for this negotiation by revealing the historical and rhetorical process of

the gendered identity formation.

CHAPTER-V
PROJECTION OF DIASPORIC EXPERIENCE

The term ‘diaspora’, from the Greek, meaning dispersal,

distribution, or spreading has been applied for many years to the
worldwide scattering of the Jews; in more recent times it has been applied
to a number of ethnic and racial groups living distant from their
traditional homelands; and it has been used with particular application to
people from the former British India—a result of the colonization, though
of late one occasionally hears or reads of the African diaspora. When one
speaks of the Indian diaspora, writers generally refer to persons of Indian
birth or ethnicity living abroad . Emmanuel S. Nelson defines the Indian
diaspora as the “historical and contemporary presence of people of Indian
subcontinental origin in other areas of the world”.(P 56) Many are first
generation expatriates who continue to consider India their true home, the
place of their nurture, values, and extended families as well as their
deepest sympathies and attachments. However, this is not universally the
case; accommodated to overseas lifestyles, many members of the
diaspora experience a distinct dissonance when reintroduced to their
former subcontinental culture. GS. Sharat Chandra, the noted academic
and novelist states in Sari of the Gods (1998):
I was twenty-seven when I left India for good. Since then, I’ve
steered a new course in my life... .Though India is always on
my mind, there’s no link that connects the sudden stop my life
came to there and my new self. I leaped from one life to
another, and in between 1 left nothing but a vacuum. Only
imagination and memory, when I need them, act as my bridges.
Thus whenever 1 go back to India, I’m a stranger wandering
almost invisibly in familiar neighborhoods. (P 232)
Generally speaking, the literature of the Indian diaspora is
considered to be that body of writing in English produced by persons who
identify themselves as of Indian heritage who are living or have lived for
some time outside the nation state of India or Mother India in such places
as Australia, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana and Mauritius, Malaysia and East
Africa, or in Western countries such as Canada, the United States and
Great Britain. Though the writing of the diasporic Indians is not new, it
has of late raised complicated issues which is the in-word or talking point
in postcolonial cultural and literary discourses. The formation of Indian
diaspora is one of the most significant demographic dislocations of
modern times and can be classified according to Sudesh Mishra as the
‘sugar’ and the ‘masala’ diaspora:

There is a distinction to be made between the old and the new

diasporas. This distinction is between, on the one hand, the
semi-voluntary flight of indentured peasants to the non-
metropolitan plantation colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad,
Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam, and Guyana,
roughly between the years 1830 and 1917; and on the other the
late capital or postmodern dispersal of new migrants of all
classes to thriving metropolitan centers such as Australia, the
United States, Canada and Britain (276).

This classification is termed by other critics as forced diaspora and

voluntary diaspora. Another critic and scholar Vinay Lai calls it ‘diaspora
of labour’ versus ‘diaspora of longing’. For most of the older diasporic
writers there is an unease of the dislocated and the deracinated who either
by choice or by compulsion have abandoned house/home in the country
of their birth for housing/lodging in their adopted country. For instance,
Naipaul, originally a third generation immigrant from a ‘branch of
Dubes’ of a Brahmin village of Uttar Pradesh, who moved to Trinidad
expresses a sense of unease on the question of inheritance. In A Way in
the World (1994), the narrator comments on the ancestry of the British
immigrant mortician Leonard Side/Sayed’s inheritance:

I might say that an ancestor of Leonard Side’s came from the

dancing groups of Lucknow, the lewd men who painted their
faces and tried to live like women. But that would be only a
 fragment of his inheritance, a fragment of the truth. We cannot
understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can
be strangers to ourselves.

This quote applies to all the first/second/third generation writers

who were migrants by compulsion, usually descendants of indentured
labourers from India sent to work in various British colonial plantations.
For the migrants by choice, the situation is totally different. Usually
upper-middle class and cosmopolitan, these first and second generation
writers live in a kind of cosmopolitan, globalized world where the
markers of their borderless state have often to be invented. Apart from
fictional example of Thamma who is contused between going and coming
home in Dhaka, in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, one is also
reminded of a recent experience in an international flight where in
between the movie scenes, the screen in front of me showed the image of
the plane with an arrow over it that was constantly pointing towards
Mecca with the mileage noted in bold below it. This attempt at mooring
oneself within the concept of a ‘meta-home’ in a borderless state of
existence at about thirty thousand feet height above sea level, is an
important feature of contemporary diasporic thought. One is also
reminded of the wedding cards that one often receives in Kolkata where
the bride’s and groom’s addresses are often mentioned along with their
original ‘home town’ in parenthesis. What is interesting is that for most
of the time, this ‘metahome’ is located in erstwhile East Pakistan, or
present Bangladesh, places where their fathers, grandfathers, or ancestors
hailed from, and which the bride or the groom have never ever visited.
These two instances therefore serve to emphasize the desire for roots and
belonging in all diasporic sensibilities.
 The idea of home as an ambivalent location shows that identities
are not fixed but stay in transition, drawing on different cultural traditions
at the same time. It may be tempting to think of identity as destined to
end up in one place or another, either returning to its roots or
disappearing through partial assimilation in a hermeneutic “fusion” that is
possible because of the supposed translatability and commensurability of
different cultures. Caught between a nativist traditionalism and a
postcolonial metropolitan assimilations, the migrant culture of the “in-
between” according to Homi Bhabha, dramatizes precisely the activity of
cultural untranslatability. These hybrid identities are metaphorically
located on borders and boundaries where the world of capitals and of
universalistic assumptions is subverted by interpenetration and reversals
of different cultures, where subjectivities are shifting, epistemologies are
questioned, and homogeneity is replaced by heterogeneity. As Arif Dirlik
has put it:
New diasporas have relocated the Self there and the Other here,
and consequently borders and boundaries have been
confounded. And the flow has become at once homogenizing
and heterogenizing; some groups share in common global
culture regardless of location while others take refuge in
cultural legacies that are far apart from one another as they were
at the origin of modernity. (P 352)

