang, whose specific aim is to do just that. Thus the King commands: Fellow comrades, please take careful note of the fact that the imitation of your ancestors is of genuine benefit to you, much more so than allowing yourselves to be drawn into the mindless imitation of the farang.

47

Copeland, “Contested Nationalism,” 36. “Contested Nationalism,” 36. 49 Asavabahu, “Latthi ao yang” (The cult of imitation) (Phim thai, 7 April 1915) and “Khlone tit lor” (Mud on the wheels) (Phim thai, 28 April–11 May 1915), both quoted from Copeland, Contested Nationalism, 36. 50 The word ‘Thailand’ or prathet thai means literally ‘The Land of the Free’. 48

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Vajiravudh’s replacement here of the contemporary West by the traditional Siamese past as a desirable model for imitation marks the culmination of a quest on which he had already embarked in his years as Crown Prince. The campaign is epitomized, for example, by the expedition he undertook to the ancient Siamese kingdom of Sukhothai in 1907 and which resulted, a year later, in a versified account of his visit, entitled Thiaw meuang Phra Ruang (A journey to the land of Phra Ruang). Adopting an approach to the gathering of historical knowledge that was itself arguably based on colonial models, Vajiravudh praised the ruins of Sukhothai as symbols of Siam’s power and evidence of its civilizational lineage.51 But the sheer complexity of the ambivalence towards issues of imitation that is discernible in Vajiravudh’s prolific writings throughout the early years of the twentieth century is nowhere better captured than in a photographic portrait taken in the immediate aftermath of his trip to Sukhothai. Clad in Thai silk trousers (jongkraben), a Western-style jacket, silk stockings, and shoes, the Crown Prince is seated on a (Western) chair, with one foot on the base of an adjacent table. On the table, a ceramic, Sukhothai-era dragon and a notebook allude to the classification of data and the acquisition of knowledge it generates. Vajiravudh assumes the posture of the detective in the execution of this valuable national task – he employs a magnifying glass to scrutinize a smaller artefact in his hand, smokes a meerschaum pipe as would Sherlock Holmes, and sports a panama hat, just like the detective hero of his own invention – the exceptionally talented Mr Thorng-In.52

Mr Thong-In, the Siamese Sherlock Holmes, and the Allure of Arthur Conan Doyle Vajiravudh’s creation of the Nithan Thorng-In signals an all but new venture in early Siamese prose fiction, that of the invention of a localized genre of crime writing, influenced in part by the Western literary form, though this is in no way to suggest that the adoption and adaptation of Victorian detective fiction was unique to Siam.53 As Jedamski’s extensive studies re51

See also Maurizio Peleggi, “Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism and the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in Modern Siam,” in Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia, ed. Srilata Ravi, Mario Rutten & Beng-Lam Goh (Singapore: I S E A S , 2004): 133–61. 52 The photograph is reproduced in Baker & Pasuk, A History of Thailand, 73. 53 Although Crown Prince Vajiravudh is credited by the Thai literary critic Suchat Sawatsi as the “Father of the Thai detective story,” earlier versions of detective fiction did appear in

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veal, a parallel evolution of crime fiction and the reinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes occurred in the Malay/Indonesian literary world.54 Whereas the Nithan Thorng-In is typically perceived by critics as somewhat straightforward (and often pale) replications of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the present article instead argues for a more nuanced understanding of it as an amalgam of varied literary source materials and influences which further includes allusions to the works of Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe and others, alongside the more frequently acknowledged homage to Conan Doyle. Consisting of a total of fifteen short stories in which a series of mysteries are presented to and subsequently solved by the inspired reasoning of their detective hero, the Nithan Thorng-In are, like Doyle’s tales, largely unrelated to each other, except through the recurrence of their key protagonists. These include Mr Thorng-In, a Bangkok-based secret policeman in civil-service employ (phontrawen lap khorng thang ratchakan), albeit working on an independent basis (thang ekathet), and his accomplice Mr Wat, who, as with Doyle’s similarly named Watson, is also the narrator of the stories. As a narrative device, therefore, the character of Wat operates in a way akin to that of Watson, as mediator between the reader and the brilliant yet often otherwise opaque logic of the private detective Thorng-In. As with Watson, he consistently proves himself to be one step behind his colleague, courtesy of an inferior intellect, and confirmed to him in a tone identical to that of Holmes’s supercilious approach to Watson: “You never do understand what it is that I am up to.”55 In a slight alteration of Doyle’s prototype, Wat’s principal employment is not, however, as a medical doctor but as a lawyer (mor khwam), the modification perhaps indicative of the royal author’s avid interest in judicial court drama, directly expressed in

magazines such as Darunowat, Wachirayan wiset, Lak witthaya, and Thalok witthaya. Suchat refers, for example, to a short story entitled “Mae seup” (The female detective), composed by the author Khru Liam under the pseudonym Nai Thalok. The story was written to parody an earlier work –“Nai seup” (Mr Detective), first published in Lak witthaya; Suchat, “Dae… bida haeng rahatsakhadhi thai phu hai kamnoet Nai Thorng-In,” 184. 54 See Jedamski, “Popular Literature and Postcolonial Subjectivities,” 20. See also Jedamksi, “Genres of Crime Fiction in Indonesia,” 167–89; and “Mabuk Modern and Gila Barat,” 167–86. 55 Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In (Phranakhorn: publisher unknown, n.d.): 17.

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one episode of the collection (Wut wit) and in plays he composed on the same theme.56 Although Vajiravudh evidently constructs his Nithan Thorng-In along lines inspired by the key figures in Conan Doyle’s crime fiction, his work bears no evidence of the same detailed development with respect to his protagonists’ personalities. The depiction of the developing relationship between the detective and his sidekick and the quirks and preferences that mark out the idiosyncratic Mr Sherlock Holmes are in no way embellished to the same extent in the Tales of Mr Thorng-In. When Thorng-In and Wat are introduced to the reader in the first story in the collection – “Nak Phrakhanong thi sorng” (The return of Nak, ghost of Phrakhanong) – neither is described in any detail, in this story or in others of the series. Instead, only the barest of descriptions is provided: Mr Thong-In was a man of very fast reasoning and was also extremely knowledgeable, making those who were acquainted with him wonder why he had not taken up a post in the civil service. Furthermore, most were unaware of how he made a living. He was not a trader or a lawyer, and in fact he appeared not to work at all, though he had comfortable accommodation and sufficient funds on which to live. I would like to relate to you here something of his secret (he has granted his permission for me to do so). Mr Thong-In is a kind of private detective, by which I mean that he investigates criminals in secret. He knows them, but they do not know him, because he is a master of disguise. I myself have seen him in disguise many times, so I know how good at it he is and how thoroughly convincing he looks.57

This scanty description stands in considerable contrast to the introductory tale of Sherlock Holmes, in which Conan Doyle devotes several pages to establishing the nature of his protagonists and defining how they came to meet, background information with which the reader of the Nithan ThorngIn is never provided. Vajiravudh’s divergent de-emphasizing of the issue of characterization thus avoids an imitation of Holmes’s qualities as an ac56 For further discussion of Vajiravudh’s authorship of plays, see Vilawan Svetsreni, “King Vajiravudh and the Thai Spoken Drama: His Early Plays in English and His Original Thai lakhorn phut With Special Emphasis on the Innovative Uses of Drama” (doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1991). 57 Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 3. This and all following translations of excerpts from the Nithan Thorng-In are by the author. Although Mr Thorng-In is initially described in the opening story as a ‘secret policeman in civil-service employ’, this later characterization appears to conflict with the earlier one. The most likely explanation is that the author forgot the earlier description.

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complished violinist and, perhaps more conveniently, as a habitual user of cocaine. The latter absence is understandable, given that drug addiction can hardly have ranked high among the traits of a hero and potential role model for the emerging Siamese nation, albeit accompanied by a ‘civilized’ ear for music. Moreover, the broadly political significance of this exclusion is supported by the comparative history of Sherlock Holmes in colonial Indonesia, where, as Jedamski explains, of the four stories selected for translation by the colonial agency Balai Poestaka, the detective appears “as a ‘clean’ hero with no shortcomings whatsoever, no drug addiction, no failure, no defeat.”58 While Vajiravudh’s selective erasure of unwholesome features in the conception of his protagonist can be argued to serve a wider political purpose in his texts, his overall lack of attention to the detail of characterization can be understood in terms of a straightforward correspondence to existing literary tastes. The predominant Southeast Asian literary preference for romance and adventure drew local audiences to the action of Western fiction more than to its in-depth portrayal of individuals or its extensive treatment of their personal motivations. In the same vein, therefore, Vajiravudh, unsurprisingly, retained the element of disguise in his Tales of Mr Thorng-In, since this device was known and liked by audiences familiar with such classical works as Inao. Hence the lengthy description of Thorng-In’s abilities provided in “Khwam lap phaen din” (A state secret): Mr Thorng-In told me he may be out for some time, but that I was welcome to wait if I pleased. He then disappeared into his room for a moment and I saw a low-class ruffian emerge wearing an old loincloth, a shabby shirt, and a yellowing old straw hat. He was carrying a walking-stick and smoking a glowing Thai cigarette [buri thai]. I was bewildered for a moment, and then I burst out laughing when I suddenly realized that it was Mr Thorng-In. Here was a man who never went anywhere barefoot for fear of hurting his feet, who only ever wore the newest of brand-new loincloths, whose shirts were always whiter that white, and who never donned a hat other than a panama. Here was a man who only ever held a silver cane, who smoked only top-quality cigarettes [sigaret] and cigars, so different from the creature that staggered out before me. The stench of his cheap cigarette smoke filled the room, and how could I help but laugh?59

The above passage closely echoes a passage in Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” a story which in turn drew inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s 58 59

Jedamski, “Genres of Crime Fiction in Indonesia,” 183. Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 50.

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“The Purloined Letter,” first published half a century earlier, in 1845. “A State Secret” derives more closely from Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” than it does from Poe’s tale, though traces of the latter are also clearly discernible. It was close upon four before the door opened, and a drunken-looking groom, ill-kempt and sidewhiskered, with an inflamed face and disreputable clothes, walked into the room. Accustomed as I was to my friend’s amazing powers in the use of disguises, I had to look three times before I was certain that it was indeed he. With a nod, he vanished into the bedroom, whence he emerged in five minutes tweed-suited and respectable, as of old.60

While distinct elements of the plot of “A Scandal in Bohemia” are replicated in “A State Secret,” the considerations of local political sensitivity and ideology again insert themselves into Vajiravudh’s reworking of the Doyle original, in similar vein to his erasure of reference to the attractions of cocaine. In Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Vajiravudh clearly identified the basis of a tale which could, with the variation of certain details, be harnessed to the agenda of national security. In both the British and the Siamese versions, the story opens with a report of a serious state of affairs – an important document of national significance has fallen into ‘enemy’ hands. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the document in question is a compromising photograph of the King of Bohemia, taken in the company of his mistress, the beautiful opera singer Irene Adler. When the King announces his intention to marry another woman, Irene threatens to produce the photograph on the day of the wedding and thus shame him with a revelation of his less-than-seemly past. Given that the deeply personal nature of this scenario would have appeared most inappropriate for transfer to a Thai setting (most especially, too, perhaps, because of Vajiravudh’s reluctance to take a bride), the document in “A State Secret” is transformed into a state treaty or agreement (sanya), the precise content of which remains undisclosed to the reader. Moreover, the means by which the detectives learn of the need for their respective missions of retrieval again differ according to cultural sensibility. In Doyle’s adventure, the King of Bohemia himself visits Holmes’ famed apartment at 221B Baker Street in a disguise soon rumbled by the wily sleuth. A mirror situation would have degraded a Siamese monarch, hence a significant reduction in the rank of visitor to Mr 60

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Other Detective Stories, intro. & sel. Owen Dudley Edwards (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994): 277.

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Thorng-In. Despite this amendment, the two stories begin in similar fashion, with a troubled request for help from the detective on an issue of great secrecy, the details of which must in no way be leaked to the public. In both texts, the sensitivity of the crisis leads the visitor to question the presence at the meeting of the detective’s associate (Watson/Wat) and provides subsequent assurance of the assistant’s entirely trustworthy nature. Not only was it “A State Secret,” however, that bore pronounced resemblance to the plot of one of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; several others among Doyle’s collection provide evident templates for the Nithan Thong-In. “Ya ma Bangalo” (The drugging of Bungalow the racehorse), for example, bears certain resemblances to “Silver Blaze,” and “Ai Man meu lek” (Man, the iron-handed) to “The Final Problem,” while “Raden Landai” (Raden Landai the beggarman) appears to have been closely modelled on “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (albeit with complete removal of all references to the opium addiction which drives the actions of the antagonist). While the latter is set in London and Kent, the Thai text transfers the action to downtown Bangkok and the adjacent rural province of Nakhon Pathom; and whereas Watson’s encounter with his bride-to-be occurs as a resolution to The Sign of Four, it is in the tale of “Raden Landai” that Wat restores propriety by marrying the discarded wife of the fraudulent vagabond. Evidently Vajiravudh created the Nithan Thorng-In by selectively imitating elements of the early tales of Sherlock Holmes, circumventing and eliminating as he did so aspects he deemed unsuitable for the local context in which he wrote. As part of this process he was drawn for inspiration not only to the key figures of Doyle’s detective adventures and their storylines, but also to their form. Whereas his adoption and adaptation of the content of these stories frequently reflected a nationalist agenda, Vajiravudh’s mimicry of certain aspects of their literary form is often redolent of a more humorous and pleasurable engagement with mimicry of the West as a means of entertainment. Here Western literary models suggest less a useful source of politically engaging material than they do a site of desire. A case in point is provided by Vajiravudh’s division of the Nithan Thorng-In collection into two parts, the second of which (made up of only four tales) is structured around Wat’s recollections of earlier adventures with ThorngIn. The need for this device, precisely mirroring that employed by Conan Doyle, derives from the ostensible murder of Thorng-In in “Ai Man meu lek,” the sixth and final story of the first series. In a replication of the apparent death of Holmes in a scuffle with his arch-enemy Moriarty at the

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Reichenbach Falls, Vajiravudh’s hero is shot by the notorious up-country bandit Man and his body is never recovered. Doyle’s motivation for terminating Holmes’ life was to bring to an end in 1893 a series of stories he had lost interest in continuing. Owing to public demand, however, he was obliged to resume production in 1902, first by having Watson recall additional adventures from the time when Holmes was still alive, and eventually by resurrecting Holmes altogether. Vajiravudh duplicates this pattern, though arguably as a result of fascination with the imitation of form rather than as a response to irresistible popular demand. The gap between collections one and two of the Nithan Thorng-In is no more than a matter of months, and the readership of the Strand magazine in which the Sherlock Holmes tales were published far exceeded that of Thawi panya.61 Despite the association that Vajiravudh’s temporary termination and revival of Mr Thorng-In has with questions of fascination and desire for the West, this instance of mirroring nevertheless harbours pertinent ideological implications. Conan Doyle’s lack of interest in continuing the adventures of his detective hero resulted from the fact that they distracted him from what he saw as more serious matters of authorial concern – the issues of Empire. A staunch defender of British imperial values, Doyle volunteered in 1900 as a doctor in the Boer War, after which he penned “an impressionistic history” of events.62 His later defence of English conduct in the war, “The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct,” was the piece that gained him his knighthood – not the tales of Sherlock Holmes, for which he is better remembered. As Jon Thompson concludes, It should be no surprise, then, that Conan Doyle’s fiction was shaped by these imperial values. […] Through the figure of Sherlock Holmes, and through the empirical values he championed, Conan Doyle’s fiction ratified the principles and ideologies of an imperial, patriarchal Britain.63

Moreover, as Thompson goes on to argue, these stories did not merely reflect a pre-formed British middle-class ideology, they also helped produce a comforting and reassuring image of late-Victorian society that was 61 Commencing in 1890, the first issue of the Strand magazine sold 300,000 copies. Its readership was largely drawn from the commuting white-collar market in London and its bourgeois, middle-brow content reflected their tastes. 62 Jon Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism (Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P , 1993): 68. 63 Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire, 68, 75.

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itself ideological and ultimately functioned to produce submission to the existing order.64 Jedamski has argued with reference to the reception and adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, the Count of Monte Cristo, and Sherlock Holmes in Indonesia that “the specific historical context of these texts does not seem to have hindered their transfer to non-Western – and colonized – cultures.”65 Although the present article concurs in general with Jedamski’s implication that the transferred text loses association with its origins and assumes new meanings in its new locale, it is also cognizant of the fact that in the case of the Nithan Thorng-In, the specific historical context of the Sherlock Holmes prototype certainly resonated for the Siamese milieu in which it was re-invented. Crown Prince Vajiravudh’s choice in creating a collection of stories based on a British source that was profoundly imperial in stance went beyond questions of Siamese fascination with a Western literary form. The prince’s overt desire to follow the imprint of this particular brand of late-Victorian crime fiction came, too, because the colonial outlook it suggested matched the needs of the Siamese elite for their own discourses of power and knowledge. Their aim was multifold: to establish their own potency and position in a world governed by a new world order; to answer back to Western colonial dominance in the region; and to assert control over the Siamese territories beyond Bangkok in a state project characterized by Thongchai as that of internal colonialism.66

Foreign ‘Others’ in the Nithan Thorng-In In his insightful study into the relationship between fiction, crime, and empire in the tales of Sherlock Holmes, Jon Thompson convincingly indicates how Conan Doyle’s detective fiction pushes to the margins every potentially disruptive subject imaginable – racism, imperialism, class conflict, even women. […] once individuals are designated as cultural “others” by virtue of being foreign, lower class, or simply female, they are scarcely characterized at all or are only handled in the most stereotypical fashion. Typically, characterization is replaced by an assumption of inferiority. Similarly, whatever cameo roles Indians have in the Sherlock Holmes stories, they are invariably represented stereotypically, as unfathomable exotics of the 64 65 66

Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire, 75. Jedamski, “Popular Literature and Postcolonial Subjectivities,” 19. Thongchai, “The Others Within.”

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East. Behind these stereotypes is the assumption that foreigners, especially dark ones, are only important enough to warrant a quick “snapshot” characterization.67

It is the early novella The Sign of Four, however, that Thompson holds up as offering the most extensive treatment of colonial relations in Doyle’s oeuvre and that includes the minor character of Tonga, an Andaman aborigine and fearful henchman of the key antagonist Jonathan Small, introduced into the narrative by means of the following objectified description of his race. They are naturally hideous, having large misshapen heads, small fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they, that all the efforts of the British officials have failed to win them over in any degree. They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, braining the survivors with their stone-headed clubs or shooting them with their poisoned arrows.68

As Thompson rightly points out, the attitudes conveyed in this passage are entirely orientalist in nature, demonstrative of the imperial perception of the East as a domain requiring the civilizing influence of the West. “The persistently paternalistic tone of Conan Doyle’s pseudoethnographic description suggests that these primitives need the civilising touch of English culture to curb their innate savagery.”69 Like his predecessors, King Chulalongkorn and King Mongkut before him, Vajiravudh had engaged with the dominant ideology that justified the Western imperial project of the day, as shown in the adoption of siwilai by the Siamese elite in the late-Victorian era. Of the three monarchs, however, Vajiravudh had imbibed colonial discourses most completely as an effect of his lengthy education in Britain and his consequent exposure to such values in their popularized and most pervasive forms, such as the pages of the Strand magazine with their Sherlock Holmes stories. In his re-invention of these tales in the form of the Nithan Thorng-In, Crown Prince Vajiravudh retains the colonial strategy of the stereotype in his presentation of those deemed ‘Other’ to the ideology of the Siamese nation. In short, he closely mimics the practice of orientalism in his depictions of cultural ‘otherness’, 67

Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire, 68, 69. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, quoted in Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire, 69. 69 Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire, 70. 68

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despite the fact that Siam was itself a victim of the West’s orientalist views. His strategy was either to ignore the ideological irony of this position or to consciously subvert it in the creation of a counter-attack on colonialism that asserted Siamese independence from the West and the superiority of the ruling elite. His calculated employment of the objectifying force of ‘othering’ in the Nithan Thorng-In served the purpose of asserting control over a series of alterities that in their different ways posed a threat to the order of the day. In their symbolic campaign to establish a sense of order and enlightened reason over Bangkok and its immediate environs, the Nithan Thong-In are candid in their depiction of ‘enemy Others’ that pose a threat to urban security. In this sense, the stories neither marginalize nor attempt to repress the causes of anxiety in the way that Thompson argues Conan Doyle did. Instead, they bring certain races and ethnic Others to the fore as a focus of concern. Hence, the crimes portrayed in The Tales of Thorng-In are invariably the machinations of foreigners, from Vietnamese, Burmese, Chinese, Indians, and farangs, to the subjects (sapayek) of European colonies in the region. And even the Siamese protagonists found guilty of criminal activity have, more often than not, acquired their sophisticated techniques of deception as a result of an education in the West. In its initial definition of Thorng-In’s pursuits, provided in the opening story of the collection – “Nak Phrakhanong thi sorng” (The return of Nak, ghost of Phrakhanong) – it is Chinese and Vietnamese residents of the capital that are singled out as the perpetrators of crime: Mr Thorng-In has aided the secret police on many occasions, once disguising himself as a Vietnamese to gain entry to a Vietnamese household in Sam Sen, where they were engaged in the production of moonshine. And the Vietnamese did not suspect a thing. Had the police not missed the appointment that time, then they would surely have been able to arrest many of the moonshine producers. On another occasion, Mr Thong-In disguised himself as a Chinaman in order to gain entry to a Chinese triad meeting in Chinatown [Sampheng] and was able to glean some very useful information to pass on to the Police department.70

Given that a deep suspicion of the Chinese was to mark much of Vajiravudh’s political thinking, as evidenced by his 1914 pamphlet on the Chinese as the Jews of the East (Phuak yiw haeng buraphathit), further nega70

Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 3.

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tive treatment of their activities in Siam is, unsurprisingly, included in other of the Thorng-In tales. In “The Drugging of Bungalow the Racehorse” (Ya ma Bangalo), Thong-In unveils, for example, the dishonest practices of the affluent Bangkok racehorse owner of Chinese origin, the aptly named Chin E (E the chinaman): My dear readers, those among you who enjoy horse racing or who have frequently read the newspapers will all be fully aware of the best-known racehorse owners at that club. No one has such good stock or owns as many horses as E the Chinaman, and his horses win time and time again, meaning that the money he spends on rearing them is by no means simply a waste. Many people will know Chin E beyond those who are simply horse-racing fans, for he is a rich man from Hong Kong and a British subject, who is completely westernized [farang] in manner, except for wearing a Chinese pigtail. He has lived in Thailand for many years, though he has made no effort to learn Thai in all this time. Instead he speaks perfect English, just like an Englishman. And as for those involved in horse-trading, there is none who has not heard the name of Chin E. For who among them has not heard of how he travels around from one place to the next buying up horses? One minute he’s making purchases in Ang Thorng, the next in Lopburi, the next in Ayutthaya. And who among them has not seen him at the racecourse, dressed in a clean white suit, sporting yellow shoes, a pale cream silk hat with a red scarf around it, and the gold-embossed red bow pinned to his chest that marks his membership of the club’s committee.71

In its association here between the behaviour, manner, and dress-code of Chin E and his overtly farang characteristics, ‘The Drugging of Bungalow the Racehorse’ points to an aversion not only to the antagonist’s Chinese ethnicity but doubly to his mimicry of the West. The implication is fraught with ambivalence, given the Siamese penchant for similar patterns of imitation, exemplified not only by the invention of the Nithan Thorng-In themselves but also by the photograph of Vajiravudh as Sherlock Holmes, clad in semi-Western attire. Something of the distaste he expresses with regard to Chin E relates additionally, however, to the position the ‘Chinaman’ occupies as a subject (sapayek) of the British Empire. In the fifty years leading up to the publication of this story, a series of treaties signed with Western powers had imposed provisions of extraterritoriality that protected foreign subjects from criminal proceedings in Siam. The Tales of Mr Thorng-In vent Vajiravudh’s sense of injustice at this state of affairs, serving perhaps as a literary response to a legal situation beyond his country’s control. The same can be argued of others in the series, such as “Nangseu 71

Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 88.

