And just as Shakespeare’s history plays had once taught me about the War of the Roses and Vanity Fair been my guide to the Battle of Waterloo, so now I understood more about the Amritsar Massacre, the genocide of Partition, and the war between West and East Pakistan from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or about Syrian Christianity and Kathakali dance from Roy’s The God of Small Things. I learned, too, about Indian cities—Lahore in the Punjab, the setting for Sidhwa’s Cracking India, Bombay, Rushdie’s beloved city in Midnight’s Children, and from all the books I learned about the gods and the myths and the foods and the customs and the words: namaste; chapatti; dhoti, mol. And I learned what it’s like to weave so many cultural traditions together in works that are increasingly, in Rushdie’s words, “de-centered, transnational, inter-lingual, cross-cultural.”
I found myself on the kind of steep learning curve I hadn’t experienced since college and began to consider writing a book about Indian English fiction. A grant from the City University Research Foundation funded a return visit to India in January 2000. I wanted to travel in the South, the part of the country least explored on my earlier trip and interesting to me in being both more heavily Hindu and more Christian than the North. I especially needed to learn more about Hinduism. However cross-cultural the texts I was teaching, the great Hindu religious stories still seemed to infuse almost all of them, and I was aware how little I really understood these.
Thus, with the grant funding a car and driver and another friend agreeing to come along, I spent a month on the road between Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai), never quite sure which name to use, old or new, as I read the passing Tamil/English, Kannada/English, Malayalam/English, and Gujarati/English road signs. We stopped in temples in Chidambaram and Madurai, ascended to the old colonial hill station of Ootacamund or Ooty, visited a game preserve and a coffee plantation in Karnataka, spent a night on a houseboat in Kerala, and watched Kathakali dancers in Cochin put on their makeup and perform for visitors. If this sounds like standard tourism, to a large extent it was, though we also met with Indian academics on their campuses and with relatives of my students back in the States, who took us into their homes and shared meals with us along with their hopes for their lives and insights about their country.
All in all, I fulfilled the goal of the trip, which was to gain a better understanding of India’s geography, peoples, history, and cultures. As for my specific hope to deepen my grasp of religion, my knowledge grew exponentially of temples and gods and the ancient sagas performed in song and dance. I also understood better the cross-fertilization of India’s diverse traditions by one another to create what Rushdie celebrates as its “impurity.” Above the altar of an Anglican church in Madras hung a blue-skinned Christ figure standing on a lotus petal. That’s the image that lingers for me as a vibrant representation of India’s ingenious accommodations.
By the end of that trip, though, I had reached what felt like a conclusion. For all the fascination of India’s richly intersecting strands, a month on its bad roads left me eager to get safely home and not at all sure about coming back. The book project hung in the balance, and I decided I would not pursue it. Like Cyril Fielding after all, I recognized the limits of my flexibility and understanding. I had gone a certain distance but did not have the stamina or desire to go further. I did not want to stay on in India, literally or metaphorically, beyond my tourist’s visa. To do so would not be right for me—I knew that clearly. I could travel with verve and enthusiasm, but to become a true expert on Indian culture would entail a greater commitment than I had it in me to make. So I would remain someone passing through, culling impressions, zealous to learn everything possible, to know where I had been, but with an end date to the trip, an end to the syllabus.
I have continued to teach Indian English literature, both regularly at Brooklyn College and once in Spring 2007 at the University of Paris VIII. The students at Brooklyn College—Jews, Christians and Muslims—are of Caribbean, Russian, German, Italian, Lebanese and African-American descent as well as South Asian; those in Paris were mostly Eastern European and North African. All have been curious about Indian culture, respectful of its layered richness, and at the same time inclined to sift the readings through their own experiences of colonization and immigration.
That I came to be teaching at Paris VIII, a cluster of run-down buildings in St. Denis in the northern part of the city with a predominantly immigrant student population, is one of my own life’s latter-day adventures—a different kind of adventure from going to India but in its own way as eye-opening. I had been a regular visitor to France for many years because my son had lived there since his 1994 graduation from college. He had married a Frenchwoman, and now with three children, they had settled in the Ardèche, my daughter-in-law teaching elementary school and my son restoring old houses. People often remarked how lucky I was to have an excuse to visit France, but in truth it was hard to have my son and his family so far away. When the opportunity arose for me to spend a semester in Paris as part of a Paris VIII-Brooklyn College faculty exchange, this seemed a welcome way, thanks to the vitesse of the