Therefore, the words exile, diaspora, migration, dislocation,

deracination and displacement are the leading metaphors used to express
not only disorientation but also ideological and existential fragmentation.
Dismantling the binary between the centre and the periphery, diasporicity
or nomadism refers; in fact, to a state of mind that manifests itself
through strategies of assimilation and resistance within the new cultures.
Academically speaking, the diasporic nature of Indian writing in English
by the so-called ‘voluntary’ diasporics once again has three visible
sections:

a) In the first category falls a writer like Bharati Mukherjee-one

who detests the idea of being called the immigrant writer and considers
herself mainstream American. Simplistically, she sees expatriates
resisting assimilation, immigrants welcoming it. “For me,” she says, “it is
a movement away from the aloofness of expatriation, to the exuberance
of immigration”. b) In the second category falls a whole group of writers
who shuttle between different continents. Within this group, some write
about their immigrant experiences, while others physically living there
write on the exoticism of their home country or of characters who go as
aliens and try to fit into the western world. Sunetra Gupta is a case in
point. Born in Calcutta, she now lives in Oxford and her novels Memories
of Rain and .4 Sin of Colour are set in both Calcutta and Oxford. Living
in London, Meera Syal too believes that “duality and conflict make you
want to express yourself. This is why (her) generation is so outspoken”.
c) The most complicated case is the third category of writers whose origin
is India but whose work has no connections as such with the mother
country. Bidisha Bandopadhyay (who incidentally never writes her
surname) is a second-generation Bengali writer born and brought up in
England. Her debut novel Seahorses (1997) is an urban pageant about
three young British men and is in no way even remotely connected to
India. Another interesting example is that of Abha Dawesar, whose debut
novel The Three of Us (2003) is not what we usually expect from a
twenty- six year old immigrant South Asian woman writer. She creates a
story that shrewdly explores sexual dependency from the perspective of a
white male investment banker in Manhattan, New York, whose affairs
range from having sex with his boss as well as his wife, all neatly timed
with the help of a mini-planner. In arecent article called “India Away
From Home,” Dawesar explains her predicament and raises several
pertinent questions that can be applied to many others as well:

My novel was about and in the voice of a young man: Andre

Bernard. A white man.A gay man.An American. The book was
not of India in any sense of the term. Can I be considered an
Indian writer by virtue of my birth alone? Do I remain an Indian
writer if I write in the voice of a white American man? Is it my
literature that makes me Indian or my passport? This class of
questions will gain in significance as diasporic writing speaks in
more and more tongues. (30)

Let one also examine the case of Jhumpa Lahiri whose Interpreter of
Maladies took the literary world by storm. Bill Buford, the literary editor
of The New Yorker catapulted her into limelight when he included her in
his list of “the twenty best young fiction writers in America today.” Bom
in London, raised in Rhode Island, Connecticut and presently living in
New York, Jhumpa set some of her stories in Calcutta because of “a
necessary combination of distance and intimacy” and in an interview
confessed to Radhika S. Shankar:

I went to Calcutta neither as a tourist nor was a former resident-

a valuable position, I think, for a writer.... 1 learnt to observe
things as an outsider and yet I also knew that, as different as
Calcutta is from Rhode Island, I belonged there in some
fundamental way. In the ways I didn’t seem to belong in the
United States.
 Another young novelist, Kiran Desai, whose debut Hullabaloo in
the Guava Orchard found extraordinary welcome on both sides of the
Atlantic, shuttles between New York and Cambridge and even goes off to
a remote retreat in Mexico along with her mother for literary inspiration.
The way all these novelists’ names are used at random by critics to define
Indian Writing in English as well makes things complicated indeed. Also,
the question remains whether writers living outside India forfeit the right
to comment on behalf of an entire nation or not. An Indian writer abroad
is hardly ever looked at as anything else but an Indian ethnic writer. So it
is good that at least some young writers are attempting to do away with
stereotypes.

Living in diaspora means living in forced or voluntary exile and

living in exile usually leads to severe identity confusion and problems of
identification with and alienation from old and new cultures and
homelands. In Shame Rushdie generalizes:

All migrants leave their pasts behind although some try to pack
it into bundles and boxes — but on the journey something seeps
out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even
their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of
migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked among the
scorn of strangers upon whom they see the rich clothing, the
brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging.

Therefore most diasporic writing is suffused with identification

consciousness and the problem of living in an alien society. As Rushdie
has put it in Imaginary Homelands, the position of ‘the exile or
immigrant’ is one of ‘profound uncertainties’, (10); The diasporic person
is at home neither in the West nor in India and is thus ‘unhomed’ (Homi
Bhabha, The Location of Culture) in the most essential sense of the term.
Thus the concept and interpretation of‘home’ becomes vital in all kinds
of diasporic writing. Tara’s temporary return to Calcutta after seven years
in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger's Daughter reveals the polarities of
repulsion/attraction to her native home India as also her adopted home
America by marriage to the American David Cartwright. Ralph Singh in
Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, shifting between the West Indies and London,
finds ‘home’ nowhere. Gogol Ganguli’s meta-Indian home in Jhurnpa
Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) consists of a Hindu patriarchal home in
the interior while externally it looks like any typical American home. In
exploring the meaning of place, G.S. Sharat Chandra in his book of short
stories Sari of the Gods, brings to the forefront how “home” can be lost
forever, vividly portraying the confusion, miscommunication, and
misplaced ambitions of many new citizens in the New World. These
universal feelings of alienation underlie the larger common desire for
understanding and peace. According to Sudesh Mishra,
The movement from Seepersad Naipaul to Meera Syal suggests
an important rethinking of the concept of ‘home’ within the
diaspora, especially as this occurs against the backdrop of the
global shift from the centring or centripedal logic or monopoly
capitalism to the decentering or centrifugal logic of
transnational capitalism. Whereas for the sugar diaspora ‘home’
signifies an end to itinerant wandering, in putting down the
roots, ‘home’ for the masala diaspora is linked to the strategic
espousal of rootlessness, to the constant mantling and
 dismantling of the self in makeshift landscapes (294).