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jak meuang Perak” (The letter from Perak), a code-breaking mystery in which two Burmese nationals with British citizenship are revealed to be engaged in illegal arms-trading through Bangkok; or “Soi khor roi chang” (The priceless necklace), in which Mr Thorng-In harshly reprimands an Indian jeweller in Bangkok for handling stolen goods: If you had no suspicions about the person who brought you the necklace, then you’ll go to prison for at least a year – or whatever it is in British law. You’re a British subject, aren’t you? Well, then, the Consul will be hearing all about you.72

In each of Thorng-In’s encounters with criminal sapayek, their connection with Western powers allows their criminal activities to slip free of Siamese state control. They are subjects of suspicion both as a result of their own ethnic difference and by their association with the farang. In similar vein, the Nithan Thorng-In reveal a mistrust of Siam’s own citizens who have traded their loyalty to the homeland in exchange for closer ties with the West. Nowhere better is this illustrated than in “A State Secret” (Khwam lap phaendin), in which a treaty is stolen by a certain Mr Liam, the chief clerk of a high-ranking Ministry official. But Liam is not the real villain of the piece, a role reserved for the man to whom he sells on the document, the aptly named Nai Plian, literally ‘Mr Change’. The suspicions directed at Mr Change, of plotting to leak the document to ‘the other side’ (khang none, presumably the West), are supported by the conclusions Mr ThorngIn draws from his detective work: “Mr Plian is a convert to Catholicism. I suspect he is a foreign subject and he appears to be involved in some form of secret trade. He has a big house, money and apparently little work to do.” […] “The important thing is that Mr Plian is someone who is acquainted with Westerners. Perhaps he himself is a Westerner. His house is luxuriously decorated in Western style. It is a two-storey house with a bedroom and a bathroom upstairs and a sitting room, dining room and study downstairs.” 73

Ironically, although the westernized layout of Mr Plian’s house attracts authorial suspicion and disapproval, it is nevertheless essential to the workings of the plot. The location of the downstairs study – an impossibility in a traditional Thai house – is indispensable, permitting Thorng-In and Wat to assess the location of the missing treaty in Nai Plian’s home and to retrieve 72 73

Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 238. Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 49–50, 51.

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it in identical fashion to that of Holmes and Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The ambivalence that permeates Vajiravudh’s views of imitation is clearly revealed in this striking example of the abhorrence of adopted Western practices expressed through the barely disguised adaptation of a Western literary form. A similar perspective is further illustrated in the Nithan Thorng-In in the related suspicion of Western knowledge that the tales often imply – this, despite the fact that their replication of the detective-fiction genre simultaneously confirms the value of reason and empiricism, inherited from the Western Enlightenment. When Thorng-In is offered help, for example, following a collision with a passing driver, he pointedly rejects the proposition: “‘No thank you very much. You’re not going to run me over and then have the further audacity to take me to a farang doctor to be finished off’.”74 Other stories in the collection provide a cynical reassessment of the positive influences of Western knowledge to reveal its dual potential for abuse. In “Khem roi dorkmai” (The garland needle), a woman is able to commit the (almost) untraceable murder of her rich husband by stabbing him through the heart with a garland needle. Her awareness of how to make believe he has had a heart attack has been acquired from her brother, a doctor trained in the West. Vajiravudh’s suspicions of the overseas-educated (nakrian nork), revealed extensively in his later political writings such as Khlone tit lor (Mud on our wheels) and prominent despite his own schooling in England, are further evidenced in the story “Raden Landai.” Based closely on Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” the antagonist of this late Thorng-In tale incurs the suspicion of his wife when he makes regular business trips from his home in Nakhorn Pathom to neighbouring Bangkok (mirroring the Kent/London locations of the Doyle original). Tracing him to a less salubrious area of the city, Thorng-In discovers Mr Raden Landai disguised as a beggar to hoodwink passers-by into giving him money. The charlatan’s true identity, as a wealthy man of Westerneducated background, is revealed by the detective’s removal of his face paint with Vaseline. While parallel revelations made by Holmes’s use of a wet sponge in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” are interpreted by critics as

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a restoration of (bourgeois) order and respectability,75 Vajiravudh’s conclusion to the story reasserts Siamese authority over the deceptive capacities of Western influence through the medium of Mr Thorng-In. The author’s choice of title for Vajiravudh’s piece, replicating that of a well-known dramatic poem (bot lakhorn) by the court poet Phra Maha Montri, additionally raises the issue of social class, which simmers below the surface of this narrative. Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, Maha Montri’s parodical drama broke with established literary tradition by setting its action in a bourgeois–proletarian environment, rather than that of the court and the gods.76 As the Thai literary critic Suchat Sawatsi has noted of Vajiravudh’s “Raden Landai,” its depiction of the abnormal and disreputable behaviour of a Western-educated rogue may in turn have been a satirical reference to Khru Liam (Luang Wilat Pariwat) who was himself a student in England contemporaneous with the Crown Prince but of less elevated stock.77 Khru Liam went on to establish a reputation as a translator of English prose and author of the first Thai novel, “Khwam mai phayabat” (No vendetta, 1915, republished 2000), and he similarly dabbled in crime fiction.78 Embedded in the tale of “Raden Landai” in particular and of the Nithan Thorng-In more generally is an assertion of the supremacy of its royal author over a varied array of ‘Others’, defined as such by differences of ethnicity, background, and class. Vajiravudh’s suspicion of the Westerninfluenced and the Western-educated Siamese extends to a mistrust of certain forms of Western knowledge and practice, and, further, to scorn for the farang himself, most notably in the form of the expatriate struggling to function efficiently in Bangkok. A fitting illustration is provided by the difficulties faced by the city’s Western Chief of Police (farang chao krom), emphasized in “The Return of Nak, Ghost of Phrakhanong.” Offering an explanation of why Thorng-In has made such rapid progress in the case, Wat asks his colleague: “What do the police have to say about the haunting? Do you know?” Mr Thorng-In replied that he had made some investigations and had ascertained that the Western Chief of Police had not seen fit to apply himself to this 75

Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980):98. 76 Klaus Wenk, Thai Literature: An Introduction (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1995): 59. 77 Suchat, “Dae… bida haeng rahatsakhadhi thai phu hai kamnoet Nai Thorng-In,” 190. 78 See footnote 53 for further details.

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particular case, since it was not important enough. And that, in addition to that, he was severely preoccupied at present with the task of responding to the frequent accusations made against him by the military, who appeared to be planning his assassination one minute, an attack on the Police Hospital the next, and engaging in a gun-battle with his officers the next.79

Wat goes on to clarify, lest there be any doubt, that Thorng-In did not in any case like the Chief of Police. His competitive edge on the farang detective is again noteworthy from the perspective of ambivalence towards the West typified by so many of the short stories in this collection and presented in a form adapted from Western crime fiction. In ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, the sleuth’s opponent comes in the figure of Inspector Lestrade, whom Holmes repeatedly outsmarts. Strongly influenced in turn by the genre of detective fiction invented by Edgar Allan Poe, the Holmes/ Lestrade tensions mirror those of Poe’s protagonist Auguste Dupin with his nemesis Monsieur G – the Prefect of the Parisian Police.

Order, Authority and the Importance of Poe: Ruling Over the “Others Within” Thus far, this article has focused on the associations that exist between Crown Prince Vajiravudh’s crime-writing and that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to the exclusion of a further significant literary influence provided by the detective fiction of Poe. But the impact of Poe on the Nithan Thorng-In is also crucial, not only in terms of plot and form but also in relation to the entire raison d’être of the detective genre and the ways in which Vajiravudh sought to make it function on his behalf in his assertion of control over a modernizing Siam.80 Writing on both Poe and Doyle, literary critics have suggested that one of the key functions of Victorian crime fiction was to establish a sense of urban order over a series of anxieties pertaining to modernity and Empire.81 79

Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 5. Conan Doyle himself drew inspiration from the work of Poe, as he did from other predecessors in the creation of crime fiction and sensationalist literature of the late-Victorian era, such as Émile Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens. 81 Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire, 8. As such, argues Stephen Knight, the detective story functions in much the same way as folktales (the Thai word for which, significantly, is nithan), the essential function of which is “to explain the world, to protect the folk against psychic and physical threats, to offer escapist entertainment and to be socially normative – to urge that these values will keep society on an even keel, resist discommoding change”; 80

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As Stephen Knight therefore contends, the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories relied on the hero’s power to assuage the anxieties of a respectable, London-based, middle-class audience. The captivated readers had faith in modern systems of scientific and rational enquiry to order an uncertain and troubling world, but feeling they lacked these powers themselves they, like many audiences before them, needed a suitably equipped hero to mediate psychic protection.82

The perfect vehicle for this task was the brilliant detective hero of outstanding intellect and rationale, the prototype for which was invented by Poe in the shape of the Parisian aristocrat Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin features in three of Poe’s short stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” the first of which was a distinct model for Vajiravudh’s “Phu rai kha khon thi Bangkhunphrom” (The murderer of Bangkhunphrom). As the originating image of the superior, aloof detective, Dupin provides an apt model for Vajiravudh’s Mr Thorng-In, fittingly also suggested by the similarity in name (albeit dependent on an entirely feasible Siamese mispronunciation of the French syllable ‘in’). Dupin’s literary function as symbolic of the desire for knowledge as power83 further served the royal Siamese cause well. In Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” for example – a short story on which Vajiravudh drew for his creation of “A State Secret,” both directly and indirectly, via Doyle’s own adaptation of it as “A Scandal in Bohemia” – the detective’s enhanced knowledge of the letter’s whereabouts grants him power over the less well-informed Prefect of Police. Significantly too, in the ramifications it has for the Siamese re-write, Dupin’s supercilious attitude to the Prefect is based not simply on ‘enhanced knowledge’, but on superior class. Dupin is a member of the aristocracy, and as such he was a more appealing mirror-image of Thorng-In than Sherlock Holmes and his championing of the bourgeoisie,84 for the Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 103. This is precisely the function of the nithan in Thai, associated as it is with the didactic approach of Buddhist parables. In consequence, Knight contends that the genre does not essentially concern itself with crime at all, nor record the genuine criminal activities of the day; rather, it deals with people who have turned away from their proper, moral roles; Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 90. 82 Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 67. 83 Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire, 44–47. 84 As Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 83, argues, Holmes is, in fact, much more the agent of middle-class feeling against the manipulative, immoral hedonism of aristocrats and is essentially conservative in outlook.

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Nithan Thorng-In are arguably less concerned with the interests of any other class than the ruling elite, over whom Vajiravudh was keen to assert control. Although the Crown Prince acknowledged commoners as potential readers of the journal Thawi panya (Enhanced knowledge), in which his detective stories were published, and although he adopted the commoner title Nai or ‘Mr’ for both his key protagonist and for himself as author, the prime focus of Vajiravudh’s attentions was directed towards the aristocracy. In the context of these motivations, Poe’s detective hero may have appealed to Vajiravudh not only as a model for his own Mr Thorng-In, but also as an exemplar to himself, in the same way that Dupin was arguably a direct representation of Poe’s own views.85 As Ross Macdonald postulates with reference to crime fiction as a genre: A close paternal or fraternal relationship between writer and detective is a marked peculiarity of the form. Throughout its history, from Poe to Chandler and beyond, the detective hero has represented his creator and carried his values into action in society.86

Supported by those of Knight, Macdonald’s observations resonate with particular regard to Dupin, who, he suggests, stands in for Poe’s dream “of an intellectual hierarchy governing the cultural life of the nation, himself at its head.”87 Poe’s ambition and that of Vajiravudh bear remarkable similarities, expressed symbolically in the creation of their brilliant detective heroes, men who rule in unquestioned and monarchical fashion through the ultramodern powers of reason and intellect. The genre’s very deification of the detective hero, which Thompson identifies in the ratiocinative fiction of

85

Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 73. Ross Macdonald, “The Writer as Detective Hero” (1965), in Detective Fiction, ed. Robin W. Winks (Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice–Hall, 1980): 179. Macdonald goes on to acknowledge Conan Doyle’s deathbed confession: “If anyone is Sherlock Holmes, then I confess it is myself” (Macdonald, “The Writer as Detective Hero,” 181). 87 Macdonald, “The Writer as Detective Hero,” 179. Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 50, supports this: At a simple level it has been suggested that Dupin is basically a wishful figure of the author. The book-lover, the aristocrat fallen on bad times, the supreme analyst who reaches the highest realms of the creative imagination – these are certainly aspects of the way Poe saw himself. He too loved creating paradoxes, enjoyed pontificating and showing how wide learning could resolve problems. 86

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Edgar Allan Poe, produces a potent mirror-image that held inevitable allure for a princely author destined to become the next Siamese god-King.88 In this vein, the character of Mr Thorng-In plainly evokes Vajiravudh’s call for a systematic understanding of the world around him, and a desire to establish authority over the various troublesome ‘Others’ that it embraced. These included fellow members of the ruling elite who challenged royal authority in their attitudes, frequently deemed to have been inherited from too much contact from the West, as the result of an overseas education. The nakrian nork, the colonial sapayek, the religious convert, the covert double agent, and the farang themselves – all came under suspicion, as revealed in the criminal dramas of the Nithan Thorng-In. Mistrust is, further, reserved in the tales for other racial groups – such as the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Most notably, however, the stories have distinct implications for the native Siamese subject, an entirely local category to whom Thongchai refers as the “others within.”89 In his survey of the ethno-spatial differentiation of Siamese subjects between 1885 and 1910, Thongchai observes that they were divided into two categories: the khon ban nork (ordinary, rural peoples); and the khon pa (people of the wilderness).90 Both are represented, explicitly or otherwise, in the Nithan Thorng-In. Several stories in the collection focus on the lives of khon ban nork, located in the outlying areas of Bangkok or in the provinces of Nakhorn Pathom and Saraburi (“the untamed margins,” as Thongchai refers to them).91 Reiterating the views expressed in the quasianthropological writings of the times, Vajiravudh’s depiction of these characters’ lives is coloured by the kind of irrational superstitions that a master of reason such as detective Thorng-In is designed to counter and dispel: The favourite stories from travels to the domain of khon ban nok are about magic, superstition, spirits, local customs, and beliefs. Rare occupations, unusual individuals and their skills are also included. The stories are told merely as entertaining side issues, not as the main items. The authors seldom dare dismiss these tales, nor show disrespect, nor interrupt what they saw at the time, yet they usually express scepticism. They comment as non-believers, especially those

88 89 90 91

Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire, 51. Thongchai, “The Others Within.” “The Others Within,” 41. Thongchai, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’,” 546.

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who considered themselves men of science, such as King Chulalongkorn and his royal associates.92

Nowhere is this somewhat disdainful perception of the khon ban nork better illustrated than in the opening story of the Nithan Thorng-In collection, “The Return of Nak, Ghost of Phrakhanong.” In the same way that “Raden Landai” made local intertextual reference to a classic Siamese literary work, “The Return of Nak” alludes to the widely believed folktale of a malicious female ghost. Having died in childbirth while her husband was away at war, Nak returns to be with him as his wife and to guard him jealously against the attentions of others. By referring back to this narrative, Vajiravudh’s detective version establishes a link with both Siamese tradition and popular belief, subjecting them to the more scientific implications of Enlightenment reason and thus heavily implicated in the genre of crime fiction. As with the original story, “The Return of Nak” is set in Phrakhanong, on the (then) semi-rural periphery of Bangkok, where Thorng-In and Wat attend to a distressed local headman, Phan Chote. Haunted by the jealous ghost of his recently deceased wife Nak, Phan Chote’s house is subjected to close investigation by the sceptical detectives. In a masquerade to exorcize the spirit, Wat performs a farcical ritual requiring a drop of water from the middle of the local river, a candle, some sacred thread (sai sin), and a handful of grass. Meanwhile, it is through the scientific processes of detection that Thorng-In reveals Nak the ghost to be Phan Chote’s own sons, engaged in a ruse to scare away any potential stepmother and so preserve the family inheritance for themselves. The humorous note on which the story closes reassuringly dispels the credibility of spectral haunting in the modern, rational, and ‘civilized’ Siam: From that day on Phan Chote has never again been haunted by the ghost of his wife. As for news of whether he has yet remarried, it remains to be said that to this day he has not, and so I hope that all members of his household are living happily and in peace. As for me, I am still renowned as an exceptional ghost buster.93

Whereas “The Return of Nak” espouses the dominant, elitist view of the khon ban nork category of “others within” as wedded to the unscientific beliefs of animism and lacking in scientific reason, the wild and uncivilized character of the khon pa is implied in Vajiravudh’s “Phu rai kha khon thi 92 93

Thongchai, “The Others Within,” 50–51. Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 22–23.

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Bangkhunphrom“ (The murderer of Bangkhunphrom). Based on Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the story nevertheless relates to a clearly localized Siamese agenda, providing both pertinent insights into the ethno-spatial relations of the day and a literary expression of anxieties regarding various cultural ‘Others’. Its setting in the central Bangkok district of Bangkhunphrom, located on the periphery of the extended royal palace domain, and emphasized by reference to it in the story’s title, can be argued to symbolically suggest a terrain beyond the close authority of the ruling elite. The story’s depiction of a gruesome murder committed by a type of khon pa – in this case a term used to refer to an orang-utan – again operates on the level of metaphor to stand in for those ‘beyond the pale’ of civilized mores.94 Of greatest interest to this article in its focus on Siamese engagements with the West, the figure found culpable for the murder is the owner of the orang-utan, who turns out to be a Westerner resident in Bangkok. Hence, it is the farang who is explicitly made responsible in this text for having brought together the two opposing worlds of the modernizing city and the archaic ‘wild man’, through his own lack of awareness and discernment. The significance of his role in the story is suggested by Vajiravudh’s calculated divergence from Poe’s original in two noteworthy aspects. One is that he alters the emphasis from Poe’s title of ‘murders’ to a new focus on ‘murderer’ or villain (phu rai), and in addition evokes ambiguity over whether this refers to the orang-utan or the farang. (The term phu rai could even be plural in Thai, referring to both as equally culpable.) The other is that he modifies the details of the ape’s ownership for the express purpose of introducing a culpable expatriate farang: while Poe’s orang-utan arrives in Paris as the captive pet of a French sailor returning from a voyage to Sumatra, Vajiravudh’s animal, though similarly brought back from maritime Southeast Asia by a seaman, is crucially sold on in Singapore to a Western resident of Bangkok. Perhaps Vajiravudh, on reading “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” thought the Frenchman a little eccentric and wished to ridicule his actions as typically farang. Perhaps, too, he wished to comment on the very colonial practice at play in the sailor’s acquisition from foreign shores of an exotic trophy from the East.

94

Although there is no distinct Thai word for orang-utan other than the generic term ling, meaning monkey or ape, the choice of the term khon pa has marked associations with the classificatory commentaries of such Siamese nobles as Phra Surasakmontri, writing in the journal Wachirayan wiset, only several years earlier, in 1889.

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In its own reinterpretation of Poe’s original, “The Murderer of Bangkhunphrom” makes further minor amendments to characterization and plot. Whereas the Parisian murder victims are a reclusive mother and daughter, female characters are de-emphasized in the Siamese version, in which Vajiravudh’s orang-utan on the loose instead unleashes its frenzied attack on a certain Mr Rort (whose name ironically translates as ‘survival’). In both acts of mayhem, the animal uses a razor blade – Poe’s is engaged in a macabre imitation of his owner’s attempts at shaving, while Vajiravudh’s simply seizes his prey’s own razor and uses it to slit Rort’s throat. The tension and terror suffusing the murders in the Rue Morgue are, however, only faintly echoed in “The Murderer of Bangkhunphrom.” The mystery of the killer’s identity, for example, is significantly undermined by Thorng-In’s too-prompt assessment of the evidence of the body, concluding that the teeth-marks in the arm look more like “those of an ape than they do of a human being.”95 Furthermore, though retaining basic descriptions of the crime scene’s state of utter disarray, Vajiravudh downplays the considerable elements of gothic horror that pervade Poe’s depiction of the slaughter, in which one of the victims has been stuffed head-first so far up the chimney that it proves difficult to retrieve the corpse and the other’s neck has been severed so deeply that when the body is moved, the head falls off. By contrast, “The Murderer of Bangkhunphrom” provides only scant detail about Mr Rort’s mutilated corpse, thus removing the emphasis on the macabre so integral to the evolution of Victorian detective, crime, and sensationalist fiction. Arguably, the principles of gothic horror were antithetical to the wider ideology of ‘civilization’ (khwam pen siwilai) at play in Vajiravudh’s experimentation with the genre. Moreover, their association in the West with the anxieties of Empire, as Patrick Brantlinger argues, would not have resonated for Siam.96 Brantlinger suggests that the gothic came to the fore when “after the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’.”97 But this concern, deriving from an excess of 95 Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 154. Jedamski, “Genres of Crime Fiction in Indonesia,” 176, makes similar observations regarding the lack of suspense in Indonesian crime fiction. 96 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1988): 227–28. 97 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 230.

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colonial gains, was in no way shared by a country fearing it might fall victim to such gains. Nevertheless, other aspects of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” clearly held distinct appeal as a format for Siamese detective fiction. In order for the ape in the Nithan Thorng-In to be able to escape undetected from the scene of the crime in the same way that Poe’s orang-utan had in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Mr Rort contrives to sleep in a somewhat unusual dwelling chamber, comsisting of a two-storey tower (hor), which he inhabits alone at the end of his garden, separate from the rest of his household. This rearrangement circumvents a logistical problem posed by traditional Siamese housing, thus permitting the orang-utan and his keeper to mimic Poe’s characters in their flight from the murder scene: i.e. by climbing down a rope attached to a drainpipe. From this point on in Poe’s narrative, Dupin locates the animal in the Bois de Boulogne and places an advertisement in the newspaper appealing for its owner to come forth. Resolution of the horrible crime it has committed is brought about by the sailor’s auction of the beast at the city’s botanical gardens. The Siamese re-write proceeds to its conclusion in an almost identical way. On discovering the orang-utan in Rort’s garden, to which it has been attracted by the ready availability of betel nuts, Thorng-In summons its owner with a well-placed newspaper advertisement, printed, notably, in both English and Thai: “Khon pa” “Recently restrained. Will the owner please contact the office of the newspaper and should they be able to provide clear evidence of ownership the animal will be duly handed over.” T.I.98

As in the case of Poe’s story, the conclusion to the tragedy is a largely amicable one, despite the severity of the crime, even permitting an element of humour to be introduced into the Thai version that is absent in the original: The farang asked Mr Thorng-In, “Won’t the police want the orang-utan?” Mr Thorng-In replied, “I don’t think there would be much use in taking it to court. But if I were you I would find a strong cage for it so that it doesn’t get away again.” The farang shook his head and answered, “I don’t want to keep it any more. Whenever I see its face I’m reminded of the fact he’s killed someone. 98

Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 169.

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Perhaps he might even kill me. So I’m thinking of selling him. But I’m still afraid, afraid of being reported for the crime. I’m happy to pay any compensation required, but please don’t take me to court.” Mr Thorng-In replied, “I know the relatives of the dead man. Perhaps something can be arranged.” The farang thanked Mr Thorng-In for protecting his reputation and took the orang-utan away. For his part, Mr Thorng-In paid a visit to Mr Rort’s wife and explained to her in every detail what had happened. Mr Rort’s wife said that she did not wish to press charges and would be satisfied to receive compensation instead to cover the costs of her husband’s funeral. Mr Thorng-In therefore spoke with the farang and the farang agreed to pay Mr Rort’s wife the sum of 1000 baht, thus bringing the issue to a close. As for the police, they have still to this day never been able to catch the murderer of Bangkhunphrom.99

Here, just as in Poe’s narrative, a grotesque offence goes unpunished as a result of its being a freak occurrence rather than a real crime with the potential to recur.100 As Knight contends with reference to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: “No presentation or analysis of the social causes of disorder is offered, it is merely suggested that strange and terrible things can happen and a clever man will be able to explain them.”101 “The Murderer of Bangkhunphrom” diverges slightly from this analytical frame offered in regard to Poe, for Vajiravudh’s does provide a treatment of social disorder in early-twentieth-century Siam, implied in his ambiguous combination of the wild, the uncivilized, and the farang. Despite this departure from Poe, the Nithan Thorng-In nevertheless retains the ideological significance of resolution provided by the enlightened intelligence of a brilliant individual. To know is to resolve disorder; to know is to gain control. What better man could there be for this position than Crown Prince Vajiravudh himself, in the guise of his alter-ego detective, Mr Thorng-In?

Conclusion: The Nithan Thong-In as Local (Re)in(ter)vention As the critical analysis of detective fiction as a genre usefully shows, the Western literary models on which Vajiravudh drew in the creation of his Nithan Thorng-In (The tales of Mr Thorng-In) concern themselves with both knowledge and power. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle in his wake were responsible for the invention of detective heroes of superior 99 100 101

Nai Kaew Nai Khwan, Nithan Thorng-In, 173. Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 44. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 44.

