My new course, “Transnational Narratives and Theory,” looked at the stories that get told when people leave one home for another and may no longer know to which nation they belong. Among postcolonial critics terms such as globalism, diaspora, displacement, borders, multinationalism, transnationalism, migrancy, nomadry, refugeeism, and hybridity were gaining currency—umbrella words under which to group writers of wide-ranging cultural experience. Crossing all sorts of national boundaries, I could bring together Rushdie, Roy, Lahiri, Hari Kunzru, and Kiran Desai (Indians with links to Britain or America), Talik Sali (Sudanese with a sojourn in England), Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldua (Latinas), Ariel Dorfman (North and South American), Chang-rae Lee (Korean-American), Eva Hoffman (Polish immigrant to Canada, now resident of London), and Junot Diaz (Dominican-American), among others. I had not been to many of the countries these authors wrote about. Often my students had, but even when they hadn’t, together we could try to make sense of a world in motion.
I have become a bolder traveler, especially in books, someone much freer to go where I haven’t been before. Because my reading for the India and transnational courses led me to books that were very contemporary, in 2008 I had an idea for yet another new course that I called “The Shape of Twenty-First-Century Literature.” The title, of course, begs the question. I’m not sure twenty-first-century English literature can as yet be said to have a shape, though 9/11 might serve as a date that sets a before and after. Global terrorism, the Internet explosion, climate change—these were some of the new century’s markers I used to organize the course. I imported Lahiri, Kunzru, and Diaz from my other syllabi and also read a spate of new authors—Jennifer Egan, Kate Walbert, Cormac McCarthy, Rick Moody, among others—another steep learning curve. Again, as in teaching about India, I wondered about my qualifications. Surely someone my age (now nearing seventy), never especially avant-garde, and with a primary attachment still to Victorian fiction, might not be the likeliest person to take on literature of the twenty-first century. But why should such qualms stop me now?
THERE is no single work of fiction, or pair of works, I have read in the last twenty years that I can confidently choose as pivotal to this chapter of my story—no David Copperfield or To the Lighthouse that I knew I had to write about, no Jane contending with Becky, or Isabel in dialogue with Tess. The books of this chapter sparkle for me in their accumulation and abundance. They might be said to resemble the plethora of gods on the walls of a Hindu temple, so many of them, embodying principles of fecundity and generation, each pointing the way to another on a journey that seems unbounded. But just as Hindu worshippers choose allegiance to a particular diety—Vishnu or Shiva, Ganesh or Lakshmi—as their path to a divine essence, so I, too, have my particular devotions, books I praise and recommend to others and need to keep where I can find them on my shelves. Among these, I have chosen three to round out this saga of a reading life or at least to bring these pages to a close.
Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa (1991), The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997), and Brick Lane by Monica Ali (2003) are works that range in their settings and the cultural traditions they derive from, though all fall within the rubric of Indian English fiction that has reached an international readership. Cracking India, set in Lahore in the Punjab at the time of Partition, has a Parsee child as its narrator, a young girl with a limp, who witnesses the sectarian changes that “crack” the world around her; Arundhati Roy, moving between 1969 and the 1990s, tells the story of a Syrian Christian family in Kerala rent by issues of class and caste; and Monica Ali, born in Dacca to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother, raised in London and educated at Cambridge, writes of the struggles of present-day Muslim Bangladeshi garment workers both in India and in the East End of London. Before reading these books, I knew little or nothing about Parsees, Syrian Christians, or Bangladeshi Muslims. At the same time there are aspects of these novels that reverberate as deeply familiar.
All three books, as in much Indian English fiction, draw the reader into the intimacies of family life—what it feels like, for example, to be a young child dependent on parents who both protect and fail to protect that child, or a young mother with secret yearnings for herself that conflict with commitments to a husband or children. In many respects Indian English fiction, for all the ways that it introduces Western readers to foreign cultures, continues in the great bourgeois tradition of the novel in which individuals are important but so are families and customs, and the struggle between the individual’s impulse towards freedom and self expression and the pressures to keep him or her within castes and classes and patriarchal strictures play out what for readers of Western fiction are very recognizable themes. Such struggles occur, in one way or another, in the books I have cited here.
But these books have also surprised me in touching some of the most sensitive recesses of my personal history, and I am led again to reflect on the ways we bring ourselves and our own stories to everything we read. Lenny’s limp in Cracking India comes from her having had polio. On a symbolic level the polio is the wound of colonialization. “If anyone’s to blame, blame the British,” says Colonel Bharucha, the doctor who operates on Lenny. ‘There was no polio in India till they brought