So when diasporic writing tries to reflect real and imagined worlds,

once again quoting from Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, it “is obliged
to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been lost.” Thus
one can find roving, unsettled, alienated people in the fictive world of
contemporary diasporic writers yearning for a real or imaginary
homeland, a permanent or temporary return. The declared intentions of
inclusive cultural translation, of universalization, go sadly awry in created
aesthetic constructs. However, this could also be seen as the strength of
diasporic texts — that they are incomplete, the fact that they do not claim
to offer the ultimate truth — the fact that they deal with alternatives
rather than essentials. It is these alternative histories and narratives that
Salman Rushdie’s texts have offered from Midnight's Children (1981)
down to The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2003).

The different labels that have been attributed to Indian diasporic

writing include “Neither Here Nor There,” the Trishanku image from the
mythic tale of The Ramayana made popular by writers like Uma
Parameswaran and Sujata Bhatt Further, diasporic writers have variously
described themselves as migrants, plural, hybrid, expatriate, immigrant —
every individual investing these words with personal and restrictive
connotations. In Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie extends his perception of
migrant writers as endowed with a double/plural, insider/ outsider
perspective, whose hybrid predicament can be universalized into art with
a globally accepted theme. In her introduction to Darkness, Bharati
Mukherjee distinguishes between ‘expatriate’ and ‘immigrant’:

In my fiction and in my Canadian experience, immigrants were

 lost souls, put upon and pathetic. Expatriates on the other hand,
knew all too well who and what they were, and what foul fate
had befallen them. Like V.S. Naipaul in whom I imagined a
model, I tried to explore state-of-the-art expatriation.

The alienated consciousness of the writer using the English

language is another important factor. But since the late 1970’s and early
1980’s, after expatriation, immigration to the West, the trauma of
uprooting, the diasporic consciousness and the loss of “home” and
identity have preoccupied many Indians writing in English. In order to do
away with the false image of projecting India as a land of snake-charmers
and princes and elephants, they have started inscribing Indian words
without glossary or italicization into the text with a vengeance. This use
of heteroglossia leads to a renewed exoticization practically a re-
orientalization of India in their writing. This commodification of India in
the global literary marketplace is most visible in the anti-realistic
representation in Rushdie’s later fiction, as well as in the more realistic
depictions in Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s works.

The relationship between East and West, both used as metaphors

for different ways of life, have also been explored in the writing of most
of these writers. Diasporic Indian writers in English have often been
criticized of writing for the Western audience in mind and with an eye
towards bagging a Booker or a Commonwealth writer’s award, along
with their astronomical advance amounts: they all seem to try out their
luck in this Cinderella syndrome.

History, in addition to magic realism, has been the major

preoccupation of the recent Indian writer in English. There is a view that
many of our contemporary novelists writing in English are overburdened
with history and in novelist Shashi Deshpande’s opinion, the novels are
so full of details from Indian history that they end up sagging under its
weight. One novelist whose novels do not suffer from this excess as
alleged by Deshpande is Rohinton Mistry. His A Fine Balance attempts to
locate the lives of its characters in a historical context, i.e. to suggest that
the personal is seen in relation to the general. His Such a Long Journey
(1996) follows a similar pattern and explores into areas of human
experience that were hitherto only tangentially touched upon. Amitav
Ghosh is another novelist who explores the relationships between
historical processes and human destiny. In his novel The Shadow Lines,
Ghosh successfully interweaves personal history with a nation’s destiny
giving us a poignant story of the partition. The recurrent theme of
comparing ‘home’ culture with that of the ‘new’ world where the
diasporic writer is settled is found in a lot of diasporic writing. This is
often defined as a new form of cultural imperialism. Another direct result
of the globalized world is found the way novels are set in a contemporary
deterritorialized world spanning different continents. Thus, the characters
in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines or Sunetra Gupta’s Moonlight into
Marzipan, elude a sort of generalised cosmopolitan identity that tends to
slamp quite a sizeable part of Indian English fiction in general.

In an essay entitled “The Historical Formation of Indian English

Literature” (2003). Vinay Dharwadker mentions how migrant and
itinerant writers have energized Indian writing in English in most of its
historical phases: Din Muhammad and Rammohan Roy at the inception;
Toru Dutt and Manmohan Ghose before the close of the nineteenth
century; Sarojini Naidu, Muik Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and G.V. Desani in
the later colonial period; and Nirad Chaudhuri, Ved Mehta, Santha Rama
Rau, Aubrey Menen, Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, Nissirn Ezekiel,
Dorn Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, and A.K. Ramanujan, among others, in
the early postcolonial decades. Despite such precedents, however, the
literary- cultural output of the contemporary diaspora has metamorphosed
the inner kinetics of Indian English literature on an unprecedented scale.
He further stresses on how in the last few decades of the 20th century, the
very centers of Indian English literary culture appear to have migrated
front the subcontinent, as writers of the Indian diaspora — particularly in
Great Britain and North America—have rapidly and increasingly come to
dominate the international literary marketplace in the English language.