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intellect and reason, hence qualifying them to symbolically quell the anxieties that marked their times. In the transfer of this literary model to earlytwentieth-century Siam, the political and ideological potency of the detective hero did not go undetected or unutilized. For a variety of historical reasons, Crown Prince Vajiravudh and his fellow ruling elite were deeply motivated by a quest for knowledge that was in turn a quest for power. His publication of Nithan Thorng-In in the aptly named journal Thawi panya (Enhanced knowledge), of which he was founder and editor, mirrors his stories’ reverence for an improved intellect and the application of rationalism. That the principles to which he was attracted were distinctly Western in origin and closely associated with the philosophy of the European Enlightenment mattered little, for Siam had long engaged in the processes of adoption, adaptation, and reinvention of literary, cultural, and ideological influences from dominant foreign Others, so much so that in several cases the revised output had come to be emblematic of what it meant to be Thai. The complexity of the West’s position as a model for assimilation and modification is derived at this historical moment from its authority as a colonial power and the peril it consequently posed to the particularity of being Siamese. Siam’s response to the perceived threat and related anxiety of falling under colonial rule was to engage in a quest for siwilai that brought it voluntarily closer to Europe in cultural terms and inserted itself in the imaginary of the new world of nations. Becoming ‘westernized’ in certain ways became inextricably linked with remaining Siamese. Moreover, this apparent mimicry of the West was motivated as much by a recognition of colonial discourses as a source of power that could be adapted to the requirements of internal control, as it was by the fear of European domination. For while the spectre of the West as a powerful colonial force certainly cast its shadow over the imagination of the Siamese ruling elite, it also provided source material for a distinctly local purpose. All of these concerns are very much in evidence in Nithan Thorng-In, marked in the relationships to the West the stories explore through their ambivalent blend of imitation, reinvention, anxiety, desire, solemnity, joviality, and the need to assert authority over a variety of disquieting ‘Others’, both foreign and Siamese.

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WORKS CITED Arkartdamkeung Rapheephat. The Circus of Life (Bangkok: tmc, 1995). Allen, Christopher B. “The 1688 “Revolution” in Siam and Its Origins: An In Depth Examination of a Seventeenth-Century Siamese Power Struggle” (doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1991). Asvabahu. Latthi ao yang (The cult of imitation) (Phim thai, 7 April 1915), quoted from Copeland, “Contested Nationalism,” 36. ——. Khlone tit lor (Mud on our wheels) (Phim thai, 28 April–11 May 1915), quoted from Copeland, “Contested Nationalism,” 36. Baker, Chris, & Pasuk Phongpaichit. A History of Thailand (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2005). Batson, Benjamin. The End of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam (Singapore: Oxford U P , 1984). Battye, Noel A. “The Military, Government, and Society in Siam, 1868–1910: Politics and Military Reform During the Reign of King Chulalongkorn” (doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1984). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1984). Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1988). Copeland, Matthew P. “Contested Nationalism and the 1932 Overthrow of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam History” (doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, 1993). Damrong Rajanuphap. Monuments of the Buddha, tr. Sulak Sivaraksa (Bangkok: Siam Society, 1962). Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Other Detective Stories, intro. & sel. Owen Dudley Edwards (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994). Greene, Stephen Lyon Wakeman. Absolute Dreams: Thai Government Under Rama V I , 1910–1925 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1999). Harrison, Rachel. “The Indigenous and the ‘Foreign’: The Reception, Adaptation and Reinvention of Western Literatures in South East Asia,” in France–Asie: Un siècle d’échanges littéraires, ed. Muriel Detrie (Paris: Librairie You Feng, 2001): 240–54. ——. “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Towards a Comparative Study of the Interaction between the Traditional and the Modern in Contemporary South East Asian Literatures,” Tenggara 42 (2000): 19–47. ——. “Thailande. Between East and West,” in États et littérature en Asie. L’Émergence des États modernes (X I X e – X X e siècles), ed. Monique Zaini–Lajoubert (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2003): 157–84. ——, & Peter A. Jackson, ed. The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , forthcoming 2009). Herzfeld, Michael. “The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (Fall 2002): 899–926. ——. “The Conceptual Allure of the West: Dilemmas and Ambiguities of CryptoColonialism in Thailand” (2009), in The Ambiguous Allure of the West, ed. Harrison & Jackson, forthcoming.

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Hong, Lysa. “ ‘ Stranger Within the Gates’: Knowing Semi-Colonial Siam as Extraterritorials,” Modern Asian Studies 38.2 (2004): 327–54. Huddart, David. Homi K. Bhabha (London & New York: Routledge, 2006). Jackson, Peter A. “The Performative State: Semi-Coloniality and the Tyranny of Images in Modern Thailand,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in South East Asia 19 (2004): 40–74. ——. “The Ambiguities of Semicolonial Power in Thailand” (2009), in The Ambiguous Allure of the West, ed. Harrison & Jackson, forthcoming. ——. “Semicoloniality, Translation and Excess in Thai Cultural Studies,” South East Asia Research 13.1 (March 2005): 7–41. Jedamski, Doris. “Genres of Crime Fiction in Indonesia,” in Pramoedya Ananta Toer 70 Tahun: Essays to Honour Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s 70th Year, ed. Bob Hering (Sulating Maphilindo: Edisi Sastra Kabar Seberang, 1995): 167–89. ——. “Mabuk Modern and Gila Barat – Progress, Modernity, and Imagination: Literary Images of City Life in Colonial Indonesia,” in Lasting Fascinations: Essays on Indonesia and the Southwest Pacific to Honour Bob Hering, ed. Harry A. Poeze & Antoinette Liem (Stein: Edisi Sastra Kabar Seberang Sulating Maphilindo 28/29, 1998): 167–86. ——. “Popular Literature and Postcolonial Subjectivities; Robinson Crusoe, the Count of Monte Cristo and Sherlock Holmes in Colonial Indonesia,” in Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, ed. Keith Foulcher & Tony Day (Leiden: K I T L V Press, 2002): 19–47. Kasian Tejapira. Commodifying Marxism: The Formation of Modern Thai Radical Culture, 1927–1958 (Kyoto: Kyoto U P , 2001). Kepner, Susan. “Anna (and Margaret) and the King of Siam,” Crossroads 10.2 (1996): 1–32. Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980). Kulap Saipradit (Siburapha). Kulap in Oz: A Thai View of Australian Life and Society in the Late 1940s, tr. & ed. Scot Barmé (Monash Paper on Southeast Asia 36; Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, 1995). Leonowens, Anna. The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870; Singapore: Oxford U P , 1989). ——. Siamese Harem Life (London: Arthur Barker, 1873). Macdonald, Ross. “The Writer as Detective Hero” (1965), in Detective Fiction, ed. Robin W. Winks (Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice–Hall, 1980): 179–87. Nai Kaew Nai Khwan (Crown Prince Vajiravudh). Nithan Thorng-In (The tales of Mr Thorng-In) (Phranakhorn: publisher unknown, n.d.). Pattana Kitiarsa. “An Ambiguous Intimacy: Farang as Siamese Occidentalism” (2009), in The Ambiguous Allure of the West, ed. Harrison & Jackson, forthcoming. Peleggi, Maurizio. “Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism and the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in Modern Siam,” in Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia, ed. Srilata Ravi, Mario Rutten & Beng-Lam Goh (Singapore: I S E A S , 2004): 133–61. ——. Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 2002).

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Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Reynolds, Craig. “On the Gendering of Nationalist and Postnationalist Selves in Twentieth Century Thailand,” in Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand, ed. Peter A. Jackson & Nerida M. Cook (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1999): 261–74. Smithies, Michael. Witnesses to a Revolution: Siam, 1688: Twelve Key Texts Describing the Events and Consequences of the Phetracha Coup d’Etat and the Withdrawal of French Forces from the Country (Bangkok: Siam Society, 2004). Suchat Sawatsi. “Dae… bida haeng rahatsakhadhi thai phu hai kamnoet Nai ThorngIn” (In dedication to the father of the Thai detective story – the creator of Mr Thorng-In), Rahatsakhadi (Mystery) 3 (2000): 184–91. Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism (Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P , 1993). Thongchai Winichakul. “The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-Spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects 1885–1910,” in Civility and Savagery, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000): 38–62. ——. “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam,” Journal of Asian Studies 59.3 (2000): 528–49. ——. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Chiangmai: Silkworm, 1994). Van Esterik, Penny. “Anna and the King: Digesting Difference,” South East Asia Research 14.2 (July 2006): 289–307. Vella, Walter. Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 1978). Vilawan, Svetsreni. “King Vajiravudh and the Thai Spoken Drama: His Early Plays in English and His Original Thai lakhorn phut with Special Emphasis on the Innovative Uses of Drama” (doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1991). Wenk, Klaus. Thai Literature: An Introduction (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1995). Wibha Senanan. The Genesis of the Novel in Thailand (Bangkok: Thai Watana Panich, 1975). Winks, Robin, ed. Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Twentieth Century Views; Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice–Hall, 1980): 38–62.

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The Vanishing-Act of Sherlock Holmes in Indonesia’s National Awakening D ORIS J EDAMSKI

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N T I L T H E Y W E R E I N T R O D U C E D through Western book and film culture, neither the profession nor the concept of the detective had been known in the Malay world. Information (and gossip) was commonly channelled by way of the effective network of household employees, street vendors, and door-to-door salesmen. The Malay society of the early-twentieth century, however, soon grew acquainted with the ever-expanding official and semi-official ‘investigating agencies’, mostly represented by police agents and spies (mata–mata) who worked for the colonial government.

Police activities were not confined to apprehending against the myriad laws governing political life or to warning who might do so. There existed a network of undercover police officials masquerading as politically active Indonesians which covered much of the Indies, and this network was aided and assisted in its task of collecting political intelligence by another network of paid informers.1

Hence, as far as police practice and spy activities were concerned, the young Chinese-Malay and indigenous writers who emerged during the first decades of the twentieth century would have found plenty of inspiration in their own colonial life-world, but none with regard to detectives – had it not 1

William Joseph O’Malley, Indonesia in the Great Depression: A Study of East Sumatra and Yogjakarta in the 1930s (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1977): 228. Those representatives of colonial power stemmed from the various ethnic groups in the Netherlands East Indies, with the pribumi (‘native’) at the bottom of the hierarchy and the ‘white’ Europeans at its top.

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been for the popular novels and movies coming from other Asian and, most of all, Western cultures. Along with the smart, rational detective, these media also brought entertaining images of crime, weapons, and violence, much to the annoyance of the Dutch rulers. From a position of being able to look back on a long tradition of highly esteemed detectives and related genres in Chinese literature, the ChineseMalay part of colonial society perceived the genre as perhaps less foreign, less ‘Western’. Whatever the case, they were the first among the non-Western groups of society to consume and, in turn, to produce detective/crime fiction in the Dutch East Indies. As well as being acquainted with such Western crime-fighting heroes as Raffles (Lord Lister) and Sherlock Holmes, Indonesians and Malays became familiar with their equivalents in a number of Chinese detective and police stories, which were translated and adapted into Chinese-Malay.2 Through their translation activities, ChineseMalay writers and publishers thus functioned as cultural intermediaries, making the texts selected accessible to a Malay audience.3 In a similar vein, Eurasian writers selected Western novels for translation and took on the task of cultural ‘gatekeepers’,4 but they showed little apparent interest in the detective genre. In their efforts to belong to the (allegedly superior) Western layer of colonial society, most Eurasian intellectuals readily adopted Western cultural values, including the literary hierarchy that consigned popular literature and crime fiction to the very bottom. They would therefore not easily include this kind of popular fiction in their 2 Chinese (or ‘Low’) Malay was the predominant variant of the lingua franca Malay in the world of print culture at the time, in particular the press, until it was gradually superseded by the Balai Poestaka variant based on the regional variant used in Riau, born of and propagated by the Dutch colonial ‘social agency’ Kantoor voor de Volkslectuur / Balai Poestaka. The term ‘Low Malay’ covers a number of variants of the Malay language that were used as linguae francae among the manifold ethnic groups in the Malay archipelago. The dominant variants were the urban ones shaped by Chinese Malays in large cities such as Surabaya and Batavia. The colonial power disparagingly used the term ‘Low Malay’ (also ‘Market Malay’) while promoting its own policy of linguistic standardization, which favoured the Riau Malay variant. 3 Examples of translated / adapted Chinese crime stories are: C.P. Chen, Souw Lian Eng (tjerita politie resia di Tiongkok) (Souw Lian Eng [a secret police story set in China] (1924); Thia Siauw Tjeng, Soeara menggonggongnja andjing: Satoe tjerita dari detective Hok Song (The noise of the dog that barked, a story featuring the detective Hok Song) (c.1935, tr. Haij Teng Djin); and Nyonya The Tiang Ek (one of the very few women writers), Huang Jing Hoa (tjerita politie rahasia) (Huang Jing Hoa [a secret police story] (1925). 4 In the legal sense, Eurasians were equal in status to the Dutch, but socially they remained stigmatized and trapped between two cultures, neither of which would fully accept them.

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translation, writing, or publication activities – unless for a very good reason, such as commercial benefit or political calculation. However, the presence of imported Western detective novels indicates that both Dutch and Eurasians must have taken some pleasure in reading them.5 But it was not until the 1940s that a number of Eurasian writers began to engage in the production of crime fiction.6 Unequal access to education – the pribumi, ‘natives’, were the last to be granted such access – constitutes one possible explanation for the fact that modern Chinese-Malay literature emerged in colonial Indonesia decades before indigenous modern Malay literature. The aspect of (Western) education, however, can only partly explain the fact that the Chinese Malays cultivated a liking for Sherlock Holmes, the epitome of Western rationality, while this emblematic detective remained more or less absent from the Islamic Sumatran Malay crime fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. The latter did embrace the detective genre, but soon discarded Sherlock Holmes from its echelon of central characters.7 The Sumatran Malay writers, more rigorously than others, transformed and re-defined the genre – first and foremost in terms of its core feature, the detective – in response to the colonial situation, thus making it part of the process of decolonization that was slowly gaining momentum. Popular literature has always been less exposed to colonial monitoring and censorship than other domains of print media (the indigenous press, for instance). It entered the indigenous literary world almost unaltered and without any literary label attached to it that might stigmatize it as inferior. As I have shown elsewhere, indigenous authors and readers would initially encounter the detective genre with an unbiased eye. Indigenous intellectuals perceived the genre of crime fiction as being in no way inferior to other literary genres, for such hierarchical Western categories had not yet 5

Most of the detective novels circulating in the Dutch East Indies at the time were written in or translated into Dutch; others were in English, French, or German. 6 Ucee (S.H. Ulrich Coldenhoff) is here the exception; as early as the mid-1920s, he created a book series featuring the Eurasian detective Leo Brandhorst and his Eurasian ‘Watson’ Kees. At least one title from this series was also translated into Malay. Faced with the loss of their colony, a number of Dutch officials, surprisingly, turned to the detective novel to express their anxiety, fear, anger, and frustration. They wrote their novels in Dutch with a colonial setting but degraded the indigenous personage to either faithful, voiceless servants or to dark mysterious, almost supernaturally threatening opponents. 7 It is noteworthy that Sherlock Holmes made a dramatic reappearance during the 1980s and 1990s throughout Indonesia in numerous translations of Conan Doyle’s stories.

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been implemented in Malay culture, although the categories of ‘low literature’ versus ‘high’ (hence valuable) literature were being strongly advocated by the Dutch colonial publishing house Balai Poestaka – a binary to which indigenous intellectuals became increasingly susceptible during the 8 1930s. But both Chinese-Malay and Islamic Sumatran Malay authors looked at detective literature from an angle that was actually diametrically opposed to the Western evaluation of the genre. Particularly in the eyes of the Sumatran Malays, it constituted a valuable form of literature that could even be of relevance to the process of nation-building.9 Dutch colonials made some efforts to correct the unwanted re-interpretation of the Western literary hierarchy, although it is doubtful that they actually recognized the full scope of decolonizing potential inherent in this development, of which Malay crime fiction was but one symptom. Operating on the periphery of colonial power, however, Sumatran Malay authors and publishers were not immediately affected by any colonial measures. Only towards 1939 did public criticism became so pressing that they had to act on it.10

The Detective Arrives in the Dutch East Indies What was the very first Sherlock Holmes text to be translated into Malay (or any other indigenous language in the colony, for that matter)? This remains an unsolved mystery. In all likelihood, this ‘pioneering’ text appeared in serialized form in one of the urban Malay newspapers of the latenineteenth or early-twentieth century. During the first decade of the twen8

Doris Jedamski, “Genres of Crime Fiction in Colonial Indonesia,” in Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 70 tahun: Essays to Honour Pramoedya Ananta Toer, ed. Bob Hering (Stein: Edisi Sastra Kabar Seberang, Sulating Maphilindo 1995): 167–89. A central role in the westernization of the Malay literary world was played by the Poedjangga Baroe (New poet), a small circle of indigenous writers named after the literary forum that they had set up in 1933. For a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual process and the debates cconducted by this group (which made considerable efforts to define its position via the reconciliation of the East with the West), see Keith Foulcher, ‘Pudjangga Baru’: Literature and Nationalism in Indonesia, 1933–1942 (Asian Studies Monograph 2; Adelaide: Flinders University, 1980). 9 Jedamski, “Genres of Crime Fiction,” 169–71. 10 Notably, criticism did not come solely from the Dutch side. Islamic schoolteachers, imams, and orthodox hajjis, too, demanded a change in the editorial policy of Sumatran publishers. The conflict culminated in the so-called Medan debate on modern media and, preeminently, on the (popular) novel; Doris Jedamski, “The Novel-Humming Ulama: Islamic Debates on Popular Literature in Late Colonial Indonesia,” in Indonesia – the Presence of the Past: A Festschrift in Honour of Ingrid Wessel, ed. Eva Streifeneder & Antje Missbach (Berlin: regiospectra, 2007): 303–24.

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tieth century, periodicals such as Bintang Hindia (Star of Hindia) featured serialized translations on a regular basis, among them Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887; Malay tr. c.1904). It is safe to say that the Sherlock Holmes stories belong among the first Western texts ever to be translated into Malay by non-Dutch hands. Sherlock Holmes owed his presence in the colony and popularity among the Malay-speaking population primarily to the translation and publication activities of the Chinese Malays. Claudine Salmon makes mention of a Sherlock Holmes serial that appeared in the Chinese-Malay periodical Hoa Pit around 1910.11 Only a few years later, the first translations in book form came out, again translated and published by Chinese Malays in so-called Low Malay. A seven-volume series featuring Sherlock Holmes cases, which had been published in 1914 in Batavia, was still circulating in a Batavian Chinese Malay library in 1951. Like most of the Chinese-Malay Holmes translations, this series, too, generally adhered to the source texts. Once in a while, brief passages were added, omitted or abbreviated, and, here and there, some explanatory remarks were inserted to help the indigenous reader understand certain expressions or aspects of Western culture, but never was plot or meaning intentionally altered.12 In 1924, at least five Chinese-Malay publishers launched so-called roman madjalah (magazine novel), periodicals containing one short novel(ette) per edition, typically supplemented by an editorial, sometimes a selection of short news features, a couple of photographs linked neither to the story nor to the news, and, should the novel be shorter than the usual eighty pages, an additional short story.13 One of the first magazines of this type, Tjerita Pilihan (Selected stories), started off in 1924 with a series of detective novels in Malay translation. In the foreword to the first edition of the magazine, the editor announced the publication of “a selection of novels by famous European, American, and Chinese authors which would be full of sophisticated smartness, bravery, evil, and honesty – everything usually 11

Claudine Salmon, Literature in Malay by the Chinese of Indonesia: A Provisional Annotated Bibliography (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981): 527. 12 The translator of “The Red-Headed League,” for instance, decided to provide the information that London was the home of five to six million inhabitants and thus could not be considered a small town. The translator also made sure that the indigenous reader would know that ‘Mr’ in the text did not stand for the Dutch abbreviation of meester (master of law) but was the abbreviation for the English ‘Mister’. T.H. Phoa, Jr., Riwajat Sherlock Holmes dengan pakoempoelan ‘Ramboet Mera’ (Batavia: Tan Ing Liong, 1914): 14; 27. 13 See Salmon, Literature in Malay, 106–107, for a complete list of titles of the magazines.

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to be found in detective literature.”14 The first issue of Tjerita Pilihan appeared, according to the editor, in ‘only’ 5,000 copies – in fact, a remarkably high circulation at the time. The sixth edition of Tjerita Pilihan (September 1924) presented the Malay translation of three Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Crooked Man,” “The Priory School,” and “The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles.”15 Penghidoepan (Life) was another, even more successful and long-lived ‘magazine’ of this kind. In the editorial of the January 1926 edition, Nyoo Cheong Seng proclaimed that he would himself be writing a couple of detective stories of great relevance to Penghidoepan: Life. In doing so, he took a further step in the process of acquisition – from translation/adaptation to personal creation.16 He also promised the reader that he would do his utmost to write in a pleasant and palpable manner. Rooted in a long tradition of Malay literature, a decisive element in the production of all indigenous popular fiction was indeed the aspiration to create literature that was both educative/didactic and entertaining. Modern realism as an obligatory ingredient and the promise of significance to real-life experience were new qualities in indigenous literature.

No Unanimous Welcome for Holmes & Co. In its attempt to control the indigenous book market and to counteract Chinese-Malay success in the field of popular literature, the colonial agency Balai Poestaka eventually launched a number of detective novels in Malay

14

Tio Ie Soei, editorial in Tjerita Pilihan 1.1 (1924): 1. The three stories, “Orang bongkok,” “Anak jang ilang,” and “Satoe pertemoean jang aneh dari John Scott Eccles,” are bundled under the title “Sherlock Holmes (Tjatetan peringetan dari sobatnja Sherlock Holmes, jaitoe H. John Watson, M.D. dari millitairen geneeskundigen dienst)” (Sherlock Holmes [Notes / Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes’ friend, H. John Watson, M.D. of the Army Medical Service]), tr. Tio Ie Soei, Tjerita Pilihan 1.6 (September 1924). The title was clearly adopted from the first part of A Study in Scarlet. The other issues of the magazine also name the translator but do not mention the Western source-text; the titles and plots, however, give some indication of the country of origin. The first story is most likely based on a French tale; others have a distinct German, Swedish, Chinese, and English ambience (all of them were probably rendered from a Dutch translation). 16 Nyoo Cheong Seng was one of the most famous, most creative, and most productive Chinese-Malay authors of the twentieth century. He worked as a journalist, translator, editor, novelist, and scriptwriter for theatre and film. Surprisingly, his life and work have not yet been researched. 15

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translation, most of them Sherlock Holmes stories.17 This step was taken with great reluctance. In the eyes of the Dutch colonizers, crime fiction was of no didactic (or any other) value with regard to the ‘civilizing mission’ that, around the turn of the century, the Dutch had officially declared was being undertaken in accord with the ‘Ethical Policy’ doctrine. The Dutch despised the Chinese-Malay publications as being sensational, pornographic, and violent. The publishers of such works were accused of profitmongering and were deemed irresponsible. A look at the textual material in question, however, shows that perhaps only a very small percentage of it fits that derogatory description. On the contrary, analysis of the ChineseMalay literature opens up manifold insights into this specific segment of colonial society – and beyond. It conveys intricate social and cultural conflicts, portrays adversaries and allies, and brings to light the multi-layered vision of Chinese-Malay intellectuals. A proper look at the texts reveals that some Chinese-Malay writers and publishers showed a keen appreciation of the intellectual challenge of detective stories.18 Some writers developed a fine ironical undertone in their detective novel(ette)s, wittily mocking the West. It is true that the Chinese Malays, in contrast to the colonial agency Balai Poestaka, had no scruples about presenting the Western detective Holmes as the cocaine addict that he was, or as the male ‘super brain’ outsmarted by a woman. Also, the Chinese Malays preferred translations of Holmes cases that involved some action and violence. In all likelihood, this can be put down to another very successful literary tradition in Chinese literature: the silat genre.19 Any story would sell better when spiced with some silat fight-scenes. In deciding whether or not to accept a text, the Chinese-Malay publishers evidently did not follow the Western bourgeois standards of ‘high literature’. After all, they were small entrepreneurs (and not necessarily of their own free will) who had a very hard time making a living in a place where only a tiny percentage of the population could read and even fewer could afford the luxury of actually doing so. For the Dutch, morals were thus one reason to reject crime fiction. Subtle power policy was another. Colonial authorities anxiously watched 17 Other Balai Poestaka translations of Western detective literature were Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary and G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown: The Blue Cross. 18 The overtly positive reception of detective literature among intellectuals all over the world deserves separate discussion but clearly exceeds the frame of the present essay. 19 Silat is a highly regarded form of martial art, which also gave its name to an extremely popular genre in (colonial) Indonesia. The latter has not yet found due scholarly appreciation.

