Kanthapura by Raja Rao was more perplexing. The villagers who were its characters had strange, similar-sounding names such as Akkamma and Waterfall Venkamma and Rangamma and Subbayya and Chandrayya, and its prose tumbled breathlessly along as the author explicitly set himself the task of conveying “in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own.” The book has a memorable scene in which a Brahman, a follower of Gandhi who returns to his South Indian village of Kanthapura, forces himself to eat in the house of an untouchable. That gave me insight into the viscerally felt prohibitions of the caste system. I also could follow the buildup of fervor for Swaraj, Gandhi’s concept of home rule, climaxing when the villagers march on a British-run coffee plantation and their leaders are arrested. Overall, though, Kanthapura didn’t seem to have much of a plotline or characters you could get deeply involved with. Characters and plot aren’t so important, my friend explained. What is, she said, in Indian literature, is mood; the overall tone and feeling. Okay, I said to myself. Think about mood in poetry and music.
By the time of the trip I had a roadmap in my mind of the Aryan wheat-eating North of India and Dravidian rice-eating South as well as rudimentary knowledge of such concepts as caste, karma, dharma and rasa, and the achievements of the great Mogul emperors. I had also started reading more recent fiction: works by Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, and Bharati Mukherjee, among others, writers with the exception of Rushdie I’d previously not even heard of. It’s amazing, given all the postcolonial literature I’ve read since, to think that in 1992 the only works I knew by authors living in non-Western countries were The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner, a novel I’d discovered in the 1980s as part of my interest in late nineteenth-century feminism, a few works by Nadine Gordimer, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, my choice—and the choice of most of my English department colleagues—for the mandatory single non-Western text we were asked to include in the core curriculum Great Books literature course at Brooklyn College.
I did fall sick in India. A spicy meal in a palace hotel in Jaipur led to a bad stretch on an eighteen-hour train ride from Delhi to Calcutta. Then in Calcutta the fume-filled acrid air seemed literally to take me by the throat and infect me. Dr. Chatterjee, a sympathetic young Bengali doctor, came to our hotel and was impressed that we had books with us—serious novels and tomes of theory. He warned us against the danger in India of succumbing to lassitude. Lassitude, as its syllables hovered in the air, seemed such a poignant word and seductive concept that we felt ourselves half in love with its invoker, our own Dr. Aziz. I must say, though, that neither my friend, the seasoned Indophile, nor I, the neophyte, succumbed to lassitude. Being sick didn’t matter. I got better. The heat didn’t matter. We took shelter from it when we could and otherwise pushed through it. And in all the places we visited—Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Calcutta, Madras; through transportation adventures that included long rides in careening buses, days and nights in second-class AC trains with their shared compartments (I had a Muslim gentleman praying through the night in the berth above me on the thirty-six hour ride from Calcutta to Madras), travel by rented cars with hired drivers, and rides in rickshaws pedaled through the heat by bicycle wallahs; through the visits to imposing mosques and exquisitely carved temples, a session watching a class of Bharatnatyam dancers in Tamil Nadu, shopping expeditions to bazaars and government emporiums, meals of Tandoori lamb and chicken, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Chinese food (easier on my poor stomach) and drinks of fresh lime soda—through all this and more, I had a surprising sense of ease.
In A Passage to India, E. M. Forster expresses the fear I had before I went there, of India as dangerous—or at least dangerous to the Westerner. You could say it is India that kills his Mrs. Moore. Dr. Aziz impetuously befriends her as an “Oriental” when they first meet in the mosque, but I’d argue it’s her distinctly Christian charity that she relies on to guide and sustain her. With the echo in the Marabar cave reducing all sound to sameness, “poor little talkative Christianity” becomes only “boum,” and Mrs. Moore spirals into her strange and permanent withdrawal—not gentle lassitude but numb disengagement. The vastness of India, or least the sense of that vastness, annihilates order, individuality, and purpose. Even as sturdy a character as the Englishman Cyril Fielding welcomes the relief he feels upon reaching Venice in being able to recognize its “beauty of form” and “Mediterranean harmony.” In contrast, the “idol temples and lumpy hills” of India, remain for him always a little menacing and confusing.
I, too, had a kind of Mrs. Moore moment on a visit to the temple of Kanchipuram south of Madras. After getting beyond the beggars and the pigeons outside it, and lingering over the erotic carvings of the playful gods on the exterior walls, I passed through the temple portal (my equivalent of the entrance to Forster’s cave) into a dark interior courtyard, redolent with incense