Before winding up, it has to be mentioned, reiterating

Dhadwadker’s idea, that the diaspora has perceptibly modified the four
primary zones of contact that have provided a social framework for
Indian English literary culture since the late eighteenth century, the
principal change being that the zones are now geographically located
overseas. First, in its foreign setting, the zones now bring Indian
professionals into contact with people of many more races and
nationalities than it did in the colonial period of the subcontinent,
absorbing them into a radically multicultural and multilingual
international white-collar workforce. It also attracts much higher number
of educated Indian women into a wider array of professions than before,
especially in North America, which has contributed generally as well as
concretely to the growth and dissemination of Indian women’s writing
and intellectual work across international borders. Well-educated,
professionally successful, and financially secure diasporic and itinerant
Indians in the zones of employment abroad currently constitute networks
of a few million Anglicized, Europeanized, or Westernized men and
women scattered around the globe. This fragmented yet interlinked
community has produced many of the newest authors of Indian origin in
English, besides serving as an extensive, enthusiastic international
readership for contemporary lndian-English writing.

Secondly, the zone of marriage and family has altered a lot in its
internal structure resulting in varied interracial and intercultural social-
sexual relations and has left its mark in the racial, cultural and sexual
aspects of diasporic lndian-English writing. Interracial marriage in the
diaspora mediates the work, for instance, of Bharati Mukherjee, Meena
Alexander and Sujata Bhatt, among women writers, and of Salman
Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, among male writers, and its sexual and
familial boundaries are ruptured by the thematization, for example, of
homosexuality in Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry, of bisexuality in Vikram
Seth’s poetry' and fiction, and of lesbian identity and queer politics in
Suniti Namjoshi’s verse and prose.

Thirdly, many of the lndian-English writers in the diaspora come

from non-Christian background and continue to occupy a remarkable
spectrum of identities and backgrounds in relation to religion. Though
broadly secular in content and perspective, the sheer diversity of the
religious backgrounds of its authors and hence also of their related
ethnic, linguistic, regional, and cultural origins on the subcontinent
constitutes one of the greatest strengths and source of fascination of this
literature. We have several Muslim, Christian. Hindu, and Parsi writers
representing India in the diaspora.
 Fourthly, the zone that has expanded the most in scope and effect
in the diaspora is that of intercultural friendship and social relations that
has proved vital for the maintenance of the Indian component in a
culturally ambidextrous, cosmopolitan identity. This division of cultural
loyalties has contributed once again to the extensive revision of two key
features of Indian writing in English. It has altered their conceptions of
what constitutes their Indianness vis-a-vis the East-West encounter and
done away with the earlier formulations offered by Kipling, Forster and
Raja Rao. Also, shifting away from the bookish Oxbridge norm of
writing, the English language used by the Indian writers in the diaspora
has moved towards a plethora of national, international, colloquial,
generic, and experimental styles.

Finally, Indian immigrants and their descendents in different parts

of the world differ from each other in their attitudes towards and actual
connections with India, resulting in a corresponding spectrum of
conceptions of India, Indian religions and cultures and especially of
Indianness that is directly related to the psycho-social effects of
displacement and dislocation.
Looking at the present day scenario, one can conclude by stating
that diasporic Indian writing in English is in a state of good health and
flourishing as never before but it still requires an expert’s eye to
judiciously segregate the wheat from the chaff. Also, though it is
impossible to predict how Indian writing in English will be defined just
ten years from now, it can be certainly stated that canonical Anglo-Saxon
literature is already threatened with this onrush and literary flowering of
India and the harbingers of 21 st century literature will be a new breed of
writers whose origins are from this part of the de-colonized world
irrespective of which part of the world they are actually residing now. No
wonder Routledge put in an advertisement in the Times Literary
Supplement to this effect: “God help the English Novel! Send in serious
manuscripts on fiction”.

Since the last quarter of the 20th century, South Asian writing has
increasingly received greater acclaim all over the world. “The success of
Rushdie, Roy, Desai and Adiga enormously boosted the entir corpus of
Indian writing in English. There has also been a tremendous change in the
patterns of publishing and distribution of Indian writing in English over
the last two decades. A remarkable feature of the 21st century writers is
that they are not only involved in the process of creative writing but are
also involving themselves in advertising, publicity, pricing, sales and
follow-up of their books” (Vinai 33). The benefits an Indian English
writer enjoys is enormous: like prestigious awards, world-wide audience,
huge-prize-money, translations and film- adaptations. This has made both
writers as well as publishers very enthusiastic. Within the faction of
Indian English writers, there are rifts and clashes between home based
writers and the diasporic writers, between regional language writers and
Indian English writers. And unfortunately, this ‘insider-outsider’ debate
has been raging across literary circles for more than three decades now.
Till the present century, the diasporic writers have been dominating the
literary firmament, and the success ratio mostly remains tilted towards
that of the diasporic writers. However, the most contested issue in this
remains as to how a writer occupying a privileged position in the West
can write about the East.