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the print and film media to make sure that no obscene or violent scenes were displayed. The simple native has a positive genius for picking up false impressions and is very deficient in the sense of proportion. By the unsophisticated Malay, Javanese, or even the Indian and the Chinese, the scenes of crime and depravity which are thrown on to the screen are accepted as faithful representations of the ordinary life of the white man in his own country. [...] The police authorities in the East are unanimous in attributing many of the more important and complicated crimes to the suggestions of the cinema.20

It is an undisputed fact that the Dutch colonials shared these anxieties, and not only with regard to foreign film productions which increasingly attracted large (indigenous) audiences in the urban cinemas of the Dutch East Indies.21 This is a topic for discussion in its own right, and this is not the place to elaborate on it; but the presence of real or fantasized crime in most non-democratic societies appears to be perceived as a direct threat to the powers that be.22 The ostensible absence of severe crime and violence in a colonial society was to serve as justification and legitimation of the colonial system. The presence of crime, even in an imaginative form, had a destabilizing effect, and crime fiction imagined crime and violence right back into colonial life. Real criminals such as Al Capone and literary figures such as Fantomas were celebrated heroes. The Dutch were understandably very reluctant to tolerate such a state of affairs. Trapped in their own ideals of the Ethical Policy, however, they could not simply ban all unwanted literature. Taking up the challenge by publishing their selection of Western detective fiction was a bitter compromise. 20

“The Cinema in the East: Factor in Spread of Communism (From a Correspondent),” The Times (London; 18 September 1926), repr. in “The Cinema and Colonial Rule in Southeast Asia: A Documentary Anecdote,” Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs (R I M A ) 15.1 (1981): 151–55. 21 Some of the popular films and novels of the time, such as The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Sherlock Holmes, reached an even larger audience when they were staged by travelling Malay theatre troupes that also performed outside the urban centres. See Andjar Asmara, “Suka–Duka Dibelakang Lajar Sandiwara: Memoires dari Andjar Asmara” (Joy and sorrow behind the curtain of the sandiwara theatre: Andjar Asmara’s memoirs), Varia 1.21 (1958): 28–29; 1.22 (1958): 28–29. 22 For fear of exposing the state to bad publicity, remarkable efforts have been made in history to deny the existence of criminality, and totalitarian regimes have shown a tendency to reject crime fiction. In Nazi Germany, crime fiction was so effectively shunned that most scholars to date believe that it was actually banned or even did not exist at all (both misapprehensions).

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By the mid-1920s, the nationalist movement had grown threateningly active, and the Holmes translations by Balai Poestaka coincided with the first organized violent upheavals, the communist rebellions of 1926/27 in Java and Sumatra. Taking into account the general policy of Balai Poestaka, it was hardly coincidence that, in this time of turmoil, the Balai Poestaka’s texts of choice should be Western fairytales and ‘harmless’ Holmes stories. Between 1926 and 1927, Balai Poestaka published in serialized form the stories “The Noble Bachelor,” “The Solitary Cyclist,” and “The Man with the Twisted Lip” in its Malay weekly. Early in 1929, these Malay versions also came out as booklets and were circulated with the help of Balai Poestaka’s extensive system of branch libraries. Like the Chinese-Malay translations, the Balai Poestaka Holmes translations usually did not deviate much from the source-text.23 It is the text selection that reveals some manipulative intent. The stories chosen by Balai Poestaka all feature a strong Holmes, free of flaws or weaknesses. And they were deemed harmless because they presented cases free of all violence and weaponry. These stories were not even centered on criminality as such, or, to put it in Holmes’s own critical words directed at his chronicler Watson: “you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.”24

With reference to such ‘non-violent’ Holmes stories, Franco Moretti draws attention to another crucial aspect by viewing the texts from a sociological perspective: Uniqueness and mystery: detective fiction treats every element of individual behaviour that desires secrecy as an offence, even if there is no trace of crime (for example, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, ‘The Yellow Face’, ‘A Scandal in

23 The Malay version of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), translated in 1928 by the writer and Balai Poestaka employee Nur Sutan Iskandar, is a possible exception.

Iskandar had a reputation for his skilful adaptation of Western novels. It would come as no surprise if this Holmes story failed to escape his subtle adjustments. A closer text comparison still needs to be conducted to provide evidence either way. 24 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Copper Beeches,” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891–82; London: Reed International, 1991): 180.

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Bohemia’). The idea that anything the individual desires to protect from the interference of society – the liberal ‘freedom from’ – favours or even coincides with crime is gradually insinuated (…).25

The passage above can also be read as a circumscription of one of Balai Poestaka’s major concerns and the ultimate goal of early-twentieth-century Dutch colonization policy: securing the state’s grip on the colonized mind in order to gain total control without overt measures of violent oppression.

The Symbolic Order and a New Sense of Subjectivity Individuality, subjectivity, and identity are issues that form a constant undercurrent in the Malay literature of the 1920s and 1930s – and they were always discussed in relation to westernization and modernity. Despite its entirely different cultural context, the symbolic order as represented in the Western detective genre apparently corresponded in some particular way to the mind-set of the (Chinese-)Malay writers discussed here.26 They communicated – not much differently from the pioneers of the crime fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle, or, more recently through film, Alfred Hitchcock and Brian de Palma – a crucial desire in a ciphered form to appeal to the subconscious of a large audience. One of the premisses of this research can be presented in the words of Meyda Yeğenoğlu: the psychoanalytic notion of ‘fantasy’ and the associated term ‘object petit a’ should not be considered as an individual matter, but rather something conditioned by objective and structural processes.27

25

Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders. Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, tr. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs & David Miller (London: Verso & N L B , 1983): 135–36. 26 Restoring the ‘narrative order’ was not the most pressing demand. Indigenous forms of narrative were in a phase of drastic renewal and were no longer bound to traditionally defined formats. Efforts to standardize the new literary forms were not tantamount to firm restrictions, as had been the case with Western realism and its emphasis on chronology, which determined modes of production and reception in Western cultures in the nineteenth century. The indigenous producers and recipients of literature were still enjoying the experimental phase. 27 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998, repr. 1999): 4. See also Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood And Out (London & New York: Routledge, 1992). Considering the complex colonial context, a much closer analysis than can possibly be provided here of the relation between fantasy, desire, and articulation of the Self would be required to display the full range of possibilities that (popular) literature opened up within the decolonizing process.

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The indigenous writers were striving for emancipation from the Western colonizers, while, at the same time, they were, in Homi Bhabha’s term, mimicking them. Their popular literature, in particular, points to emulation as it points to rejection. Detective fiction offered a new, specific, and subtle formula with which to express this dilemma. Any classic detective story begins with a crime or the discovery of the same. The crime threatens the social order presented in the story. It also upsets the narrative and the symbolic order inherent to the text. The detective, most famously Sherlock Holmes, embodies a strong subject whose sole task (and, in fact, raison d’être) is to restore this social, symbolic, and narrative order before the eyes of the reader. The story begins with the ending of another – a hitherto untold story symbolized by a crime or a dead body – and is finished not when we get the answer to ‘Whodunit?’ but when the detective is finally able to tell the ‘real story’ in the form of a linear narration. […] At the beginning, there is thus the murder [or other crime, DJ] – a traumatic shock, an event which cannot be integrated into the symbolic reality, i.e. which appears to interrupt the ‘normal’ causal chain. From the moment it erupts, even the most ordinary events of life seem loaded with threatening possibilities.28

The crime or corpse is seemingly deprived of all connectedness with the other elements or personages of the story. They, too, are rendered ‘storyless’ and ‘meaning-less’ until the detective appears on the scene. The detective, by means of his sole presence, guarantees that all these details will retroactively acquire meaning […]. And the detective’s role is precisely to demonstrate how “the impossible is possible” (Ellery Queen), i.e. to re-symbolize the traumatic shock, to integrate it into symbolic reality. His very presence is a kind of pawn guaranteeing in advance the transformation of the lawless sequence into a lawful sequence, in other words, the re-establishment of “normality.”29

The detective is a response to the anxiety that spread in Western societies around the turn of the last century when people felt confused and powerless as they watched ‘modern civilization’ sweeping through their lives. The detective brings with him the ability to decipher secret codes, to read fingerprints and footprints, to restore identities, and to tell whole life-stories 28

Slavoj Žižek, “The Detective and the Analyst,” Literature and Psychology (1990): 27– 46. Expanding Lacan’s theories and applying them to popular culture, Žižek opens up new perspectives on the genre of detective and crime fiction. 29 Žižek, “The Detective and the Analyst,” 38–39.

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merely by looking at a person’s collar. The criminological practice of the nineteenth century aimed at individual identification. Individuality was no longer perceived as singularity but as uniqueness and distinctiveness.30 Walter Benjamin located the origin of the modern detective story in the mobile transformation of identity, in ‘the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big city crowd’ allowed by the modern environment. […] In new systems of mobility and circulation, the criminal who could hide beneath an assumed identity functioned like a forged banknote, exploiting the rapid exchange of modern currency while undermining the confidence on which it depended.31

In the end, it is the detective who, by applying modern ways of observing and analysing, masters the world when it seems to have been tipped off its (alleged) balance. Only when he is successful in solving the case, when he “is able to tell ‘the real story’,” can the detective confirm the strong modern subject that he himself represents.32 He thus has to provide everyone and everything with an individual story and a place in the microcosm of this particular imaginative reality. In the context of the colonial world, the disruption of the symbolic order and the feeling of ‘anything can happen’, as Žižek puts it, constituted, at least for the indigenous part of society, not so much a menace as a tempting promise – “the impossible is possible” was likely to be interpreted as an opportunity rather than a threat. In the last decades of colonial rule, the symbolic order vehemently demanded re-definition, inevitably posing the crucial questions: Whose story was to be told? Whose order to be restored? The telling of ‘the real story’, the reconstitution of the symbolic order, was one task taken on by indigenous crime literature, with the detective fulfilling the key function. But, intriguingly, his alter ego, too – the (noble) criminal – could assume the role of the strong subject, making everything and everyone ‘fall into place’ again: Elang Emas . . . He is a mystery-man (mysterieman) […]. He comes where he pleases and he goes where he wants. [. . . ] Here. There. Everywhere. He comes

30 Joachim Küchenhoff, “Der Leib als Statthalter des Individuums?” in Individualität, ed. Manfred Frank & Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988): 168. 31 Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” in Cinema and the Innovation of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney & Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1995): 20. 32 Žižek, “The Detective and the Analyst,” 28.

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to make biographies and he goes, leaving the story. The story stays behind and he is always making new ones.33

Moretti’s sociological reading of the detective-story genre offers an explanation. He, too, puts the criminal in the place of the subject instead of the detective, arguing that, in contrast to the detective, the criminal truly insists on his individuality and non-conformity, which themselves constitute a threat to the status quo: The sociological hypotheses are that the detective story dispels from the consciousness of the masses the individualistic ethic of ‘classic’ bourgeois culture […]. The structural hypotheses are that the dominant cultural oppositions of detective fiction are between the individual (in the guise of the criminal) and the social organism (in the guise of the detective). 34

In the colonial context, the basically affirmative detective genre gains a new dimension, in that it is transmuted into a new form drawing on both the above concepts at once: the ‘criminal’ as the strong subject to challenge and potentially overthrow the colonial social order, and the ‘detective’ as the one guaranteeing a generally affirmative attitude and safeguarding the new order of the future independent state. The ‘criminal’ contested the disdained aspects of Western impact (the ‘malady’ resulting from colonial oppression and exploitation); the detective was employed to promote the desired elements of Western culture (the ‘remedy’ – for instance, rationality, education, technology). The detective is often labelled ahli pikiran, an expert in (Western) thought. He hardly ever needs any weapon other than his intellect. He is not merely the individual investigating a crime, the one outsmarting the authorities (police); he is also the self-assured individual moving effortlessly through the jungle of the modern world. The detective personifies the steadily growing belief in Western education and science, in knowledge and information as the most powerful weapon.35 It was their 33

Joesoef Sou’yb, Roemah Hantoe (Ghost House), Loekisan Poedjangga (November

1938?): 3. 34

Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, 134. Absurdly enough, it is hardly ever any of Holmes’s pseudo-scientific approaches that brings the truth to light. Žižek, “The Detective and the Analyst,” 28–29, convincingly demonstrates that any interpretation of Holmes as “‘bourgeois’ scientific rationalism personified” is inadequate; he argues, like others before him, that Holmes has more in common with a psychoanalyst. See also Marcello Truzzi, “Sherlock Holmes: Applied Social Psychologist,” in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1983): 55–80. 35

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intellect that the young educated Indonesians were enthusiastically discovering as a weapon already at hand – an effective weapon against colonial domination and a means with which to handle modern life in general. But in addition to this they apparently still felt the need to keep other options open: armed and ‘criminal’ ones if necessary. Both characters, the detective and the noble criminal, contributed in the same measure to the creation of a ‘national self’, as will be shown in the second part of this essay. After the abortive communist upheaval of 1926/27, the Dutch were exceedingly alert, but the production of popular literature continued to escaped censorship for quite some time. Literary imagination, in particular of the kind present in Damhoeri’s and Sou’yb’s popular novels to be discussed below, was a pertinent element in the otherwise very restricted decolonizing political discourse. Popular literature in general and crime fiction in particular provided a vital forum for cunningly wrought, covert fantasies about the new Indonesia to come. Writers would not have openly fantasized about any political action or armed rebellion against the Dutch; it is perceivable that the reading and writing of crime fiction – which, by definition, centrally features social disobedience, conflict with the hegemonic order, and often armed resistance against it – also assumed the function of a surrogate rebellion on a smaller and individualized scale. It must be noted, however, that some writers included peaceful coexistence of Dutch and Indonesians in their vision of an independent Indonesia. Whatever utopian constellation was favoured in the end, when the colonized discovered their voice, the colonial order was disturbed for good, no matter whether it was the detective or the noble criminal who told the story – it was in any case no story the colonizer wished to hear.

Further Appropriation of the Literary Model During the 1930s and 1940s, most segments of colonial society were still absorbed in their celebration of modernity. The indigenous intellectuals, too, focused on modernization – modernization of the Malay language, Malay culture, and Malay society in general – with the objective of creating an independent Indonesian nation that would eventually join the global network of modern mankind. They also searched the field of literature for new forms of cultural communication, new role models and prototypes of national heroes. The translation and publishing activities of the Chinese-

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Malay during the first two decades of the twentieth century had helped the detective genre to become very popular in colonial Indonesia. During the late 1930s and 1940s, the Islamic Sumatran Malay writers took up that thread; they successfully adopted the popular format of the roman madjalah previously introduced to the Malay literary world by the Chinese Malays, and they began to produce their own variety of crime and detective fiction and in the regional variant of Malay.36 It is a matter of speculation whether it was the Balai Poestaka publications, the Chinese-Malay novels, or indeed the many Western detective films (including Sherlock Holmes movies) that provided the most decisive stimulus. Western literary models evidently offered plenty of inspiration. It can be taken as a fact that the Sumatran writers, most of them situated in Medan, were well-acquainted with the above-mentioned printed and cinematic sources.37 It is not known which precise source of inspiration helped in moulding the character called Sir John. Despite his obvious affinity with Western models, he is a phenomenon in his own right, not least in the highly remarkable fact that he, as a kind of collectively formed hero, was passed on from one author to the next. It was in December 1938 that Sir John made his appearance as the director of the Singaporean Secret Service in one of the Medan ‘magazine novels’.38 A month later, Sir John featured again as the main protagonist in another novel by the same author.39 Again a month later, in February, Damhoeri playfully referred to his Western protagonist in yet another detective novel of his. But this time he introduced an indigenous detective onto the scene. The setting, however, remained Singapore: 36 The Sumatran ‘roman madjalah’ contained translations, too, but noticeably fewer in number than in the Chinese-Malay ‘magazine books’ of the 1920s. Straightforward translations of Sherlock Holmes stories were rarely included; Mochtar Nasution’s “Randjang Kematian” (The deathbed), a translation of “The Speckled Band,” appeared in Loekisan Poedjangga 3.44 (October 1941). A Chinese–Malay translation of the story had already appeared in 1922. 37 Yoesoef Sou’yb, for instance, at the time one of the most popular representatives of this group, had honed his skills by writing for the Chinese-Malay magazine Liberty. He started off with straightforward translations, and then produced texts of his own. He also went to the movies on a regular basis, for it was there that he got the best ideas for his novels. After the film, he usually went straight home and started writing on a new novel (personal communication, Medan, November 1992). 38 A. Damhoeri, “Boeaja Deli Diserkap Matjan Singapoera” (The scoundrel of Deli caught by the tiger of Singapore), Doenia Pengalaman (World of Experience) 1.3 (December 1938). 39 A. Damhoeri, “Hantoe Laoet di Selat Malaka” (The sea ghost of the Malacca Straits), Doenia Pengalaman 2.1 (January 1939).

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His colleagues have given him the title Sherlock Holmes from Malaya. Wan Teroena Djaja, the famous detective of Semenandjoeng. His fame equals that of Sir John, who also belonged to the Singaporean police force. Only, recently he has not been heard of in police circles, for whatever reasons. Maybe he is pausing for a while.40

In June of the same year, 1939, Sir John resurfaced to play a central role in one of Joesoef Sou’yb’s famous Elang Emas novels. In fact, Sou’yb adopts the detective Sir John and his fiancée Suzanne for two further stories in the Elang Emas series (to be discussed later). When, around August 1939, the detective appeared again in a novel by Soeman H.S., he did so in the guise of a Eurasian with an ‘indonesianized’ name: Sier Djoon.41 Compared to other detectives created by Sumatran Malay authors (including Sir John), Sier Djoon most closely resembles Sherlock Holmes, despite the fact that the former is married with two children. The indigenous detectives owed their existence to Sherlock Holmes, but they soon went their own way. The Chinese Malays had taken the first step in the process of literary acquisition when translating the Western model into Malay. Sir John was a transitional hero, still Western but moving in the indigenous world like one of its very own inhabitants. A logical next step was eventually to replace the Western master-brain with an indigenous intellectual. But replacing Sir John by putting a pribumi, a ‘native’, at the top of the Secret Service (or any other colonial authority), if only fictionally, must have been too daring or provocative a thought to even playfully contemplate.42 And, as I intimated earlier, the social world could not yet provide any ‘natural slot’ for an indigenous ‘full-time’ detective. Both scenarios could have been fantasized, but apparently the urge to do so was not yet urgent enough to prompt any author to cross that line of colonial 40

Aria Diningrat (i.e. A. Damhoeri), “Rahsia Kaloeng Moetiara” (The mystery of the pearl necklace), Doenia Pengalaman 2.4 (February 1939): 4. This title was reprinted in 1964. 41 Soeman H.S., “Teboesan Darah” (Blood revenge), Doenia Pengalaman 2.8 (1939). The novel was reprinted in 1962, 1965, and 1981. 42 The Sumatran Malay writer Joesoef Sou’yb did indeed take this astonishing step, albeit one affecting only a minor character, in his novel “Siapa Pemboenoehnja?” (Who is the murderer?), Doenia Pengalaman 2.23 (15 November 1939): in place of the Dutch police chief and ignoring real-life hierarchies, Sou’yb put an indigenous official at the head of the Medan Police. Remarkably, Sou’yb chose a Javanese, Mas Tjipto, as his stunning protagonist. It is conceivable that the Moslem nationalist Sou’yb wanted to pay tribute to the Javanese activist Dr Tjipto Mangoenkoesoema, one of the most famous leaders of the Sarekat Islam (a politically pivotal Islamic organization founded in Java in 1912). Mangoenkoesoema was banished to Banda in 1928.

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order. Consequently, the detective was allocated a profession more central to the heart of the indigenous intellectual life in the Dutch East Indies: the indigenous journalist was one of the ultimate representatives of the new Western-educated indigenous elite. It was generally accepted at the time that journalists were to play a significant role both in the struggle for independence and in the process of nation-building. The Sumatran Malay transformation of Conan Doyle’s eleven-page-long story “The Crooked Man” into Emnast’s eighty-page novel Pembalasan (Revenge, 1939) illustrates perfectly the second phase of the process of acquisition and appropriation.43 The story in question must have been particularly appealing, because it combined suspense with two vital contemporary discourses: romantic love (as opposed to forced marriage) and retaliation (individual vengeance versus divine retribution for injustice endured). Emnast, like most Sumatran writers, applied a vast range of cinematic narrative devices and a great number of dialogue scenes, the latter most likely also inspired by the ‘talkies’ shown at the local cinema rather than by the few Western novels in the realist mode accessible almost exclusively through Balai Poestaka’s libraries. In terms of content, Emnast greatly elaborates the love story, which in the source-text is inconspicuously built into the main plot. The most striking alteration, however, is the absence of Sherlock Holmes, who has to make place for Roeslan, the energetic and congenial journalist – and gifted lay detective. Roeslan is eager to expand his knowledge by drawing information and data from all kinds of books. He has a collection of books on secret codes and scripts, and almost sacred to him is his copy of ‘How to become a detective without a teacher’ (Peladjaran djadi detektip zonder goerore). Roesli and the police make a bet: whoever solves the case first is invited to dine, all colleagues included, at one of the most expensive restaurants in town. This playful competition could be read as a sly challenge to the colonial authorities. In the end, no side is announced the winner, although Roeslan does solve the case. Instead, they all harmoniously celebrate the restored order at a wedding where the two ‘true lovers’ are reunited after the ‘bad guy’ has been justly punished by Allah – the general desire for revenge also being satisfied. Epilogue: when, a month 43 Emnast, “Pembalasan” (Revenge), Doenia Pengalaman 2.25 (December 1939). In the course of the appropriation process concerning detective fiction, the genre of the short story was, unlike the case of Siam / Thailand (see Harrison in this volume), not retained. It was not until the 1950s that the short story actually gained ground in Indonesia, eventually developing into one of the most popular literary forms, surpassed only by poetry.

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later, Roeslan gets to solve another case for Doenia Penghidoepan, he has already emancipated himself from the Western role model; he is no longer following in Holmes’s footsteps and moving through a borrowed plot, but is now starring in his own story.44 The above case serves to illustrate the fact that it was neither the emblematic Sherlock Holmes figure itself that was embraced by the Sumatran Malay writers, nor was it Conan Doyle’s typical narrative style. Also prescribed by the limitations of the (serialized) short story, the dialogue form that allowed for some psychological depth was no option for Conan Doyle, who rendered central parts of the plot mostly through detailed but dispassionate reports provided by Holmes, and supplemented by the descriptive narratives of one or two other persons involved in the case, usually the victim and/or culprit. The Malay authors, by contrast, preferred to relate the story like a film narrative, creating the illusion of real time and action. Consequently, they employed an abundance of cinematic devices to keep the reader involved in the plot.45 Furthermore, Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, almost as a rule, start off with fragments of the past of a particular individual, presenting them in the most logical and seemingly objective narrative order to fill in the gaps in the course of the story – thus ‘telling the story’ and providing the individual with story and place within the symbolic order. Conversely, Malay literature tends to blur the focus on the individual, clearly prioritizing his allocated position within the social order and the social order itself. Another striking difference is the indigenous detective himself; in no way does he display the repellent egotism that Watson ascribes to Holmes.46 His behaviour and attitude equal in nothing the casual arrogance, superiority, and assumed infallibility of super-brain Sherlock Holmes. Rather, he is depicted as a person who knows uncertainty and doubt, and who, at times, even shows a hint of self-awareness. In conjunction with the appropriation of the detective figure, the detective-helper, too, was modified or even omitted altogether. Whether the character of Watson 44

The follow-up title is Waktoe Malam di Medan (Night-time in Medan), which also appeared as a Doenia Pengalaman issue (25 January 1940). So far, only an incomplete copy of the text has been retrieved. It is not known whether Emnast produced further novels featuring the detective Roesli, which would make him one of the very few indigenous heroes of the colonial period to have been serialized. 45 Phrases such as kita melihat dia (we see him) or Lihatlah–lihatlah! (look! look!) evoke the impression that the reader is actually watching. A wide range of semantic elements and a virtuoso handling of perspective help introduce an ‘imaginative camera’. 46 Conan Doyle, “The Copper Beeches,” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 179.

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as typified by Conan Doyle was disliked or simply conceived of as a dispensable figure can only be guessed – but a ‘typical’ Watson would not have made much sense without the ‘typical’ Holmes.47

The Master-Brain, the Gentleman Thief, and the Phantom While Emnast still fully relies on the detective to represent the national(ist) Self, other writers favoured the noble criminal as the strong subject. Almost concurrently with the master-brain Sherlock Holmes, two other literary models of crime fiction had come to the Malay archipelago, both focusing on the criminal: the gentleman thief à la Lord Lister or Arsène Lupin, and the phantom criminal à la Fantomas. After Malay translations of all three sub-genres had been well received, the Chinese-Malay writers and publishers soon embarked on writing their own novels in a similar style. Whatever adjustments they made, they usually did not blend these subgenres of crime fiction; the detective clearly remained the detective, the trickster a trickster; nor would the phantomized criminal turn sleuth.48 More than a decade later and in quest of new literary models, the Sumatran Malay writers also came to test the three above-mentioned sub-genres. But in contrast to the Chinese Malays, they almost instantly began to mix and fuse the various plot patterns, character types, and narrative devices. New indigenized heroes emerged. In one of his first creative attempts, Yoesoef Sou’yb explicitly lists Lord Lister, Arsène Lupin, Fantomas, Rocambole, and the Chinese-Malay character Gagaklodra, but also real-life criminals such as Al Capone and “Legs” Diamond as role models for his prototype of an indigenous hero, Enggang Enggap (Hornbill).49 In contrast to the publishers situated in Java, who more often than not gave preference to the

47 Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, 146–48, gives a rather laconic, not particularly positive characterization of the literary function of Watson as helper: “While the criminal opens the action and the detective closes it, Watson drags it out […]. Yet Watson’s function is quantitative in a more profound way: he accumulates useless details” (146; 147, emphasis in the original). 48 Nyoo Cheong Seng’s creation Gagaklodra (also Gagak Lodra) is a magnificent exception and might have sparked off the creation of the new literary heroes of Sumatran descent. In this context, it is also worth noting that silat fiction increasingly absorbed detective elements. More research is required to determine whether there is a tradition of ‘silat detectives’ that can be traced back to China, or if the Eastern form of silat literature indeed amalgamated with the Western genre of detective fiction. 49 Yoesoef Sou’yb, “Engang Enggap,” Liberty (July 1936): 50.

