As I describe my hasty retreat, it seems closer to Adela Quested’s bolt down the hill from the cave than to Mrs. Moore’s quietly borne claustrophobia. But it’s really not accurate to compare myself to either. The bats unnerved me for a moment; then I continued on my travels. India, as my friend had foretold, was indeed the most “foreign” place I had ever been to. The mix of faiths, the heat, the crowds, the languages for which I didn’t know words or grammar or even scripts, the cows and elephants and monkeys seen along the roads: all this was unprecedented in my experience. But that being said, it did not seem remote or difficult. Cyril Fielding’s experience to the contrary, Indian temples seemed no more idolatrous and Indian hills no lumpier than did the features of culture and landscape I’d encountered traveling in Italy. In fact, India seemed to me to have much in common with Italy. So much vibrant life in both these parts of the world is visibly lived in the streets rather than hidden behind the stolid fronts of houses as in England. India seemed exuberant, and I felt exuberant being there. Someone puts up a corrugated roof and calls it a barbershop. People talk readily to you, and you can talk to them. Of course, I was a tourist—being catered to as a tourist, nothing more. I don’t lose sight of that. But the way I felt, especially after so much pre-trip apprehension, was wonderful. Though I took in strange sights, I did not feel a stranger. The world seemed safe to me. I was someone, it turned out, that felt more at home in it than I would have ever imagined.
WHEN I returned home, the reading project continued. More Rushdie, more R. K. Narayan, more Anita Desai, the discovery of such authors as the Parsee novelists Rohinton Mistry and Bapsi Sidhwa, the worldly Pakistani Sara Suleri, who was then writing both memoir and criticism, the Sri Lankan novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, who in A Suitable Boy had relocated and rewritten Pride and Prejudice. Indian authors were beginning to be more generally read and written about, so I found myself at once on the cusp of things and in the stream of literary fashion. By 1995 I felt I had read enough and perhaps knew just barely enough about Indian culture to propose teaching a course at Brooklyn College on Indian English fiction. A Comp Lit course on Literature of India had been offered in the past by Professor Rahman, but he had recently retired and no one in the department had more background than I did. Still, I felt trepidation. How could I, someone who had spent only a month in India, knew no Indian languages, and had read only a few books on Indian history and religion and perhaps two dozen novels by Indian English authors, dare to profess knowledge of this field? And to do so, moreover, at a time when identity politics made it problematic to be a white person in any way presuming the ability to speak for people of color?
My first syllabus was a cautious one, frontloaded with English authors already incontestably within my purview. I had taught Kipling, Forster, and Orwell in other courses, but now the focus became their relation to India, their engagement with its culture, their inevitable British, one might say Orientalist, perspective. When Kipling turns his enervated Anglophile Muslim, Wali Dad, in the short story “On the City Wall” into a fanatic, frothing at the mouth and beating his breast raw during Mohurrum, is this not saying scratch a Muslim and find an atavistic beast? When Forster mystifies the experience of Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested in the Marabar caves, leaving vague the causes of their breakdowns, is he not contributing to the image of India as overwhelming and indefinable? And even though the British characters in Orwell’s Burmese Days are detestable, his lisping Indian character Veraswammi is craven. But postcolonial critics such as Rushdie and Suleri explore these issues, and we read them as well.
From the British writers, I moved to Indian ones, though still with a foothold—theirs and mine—in familiar literary terrain. R. K. Narayan’s early novel The English Teacher, in which, among other themes, a young teacher in an English-language Indian secondary school wrestles with his relation to English literature, offered a chance to explore the cultural legacy of colonialism. There’s a wonderful scene in which the protagonist is just trying to get through the class hour—what teacher doesn’t know that feeling?—and starts to read King Lear aloud to kill time. The language soon draws him in and so engages his imagination and emotions that he loses consciousness of everything but its beauty and power. At the end of the book the protagonist leaves the English school to teach in a Hindi school for young children, but the novel has made its complex statement about the abiding imprint of his English education. I also taught for the first time Rushdie’s extraordinary Midnight’s Children, a novel that for all the ways it plays with Hindu mythology, Mogul emperors, and Bombay cinema, among the myriad influences in its epic sweep, has a deep interplay with English literature. The protagonist Saleem Sinai is oedipal Hamlet and impotent Tristram Shandy as well as resilient Ganesh and the enigmatic Buddha.
I’m sure one strong reason I was drawn to Indian writers was