What is sought here is to locate the presence of diasporic

consciousness in the works of Anita Nair and establish that this
consciousness has provided her with a healthy location for recreating
home, country and her own identity. Nair recurrently comes up with a
narrative of dislocation and attempts to recreate an identity not just for
her characters but herself too. The debate over authenticity and
Indianness was started by Salman Rushdie in his famous collection of
essays Imaginary Homelands (1991) where Rushdie scorns at the Indian
literary vanguard that gauges the authenticity and Indianness of a work of
art based on location of the author and the language in which the writer
writes. He accuses the literary world of being burdened with the bogey of
authenticity by which he means that sources, forms, style, language and
symbols all should be derived from a supposedly homogeneous and
unbroken tradition. Debates over Indianness have often been
counterproductive, even leading to cultural intolerance at times. The
Rushdie-Roy- Desai-Adiga success has inspired the aspiring writers to
venture and market India its images, sounds and flavor to give it a truly
exotic treat to the audience abroad. The noted Kannada writer, U.R.
Ananthamurthy says, “A lot of new writers who get the kind of attention
that Rushdie gives them are writers who write for export. It is a shame
that in the whole world only Indian writers in English write for export . . .
these writers are ‘restaurant- keepers of Indian culture’ who cater only to
a certain market” (Belliappa 6)

After a book is launched, the question whether the writer has

written a genuinely ‘Indian’ book or simply an entertainment for the
Western audience and the Indo-Anglican cultural elite haunts the literary
world. In her collection of non-fiction essays The Perishable Empire
(2001), Meenakshi Mukheijee suggests that this self-conscious anxiety
that Indian writers have, is reflected in an overplay of markers of
‘Indianness’ to establish their ‘authenticity’ as well as intimacy of their
knowledge of Indian culture and geography. She also puts forth the
argument that the novelist in the Indian language seems more involved
with the local and particular, compared to the national project in English
which has a greater anxiety to appear ‘Indian’ because the target
readership is diffuse and may include those who have no first-hand
experience of India. This anxiety sometimes manifests itself in a pull
towards homogenization, an inability to perceive those realities which are
situated outside the cognitive limits imposed by English and which
cannot be appropriated into east-west or colonial paradigms. As a result
of this, defects like being ornate or over descriptive writing, exoticization,
nostalgic evocation of sensuous details, and glossing comes to play.
Mukherjee further goes on to claim that to write about India in English is
at best a brave failure, and at worst a betrayal of Indian “realities.” She
also contends that “in the English texts of India there may be a greater
pull towards a homogenization of reality, an essentializing of India, a
certain flattening out of the complicated and conflicting contours, the
ambiguous and shifting relations that exist between individuals and
groups in a plural society.” (P 172)
Her argument is that a regional writer like O.V. Vijayan or
Balachandra Nemade won’t go in for such ornamental representation
because he knows exactly his “constituency and is secure in the
knowledge of the shades of response his associated word-play or ironic
understatement will evoke in Malayalam or Marathi readers who are
equipped with the keys for decoding these oblique messages.”
(Mukherjee 172) She places the bhasha novelists on a pedestal because
they seldom make figurative use of something as amorphous as the idea
of India like the Indian- English writers because they have a multitude of
specific and local experiences to turn into tropes and play with. The other
charges she levels are: that Indo-Anglican writers write for a Western
audience, ‘make too much money,’ ‘a lot of these writers live abroad,’ so
they are disconnected from Indian realities, they are a prey to nostalgia
and since they don’t suffer like us, they can’t possibly be virtuous enough
to be good artists.’ (182). Mukherjee argues that exoticism in the writing
of the earlier generation of Indian Anglophone writers signified their
compulsion to provide a veneer of detachment from the indigenous
context; whereas, in contemporary writers, exoticism is often the outcome
of their anxiety to be viewed as authentic. Eminent critic Rajeshwari
Sunder Rajan too endorses the view that Indian writers in English are
positioned to look in two directions, towards their Indian English readers
on one side, and their readers in the West on the other. They swing
between explaining too much or too little: leading to the “anxiety.” (45)

This debate is further taken forward by Vikram Chandra who

refutes all the above arguments in his essay The Cult of Authenticity in
the Boston Review in March 2000. His famous vitriolic counter attack is
evident in his statement:
To have less money does not mean that you are more virtuous;
to have more money does not mean you are less capable of
integrity.. . . [I]f you write in Marathi or Gujarati, of course it is
hugely angering to be told that you are not as “strong” as a
bunch of toffeenosed English speaking brats, and of course it is
annoying to enjoy less than your fair share of any pie. But when
a certain set of people start referring to you collectively and
generally as “regional writers,” and when they start locating in
you a paranormal connection to reality and lost innocence and
original virtue, and using you as a stick to beat other writers
over the head with, you may be absolutely certain that you are
being simplified, exploited, and used. Saintliness may have its
 temporary and ethereal satisfactions, but for any artist it is
finally a trap(Inteivew)

Chandra concludes his entire counter-attack essay by stating that

whatever you do felicitously will be Indian, and if some reader in New
Jersey finds it exotic, this is irrelevant. Interestingly, Amit Chaudhuri's
article, “The East as a Career,” too was written as a defence of Indian
Anglophone literature. His main concern is to reject the charge of
“exoticism” frequently levelled against this body of work. The
publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism,

Chaudhuri contends, has generated a climate of obsession with the

“politics of representation” (111) at the expense of the appreciation of
literary practice. Meaningful discussions regarding the mystery of the
creative act have been usurped by tired moral gestures about the social
construction of meaning. From these bitter counter attacks and
justifications it is quite clear that, in the post-Saidian era, analysis of a
text’s conditions of production has taken clear precedence over the
examination of its meaning.

The specific accusation that both Chaudhuri and Chandra contest is

that Indian Anglophone writers tend to become Orientalists to cater to
their international audience. In their articles, Chaudhuri and Chandra
highlight some of the central critical assumptions against Indian
Anglophone literature. They foreground the critical contention that Indian
English writers capitalize on their ethnic identity in ways that both pander
to immigrant nostalgia and offer images of India that are packaged for
easy consumption in the West. The exoticized cultural images, the
critique claims, rather than being a presentation of the national condition,
in effect are details of banal particularities devoid of history and politics.
(Chaudhuri 122-24).