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law-abiding detective,50 the Sumatran authors went for a model of their own brand and of a less acquiescent nature: a masked super-hero with the brains of Sherlock Holmes, the skills of Arsène Lupin, the criminal energy of Fantomas – and the social conscience of Robin Hood. Perfecting his creation Enggang Enggap, Yoesoef Sou’yb conjured up Elang Emas (Golden Eagle/Hawk), the “burglar gentleman from the East, a match for Arsene Lupin from Paris and Lord Lister from London,” who became probably the most prominent exemplar of his kind.51 An increasing number of writers adopted the amalgamated form, and labels such as “M R PHANTOM […] INTERNATIONAL-DETECTIVE ” used in the stories became quite frequent.52 The mingling of the sub-genres, however, involved a dilemma: the masked avenger and gentleman thief presented a law-breaking hero on one side, while on the other side the smart, superior but lawabiding, even law-enforcing detective was at work. Breaking the (colonial) law, ridiculing its representatives, and getting away with it must have been a legitimate fantasy for the colonized. But at the same time, enforcement of and abidance with the law would soon be one of the most essential prerequisites for building the envisioned independent nation.53 In some novels, the synthesis or symbiosis of the two competing types, the detective and the criminal, manifests itself in peculiar ways. In the first volume of his Elang Emas serial, Joesoef Sou’yb is apparently not yet in doubt whose side to choose, be it in terms of narrative perspective only. The story is told from the viewpoint of the Malay police assistant Soufyan, who, remarkably enough, is not tagged as a police agent but is labelled “cunning tjariman,” a *seek-man.54 Furthermore, Sou’yb ‘borrows’ the de50

A case in point is the detective series Patjar Koening, featuring the Javanese detective of noble descent, Raden Pandji Soebrata, who is not only law-abiding but also utterly loyal to the colonial government. It would not be astonishing if the pen name Ketjindoean concealed a Eurasian writer. The series – at least eight volumes are preserved – was published by the private Dutch publisher Kolff–Buning in Djokjakarta around 1940. 51 “Elang Emas dikota Medan; Burglar Gentleman dari Timoer, imbangan Arsene Lupin dari Paris, Lord Lister dari London,” advertisement in Pedoman Masjarakat 6.14 (3 April 1940): 272. 52 M.A. Rasjid Hilmy, “Penoempang Rahsia” (The mysterious passenger), Loekisan Poedjangga 3.43 (September 1941): 17. (Emphasis in the original.) 53 A strikingly high number of the crime and spy novels that appeared plentifully after 1949 strongly emphasized the importance of obedience to the law. 54 Joesoef Sou’yb, “Elang Emas Ketawa,” Doenia Pengalaman 2.2 (January 1939). A footnote explains: “tjariman = detective” (6). Being a compound, the word tjariman combines the Malay word cari (seek) probably with the Sanskrit suffix -man, indicating a person / pro-

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tective Sir John from his author colleague Damhoeri to place him at Soufyan’s side for support.55 Giving evidence for the decolonization process already set in motion, the indigenous protagonist in this constellation of high-ranking ‘white’ police agent and smart but insecure ‘native’ detective is not relegated to playing the dark-skinned Watson or worse: an allobedient Friday. Their relationship has a surprising air of equality, as the following scene illustrates: Sir John (like his famous colleague Holmes smoking his pipe, and after a thoughtful pause) presents his careful conclusions – which Soufyan, after only brief consideration, sets aside as not being the right ones: Suddenly, Sir John lifted his head. “This is significant, tuhan” he said seriously. […] “Well [Wel], Soufyan, what do you think, friend. It is appropriate to arrest that young man, isn’t it?” Soufyan went up and down. […] “I feel, Sir John, that it doesn’t make much sense to arrest that kid now.”56

Instead, Soufyan suggests deploying a number of spies in order to keep an eye on the suspect – to which Sir John unhesitatingly agrees. Hence, not only does the indigenous detective have the right and competence to object, but his advice is also heeded. Whereas he is the (almost undisputed) hero in the first volume, Soufyan is pushed into the background in the subsequent volumes of the series, where the masked trickster Elang Emas gradually takes over the leading role and the reader’s sympathy. Half a year later, Sir John returns to Medan to help Soufyan in his pursuit of Elang Emas.57 A conversation between Sir John, still representing the top of the Singaporean Secret Service, and the Dutch police chief in Medan establishes the grounds for Elang Emas’s popularity with the people. The Dutch chief has no doubts that even “Homlock Shears of Scotland Yard” (18), had he ever lived to face Elang Emas, would have been baffled. He describes Elang Emas as fession. Due to the nearby British colonies and a somewhat anglophile penchant among writers of that region, it is also conceivable that the English word ‘man’ was indeed used. Not only does this expression itself and the attendant explanation once again underline the alienness of the concept of the detective within Malay society. It also suggests a dissociation of the indigenous police agent from the colonial police apparatus that he is working for. 55 In at least three cases, discussed below, Sir John comes to Soufyan’s assistance. 56 Joesoef Sou’yb, “Elang Emas Memboenoeh” (Elang Emas kills), Doenia Pengalaman 2.16 (August 1939): 25–26. 57 Joesoef Sou’yb, “Memikat Elang Emas” (Trapping Elang Emas), in Doenia Pengalaman 2.11 (14 June 1939).

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“sharp-tongued and wild, even Arsene Leupin [sic] appears docile in comparison. We used to laugh about the police agents in Osaka, in India, in Burma; that was what the police in Singapore did, too. Only now we know, Sir John, what it means to be fighting Elang Emas. Vicious, but not vicious enough that people would be horrified. His mockery is very painful. He has carried out some truly grand-scale robberies in gentleman-style, in that American fashion [. . . ], taking from the rich giving to the poor!”

Sir John’s Dutch colleague continues, his anxiety revealing the true fear in the colonial heart: “Your judgement is sharp and your thinking is swift, Sir John. Yes, that is precisely what he does; usually there are hundreds of unemployed and beggars loafing around the streets of Medan; but since he has been here, all the streets in Medan are free of this pitiful scum of society. In the beginning, this change was not obvious, but after two days it became more and more visible, and then it attracted our immediate and greatest interest. We heard the wind whispering that this change was Elang Emas’s doing. It is strange, what sentiment [lurks] in the heart of this criminal! If brought into the political arena – he would probably be a socialist. However, his wickedness would still be called wickedness, breaking the laws concerning rights of ownership and breaking the laws of the country.”58

It does not take much imagination to read the above passages as an anticolonial allegory. But in his story Sou’yb also connects the law-abiding detective, here in the twin version of the ‘white’ Sir John and the indigenous Soufyan, in such an ingenious manner to the noble-hearted criminal that both come across as amiable characters and easily acceptable role models. The detectives are positive figures, representing the law as a achievement of Western modernity and rationality, including positive power-control and efficient administration. The ‘bad guy’, on the other hand, is not bad but a public-spirited outlaw with a social conscience, almost a philanthropist, law-breaking all right, but transgressing against the laws of colonial rule and always with the aim of guarding humanity. It is Elang Emas, not Sir John or Soufyan, who is determinedly committed to help the deprived (indigenous) people. He feels for them and recognizes their misery, and where the law cannot or would not help he comes to rescue. He is truly involved – something that a detective à la Sherlock Holmes would never allow himself to be. Holmes would always put his ‘neutrality’ – or aloofness – above

58

Sou’yb, “Memikat Elang Emas,” 18–19.

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compassion. Holmes & Co. can be hired; their services are for sale.59 But the nationalist mind needed heroes that uncompromisingly took the side of the weak and poor, heroes that would not hesitate to break the law, even if this meant making use of a weapon to kill. In his novel Elang Emas memboenoeh (Elang Emas kills), Joesoef Sou’yb defuses the polarity of detective and ‘criminal’ further with the help of a conspicuous plot-twist. Elang Emas keeps Sir John and his Malay colleagues captured to keep them out of the way when going after the real culprit himself. Elang Emas and his two closest friends then return to their hideaway and, in a key scene, appear before Sir John and his colleagues looking exactly like them. It turns out that, having taken on the identities of the detectives in perfect disguise, they have successfully brought the real wrongdoer to justice. The core of the passage reads: In that corner, facing each other now were six men who until then had been the worst of enemies, one side wishing to crush the other. But apparently Elang Emas and his people did not have that desire after all. Looking at those six men, their stature, their faces, they seemed like twins, three pairs of twins born at once.60

The Elang Emas novels, and others soon to follow, thus present the reader with two character types at once to identify with, the detective and the lawbreaker. But who took the role of the genuinely ‘bad guy’, then? In this respect, Sumatran-Malay crime or detective fiction communicates quite clearly a national Self that marked certain ethnic groups as the “other within,” to be excluded from a future national identity (contributing to it, of course, by being the Other).61 The novels in questions recurrently ascribe to Chinese or Arab characters a criminal nature. They are described as morally corrupted shop owners or rich and ruthless merchants. But nor can the pitiless employer who sacks his workers out of greed, or the old but powerful man who harasses women, escape due punishment – only Europeans are never portrayed as the villains. One can only speculate whether this was out 59 See also Žižek, “The Detective and the Analyst,” 40–43. Žižek points out the major discrepancy between the classical detective and the ‘hard-boiled’ private eye as being a matter of (a lack of) personal involvement – and financial ‘compensation’. 60 Sou’yb, Elang Emas Memboenoeh, 64. 61 For the term “the other within” as applied in this context, I am dependent on Thongchai Winichakul, “The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-Spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects 1885–1910,” in Civility and Savagery, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000): 38–62, as discussed in Rachel Harrison’s contribution to this volume.

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of fear of repression or because these writers were so absorbed in fantasizing a future national identity that the power-structure of colonial reality was momentarily suspended. Damhoeri’s Azimat Toea Abad 17 (Topeng Hitam) appeared in 1938, a year before Sou’yb’s Elang Emas novels, and already exemplified the specific interconnectedness of the law-abiding detective and the ‘rebellious criminal’. While Elang Emas and Sir John/Soufyan are unified in a highly symbolic act of staged mimicry, Damhoeri comes up with a more straightforward literary solution. At one point in the second half of the story, the detective, this time well-equipped with a pistol, stands face to face with the masked criminal; and a criminal he must be, as he apparently has escaped from prison. Before the reader gets to know the criminal’s story, however, a whole chapter is devoted to the lay detective, Sjamsoe, under the heading “Wishing to Become the Sherlock Holmes of Indonesia” (Maoe djadi Sherlock Holmes Indonesia).62 Sjamsoe underscores his determination to accomplish this goal in discussion with his Watsonian friend, explicitly asking him “to become his Watson” (Akoe akan djadi Scherlock [sic] Holmes dan kaulah koeharap djadi Watsonnja).63 The chapter in question, full of praise of European detective novels in general and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in particular, gives the text a playful touch, whereas the final confrontation between the young ‘Sherlock Holmes of Indonesia’ and his opponent, the Black Mask, is narrated with surprising sincerity. However, any psychologist’s heart would jump for joy when reading the last part of the story. Here it is finally revealed that both protagonists are identical twins separated at birth. Sjamsoe’s brother turns out to be a noble criminal (“pendjahat jang ksatria,” 50) who has always distributed his haul among the poor. On top of this, he turns out to be a communist who took part in the rebellion of 1926/27, the fictionalized description of which, amazingly, fills several pages. Realistically fearing reprisals, most writers would not so much as mention the rebellion or any other form of armed nationalist struggle in their writing, let alone explicitly build it into the plot of their stories. ¹º

62 A. Damhoeri, “Azimat Toea Abad 17 (Topeng Hitam)” (The old, seventeenth-century charm [The Black Mask]), Doenia Pengalaman 1.1 (1938): 20. 63 Damhoeri, “Azimat Toea Abad 17 (Topeng Hitam),” 23.

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In present-day Indonesia, as in almost all countries in the world, Sherlock Holmes is a celebrity. Everyone knows this master detective, his deerstalker cap and pipe, his legendary skill at deduction and induction – and his loyal companion, Dr Watson. Far beyond the realm of popular literature, Holmes has become a symbol of modern rationality – despite the fact that the indigenous detective fiction of the 1930s and 1940s soon abandoned this characteristic and charismatic detective. He did, however, live on in advertisements, essays, articles, and illustrations – as an icon, detached from his own literary universe. It can be suggested that the literary figure of Sherlock Holmes was indeed perceived as the idealized manifestation of modern reason, and that he was adopted precisely for that reason. Holmes provided a first rough literary design of a strong subject, a subject superior to the police apparatus and other unloved authorities, a subject that effortlessly negotiates modern urban life, not only reading and interpreting the signs of modernity but also deploying them whenever needed. But the classic detective à la Sherlock Holmes did not correspond sufficiently to the needs and fantasies of nationalistically minded writers. The combination of his superiority, his gift for observation, and his almost machine-like intellectual capacities had certainly made the detective suitable material to make him a role model, but he failed to meet all of the formulaic expectations, apparently lacking the commitment and lawlessness provided by other fictional blueprints. The local literary imagination thus gradually distanced itself from Holmes. The detective genre, however, with Holmes as its pioneer, had provided a fruitful field for experiments with new forms of expression and characterization that were to flourish in the decades to come.

The Quest for the Ultimate National Hero: The ksatria with a Modern Touch When the Chinese Malays got involved with popular literature, they were not particularly driven by the urge to seek a literary figure with the potential to qualify as a national hero. Their discourses did not orientate themselves primarily towards nationalism and its heroes but, rather, dealt with the average individual and his position in a rapidly changing world, seeking ways to cope in a modern, capitalistic, yet still colonial society. All the more energetically, the Sumatran Malay writers were on the lookout for a literary hero of national magnitude. They tested, as described above, various self-designed but Western-inspired models, Elang Emas surely being

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one of the more successful ones. In the end, it was the Scarlet Pimpernel in his transformation as Patjar Merah (the Malay equivalent of the flower ‘scarlet pimpernel’) that filled the void. This Malay Scarlet Pimpernel – a follow-up model to Elang Emas but more sophisticated, more politicized, and more elusive still – provoked a remarkable historical phenomenon.64 Only remotely based on the famous Scarlet Pimpernel novels created by Baroness Orczy in 1905, the Patjar Merah novels were in fact inspired by the biography of Tan Malaka – or what the nationalists wished to see in him. Tan Malakka, one of the most prominent nationalists of the 1920 and 1930s, had to flee from the Dutch East Indies after the failed communist rebellions in 1926/27.65 After years in hiding, he was captured and finally executed. While the real-life Tan Malaka was leading a miserable life on the run, his fictional counter-ego, Patjar Merah, constantly mocked the Dutch in their attempts to detain him and his comrades. As was the case with Damhoeri’s character Sir John, Patjar Merah/Tan Malakka, too, featured in a series of novels (by the Sumatran Malay writer Matu Mona) but was also taken up by other authors. The literary imagination knows no bounds. Such was Patjar Merah’s fame that, in the eyes of readers, the defeated political figure Tan Malaka could become the charismatic and flawless Patjar Merah. This idolizing and phantomizing of one of its foremost characters cloaked the painful political setback of the nationalist movement so successfully that, at one point, it is said, Tan Malaka himself actually believed himself to be Patjar Merah. The literary figure of Patjar Merah combines the rationality of the detective with the skilful opposition to law and order of Elang Emas, but he adds to the character the nobility, will-power, and loyalty of a ksatria (knight). By reverting to the traditional (and aristocratic) concept of the ksatria, the genre of crime fiction takes its last step in the process of appropriation, turning decisively away from Western value-patterns.66 Surprisingly, the 64 For a more detailed discussion of this special case of adaptation, see Doris Jedamski, “Dummy Subjects and National Heroes: Some Thoughts About Identity, Mimicry, (Auto) Biography, and the Novel in Indonesia,” Tenggara 47–48 (2004): 27–36. 65 For a detailed portrait of Tan Malaka and an assessment of his historical and political significance, see Harry Poeze, Tan Malaka, Strijder voor Indonesië’s Vrijheid: Levensloop van 1897 tot 1945 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), and Tan Malaka, From Jail to Jail, tr. & intro. Helen Jarvis, three vols. (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1991). 66 The expression ksatria or satria appears with a strikingly high frequency in crime literature of the 1930s and 1940s and indicates the re-orientation towards a local tradition.

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value-patterns reverted to are deeply rooted in Javanese ethical codes. Elsewhere in the present volume, Keith Foulcher shows that, among Javanese nationalists, such a turn to traditional values during the phase of the nationalist awakening was indeed a fairly common phenomenon. He, among others, refers to one of the most famous nationalist leaders, Tjipto Magoenkoesoema, who was convinced that the pergerakan movement was being tested on its “qualities of determined will and firm character which Javanese tradition recognized as the attributes of the warrior/knight (sastria)” and that “the evolution and liberation of Java was possible only when the people reincarnated the essence of the genuine satria, his moral quality, through uncompromising struggle against the suffocating oppression and exploitation of the Dutch-priyayi regime.”67 The Sumatran-Malay writers of popular fiction apparently shared this assessment and found the concept of the (k)satria appealing enough to borrow it from the Javanese tradition, but the ksatria, now become the nationalist hero of their dreams, had to remain equipped with modern rationale and a sense of non-conformity – and with the requisite dose of criminal energy.

Conclusion Scholarly research has produced a great number of studies on Sherlock Holmes, the most emblematic representative of both the detective story and Western rationalism. On the genre of detective fiction in general, the number of studies is even more remarkable. Still, the appropriation of the detective figure, and specifically of Sherlock Holmes, outside Europe and the U S A has not yet been systematically researched – astonishingly so, for it is a long-known fact that a wide range of detective stories were translated and adapted into, among other, Malay, Burmese, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai during the first decades of the twentieth century. In the case of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), it is hoped that this essay has managed to shed some light on how Chinese-Malay publishers introduced the detective genre through Sinomalay translations of Sherlock Holmes during the first two decades of the twentieth century to the Dutch-ruled part of the Malay world. The first Malay adaptations and their detectives celebrated Western 67

Keith Foulcher, “Moving Pictures: Western Marxism and Vernacular Literature in Colonial Indonesia,” in this volume; second part of the quotation: Takashi Shiraishi, “The Disputes between Tjipto Mangoenkoesoema and Soetatmo Soeriokoesoema: Sastra vs. Pandita,” Indonesia 32 (1981): 108, as quoted by Foulcher.

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modernity, only rarely with a critical undertone. In the course of the 1930s and 1940s, however, the basically affirmative genre took on new qualities and communicated new value-patterns and designs of identity within the decolonizing discourse. It was the Islamic Sumatran writers who abandoned the socially and emotionally rather detached Sherlock Holmes in favour of a ‘hero tandem’, also born out of the impact of Western popular literature: the law-abiding detective and a daredevil criminal with a social conscience, the latter inspired by fictional characters such as Arsène Lupin, Lord Lister, and Fantomas. Both of these competing characters answered to the needs of the nationalist movement in its attempt to redefine the social and symbolic order. As a team, they could both dismantle the – colonial – order and shield the new, delicately nascent order. Drawing on yet another source of Western inspiration, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and fictionalizing the biography of the famous nationalist Tan Malaka, the two character types soon merged to become the super-hero of nationalist aspirations, Patjar Merah. While the Chinese-Malay crime fiction typically presented its detective heroes as possessing worldly qualities and a quotidian robustness, the Sumatran-Malay heroes of the 1930s and 1940s gradually receded behind a facade of mystification, taking on almost superhuman features. They are no longer detectives but, like Elang Emas and Patjar Merah, solve crimes because it is simply necessary to do so, not for the sake of solving them with aesthetic elegance, not in order to celebrate Western science, modern technology, or human rationality. Rather, they act as judges, putting themselves above colonial law; they “relieve the innocent from suspicion. Indeed, relieving the innocent from suspicion is the function of the fictional version of ‘Tan Malaka’ even when he is not a detective.”68 Elang Emas has no outspoken political mission; instead, out of compassion he generally takes the side of those in need – specifically, the working class (kaum pemburu). Patjar Merah, by contrast, is a self-declared opponent of the Dutch authorities and a celebrated leader of the nationalist movement. He is the upright, fearless knight fighting for the good of all Indonesians – whoever that was, precisely, remained a matter of perspective. Elang Emas and Patjar Merah show a clear politicization but become so elusive in the process that one might wonder whether, possibly, the nationalistically minded writers, even in their imagination, might not yet be pre68

James T. Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997): 162.

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pared to enter into open confrontation with the Dutch colonizers. But regardless of their ethnicity, Chinese-Malay or Sumatran, the literary imagination transferred them all beyond the real world of colonial oppression to the land of utopia, of unlimited dreams of justice and equality, but also of power and supremacy. The popular genre of detective fiction encouraged and nourished this dream and provided one possible form of expression. On the imaginative plane, Holmes and the other popular characters from the West opened up the opportunity to challenge and mock the colonizers with impunity in order to disrupt the symbolic order, to shut out those who were perceived as the unwanted “others within” – and to take the place of judge and executioner, re-defining the law according to their own values and needs. Without Holmes & Co., the Scarlet Pimpernel most likely would not have been transformed into the national hero Patjar Merah alias Tan Malaka, a step that paradoxically ‘re-personified’ the hero by referring to a real-life nationalist, taking away the aloofness and anonymity, and which, at the same time, came close to sacrificing the rebellious potential of literature to an escapist fantasy.

WORKS CITED Anon. “The Cinema in the East: Factor in Spread of Communism (From a Correspondent).” The Times (London; 18 September 1926), repr. under the heading “The Cinema and Colonial Rule in Southeast Asia: A Documentary Anecdote,” Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs 15.1 (1981): 151–55. Anon. “Elang Emas dikota Medan; Burglar Gentleman dari Timoer, imbangan Arsene Lupin dari Paris, Lord Lister dari London” (Elang Emas in Medan; the gentleman burglar from the East, a match for Arsène Lupin from Paris, Lord Lister from London), book advertisement in Pedoman Masjarakat 6.14 (3 April 1940): 272. Asmara, Andjar. “Suka–Duka Dibelakang Lajar Sandiwara: Memoires dari Andjar Asmara” (Joy and sorrow behind the curtain of the sandiwara theatre: Memoirs of Andjar Asmara), Varia 1.21 (1958): 28–29, and Varia 1.22 (1958): 28–29 (nine parts in total). Damhoeri, A. “Azimat Toea Abad 17 (Topeng Hitam)” (The old, seventeenth century charm [Black Mask]) Doenia Pengalaman 1.1 (1938). ——. “Boeaja Deli Diserkap Matjan Singapoera” (The scoundrel of Deli caught by the tiger of Singapore), Doenia Pengalaman (World of Experience) 1.3 (December 1938). ——. “Hantoe Laoet di Selat Malaka” (The sea ghost of the Malacca Straits), Doenia Pengalaman 2.1 (January 1939). Diningrat, Aria (A. Damhoeri). “Rahsia Kaloeng Moetiara” (The mystery of the pearl necklace), Doenia Pengalaman 2.4 (February 1939).

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Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891–92; London: Reed International, 1991). Emnast. “Pembalasan” (Revenge), Doenia Pengalaman 2.25 (December 1939). Foulcher, Keith. ‘Pudjangga Baru’: Literature and Nationalism in Indonesia, 1933– 1942 (Asian Studies Monograph 2; Adelaide: Flinders University, 1980). ——. “Moving Pictures: Western Marxism and Vernacular Literature in Colonial Indonesia,” in this volume. Gunning, Tom. “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” in Cinema and the Innovation of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney & Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley & Los Angeles & London: U of California P, 1995): 15–45. Harrison, Rachel. “ ‘ Elementary, My Dear Wat’. Influence and Imitation in the Early Crime Fiction of ‘Late-Victorian’ Siam,” in this volume. Hilmy, Rasjid M.A. “Penoempang Rahasia” (The secret traveller), Loekisan Poedjangga 3.43 (15 September 1941). Jedamski, Doris. “Genres of Crime Fiction in Colonial Indonesia,” in Pramoedya Ananta Toer: 70 tahun; Essays to honour Pramoedya Ananta Toer, ed. Bob Hering (Stein: Edisi Sastra Kabar Seberang, Sulating Maphilindo 1995): 167–89. ——. “The Novel-Humming Ulama: Islamic Debates on Popular Literature in Late Colonial Indonesia,” in Indonesia – the Presence of the Past. A festschrift in Honour of Ingrid Wessel, ed. Eva Streifeneder & Antje Missbach (Berlin: regiospectra 2007): 303–24. ——. “Dummy Subjects and National Heroes: Some Thoughts About Identity, Mimicry, (Auto)biography, and the Novel in Indonesia,” Tenggara 47–48 (2004): 11–36. Küchenhoff, Joachim. “Der Leib als Statthalter des Individuums?” in Individualtität, ed. Manfred Frank & Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988): 167–202. Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, esp. the chapter “Clues,” tr. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs & David Miller (London: Verso & N L B , 1983): 130–56. Nasution, Mochtar. “Randjang Kematian” (The deathbed), Loekisan Poedjangga 3.44 (October 1941). Njoo Cheong Seng. Boeaja Soerabaia, Penghidoepan (1926). O’Malley, William Joseph. Indonesia in the Great Depression: A Study of East Sumatra and Yogjakarta in the 1930s (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1977). Phoa, T.H. Jr. Riwajat Sherlock Holmes dengan pakoempoelan ‘ Ramboet Mera’ (Batavia: Tan Ing Liong, 1914). Poeze, Harry. Tan Malaka, Strijder voor Indonesië’s Vrijheid: Levensloop van 1897 tot 1945 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1976). Salmon, Claudine. Literature in Malay by the Chinese of Indonesia. A Provisional Annotated Bibliography (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981). Siegel, James T. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997). Soeman H.S. “Teboesan Darah” (Blood revenge), Doenia Pengalaman 2.8 (1939). Sou’yb, Joesoef. “Elang Emas Ketawa” (Elang Emas laughs), Doenia Pengalaman 2.2 (January 1939).

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——. “Elang Emas Memboenoeh” (Elang Emas kills), Doenia Pengalaman 2.16 (August 1939). ——. “Enggang Enggap” (Hornbill), Liberty (July 1936): 50–55. ——. “Memikat Elang Emas” (Trapping Elang Emas), Doenia Pengalaman 2.11 (14 June 1939). ——. “Roemah Hantoe” (Ghost house), Loekisan Poedjangga (November 1938?). ——. “Siapa Pemboenoehnja?” (Who is the murderer?), Doenia Pengalaman 2.23 (15 November 1939). Tan Malaka. From Jail to Jail, tr. & intro. Helen Jarvis, three vols. (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1991). Tio Ie Soei. Editorial to Tjerita Pilihan 1.1 (1924): 1. ——. “Sherlock Holmes (Tjatetan peringetan dari sobatnja Sherlock Holmes, jaitoe H. John Watson, M.D. dari millitairen geneeskundigen dienst)” (Sherlock Holmes [Notes of Sherlock Holmes’ friend, H. John Watson, M.D. of the military health service]), tr. Tio Ie Soei, Tjerita Pilihan 1.6 (September 1924). Truzzi, Marcello. “Sherlock Holmes: Applied Social Psychologist,” in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1983): 55–80. Yeğenoğlu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998). Žižek, Slavoj. “The Detective and The Analyst,” Literature and Psychology (1990): 27–46. ——. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London & New York: Routledge, 1992).

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Notes on Contributors

A M I N A A Z Z A B E K K A T is a professor at the University of Blida, Algeria and holds doctorates from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) and Cergy Pontoise. Her field of research is African literatures. She has participated in many conferences in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, France, Canada, Spain, and the U S A . Among her publications are the introduction to Convergences critiques II , with Christiane Achour (2003), Lire, relire Mohammed Dib, with Afifa Bererhi (2003), and Regards sur les littératures d’Afrique (2006). T H O M A S D E B R U I J N is currently attached to Leiden University in an administrative position. He pursued his studies in modern and medieval Hindi at the University of Leiden, where he obtained a doctorate in 1996 on the poetics of Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat. He worked as postdoctoral fellow at the I I A S in a project on Nayi Kahani, the post-independence modernist movement in Hindi literature. He was a guest lecturer at INALCO in Paris in 2004–2005 and continues to publish on Hindi literature. M A T T H E W I S A A C C O H E N is senior lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London. He holds a doctorate in anthropology from Yale University and performs on occasion as a wayang kulit puppeteer. Publications include Demon Abduction: A Wayang Ritual Drama from West Java (1998) and The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (2006). He is currently researching the history of intercultural Indonesian performance. R A S H E E D E L -E N A N Y is Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. His books include Arab Representations of the Occident (2006) and Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (1993).

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K E I T H F O U L C H E R is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has been a student and teacher of modern Indonesian literature since the late 1960s, and has published widely in this field, both in Indonesia and internationally. With Tony Day, he is joint editor of Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature (2002). S A D D I K M. G O H A R has been Associate Professor in the English Department at United Arab Emirates University since 2002. He holds a doctorate in English literature and criticism from Indiana University. He has published numerous articles on Arabic poetry and various intercultural aspects of Arabic literature. R A C H E L H A R R I S O N is a senior lecturer in Thai cultural studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she teaches courses on both modern Thai literature and Thai cinema. Having published widely on issues of modern women’s writing and sexuality in Thailand, she has just completed a major research project in collaboration with Peter Jackson (A N U , Canberra) entitled The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Power, Aesthetics and the Making of Thai Identities. Harrison’s and Jackson’s forthcoming edited collection on the topic investigates Siam/Thailand’s cultural interactions with the West from 1850 to the present day, while Harrison’s own monograph on the subject deals specifically with the field of literature and film. D O R I S J E D A M S K I specializes in comparative literary and cultural studies with a regional focus on Indonesia and Malaysia. Since the early 1980s she has published on various aspects of interculturality, (post)colonialism, (popular) literature, the culture of travelling women, language policy, and translation history. She has held academic positions at, among others, Hamburg University, N T U Darwin, and La Rochelle University. Her current research is centred on the cultural constitution and representation of the decolonizing Self in the Dutch East Indies; a monograph which is close to completion. Jedamski currently teaches at the University of Leiden, where she also works as subject librarian for Southeast Asia and Oceania. U R S U L A L I E S is a graduate in Vietnamese from Humboldt University, Berlin (1970–75) and the University of Hanoi (1976–77, PhD). She has spent many short and long-term periods of time in Vietnam and taught Vietnamese at Humboldt University. Her publications cover Vietnamese

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literature, language, gender, art, and culture. She is currently living in Potsdam as an independent researcher. D A N I E L A M E R O L L A works in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa, Leiden University, specializing in Berber artistic production. Her focus on both intercultural comparative literature and the anthropology of religions has enabled her to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the vast domain of African cultural productions (oral literatures, written literatures, and films in African and European languages). Her publications include Les contes berbères chaouis d’après Gustave Mercier (2002), with Mena Lafkioui, and Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (2005), with Sandra Ponzanesi. Her latest book is De l’art de la narration Tamazightt (berbère): 200 cents ans d’études: État des lieux et perspectives (2007). E V A N M W A N G I is an Assistant Professor in English specializing in twentieth-century anglophone African literature at Northwestern University. He researches the intersection of nationalism and gender in popular and canonical texts, reading local texts against global theory. He previously taught at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and Ohio University, and his published works cover various areas of African oral narrative, theatre, poetry, and fiction. His latest book is The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945, with Simon Gikandi (2007). He is completing work on a manuscript about metafiction, gender, and sexuality in contemporary African novels and another monograph on the place of gender and sexuality in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s politics of language. G U Z E L V L A D I M I R O V N A S T R E L K O V A graduated from the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University, in 1980. In 1991 she received her doctorate in philology (literature of Asia) from the same faculty. Since 1991 she has been affiliated with the Department of Indian Philology at the institute in question, first as a research fellow, later as an associate professor. She has taught courses on the Hindi language and on medieval and modern Indian literature. Her publications include over fifty articles on modern Hindi literature in general and the poetry of the Namdev and Varkari movement in particular. A N N A S U V O R O V A is Head of the Department of Asian Literatures at the Institute of Oriental Studies, the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she obtained her PhD and D.Litt in 1976 and 1988 respectively. Areas of professional interest are Indo-Islamic culture, Sufism, comparative literature,

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South Asian theatre, and contemporary fine arts. Her latest publications in English include Muslim Saints of South Asia: The Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries (2004). U W I N P E (born 1937), pen-name M A U N G S W A N Y I ; poet and critic, studied at the University of Mandalay and the University of Rangoon. A leading figure in literary movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Mandalay, Upper Burma, he was awarded the National Literary Prize for Poetry in 1964. He participated in the 1988 People’s Movement for Democracy; in 2003 he was granted political asylum in the U S A .

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Index

N O T E : Arabic prefix al- in proper names and book titles is ignored (e.g., al-Hakim is entered under Hakim), likewise U in Burmese names (e.g., U Pe Maung Tin is entered as Pe Maung Tin, U) al-Abbas, Abu (Iranian dynast) 144 Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad 264 Abbasid Dynasty 144 Abdul–Sabur, Salah 128 Abrahams, Roger D. 276 Adhe Adhure (Rakesh) 265 Ageron, Charles–Robert 244 agitprop, in India 265 Aïda 278 Ait Ali, Belaïd xxiv, 249–57; Les Cahiers de Belaïd ou la Kabylie d’antan 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 256; D amezwaru unebdu 250, 251; Jeddi 250, 251; Lexdubegga 253; Lwali bbedrar 250, 251, 256; Mes Noëls 250; Tafunast igujilen 250, 251, 253; Taneggaru 251, 254 Ajneya (Satschidananda Hiranand Vatsyayana) 192, 221, 224, 226, 228, 229, 232, 233; Apne apne ajnabi 221, 233, 240; Nadi ke dvip 232, 233; Shekhar 228, 229, 232, 233 Akatdamkoeng Raphiphat, Prince 315

Aknus al-Shams ‘an al-Sutuh (al-Shaykh) 34

Alekar, Satish, Mahanirvana 268 Algeria 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249; and language situation 244; and Western culture xxii; Berber literature in 243– 57; literature in xxii, 109–22 Ali (cousin of Prophet Muhammad) 132, 133, 148, 149, 152, 154 al-‘Alim, Mahmud Amin 6 “Aliran Djaman” (Tjempaka–Pasoeroean) 54, 55, 56 Alkazi, Ebrahim (theatre director) 265, 267

All India Progressive Writers Association 192

All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque) xxiii, 163–80 Allen, Christopher B. 308 Alloula, Abdelkader 121 Al-Amal Al-Shiriyya Al-Kamela (alNawwab) 130, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156 Als ik eens Nederlander was (Soewardi) 42

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Amrouche, Marguerite 111 Anand, Mulk Raj 105, 264 Anderson, Benedict 46 Andha yug (Bharati) 265 Andjar Asmara 356 Andrade, Oswald de xvii, 121 Andriesse, G.J. 291 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 217, 218, 224, 231, 232, 234 Anouilh, Jean 266 Anthonio, Winniefred 295 Antigone (Sophocles) 265 Antkowiak, Alfred 162, 168, 170, 177 Apne apne ajnabi (Ajneya) 221, 233, 240 Appadurai, Arjun 76 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 77 Apuleius 110, 115; The Golden Ass 111 Arabic xviii, xxii, 1, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 20, 24, 33, 87, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 127, 128, 129, 130, 134, 136, 150, 151, 155, 157, 158, 184, 245; drama 19; poetry 127–58; writing 1–34; in Algeria 243, 244 arabization 245 Arc de Triomphe (Remarque) 163 Aria Diningrat (= A. Damhoeri) 364 Aristophanes 19 Arkartdamkeung Rapheephat, The Circus of Life 315; Lakhorn haeng chiwit 315 Arnason, Johann P. xiii, xix Arsène Lupin xxx, 367, 376 Arya Samaj (Hindu reform movement) 188

‘Asa al-Hakim (al-Hakim) 19 Ashadh ka ek din (Rakesh) 265, 271 Ashcroft, Bill 117, 119, 120; and Griffiths & Tiffin ix, x, 120 Ashk, Upendranath, Girti Divarem 197 Al-‘Askar al-Aswad wa Qiasas ‘Ukhra (Idris) 24

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Associatie van Oost en West 39 associationism, in Indonesia xx, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 70, 71 Asvabahu, pseud. of Vajiravudh 320 Aswat (Fayyad) 32, 34 Augustine, St 110 Awasthi, Suresh 268 ‘Awdat al-Ruh (al-Hakim) 11, 15, 16, 17, 21, 31, 32 Azimat Toea Abad 17 (Damhoeri) 372 Ba Han 101 Bachetarzi, Mahieddine 115 Badawi, Muhammad Mustafa 6, 7 Bagh-o Bahar (Urdu romance) 187 Bai, Lakshmi, Rani of Jhansi 220 Baker, Chris 308, 321 Bakhtin, Mikhail 194, 195 Balai Poestaka (colonial agency in Dutch East Indies for, among others, publications in Malay and other indigenous languages) 40, 70, 71, 324, 350, 352, 354, 355, 357, 358, 363, 365 Balliwala, Khurshidji (actor) 263 Bana, Kadambari 214, 224 Bandivadekar, Chandrakant 229 Bandung 41, 42, 46, 62 bangsawan (traditional Malay music theatre) 275, 277, 278, 281, 285, 295 Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War 179 Barba, Eugenio 267 Batavia 46, 281, 283, 284, 291, 350, 353 Batson, Benjamin 314 Battye, Noel A. 311 Baumer, Franz 176 al-Bayati, Abdul–Wahhab 151 Beckett, Samuel 115, 121, 266 Belaïd – see Ait Ali, Belaïd Ben Brahim, Mestfa 113 Benaissa, Slimane 115

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387

Index

Benegal, Som (theatre director) 266 Bengali language and literary culture xxvii, 183, 185, 186, 188, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 231, 232, 238, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 270 Benjamin, Walter 360 Benu Hillal 110 Berber culture and language, in Algeria 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 124, 243, 244, 245, 247, 249 Berber literature, in Algeria xxiv, 243–57 Bhabha, Homi xi, xii, xxi, 276, 305, 306, 359

Bhandari, Mannu 198, 199, 204–209, 210; “Yahi sac hai” 198, 204–208 Bharata, Natyashastra 196, 284 Bharati, Dharmavir 221, 223, 237, 241, 265, 266, 273; Andha yug 265 Bhasi, Topil 264 Bhattacharya, Bijon 264 Bhave, Vishudas, Seeta Swayamvara 261 Bhutnath (Khatri) 187 Bible 12, 78, 150, 152, 213 Bildungsroman 49 Bird of the East (al-Hakim) 11, 34 Bloom, Harold 130, 135 Bluebeard 278 Bonkimchondro 219, 220, 238; Devi Chaudhurani 220 Boon, Jan (Tjalie Robinson) 294 Bosma, Ulbe 291 Boudjedra, Rachid xxii, 115, 117, 119, 120; Le Démantèlement / The Dismantling 117, 119; La Repudiation 117 Bourdieu, Pierre 246 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le (Molière) 96 Bouzar–Kasbadji, Nadya 115 Brahmosamaj (Bengali literary society) 215

Brajbhasha (Hindi dialect) 186, 187

Brantlinger, Patrick 341 Brecht, Bertolt xxvii, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268; The Caucasian Chalk Circle 267; Mother Courage 268; Puntilla 267; The Three Penny Opera 267 Brook, Peter 267 Buck, Pearl S., The Good Earth 102 Buddhism 40, 100, 101, 223, 303, 304, 320, 336; in Burma 93, 94 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrims’s Progress 103

Burma xxi, xxviii, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 262, 317 Burma Translation Society 105 Cahiers de Belaïd ou la Kabylie d’antan, Les (Belaïd) 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 256

Cairo Trilogy (Mahfouz) 9 Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ (Ngũgĩ) 82, 83 Calvinism, Dutch 281 Camus, Albert xxii, xxvii, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 233, 265; La Peste / The Plague 117; L’Étranger xxii, 117, 119 Candrakanta santati (Khatri) 187 capitalism 15, 20, 43, 53, 54, 60, 65, 67; in India 184, 185; in Indonesia 373 Capone, Al, in Indonesia 356, 367 Carlier, Omar 244 Caucasian Chalk Circle, The (Brecht) 267

censorship 106, 163, 164, 165, 169, 179, 261; in Burma 106; in Indonesia 351, 362; in Nazi Germany 356; in Vietnam xxiii, 166 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote 120 Césaire, Aimé, Une Tempête, Une Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre 116 Chaker, Salem 244, 245, 247, 248

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Chambert–Loir, Henri 46 Chandra Chattopadhyay. Bankim 215, 222

Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarat 215, 222, 231, 232, 233, 238; Grihadaha 231, 233; A Parched House 222 Chandragupta (Prasad) 222, 223 Chauhan, Subhadra 224 Chekhov, Anton xxvii, 97, 105, 218, 229, 233, 234, 237, 265, 266, 271; “Poprygunya” 233, 234, 237 Chelewa Ufike (Kenya) 75, 76 Chen, C.P. 350 China xxviii, 37, 93, 199, 308, 309, 350; detective fiction in 350, 367 Chin-baung ywet-theh Maung Hmaing (U Kyi) 100 Chinese xxix, 37, 39, 62, 64, 65, 105, 106, 277, 280, 291, 318, 330, 331, 338, 351, 353, 354, 356, 371, 373, 375 Chinese-Malay language xxx, 349, 350, 352, 353, 354, 355, 357, 358, 362, 363, 364, 367, 376, 377 Christ, in Arab poetry 151, 152 Christianity 12, 15, 40, 78, 91, 94, 135, 136, 150, 157, 162; in Africa 78; in Burma 94, 95, 102 Chulalongkorn, King (Thailand) 310, 311, 314, 316, 319, 329, 339 Chuyen tinh ke truoc luc rang dong (Duong Thu Huong) 164, 178 Cinderella story in Kenya 78, 79, 80 cinema 97, 163; in Indonesia 296, 354, 356

Circus of Life, The (Arkartdamkeung Rapheephat) 315 Cocteau, Jean 11, 19, 21 Cohen, Matthew Isaac 277, 285 Cohn, Dorrit 195 Coldenhoff, S.H. Ulrich (Ucee) 351 colonialim, in Kenya 76

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colonialism ix, x, xi, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xxv, 8, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 76, 77, 79, 83, 138, 244, 247, 254, 255, 276, 306, 307, 310, 312, 314, 321, 358, 360, 369, 370; in Africa 77; in Algeria xxii, xxiv, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 119, 120, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 250; in Arab world 1, 157; in Arthur Conan Doyle 329; in Burma 94, 106; in Egypt 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 18, 20, 23, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34; in India 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 193, 225, 261; in Indonesia xix, xx, xxviii, xxix, xxx, 37–71, 276, 281, 293, 306, 317, 324, 349, 350, 351, 352, 354, 355, 356, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 368, 370, 372, 373, 376, 377; in Java 368; in Kenya xx, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 91; in South Asia 328; in Sumatra 351, 352; in Thailand 304, 306, 307, 308, 318, 328, 329, 338, 340, 342, 344; in Vietnam 165 colonization xi, xii, xiv, 135, 138, 275; in Algeria xxii, 112, 113, 246, 247; in Arab world 141; in Egypt 33, 34; in Indonesia 355, 359, 377; in Kenya xxi, 85 Colonna, Fanny 246, 247 Commissie voor de Inlandsche school- en volkslectuur 40 Commission for Popular Literature 40, 70 Committee for Javanese Nationalism 43 communism 20, 43, 51, 57, 70, 164, 169; in Burma 98, 105; in India 263; in Indonesia xx, 357, 362, 372, 374; in Vietnam 164, 165 Confucianism 166 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 116, 117 Copeland, Matthew 319, 320 “Copper Beeches, The” (Doyle) 357, 366 Corelli, Marie, Innocent 102

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389

Index

Count of Monte Cristo, The (Dumas) xxx, 306, 316, 317, 328; in Burma 98, 99; in Indonesia 356 Cramer, Wim 281 crime fiction 334, 335, 350, 356, 359, 367, 374; in Indonesia xxviii, 322; in Sumatra xxx, 351; rejection by totalitarian regimes 356; Victorian 328, 335; Western 335 — See also detective fiction “Crooked Man, The” (Doyle) 354, 365 D amezwaru unebdu (Belaïd) 250, 251 D’haen, Theo xii; & Patricia Krüs xii Dada Kamred (Yashpal) 197, 232, 236 Dagon Khin Khin Lay 102 Dagon Saya Tin 98 Dagon Shwe Hmyar, Htù-da-dwe 102 Dagon Taya (Maung Htay Myaing) 105 Dakghar (Tagore) 260 Dalmia, Vasudha 186, 213, 228 Damhoeri, A. 362, 363, 364, 369, 372, 374; Azimat Toea Abad 17 372 Damrong Rajanuphap, Prince 303, 304 Damsteegt, Theo 232 Dandin, Dashakumaracharita 214 Dante Alighieri, Inferno 134, 147 Das, Shrinivas, Pariksha Guru 188 Dashakumaracharita (Dandin) 214 dastan (Urdu folk epic) 192 Day, Tony xvi de Palma, Brian 358 de Tollenaere, H.A.O. 40 decolonization xiii, xv, xxii, 358; in Algeria 117, 120; in Arab world 129; in Indonesia xxviii, 293, 362, 369, 376; in Kenya 76, 78; in Sumatra 351, 352 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 116, 306, 317, 328, 369; in Burma 99 Degezelle, Jules–Louis 249, 250, 254 Démantèlement, Le (Boudjedra) 117

Description de l’Afrique (Ez-Zayyati) 113 Désert sans detour, Le (Dib) 121 Deshpande, G.P. 272 detective 49, 317, 321, 335, 336, 350, 355, 368; in Burma 103, 104; Western, nature of 358, 359, 360, 361, 367, 371 detective fiction 49, 321, 335, 359, 361; in India 214; in Indonesia xxix, 306, 349–77; in Thailand 304–44; Victorian 341; Western xxviii, 356 Deval, Govind Ballal 261 Devanagari script (Hindi) 187 Devant son guichet (al-Hakim) 13 Devi Chaudhurani (Bonkimchondro) 220 Devil on the Cross (Ngũgĩ) 82, 83 dialogism (Bakhtin) 194, 195, 198, 199, 203, 209 Diamond, “Legs”, in Indonesian literature 367

Dib, Mohamed xxii, 109; Le Désert sans détour 121 Direche–Slimani, Karima 247 Dismantling, The (Boudjedra) 119 Djajadiningrat–Nieuwenhuis, Madelon 40, 45 Djaout, Tahar 115, 121 Djola–Djali, Siti Maryam, Perempoean Djalang Jang Berboedi 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68 Don Quixote 120 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 231, 234; The Possessed 231 Douwes Dekker, E.F.E. 42 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 321, 322, 323, 325, 327, 328, 329, 330, 333, 335, 337, 357, 358, 365, 366, 367, 372; in Burma 103; in Indonesia 351, 353, 357; in Thailand xxviii, 304–43; “The Copper Beeches” 357, 366; “The Crooked Man” 354, 365; “The Final Problem” 326; The Hound of the Baskervilles

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357; “The Man with the Twisted Lip” 326, 333, 357; “The Noble Bachelor” 357; “The Priory School” 354; “The Red-Headed League” 353; “A Scandal in Bohemia” 324, 325, 333, 336, 358; The Sign of Four 326, 329; “Silver Blaze” 326; “The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles” 354; “The Solitary Cyclist” 357; A Study in Scarlet 353, 354; “The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct” 327; “The Yellow Face” 357 drama xx, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 39, 63, 84, 96, 97, 230, 261, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 283, 313, 318; Hindu 219; in Algeria 115; in Burma xxi, 95, 96–98, 102; in Egypt 2, 4–10, 13; in India 185, 222; in Indian vernaculars 183; in Kenya 77

— See also puppet play, theatre dramatic monologue, in Arabic poetry 142, 158 Dreams of Maung Thaw Ka, The (U Maung Gyi) 103 Dubey, Satya Dev (theatre director) 265, 271

Dubianskaya, Tatyana 221 Dumas, Alexandre, The Count of Monte Cristo xxx, 306, 316, 317, 328; in Burma 98, 99; in Indonesia 356; The Three Musketeers in Indonesia 356 Dumas, Roland 165 Duong Thu Huong xxiii, 161–79; Chuyen tinh ke truoc luc rang dong 164, 178; Nhung thien duong mu 164; Novel Without a Name / Tieu thuyet vo de xxiii, 161–79; Paradise of the Blind 164

Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 270 Dutch colonialism x, xii, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59,

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62, 63, 64, 70, 71, 87, 276, 280, 291, 295, 296, 297, 312, 350, 351, 352, 355, 356, 358, 362, 364, 368, 369, 370, 374, 375, 376, 377 Dutch East Indies xix, xxvii, xxviii, 37, 276, 280, 283, 349, 350, 352, 356, 365, 374, 375 Dutch language xx, 277, 279, 287, 351, 353, 354 Dutt, Utpal 264, 265, 273 Dvivedi, Mahavirprasad 189, 197

East Lynne (Mrs Henry Wood) 101 education xv, 52, 53, 55, 58, 60, 63, 65, 66, 67, 70, 79, 94, 99, 103, 104, 106, 110, 222, 223, 275, 310, 313, 314, 315, 319; in Africa 85; in Algeria 111, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250; in Burma 94, 95, 105, 106; in Egypt 20, 33; in India 186, 187, 228, 260, 261; in Indonesia 351, 352, 361, 365; in Kenya 78, 81, 82, 85; in Thailand 329, 330, 338; in Vietnam 174 Egypt xviii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 314; drama in 2 Elang Emas novels (Sou’yb) 360, 364, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 376 El-Enany, Rasheed 1 Eliot, T.S. 9, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158; influence on Arabic poetry xxii, xxiii, 127–58; influence on poetry of Al-Nawwab 129–58; “Gerontion” 155; “The Hollow Men” 153; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 155; The Waste Land, influence on Arab poets xxiii, 127–58

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Index

Emnast 365, 366, 367; Pembalasan 365; Waktoe Malam di Medan 366 Enemy of the People, The (Ibsen) 97 English language and culture x, xiii, xiv, xviii, xx, 42, 49, 51, 52, 58, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 106, 130, 131, 137, 183, 186, 214, 215, 216, 218, 223, 227, 230, 236, 261, 270, 309, 313, 329, 334; in Africa 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89; in Burma 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102, 103, 104, 106; in India 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 192, 215, 217, 232, 239, 259, 260; in Indonesia 351, 353, 354, 369; in Kenya xx, xxi, 75, 76–91; in Thailand 323, 331, 342 Esterik, Penny Van 309 Ethical Policy (Indonesia) 355, 356 Étranger, L’ (Camus) xxii, 117, 119 Eurasians, xvii, xix, 116; in Indonesia xxvii, 38, 41, 42, 58, 63, 71, 277, 280, 282, 284, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 350, 351, 364; in Java 368 eurocentrism xix, xvii, 116 Evam Indrajit (Sirkar) 265, 270, 271 Existentialism xxvii, 221, 233, 266 Ez-Zayyati, El Hassan Ben Mohammaed El Wazzan, Description de l’Afrique 113

Fabian, Johannes 275 Fabricius, Jan 292, 293, 294 Fann al-Adab (al-Hakim) 17, 18, 20 Fanon, Frantz xi, 119, 120, 244 Fantomas xxx, 367, 376; in Indonesia 356

Faraj, Alfred 1, 2, 4–11; Sulayman alHalabi 4–9 fascism 12, 20, 117, 163, 168, 169 Faulkner, William 121 Faust 264, 278, 279, 293

391 Fayyad, Sulayman, Aswat / Voices 32, 34 fiction xviii, 46, 99, 103, 164, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, 209, 213, 228, 232, 256, 309, 319, 321, 327, 352; Arabic 19; in Algeria 115–21; in Burma 95, 98–104; in Egypt 11–17, 24–34; in Indonesia 48–65; in Vietnam xxiii; Western 324 — See also Balai Pustaka; India, modern fiction in; Hindi fiction, modern; short story, and detective fiction “Final Problem, The” (Doyle) 326 Fish, Stanley 284 Fisher King, in poetry of Al-Nawwab 135, 145, 146 Flaubert, Gustave xxvi, 215, 217, 218, 219, 233, 234; Madame Bovary 213, 217–18, 220, 222–24, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 239; as type in Hindi fiction xxvi, 217 folktale, in Indian theatre 268, 272; Indian 260; Kabyle 250 — See also Belaïd Fort William College (Calcutta) 186, 187 Foucault, Michel 116 Foulcher, Keith xv, 352, 375; & Tony Day ix France, Anatole 216, 217; Thaïs 217 French language and literature x, xi, xiv, xix, 2, 7, 18, 34, 58, 96, 100, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 164, 165, 166, 172, 175, 177, 181, 199, 214, 216, 217, 218, 220, 237, 243, 247, 249, 252, 253, 256, 288, 310, 311, 313, 336; in Algeria xxii, xxiv, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, 252; in Egypt 2, 13; in India 217, 232, 233; in Indonesia 351, 354 Freud, Sigmund 196, 203, 229 Furnivall, J.S. 96, 97, 98, 104

392

CHEWING OVER THE WEST

Gaeffke, Peter 185, 197, 214, 215, 228, 229, 233 Galand–Pernet, Paulette 251 Gandhi, Dina and Shana (theatre directors) 265 Gandhi, Mahatma 192, 198 García Lorca, Federico 115, 266 García Márquez, Gabriel 106 Gardienne des ombres: Don Quichotte à Alger, La (Laredj) 120 Gargi, Balwant 266 Garvice, Charles, Just a Girl 102 Gautier, Théophile 118 Geider, Thomas 89 Genoveva (European tale adaptated to Indonesian theatre) 278 “Gerontion” (Eliot) 155 al-Ghafari, Abu Thar 132, 133 Ghaire Baire (Tagore) 230 Ghashiram Kotval (Tendulkar) 265, 268 Ghosts (Ibsen) 97 Gĩkũyũ (Kenyan people) 82 Gĩkũyũ language 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89 Gilroy, Paul 276 Ginzburg, Lidia 229 Giraudoux, Jean 266 Girti Divarem (Ashk) 197 Godan (Premchand) 219 Gogol, Nikolai, The Inspector General 265; The Lower Depths 265 Golden Ass, The (Apuleius) 111 Good Earth, The (Buck) 102 Gopalray 214, 216, 217 Gorky, Maxim 105, 265 Greene, Stephen Lyon Wakeman 313, 318 Grihadaha (Sarat Chandra) 231, 233 Grimm, Brothers 111 Grotowski, Jerzy 267 Guevara, Che, in Arab world 133

W⏐X

Gujarati xxvii Gujerati 261, 263 Gunning, Tom 360 “Al-Hadara wa al-Sharq” (al-Hakim) 20 ‘Hadithat Sharaf (Idris) 25 Haggard, Sir H. Rider 101, 102; She 101 al-Hakim, Tawfiq 1, 10–22; ‘Asa alHakim 19; ‘Awdat al-Ruh 11, 15, 16, 17, 21, 31, 32; ‘Usfur min al-Sharq 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 21, 32; “Al-Hadara wa alSharq” 20; “Tabi’atunanahwa al-Shabab” 21; Al-Malik ‘Udib 19; Bird of the East 11, 34; Devant son guichet 13; Fann al-Adab 17, 18, 20; Malamih Dakhiliyya 11, 23; The Return of the Spirit 15; Tahiddiyat Sanat 2000 22; Tahta Shams al-Fikr 17, 19; Yaqzat alFikr 15, 20, 21, 22; Zahrat al-‘Umr 11, 18, 19 al-Halabi, Sulayman 2, 4–9, 10, 32 Hall, D.G.E. 165 Hall, Stuart 297 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 6, 7, 8, 9, 295 Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the D’Urbervilles 102

Harishchandra, Bharatendu 186, 213, 219, 263

Harrison, Rachel 315, 316, 317 Hasan, Mohammad 272 Hasni (Algerian singer) 114, 123 Hatley, Barbara 58 Hayavadana (Karnad) 268, 269, 270 Healy, Dana 179 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 116 Heidegger, Martin 289 Hellman, Jorgen 296 Henry, O. 105 Herskovits, Melville J. 296 Herzfeld, Michael 305, 306, 307, 312

W⏐X

393

Index

heteroglossia (Bakhtin) 88, 194, 195, 198 Hikajat Kadiroen (Semaoen) 43, 48–50, 57

“Hikajat Soerja” (Soliskson) 51–60, 61, 65, 67 Hindi culture xxvii, 105, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204, 209, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 263, 265, 267; fiction, modern xxv,183– 209; literature, modern 213–38 Hinduism 40, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 237 Hindustani (form of Urdu) 186, 187 historical materialism 60, 65 Hitchcock, Alfred 358 Hla Gyaw, James, Maung Yin Maung Ma Meh Ma 98, 99, 100, 317 Hma-daw-boun (Saya Lun) 101 Hobsbawm, Eric 66 “Hollow Men, The” (Eliot) 153 Holocaust 138 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Doyle) 357

House and the World, The (Tagore) 222, 231

Htù-da-dwe (Dagon Shwe Hmyar) 102 Huang Jing Hoa (Nyonya The Tiang Ek) 350

Huddart, David 305 Hugo, Victor 115, 216 Huntington, Samuel xiii al-Hussein (son of Ali, cousin of Prophet Muhammad) 149, 150, 151, 152, 153 Huxley, Aldous 11 hybridity xi, xvi, 114, 190, 209, 275, 276, 293, 296, 297, 307; in Algeria xxii; in Indian fiction 199; in Indian literary culture 184, 194; in Indonesia xxix, xxx, 276, 297; in Indonesian theatre

284, 288; in Kenya xx, 82, 90; in

Malay theatre xxvii; in Thailand 304; of Indian fiction 185, 192, 194, 203, 209; of Indian vernacular literatures 183; of modern Indian literature 183; of premodern Indian religions 189 I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops (al-Shaykh) 34

Ibn Zeyyad, Abullah (Iraqui governor) 149

Ibn Ziyad, Tarik 110 Ibsen, Hendrik xxvii, 97, 260, 265; The Enemy of the People 97; Ghosts 97 Idir (Berber singer) 114, 124 Ido, Victor (Hans van de Wall 291, 292, 293; De Paupers 292, 293 Idris, Yusuf 1, 23–32; ‘Hadithat Sharaf 25; “Madame Vienna” 24–25; “Sirruhu al-Bati’” 25–32; Al-‘Askar alAswad wa Qiasas ‘Ukhra 24; AlMu’allafat al-Kamila li Yusuf Idris 25; New York 80 24 Illahi, Nur 262 Im Westen nichts Neues / All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque) xxiii, 163, 172, 181 India xiv, xxvii, 87, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 270, 272, 273, 356; women, as protagonist in Hindi novels xxvi, 214–39; existentialism in xxvii; modern fiction in 183– 210; theatre in xxvi, xxvii, 259–73, 275 Indian languages 185, 189, 239 Indian National Congress 189

394

CHEWING OVER THE WEST

Indian People’s Theatre Association 263 indianization, in Thailand 303 Indies League 290, 291, 292 Indies Party 41, 43 Indies People’s Council 40 Indies Social Democrat Party 43 Indische Partij 41, 43 Indonesia ix, xii, xv, xvii, xviii, xxviii, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 56, 58, 61, 65, 69, 70, 71, 262, 276, 278, 290, 294, 295, 296, 297, 306, 317, 322, 351, 352, 353, 356, 372, 374, 375; colonial writing in 37–72; crime fiction in 322; detective fiction in xxix, xxx, 306, 324, 328, 349–77; foodways in 276; theatre in 276–97 Indonesian Communist Party 48, 69 Indrasabha (Tanvir) 267 Inferno (Dante) 134, 147 Innocent (Marie Corelli) 102 Inspector General, The (Gogol) 265 interculturalism xiv, xvi, xix, 298, 305 interpretive community (Fish) 284 I P T A (Indian People’s Theatre Association) 263, 264 Iran 129, 138, 139, 140, 141, 262 Iraq 129, 133, 134, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 149, 150, 151 Iravati (Prasad) 224 Irving, Washington, “Rip Van Winkle” 87

Iskandar, Nur Sutan 39, 357 Islam 3, 12, 15, 38, 40, 132, 202, 244 Islamic traditions xxx, 38, 42, 51, 130, 132, 133, 134, 136, 141, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156, 157, 262, 351, 352, 363, 364, 365, 376; in Algeria 121; in Arabic poetry xxiii Israel 32, 128, 130, 135, 138, 139, 155 Iyengar, K.R. Shrinivasa 213, 240

W⏐X

al-Jabarti, Abd al-Rahman xviii, 2–3, 4, 5, 8; Tarikh 2–3, 4, 5 Jackson, Peter A. 303, 307 Jain, Nemichandra 266 Jainendra Kumar – see under Kumar James, Henry 217 Janvijay, Anil 218 Jataka tales (Burma) 93, 95, 98, 99 Java and Javanese culture xxx, 38–48, 50, 51, 54, 56–60, 62–66, 69, 279, 280–82, 284, 291, 301, 312, 356, 357, 364, 367, 375; theatre, traditional 287 Jayyusi, Salma 127, 128 Jean Christophe (Rolland) 233 Jedamski, Doris 40, 49, 70, 306, 317, 321, 322, 324, 328, 341, 352, 374 Jeddi (Belaïd) 250, 251 Jerusalem 5, 128, 134, 152, 155 Jonson, Ben, Volpone 265 Joosten, Astrid 165 Joshi, Rachandra 235 Joyce, James 119, 121 Just a Girl (Charles Garvice) 102 Kabir, Humayun 215, 216, 231 Kabyle (Berber dialect and culture) xxiv, 243–56 Kabylia (Algeria) 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254 Kadambari (Bana) 214, 224 “Kafan” (Premchand) 198, 200–203 Kale, Pramod 266 Kalyani (Kumar) 219, 220, 224, 227, 228, 234, 235 Kamba (Kenyan language) 88, 89 Kambar, Chandrasekhar 273 Kamleshvar 197 Kankal (Prasad) 221, 227 Kannada language xxvii, 265, 269 Kapur, Anuradha 289

W⏐X

395

Index

Kapur, Prithviraj 264 Karbala, battle of 149, 151, 153, 154 Karnad, Girish 265, 266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 273; Hayavadana 268, 269, 270; Tuglaq 265, 267 Kashmiri, Agha Hashr 263 Kateb Yacine xxii, 115, 118, 119, 120 Kaul, Bansi (theatre director) 265 Keechakavadha (Khadikar) 261 Kembo-Sure 81 Kenner, Hugh 132 Kenya, language and narrative in xxi, 75– 90

Kepner, Susan 309 Ketjindoean (Javanese writer) 368 Khadilkar, Kakasaheb, Keechakavadha

ksatria (Malay knight) xxx, 372, 373, 374, 375

Ksentini, Rachid 115 Küchenhoff, Joachim 360 Kumar, Jainendra 192, 200, 211, 214, 216, 219, 224–30, 231, 232, 233–35, 236, 237, 239; Kalyani 219, 220, 224, 227, 228, 234, 235; Parakh 225, 226, 228, 229, 237; Sukhada 225, 227, 228, 234; Sunita 225, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236; Tyag-patr 226, 228, 229, 230, 234, 235, 236, 237; Ye aur ve 231

Kurpershoek, P.M. 24, 29 Kyi, U 97, 105; Chin-baung ywet-theh Maung Hmaing 100

261

Khaldi, Abdelkader 113, 123 Khan, Insha Allah, Rani Ketaki ki Kahani 187

Khari Boli (Hindi dialect) 186, 187 Khatri, Devaki Nandan, Bhutnath 187; Candrakanta santati 187 Khattau, Cowasji (actor) 263 Khit-san Sar pay (Burmese literary movement) 96, 97, 98, 104 Kikamba (Kenyan language) 88, 89 “Kipara-Ngoto” (Walibora) 90 Kirloskar, Annasahib 261 Kiswahili language 79, 80, 86, 87, 88 Knaap, Otto 291, 294 Knight, Stephen 334, 335, 336, 337, 343 komedi stambul (Indonesian theatre genre) xxvii, 276–97 Komedie Stamboel (Malay-language Indonesian theatre company) 277–83 Konbaung Dynasty 93 Kotte, Heinz 165 Kripalani, Krishna 214 Krishnaswamy, Shantha 224

L’Africain, Jean–Léon 113 Lacan, Jacques 358, 359 Lacoste–Dujardin, Camille 112, 244 Lakhorn haeng chiwit (Arkartdamkeung Raphneephat) 315 Lao Tze 105 Laredj, Waciny, La Gardienne des ombres: Don Quichotte à Alger 120 Lat, U, Sabeh-bin wutthú 101; Shwe-pyizò 101 Le Forestier, Maxime 114, 124 Le Queux, William, The Sign of Silence 102

Lebanon, fiction in 33 Lebedev, Gerasim 223 Lejeune, Philippe 251 Leonowens, Anna 309 Lexdubegga (Belaïd) 253 Liepman, Heinz 163 Lies, Ursula 166, 179 London ki ek raat (Zahir) 236 “London’s Burning” (English song in Kenya) 86

396

CHEWING OVER THE WEST

Loomba, Ania ix Loth, J.D. 281 Lounès, Matoub (Algerian singer) 114, 124

“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot) 155 Low Malay language 350, 353 Lower Depths, The (Gorky) 265 Lucas, Philippe 244 Ludu Daw Ahmar (Ma Ah Mar) 103, 105, 106

Lwali bbedrar (Belaïd) 250, 251, 256 Ma Ah Mar – see Ludu Daw Ahmar Ma ha san chin thu (Molière/Zaw Gyi) 96 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 265, 295 Macdonald, Ross 337 McGregor, R.S. 193, 214 McVey, Ruth 43, 48, 69 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 213, 218, 220, 222, 223, 224, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 239; as type in Hindi fiction xxvi, 217 “Madame Vienna” (Idris) 24–25 Maha Montri, Phra 334 Mahanirvana (Alekar) 268 Mahfouz, Naguib, Cairo Trilogy 9 Mahieu, Auguste 277, 279, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295 Maier, H.M.J. 43, 49, 50, 51, 53, 57 Maillu, David G., Without Kiinua Mgongo 89, 90 Maina wa Kinyatti 78 Malamih Dakhiliyya (al-Hakim) 11, 23 Malay literary culture xvii, xix, xxix, 37, 42, 45–52, 56, 57, 59, 65, 70, 71, 275, 277, 278, 279, 280, 284, 286, 290, 292, 293, 317, 351–54, 356, 364, 366, 367, 368, 373, 375; language xx, 277, 278, 352, 353, 357, 358, 362, 364; theatre xxvii; oral tradition in 287 Malaya, traditional culture in 275

W⏐X

Al-Malik ‘Udib (al-Hakim) 19 Mammeri, Mouloud 112, 246, 247 “Man with the Twisted Lip, The” (Doyle) 326, 333, 357 man-bioscope (Burma) 98 Mangoenkoesoemo, Tjipto 42, 43, 44 Mann, Thomas, The Transposed Heads 269

Mao Tse-Tung, in Arab world 133 Marathi xxvii, 186, 214, 222, 224, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 267, 270 Marco Kartodikromo 68 Marxism xix, 12, 38, 43, 51, 65, 66, 69, 129, 133, 141, 149, 150, 151, 169, 171, 177, 180, 232, 290, 297, 312, 375; in Burma 105; in colonial Indonesia xx, 37–72; in Egypt 12; in India 263: in Kenya xx; in Thailand 306; in Vietnam 168, 171 Mas Marco Kartodikromo 46, 48, 49, 56, 69; Matahariah 68; Student Hidjo 47 Matahariah (Mas Marco Kartodikromo) 68

Matigari (Ngũgĩ) 83, 84, 87, 88, 89 Matu Mona 374 Mau Mau (Kenya) 78, 85 Maung Aung San (Thakhin Aung San) 97 Maung Ba Thaung 96, 97 Maung Cham Baw 95 Maung Gyi, Ledipandita U 102, 103, 105; The Dreams of Maung Thaw Ka 103 Maung Htay Myaing (Dagon Taya) 105 Maung Htin 98, 105 Maung Kyi hnint Maung Ngeh (U Maung Gyi) 103 Maung Nu (Thankin Nu) 97 Maung Po Zaw 99 Maung Swan Yi (Thakhin U Win Pe) 105 Maung Tha Noe 106 Maung Yin Maung Ma Meh Ma (Hla Gyaw) 98, 99, 100, 317

W⏐X

397

Index

Maupassant, Guy de, in Thailand 322 Mbaabu, Ireli 81 Médecin malgré lui, Le (Molière) 96 Mehta, Vijaya (theatre director) 267 Melville, Herman 215 Memmi, Albert x, xi, xii Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) 95, 292, 293 Merolla, Daniela 244, 245, 248, 252 Mes Noëls (Belaïd) 250 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 183 Milesian tales, in Algeria 111, 112 Minthuwun 97 Mishra, Vijay, & Bob Hodge x, xi, xiv, xv Misra, Rama Darasa 229 missionary activity 227, 249, 254; in Burma 94 Mitchell, Timothy 289 Mitro, Deenabondhu 260 Mitro, Shombhu (director) 261, 264, 265 modernism xxiii, 127, 130, 134, 135, 136, 217; and Arabic poetry 127, 129, 132, 148, 150, 157, 158; in Indian fiction 199, 203; in Indian theatre 266; in Java 281; in Vietnam 166 modernity xiii, xv, xvi, xviii, xxv, xxvii, xxix, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 51, 53, 58, 59, 60, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 137, 152, 166, 177, 178, 184, 185, 188, 190, 191, 193, 198, 207, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 236, 266, 309, 336, 359, 360, 376; in Algeria xxiv, 113, 115, 121, 122, 246, 248; in Arab world 128, 144, 149; in Burma xxi, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 106; in Egypt 3, 6; in India xxv, xxvi, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 223, 224, 232, 235, 238, 239; in Indian fiction 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 203, 208, 209, 210, 214, 222, 237, 238; in Indian theatre

266; in Indonesia xxvii, xxviii, xxix, 284, 351, 352, 361, 362, 373, 375, 376; in Indonesian theatre 294; in Kenya 85, 87, 89; in Thailand 307, 337, 339 Moeis, Abdoel, Salah Asuhan 71 Molière 96, 115; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 96; Le Médecin malgré lui 96:

(Maune Ba Thaung) Saya-wun Ba Be 96; (Zaw Gyi) Ma ha san chin thu 96 Mongkut, King (Thailand) 309, 310, 329 Monin, P. 102, 105; “Myitta hnint thuya” 103; Ne Nyo Nyo 102; Ne Yi Yi 102 Montaut, Annie 228, 229 Moreh, Shmuel 127 Moretti, Franco 357, 358, 361, 367 Moses, story of, in Algeria 111 Mother Courage (Brecht) 268 Mouralis, Bernard 116 Mrázek, Rudolf 47, 48, 55, 71, 72

Al-Mu’allafat al-Kamila li Yusuf Idris (Idris) 25 Muawiyya (governor of Damascus) 133, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 215, 220, 222 Mukhia, Banani 222 “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” (Poe) 336, 340, 342, 343; in Thailand xxviii, 342, 343 Murdoch, Brian 177, 178 Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Ngũgĩ) 86 Muslim League 189 Muslims 3, 40, 280, 281; in India 184, 187, 188, 189, 190; in Kenya 79 “Mwendawazimu” (Shake) 87, 89 Mya Lay Shwe Dar Bo (Zayya) 102 Mya Than Tint 104, 106 “Myitta hnint thuya” (?P. Monin) 103 “Mystery of Marie Rogêt, The” (Poe) 336 Naang Naak (popular ghost) xxix Nacib, Youssef 111

398

CHEWING OVER THE WEST

Nadi ke dvip (Ajneya) 232, 233 Nadkarni, Dhyaneshwar 261 Nagar, Amritlal 218, 235 Nai Kaew Nai Khwan 322, 323, 324, 330, 331, 332, 333, 335, 339, 341, 342, 343 — See also Vajiravudh Naipaul, V.S. 183, 320 al-Naqqash, Raja’ 6 Nasser, Gamel Abdel 4, 5, 23, 31 nationalism 4, 8, 37, 38, 39, 43, 45, 51, 68, 71, 78, 120, 191, 199, 201, 227, 315, 364; Hindu 188, 189, 198; in Algeria 120, 248; in Arab world 132, 152; in Bengal 261; in Burma 98, 104; in Egypt 9, 10, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 32; in India 184, 189, 190, 191, 203, 209, 265; in Indonesia 37–71, 296, 297, 357, 371, 372, 374, 376, 377; in Java 375; in Kenya 80, 85; in Sumatra xxx; in Thailand 305, 326 Natyashastra (ancient dance manual by Bharata) 196, 284 Nautanki (Indian folk drama) 262 al-Nawwab, Mudhafar xxiii, 129–58; AlAmal Al-Shiriyya Al-Kamela 130, 133, 136–50, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156; Watariyyat Layliyya xxiii, 130, 133– 34, 136–50, 152–55, 157–58 — See also T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land naya drama (‘new drama’ in India) xxvi, xxvii, 265, 266, 268, 270, 272, 273 Nayi Kahani movement (India) 197, 199, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209 Ne Nyo Nyo (P. Monin) 102 Ne Yi Yi (P. Monin) 102 Nedjma (Kateb) 119 Nelson, Usha Saxena 219 Netherlands 38, 39, 42, 43, 46, 52, 53, 58, 277, 291, 293, 294, 295, 308 New Literature Movement (Burma) 105 New York 80 (Idris) 24