Many native writers like Makarand Paranjape fully endorse the

above viewpoint and have alerted us to the presence of neoorientalism.
He claims that if one examines the cultural politics and dynamics of such
representations in present, one still would be struck by how these
representations still continue and how they are generated by those people
who were formerly colonized. Though some of the representational
procedures might be unavoidable and beautifully created, there seems to
be an inherent underlying need in most of the Indian writers to repeat the
same tropes of the exotic, inscrutable or impossible Orient. Paranjape
further argues that when an Indian English writer sits down to write a
book on India, he or she, in many ways, is seeking to occupy a territory
that is already occupied, whether it is the primordialist, neoorientalist or
the constructionist subaltern.
The excessive enthusiasm of the critics to curb the regionalizing
tendencies in literature like sprinkling local tastes, sights and flavour in
their works can lead to dampening of the spirit of the piece of work.
Fiction, which is specifically region based, needs some local touch to
create the ambience and atmosphere of the novel. Local words, phrases or
proverbs and usages translated into English would not produce the
desired effect. For example, in Anita Nair’s novel Mistress, Roman’s
reminiscences about his hometown Kerala when he is in London with
Angela. This kind of nostalgic representation not only fits into the novel
but gives the reader a beautiful graphical analysis and comparison of how
a typical day would conclude for an individual back from his work in
Kerala vis-a-vis a day in the life of a Londoner.
 At home, I would have gone to the kitchen, gathered a handful
of dried coconut fronds, lit a fire and warmed a huge cauldron
of water, while the water is heated, I would rub oil into my skin
and then bathe in that water scented with smoke & wood fire.
After that I would serene myself with a plate of rice, not these
bleached white grains, but the reddish brown rice still tasting of
the earth and sunshine. There would be a curry of green papaya
cooked in butter milk and a piece of fried fish. (378)

Now these kinds of descriptions are crucial to the novel in order to

understand the differences in habits between the East and West which
make a migrant so very uneasy and alienated in a foreign land. Many
critics fail to realize that each writer carries a cultural baggage unique to
the region they belong to, resulting in varied descriptions of the
quintessential ‘back home.’
In a way, they bring the rich diversity that we have in India into
their writings by portraying the minute details of their rites, dress, cuisine,
etc. into the literature they create. It is fully agreed with Meenakshi
Mukherjee in her view that “genuine writers as a species are
individualistic in any language refusing to fall into predictable models”.
(Mukherjee 183) Whether the writers are vernacular, native or diasporic,
whether privileged or subaltern, each writer comes from a specific socio-
historical background therefore, their experience and sense of perception
will be unique. And therefore none can be easily ignored or bracketed
under a particular category. Niranjan Mohanty holds:

“Any creative writer, whether writing in the regional language or

English, has an unwritten, unconscious responsibility to the society,
culture, country, tradition, linguistic heritage he belongs to or shares with.
One cannot disapprove of or dismantle this hiatus, this inviolable,
insurmountable relationship, the relationship that ultimately goes into the
making of a literature which acquires the condition of music, or of fire or
silence or of timelessness” (P 7)

Creative artists might have a different perception and different set

of experiences and also might be dealing with themes they feel strongly
about. It can also be seen as “strong conviction of the writer about his/her
culture, nation or institution. Unless the entire text becomes jargonized to
the extent of obscurity, such descriptions should not be challenged or
dismissed as mere exoticization to grab the attention of the Western
audience” (Vinai 39).

Among the Indian English writers, Kamala Das, Geeta Abraham

Jose, Jaishree Misra, Meena Alexander, Anita Nair and Susan
Vishwanathan are the famous writers who hail from Kerala. Writers like
Anita Nair and Arundhati Roy have proved that representations of caste,
gender or other varied practices of Kerala are not the prerogative of
native/vernacular writers. These questionable practices can be analyzed at
the ‘periphery’ too. There are innumerable smaller cultural productions
and channels of distribution that contribute to the struggle against
injustice. This raging debate in Indian English writing over authenticity
and representation is going on with no consensus in sight. It is this
context that makes the work of writers like Anita Nair relevant to the
Indian student of literature. The unique location she occupies in the
terrain of Indian literary fiction makes her views, expressed through her
fiction and her non-fictional writing significant.
 The term ‘diaspora’ has become popular and fashionable and is
widely used in the media and popular parlance as well as in scholarly
literature. The popularity of the term does not however, mean that there is
consensus over its definition or clarity in its usage. Etymologically, the
term ‘diaspora’ is derived from two words dia and speirein, which
literally means ‘to spread’ or ‘to scatter’ or ‘to disperse.’ It was originally
used to refer to the dispersion of Jews after Babylonian exile in 586 BCE.
Critic Clifford argues that the peculiar feature of diasporic community is
a formation of a double consciousness that enables the individual to
transcend disappointments by emphasizing the strengths of self and
community. According to him, “Experience of loss, marginality, and
exile (differently cushioned by class) are often reinforced by systematic
exploitation and blocked advancement. This constitutive suffering
coexists with the skills of survival: strength in adaptive distinction,
discrepant cosmopolitanism, and stubborn visions of renewal. Diaspora
consciousness lives loss and hope as a defining tension.” (P 312)

Though Anita Nair is classified as stay-at-home writer by the

literary circles and academic institutions, Nair’s fiction strongly exhibits
the diasporic consciousness. Bom in Shornoor, a small town in northern
Kerala and brought up in Avadi, 22 kms. away from Chennai, her heart
holds a fond longing for her native home-state, Kerala. This longing is
evident in the glowing terms in which she describes the landscape and the
obeisance she pays to the rich cultural heritage of Kerala in her narrative.
In her Introduction to the anthology Where the Rain is born: Writings
about Kerala (2002), Kerala looks and feels like paradise on earth:
“Nowhere else in the world have I seen so many hues of green. The
velvety green of the moss on the wall.The deep green of the hibiscus
bush.The dapple green of the jackfruit. The jade green of the paddy. . . .
Leaves.Parakeet’s wing.The frogs.The opaque green of silence.” (i)

Anita Nail’s Kerala is an imagined space, recreated from memory,

nostalgia and the oral narratives of the people she loves. Kerala, its
villages, art forms, ayurveda, dance-drama, monsoons, snake-shrines,
coconuts, elephants, jackfruits all form the backdrop of her novels. It is
this part-real, part-imagined land which is the source of her inspiration.
But unfortunately, for people who reside within the territorial borders, a
migrant remains an outsider or a visitor in spite of the latter’s attachment
to the land or the local customs. The obsession with Kerala gives her
work its concrete specificity; it also limits the scope of her narrative and
her range as a creative writer.

Ironically, Anita Nair, who is not an exile, does not choose to settle
down in the land of her dreams in spite of its excellent topography. The
reason behind this is the economic gains the host state provides and the
fact that social reality of Kerala is quite depressing. The most literate
state which has a unique higher female ratio is also unfortunately the state
with highest suicide rates, highest liquor consumption, and mad-houses
overflowing with people having psychiatric problems. (Jacob 176) The
politics of the state leaves a lot to be desired. One half of party tickets are
given to older generation (grand-old men and women in their late 80s and
90s) who contests and re-contests till their death-bed. The other half goes
to candidates who have a criminal background. (Outlook 40-41) In an
interview with William Wolok writer Anita Nair voices the divide
between the real and imagined Kerala, “to live there is to be
disenchanted, because it’s a beautiful place with a lot of ugly things”. (P
19)
 Anita Nair’s perception of the “ugly things” becomes clearer in her
Introduction to Where the Rain is Bom whereby she says that when
Kerala is offered to the world it is “a package wrought of colour,
traditions, dainty foods, coconut lined lagoons and ayurveda. . . .What of
the total lack of industry, high unemployment, a competitive and
conspicuous consumerism, bureaucracy, corruption, or the stifling
conservative attitudes.” (ix)

The narratives and reconstruction of land home (read as home

state) of such writers who are not forcefully driven out of their roots and
culture are in Achebe’s words, “generally less painful and more playful,
less emotional and more intellectual” (Achebel P 5).Though a writer
leaves his home for the metropolis, the metropolis provides him/her with
a congenial and healthy location for recreating a vision of home, country
and even his/her identity. Such a reconstruction proves a source of
understanding and awareness, even empowerment. It is only those who
are pushed out of their home and land against their will, who undergo a
serious fracture of their self or psyche. This kind of dislocation is painful
because it entails abandoning what one has grown up with, of being
rooted in a definite place and climate within a network of social and
cultural relations, which are crucial to defining one’s self.

In spite of being a migrant, Nair’s work approximates the condition

of the artist in exile. For her, exile is more of a condition of the soul than
a political reality. Migrants carry with them a socio-cultural baggage
which among other things includes, a pre defined social identity, a set of
religious beliefs and practices, a framework or norms and values
governing, family and kinship organization and food habits. Her books
like The Better Man, Mistress, and Lessons in Forgetting show how the
experience of displacement and migration can be both emancipatory as
well as a harrowing experience.

Also, unlike the conception of most of the people regarding the

trauma of exile, homelessness and relocation, Nair shows how this state
of mind can afflict any individual within the particular state or country.
Even an average metropolitan person can experience something like
diasporic exile. In Sankaran Raveen- dran's words: “The pain, anxiety,
fear and insecurity that Indians have to pass through in their daily life,
especially for those who live in States other than their own, generate a
dense form of diaspora. The situation of those outside India is an
“attenuated and alembicated” form of the dense forms inside India.”
(Sharma 135) The migrant, on returning back to his village, becomes
alien to the culture and customs of that particular village. Though the
inhabitants of the village acknowledge him/her and involve him/her in
ceremonies and rituals, an opaque barrier still remains which prevents
them from treating the metro returned person as one among them. Thus
migrant is deemed ‘an outsider’ which gives him/her the feeling of non-
belonging and a no-whereness. In The Better Man, we find Mukundan
trapped in a similar situation. In a letter to his friend Anand in Madras we
find him describing his retired life in his village Kaikurussi thus:

As for me, I’m pulling on in this place. I’m slowly getting used
to village life. Believe me; it is nothing like what you see in all
those Malayalam movies you like to watch on the video. I can
understand your curiosity as to what I do all day. Actually,
come to think of it, there isn’t any fixed pattern to my day here.
 It is very different, and very often I wish I could return to an
office routine. It gave a structure to my existence. (P 121)

In The Better Man painter Bhasi, who is forcibly evicted by the

local big-wigs of Kaikurrussi for the construction of community hall
project, faces a similar predicament. The natives of Kaikurrussi find it
most suitable to deprive Bhasi of his land to build a community hall
because he is not a native of the village. The pain and anguish he suffers
on being told to leave the land he loves is unbearable for him. The
villagers feel that because Bhasi is a settler he would have no qualms
over leaving the land of Kaikurrusi. To which Bhasi retorts:

So is that what it has been reduced to? That as a native you have
certain rights, and as a settler I don’t. I love this village, this
land, more than anyone else in the village does. I love it as if it
were a living being. But because I am not a native I’m
dispensable. How am I going to make you or anyone else
understand what Kaikurussi means to me? What can I say to
you who see this land merely as mud.grass and trees, of the
bonding the land and I share? (P 311)