W⏐X

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o xx, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89; Devil on the Cross 82, 83; Matigari 83, 84, 87, 88, 89; Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ 82, 83; Mũrogi wa Kagogo 86 Nguyen, Ursula 164, 173, 177 Nhung thien duong mu (Duong Thu Huong) 164 Nietzsche, Friedrich 230 Nirala 226 Nithan Thorng-In (Vajiravudh) xxviii, 304–44 Njamba Nene (figure in stories by Ngũgĩ) 85

Njamba Nene (Kenya) 85, 86 “Noble Bachelor, The” (Doyle) 357 nouveau roman 199 novel xii, xxi, 11, 12, 15, 49, 50, 61, 71, 86, 89, 99, 100, 117, 119, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 184, 185, 187, 188, 192, 194, 195, 196, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 250, 292, 315, 334; Bengali 215; Hindi xxv, 214–38, 239; in Algeria xxii, 109, 110, 111, 115–21, 250; in Burma 97, 98–102, 317; in Egypt 9; in Kenya 82; in Vietnam xxiii, 161– 80, verse, in Vietnam 167, 175, 178 novel, Indian – see India, modern fiction in Novel Without a Name (Duong Thu Huong) xxiii, 161–79 Nugroho, Iskandar P. 39, 40 Nyonya The Tiang Ek, Huang Jing Hoa 350

Nyoo Cheong Seng 354, 367 O’Casey, Sean 115 O’Malley, William Joseph 349

W⏐X

399

Index

Ogopa Deejays (Kenya) 80 Omuteche, Jairus 79, 80 Only in London (al-Shaykh) 34 Oonk, Gijsbert 291 Orczy, Baroness 102, 374; The Scarlet Pimpernel, The xxx, 376; in Burma 102; in Indonesia 374, 377 orientalism 329 Orsini, Francesca 190, 193 Pagla ghora (Sirkar) 265 Pakistan 184, 189, 199, 236 Palestine and Palestinians 127, 128, 130, 138, 139, 140, 142, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158 Pali language 93, 94, 98, 100 Pané, Armijn 296 Pan-tha Má Sa Ù (Thakin Ba Thaung) 102

Paradise of the Blind (Duong Thu Huong) 164

Parakh (Kumar) 225, 226, 228, 229, 237 Parched House, A (Sarat Chandra) 222 Pariksha Guru (Das) 188 Parsi theatre 262, 263, 265, 267, 277, 289, 291

Partition (of India and Pakistan) 128, 184, 189, 198 Pasuk Phongpaichit 308, 321 Patjar Merah, detective figure of Sou’yb 374, 376, 377 Pattana Kitiarsa 309, 314, 315 Paupers, De (Victor Ido) 292, 293 Payevskaya, Elizaveta 215, 241 Pe Maung Tin, U 98, 99, 104 Peleggi, Maurizio 311, 321 Pembalasan (Emnast) 365 pergerakan (Indonesia) 38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 375

Perrault, Charles 111 Persian language 87, 184, 186, 187, 189, 202, 207 persona, in Arabic poetry 142 Peste, La (Camus) 117 Pilgrims’s Progress, The (Bunyan) 103 Pirandello, Luigi xxvii, 265, 266; Six Characters in Search of an Author 270 plagiarism 106 Plague, The (Camus) 117 Po Kyar, U 105 Poe, Edgar Allan 335, 336, 337, 338, 340, 342, 343, 358; in Thailand xxviii, 322, 324, 325, 335, 336, 337, 340, 341, 342, 343; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 336, 340, 342, 343; in Thailand xxviii, 342, 343 Poedjangga Baroe (Indonesian literary circle) 71, 352 poetry 113, 127, 128, 129, 136, 138, 139, 150, 151; and music, in Algeria 113, 114; Arabic xxii, xxiii, 128, 129; Bengali 260; in India 190, 193, 224, 264, 272; in Thailand 334 Poeze, Harry 306, 346, 374 Poppe, Reiner 163, 166 “Poprygunya” (Chekhov) 233, 234, 237 Possessed, The (Dostoyevsky) 231 postcolonialism ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxi, xxv, xxx, 3, 4, 8, 33, 65, 77, 80, 129, 275, 306, 307, 320; in Africa 82, 89; in Arab world 1; in Egypt 10, 22, 23, 25, 32, 33; in India 183; in Indonesia 294, 296; in Kenya 76, 81, 82, 90 Pota, Nirupama 222 Pound, Ezra 131 Pramoedya Ananta Toer 49, 278, 306, 352

Prasad, Jayashankar 214, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 236, 237; Chandra-

400

CHEWING OVER THE WEST

gupta 222, 223; Iravati 224; Kankal 221, 227; Titli 219, 222, 224, 237 Pratt, Marie Louise 251, 305 Premchand 190, 191, 192, 197, 198, 199, 200–203, 204, 209, 210, 214, 217, 220, 224, 226, 227, 229, 230, 236, 238, 272; “Kafan” 198, 200–203; Godan 219 “Priory School, The” (Doyle) 354 Progressive Writers Movement (India) 266

Pronko, Leonard 267 prostitute, as iconic figure in poetry of AlNawwab 88, 135, 143, 145; in Hindi fiction 219, 222 Proust, Marcel 121 Psyche, myth of, in Algeria 111, 112 psycho-narration (Cohn) 195 Puntilla (Brecht) 267 puppet plays 298; in Burma 94, 95 “Purloined Letter, The” (Poe) 325, 336 Pushkin, Alexander 105 Qasim, Abdul-Karim 134, 144 Qur’an 12, 26, 110, 153, 244 Raffles (Lord Lister) 350, 367, 368, 376 Rai (Algerian song-style) 113 al-Ra‘i, ‘Ali 26 Rai, Alok 187, 188 Rai, Orlok 191 Raja (Tagore) 260 Rakesh, Mohan 197, 265, 266, 271, 273; Adhe Adhure 265; Ashadh ka ek din 265, 271 Raktakarabi (Tagore) 260, 261 Rama VI, King (Thailand) xxviii, 313 Ramayana 93, 223 Rangacharya, Adya 265, 267 Rani Ketaki ki Kahani (Insha Allah Khan) 187

Rani of Jhansi Lakshmi Bai (Varma) 220

W⏐X

rasa aesthetic, in Indian art 196, 197, 202, 205, 259; in Indonesian politics and performance 43, 44, 48, 67, 189, 197, 284, 286, 287 Rasjid Hilmy, M.A. 368 Rasleela (Indian folk drama) 262 realism 49, 50, 53, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 167, 175, 201, 235, 266, 288, 358, 365; in Burma 105; in Egypt 25; in European theatre 288; in French literature 217; in Hindi fiction 209; in Indian fiction xxv, 192, 194, 198, 214, 217, 219; in Indonesia xxviii, 354; in Indonesian theatre 287; in poetry of Al-Nawwab 158 “Red-Headed League, The” (Doyle) 353 Remarque, Erich Maria xxiii, xxiv, 161– 79; All Quiet on the Western Front / Im Westen nichts Neues xxiii, 163–80; Arc de Triomphe 163; Der Schwarze Obelisk 163 Renu, Phanishvarnath 235 Repudiation, La (Boudjedra) 117 Return of the Spirit, The (al-Hakim) 15 Revue Africaine 112 Reynolds, Craig 307, 319 Rinkes, D.A. 70 “Rip Van Winkle” (Irving) 87 Roach, Joseph 276 Roberts, Hugh 244, 245, 247 Robin Hood xxx, 104, 368 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 116, 306, 317, 328, 369; in Burma 99 Robinson, Tjalie (Jan Boon) 294, 295 Rocambole xxx, 367 Rolland, Romain, Jean Christophe 233 roman à thèse 49, 50 roman madjalah (magazine novel), in Indonesia 353, 363 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 95, 292, 293

W⏐X

401

Index

Roy, Ram Mohan 215 Rushdie, Salman ix, xi, xii, xiv, xx, xxi; Midnight’s Children 183; The Satanic Verses xiv Russian language and literature 105, 106, 169, 172, 184, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 264, 273; in India xxvi, 217, 231, 232, 234 Sabeh-bin wutthú (U Lat) 101 al-Saffah, Abu Al-Abbas 144 Adam, Ahmat B. 46 Said, Ali Ahmed 151 Said, Edward xi, xiii, xxi, 18, 116, 118, 120 Saini K.M. 296 Saipradit, Kulap 315 Saladin 136, 137 Salah Asuhan (Moeis) 71 Salmon, Claudine xi, 353 Sansal, Boualem, Le Serment des Barbares 109 Sanskrit xiv, 186, 189, 194, 197, 205, 214, 219, 224, 225, 269, 272, 273, 275, 284, 368

Saraskina, Lyudmila 231 Sarekat Islam (Javanese political organization) 42, 48, 51, 364 Sartre, Jean–Paul x, xxvii, 120, 233, 265, 266

Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie) xiv Sathe, Annabhao 264 Saya Lun – see Shwedaung Saya Lun Saya-wun Ba Be (Molière/Maune Ba Thaung) 96 al-Sayyab, Badr Shakir 128, 129, 134, 150, 151

“Al-Sayyida Vienna” (Idris) – see “Madame Vienna” 24 “Scandal in Bohemia, A” (Doyle) 324, 325, 333, 336, 358

Scarlet Pimpernel, The (Baroness Orczy) xxx, 376; in Burma 102; in Indonesia 374, 377 Schechner, Richard 267, 268 Schomer, Karine 215, 224 Schumann, Robert 278 Schwartz, Vanessa R. 288 Schwarze Obelisk, Der (Remarque) 163 Scott, Sir Walter 215 Seeta Swayamvara (Bhave) 261 Segal, Erich 106 Semaoen, Hikajat Kadiroen 43, 48–50, 57

Sen, Niranjan 264 Sen, Sukumar 261 Senanan, Wibha 304, 319 Serebryany, Sergey 231, 232, 233 Serment des Barbares, Le (Sansal) 109 al-Shaher, Abdullah 137, 144 Shake, Rose, “Mwendawazimu” 87, 89 Shakespeare, William 6, 8, 9, 10, 95, 103, 115, 116, 127, 217, 260, 261, 263, 265, 290, 292, 293; Hamlet 6, 7, 8, 9, 295; Macbeth 265, 295; The Merchant of Venice 95, 292, 293; Romeo and Juliet 95, 292, 293; The Tempest 116 Shantata! Court chalu ahe (Tendulkar) 270

Shaw, George Bernard 19, 260, 265, 271 al-Shaykh, Hanan 33, 34; Aknus al-Shams ‘an al-Sutuh 34; I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops 34; Only in London 34 She (Haggard) 101 Shekhar (Ajneya) 228, 229, 232, 233 Sheng (Kenyan pidgin) 89, 90 Sherlock Holmes xxviii, 306, 317, 321, 322, 323, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 333, 335, 336, 337, 359, 361, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 375, 376; in Burma 103, 104; in Indo

402

CHEWING OVER THE WEST

nesia xxix, xxx, 324, 328, 349–77; in Sumatra 351; in Thailand xxviii, 304– 22, 326, 328, 331, 335, 336 Shiraishi, Takashi 38, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 69, 375 short story xix, xxv, 51, 56, 103, 234, 243, 313, 316, 319, 336; Hindi 197, 200– 208; in Burma xxi, 99, 101, 102, 103– 104, 105, 106; in Egypt 26; in India 184, 185, 190, 192, 225; in Indian vernaculars 183; in Indonesia 349–77; in Kenya 89; in Lebanon 33; in Thailand 304–44; in Vietnam 163 — See also detective fiction Shudan Dotto, Michael Madhu 260 Shukla, Ramcandra 190 Shukri 13 Shwe Kyu, U 95 Shwe U Daung 101, 102, 103, 104; Yádana-boun 101; Yu pá nan di 101 Shwedaung Saya Lun 95; Hma-daw-boun 101

Shwe-pyi-zò (U Lat) 101 Shwetaung Thiha Thu, Yatana Kyemon 98 Siam – see Thailand Siapa Pemboenoehnja? (Sou’yb) 364 Siegel, James T. 43, 46, 54, 68, 376 Sier Djoon, Sumatran detective figure 364

Sign of Four, The (Doyle) 326, 329 Sign of Silence, The (Le Queux) 102 silat (Chinese ‘fight’ genre) 355, 367 “Silver Blaze” (Doyle) 326 “Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles, The” (Doyle) 354 Sinh, Tribhuvan 235 Sir John (Indonesian detective figure) 363, 364, 369, 370, 371, 372, 374 Sirkar, Badal 265, 271, 273; Evam Indrajit 265, 270, 271; Pagla ghora 265 “Sirruhu al-Bati’” (Idris) 25–32

W⏐X

Siti Maryam, Perempoean Djalang Jang Berboedi (Djola–Djali) 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello) 270 Sleeping Beauty 278 Smith, Adam 11 Sneeuwwitje (Poetihnja Saldjoe) – see under Snow White Snow White, in European and Indonesian theatre 278, 279; in Kenya 78 Soeara menggonggongnja andjing (Thia Siauw Tjeng) 350 Soeman H.S. 364 Soemantri 46; “Tjermin Boeah Keroyalan” 56 Soetatmo 43, 44, 45, 375 Soetatmo Soeriokoesoemo 43, 44 Soewardi Soerjadiningrat 42, 43; Als ik eens Nederlander was 42 Soliskson, “Hikajat Soerja” / “The Story of Surya, a Man of Intellect” 51–60, 61, 65, 67 “Solitary Cyclist, The” (Doyle) 357 Somnambulist, The 278 song xiv, xv, 80, 85, 86, 96, 113, 114, 137, 267; in Kenya 82, 83 Sophocles, Antigone 265 Sorrow of War, The (Bao Ninh) 179 Sou’yb, Joesoef 361, 362, 363, 364, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372; Siapa Pemboenoehnja? 364 Souw Lian Eng (Chen) 350 “Speckled Band, The” (Doyle) 363 Starkey, Paul 17 Stewart, J.A. 96, 98, 101 “Story of Surya, a Man of Intellect, The” (Soliskson) 51–60, 61, 65, 67 storytelling, traditional 50, 51, 318; in Algeria 111, 113, 114, 116; in Ghana 275; in India 187, 192

W⏐X

403

Index

Strand magazine 327, 329 Strindberg, August xxvii, 265 Student Hidjo (Mas Marco) 47 Study in Scarlet, A (Doyle) 353, 354 Subandhu, Vasavadatta 214 Suchat Sawatsi 304, 321, 334 Sufi poets 27, 190, 202, 207 Sukhada (Kumar) 225, 227, 228, 234 Sulayman al-Halabi (Faraj) 4–9 Sumatra 64, 69, 340, 357; detective fiction in xxx Sunita (Kumar) 225, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236 Surapong Pinijkhar 310 Susanto, S.J. Budi xviii Sutherland, Efua 275 Suvorova, Anna 263, 266 Svetsreni, Vilawan 323 Swahili 75, 88, 89, 90 “Tabi’atunanahwa al-Shabab” (al-Hakim) 21

Tafunast igujilen (Belaïd) 250, 251, 253 Tagore, Rabindranath 45, 183, 215, 216, 222, 230, 231, 232, 238, 260, 261, 272, 273; Dakghar 260; Ghaire Baire 230; The House and the World 222, 231; Raktakarabi 260, 261 Tahiddiyat Sanat 2000 (al-Hakim) 22 Tahta Shams al-Fikr (al-Hakim) 17, 19 Tamazight (Berber language in Algeria) xxii, xxiv, 110, 111, 112, 243, 244 Tamil language 183, 265 Tan Malaka xxx, 374, 376, 377 Tan Sooi Beng 275, 285 Taneggaru (Belaïd) 251, 254 Tanvir, Habib (theatre director) 265, 267, 273; Indrasabha 267 Tanzania 75 Taqbaylit (Berber dialect) 243 Tarikh (al-Jabarti) 2–3, 4, 5

Taussig, Michael 276 technology 30, 39, 44, 53, 54, 309, 376; in Arab world 2; in Indonesia xx, 361 — See also modernity Tejapira, Kasian 312 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 116 Tempête, Une Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (Césaire) 116 Tendulkar, Vijay 265, 268, 270, 271, 273; Ghashiram Kotval 265, 268; Shantata! Court chalu ahe 270 Teng’o, Dan 75 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy) 102 Tet Toe 106 Thai language and culture 304, 305, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 321, 331, 332, 334, 335, 340, 375 Thailand xxviii, 93, 129, 306, 307, 308, 315, 318, 319, 321, 365; and Western culture xxi; crime fiction in xxviii, 303–44; meaning of name 320 Thaïs (France) 217 Thakhin Aung San (Maung Aung San) 97 Thakhin Ba Thaung 97 Thakhin Nu 98, 105 Thakhin Than Tun 105 Thakin Ba Thaung (aka Maune Ba Thaung) 97; Pan-tha Má Sa Ù 102 Thankin Nu (Maung Nu) 97 Thawi panya (Thai monthly journal) 304, 316, 319, 327, 337, 344 Thawiphop (film, dir. Surapong Pinijkhar) 310

theatre xii, xxvi, 15, 153, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 272, 278, 280, 281, 284, 287, 290, 293, 294, 296, 297, 298, 313; criticism, in Indonesia 282, 283; European 279, 283, 287; in Algeria xxii, 110, 114; in Burma xxi, 95, 97; in Ghana 275; in India xxvi, 259–73; in Indonesia 354;

404

CHEWING OVER THE WEST

in Kenya 77; Malay xxvii, 356; Victorian 290; Western 19 Theikpan Maung Wa 98 Thein Han, U (Zaw Gyi) 96, 99 Thein Pe Myint, U (Thakhin Thein Pe) 98, 105 theosophy 39, 40, 42, 55 Thia Siauw Tjeng, Soeara menggonggongnja andjing 350 Thompson, Jon 327, 328, 329, 330, 335, 336, 337, 338 Thongchai Winichakul 305, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 328, 338, 339, 371 Thousand and One Nights tales, in Indonesian theatre 277, 293 Three Musketeers, The (Dumas), in Indonesia 356 Three Penny Opera, The (Brecht) 267 Thuriya Kanti 105 Tickell, Paul 46, 47, 49, 50, 56, 57, 68 Tieu thuyet vo de (Duong Thu Huong) xxiii, 164, 165, 170 — See also Novel Without a Name Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 261 Tint De 105 Tio Ie Soei 354 Tirto Adhisoerjo, R.M. 46 Titli (Prasad) 219, 222, 224, 237 Tjempaka–Pasoeroean, “Aliran Djaman” 54, 55, 56 “Tjermin Boeah Keroyalan” (Soemantri) 56

Tjipto Mangoenkoesoema 42, 43, 44, 45, 364, 375 Tjokroaminoto 42 Tolstaya, Sofia 218 Tolstoy, Lev 105, 215, 216, 229; Anna Karenina 217, 218, 224, 231, 232, 234 transculturation 305 translation xviii, 5, 42, 48, 49, 52, 56, 57, 67, 85, 86, 87, 89, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101,

W⏐X

102, 105, 106, 115, 117, 118, 120, 130, 137, 163, 177, 178, 215, 216, 217, 229, 230, 231, 234, 237, 270, 279, 316, 334, 353, 363, 375; in Africa 87, 88; in Algeria 248, 250, 252; in Burma xxii, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102, 105, 106; in India 186, 214, 216, 217, 218, 237, 265; in Indonesia 277, 279, 287, 324, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 357, 362, 363, 364; in Kenya 83, 85, 90; in Thailand xxix, 319; in Vietnam 161, 166; into Arabic 127; into Hindi 190 Transposed Heads, The (Mann) 269 Trivedi, Harish 185, 218 Tsuchiya, Kenji 42 Tuglaq (Karnad) 265, 267 Turgenev, Ivan 216, 217, 218, 233 Turkana (Kenyan people) 81, 82 Tyag-patr (Kumar) 226, 228, 229, 230, 234, 235, 236, 237

U San Sher (Burmese Sherlock Holmes) 103, 104 Ucee (Coldenhoff) 351 Umar, Muhammas 262 Umayyad Dynasty 148, 154, 156 Urdu 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 194, 198, 202, 207, 214, 217, 236, 261, 262, 263

‘Usfur min al-Sharq (al-Hakim) 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 21, 32 al-Usta, Adel 158 Vajiravudh, Crown Prince (Thailand), Nithan Thorng-In xxviii, 304–44 Vajirunhis, Prince 313 van der Veur, Paul 294 Van Hinloopen Labberton, Dirk 39 Varma, Mahadevi 224 Varma, Vrindavan Lal 215, 224; Rani of Jhansi Lakshmi Bai 220

W⏐X

405

Index

Vasavadatta (Subandhu) 214 Vatin, Jean–Claude 244 Vatsyayan, Kapila 259 Vella, Walter 314, 317, 318, 319 vernacular literature and language, 45, 375; in India xxvii, 183, 184, 260, 265, 272; in colonial Indonesia xxx, 37–72; in Kenya xxi Vietnam 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 330, 316, 338; literature in xxiii; novel in 161–80 Vietnamese language xxiii Vietnamese Writers Union 165 Vishnevskaya, Natalya 217 Voices (Fayyad) 32, 34 Volpone (Jonson) 265 Voskuil, Lynn M. 290 Wahbi, Ahmed 113 Wahu Kagwi 80 Wahuh, Abdul xvii Waktoe Malam di Medan (Emnast) 366 Walibora, Ken, “Kipara-Ngoto” 89, 90 Wall, Hans van de (Victor Ido) 291, 294; De Paupers 292, 293 Wallace, Alfred Russel 298 Wallerstein, Emmanuel xiii Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira 78, 82 “War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, The” (Doyle) 327 Waste Land, The (Eliot), influence on Arab poets xxiii, 127–58; influence on poetry of Al-Nawwab 134–58 Watariyyat Layliyya (Al-Nawwab) xxiii, 130, 133–34, 136–50, 152–55, 157–58 Watson, Dr (Conan Doyle) 326, 327, 333, 366, 367, 369, 372; in Indonesia 351, 357, 373; in Thailand xxviii, 322, 326 Wayang Kasim (theatre troupe) 277 Wenk, Klaus 334

Werbner, Pnina 276, 297 westernization 47, 305, 314; in Algeria 121; in Egypt 19; in India xxv, xxvi, 185, 188, 190, 192, 193, 220, 223, 232, 238; in Indonesia 352, 358; in Kenya 75, 82; in Thailand 317, 331, 332, 344 White, Hayden xiv Williams, Raymond xxvi, 290, 297 Williamson, George 153 Wilpert, Gero von 177 Wilson, Edmund 145 Win Pe, Thakhin U (Maung Swan Yi) 105

Win Sein, U (Tint De) 105 Winner, Thomas 218 Without Kiinua Mgongo (Maillu) 89, 90 women, as protagonist in Hindi novels xxvi, 214–39 Wood, Mrs Henry (Ellen Price), East Lynne 101 writing back ix, xii, xxii, 116; in Algeria 117; in Kenya xxi, 90; in Thailand 317 Yacine, Kateb – see Kateb Yacine Yádana-boun (Shwe U Daung) 101 Yadav, Rajendra 197 “Yahi sac hai” (Bhandari) 198, 204–208 al-Yamama, Zarqa (pre-Islamic martyr) 136, 137 Yap Gwan Thay (theatre entrepreneur) 277, 278 Yaqzat al-Fikr (al-Hakim) 15, 20, 21, 22 Yashpal 224, 226, 235; Dada Kamred 197, 232, 236 Yatana Kyemon (Shwetaung Thiha Thu) 98

Yazid (son of Muawiyya) 149, 150, 151 Ye aur ve (Kumar) 231 Yeğenoğlu, Meyda 358 “Yellow Face, The” (Doyle) 357 Yu pá nan di (Shwe U Daung) 101

406

CHEWING OVER THE WEST

Zahir, Sajjad 264; London ki ek raat 236 Zahrat al-‘Umr (al-Hakim) 11, 18, 19 Zaw Gyi (U Thein Han) 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 106 Zayya, Mya Lay Shwe Dar Bo 102

W⏐X

Zionism 128, 138, 144, 155 Žižek, Slavoj 358, 359, 360, 361, 371 Zola, Émile 217 Zykova, Ekaterina 217

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