Nair’s migrant consciousness is evident from the continuous

evocation of the motif of return to the homeland in almost all her major
novels. As a child, the thought that ‘one day we would return to Kerala’
persistently haunted Anita. And this motif is manifest in her characters
like Sethu and Mukundan in The Better Man, Koman and Sethu in
Mistress and Jak in Lessons in Forgetting. The glorification of home,
tinged with nostalgia, define many of the characters who are compelled to
stay back due to economic reasons. Though Anita Nair is sympathetic
towards this nowhere man she has no qualms in portraying the ridiculous
lengths they go to create this sense of belonging while staying in an alien
land. In Lessons in Forgetting, Prof. Jak, living in the U.S, refuses to
repair the leaky tap in the garden because he wants to hear it drip, which
reminds him of the kitchen tap in the house he grew up in. Furthermore
he even disallows his wife to clean up the bird shit in the patio because it
reminds him of the backyard of his house in Mylapore. (151) Nair
demonstrates how migrancy can be both emancipatory as well as painful.
Thus throughout Anita Nair’s novels we can trace a double consciousness
pervading her writings or a like/dislike relationship which can be
construed as a byproduct of the ideological construct fashioned by
external stimuli and inner consciousness.

Critiques of caste inequality and gender oppression filled women’s

writings as early as the Fifties. Saraswati Amma’s brave voice against the
oppression of women laid a foundation to Malayalam fiction; and assailed
male chauvinism even as it challenged the complacent, subservient and
stereotypical women. In the fiction of regional writers from Kerala like
Sarah Joseph and Kamala Das (who are located within Kerala), themes
like caste and gender are treated in a radical and revolutionary manner.
For instance in her novel Othappu, Joseph shows how within the
institution of church, discrimination based on caste and gender are
commonplace. The protagonist Margalitha commits blasphemy by not
only renouncing her nun-hood but also going ahead and marrying Roy
Francis Karikkan, another like-minded individual trapped within the
robes of priesthood. However, it is the liberal outsider perspective that
actually grants Anita Nair an opportunity to understand the caste
oppression more objectively without infusing the narrative with a gloss of
activism.

While activism itself is not a limiting factor in real life, it does

interfere with a novelist’s attempt to create a world that resembles the
‘real’ world even as it lays bare the processes through which it is
constructed and sustained. She is one of the few writers to explore the
complex psyche of upper caste individuals like Mukundan inThe Better
Man and Radha inMistresswho struggle in their attempts to reconcile
their sympathies and emotions for the lower caste and class individuals
like Kamban and the factory workers with their class-induced beliefs that
underpin their very identity. Nair brings out the cause of this dichotomy
to give the reader a comprehensive view of how caste ideologies undergo
a panoramic overhaul with the infiltration of Western ideologies and
education. The highlight of Nair’s fiction is her portrayal of conflict in
the mind of her protagonists between the desire to belong to the upper
caste they come from and the awareness that the fulfillment of this desire
necessarily involves giving up human decency. The other major feature
of her fiction is the depiction of the reverse flow of power, the subversion
of the power structure through the evocation of myths, legends and sagas.
The next chapter deals with this point in some detail.

Due to her unique insider-outsider status. Nair assumes a vantage

point whereby she can contemplate on the socio cultural aspects of a
society without being consumed by the myriad debates on class, caste and
gender by various groups. In Rushdie’s terms a writer like Nair can
“speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and
appeal” (12) Nair can surreptitiously sneak in, observe and discretely
withdraw without getting involved in the vortex of political activity. And
it is perhaps this which has helped her to perceive the great bridge which
exists between the Kerala myth and reality. In the author’s words
fromWhere the Rain is Born: Writings about Kerala, it is the “craving to
read beyond lines and see beyond what is on display. To probe beyond
the surface and tap into the seams of everyday. To shrug aside recycled
nostalgia and to see Kerala for what it truly is.” (Introduction ix) Her
brief stint in Kerala while completing her education has actually equipped
her for her task as a creative writer by providing her with the historical
background as well as an intimate understanding of the caste and gender
dynamics that operate within the territorial borders of the State. Besides
this, during her occasional visits to Kerala with her brother as a child she
consistently gathered snippets about the various myths, traditional beliefs
and folklores from her parents and relatives. Furthermore she is an avid
and extensive reader of Ma- layalam literature and follows all the literary
trends of Kerala.
In a sense, Nair is a product of three cultures and her knowledge of
five languages gives her a distinct advantage over homegrown writers
rooted in their culture that they almost blindly worship. To borrow
Salman Rushdie’s words from Imaginary Homelands: “If literature is in
part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then
once our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us
with such angles.” (10). Said too affirms this view in his work
Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (2001)
where he says that by crossing borders of several kinds, a person breaks
“barriers of thought and experience,” which opens up new ways of
understanding people and situations. (P 185) The distance also provides
these creative artists with a sense of order and a pattern and a sense of
control unavailable to most artists located within the confines of a socio-
cultural context.
 Anita Nair feels that even though the landscape of Kerala figures
overwhelmingly in her writings she needs to keep a physical distance and
write outside her home state. In her perspective: “You will be limited if
you’re in the middle of things” (P 23). If we look at any native
Malayalam writer say for instance writers like M.T. Vasudevan Nair or
Malayatoor Ramakrishnan, their writings are heavily influenced by the
ideology of the Left which makes their works totally predictable. But a
writer like Anita Nair enjoys a critical distance from the local politics and
affiliations of the State machinery. Hence, her portrayal of the
contemporary life in Kerala tends to persuade one as an authentic account
of that life. Through the character of Comrade Jayan, who personifies the
communist ideals, Nair shows how easily these ideals are eroded and
watered down due to the compulsions of real politic. “The party
understands that certain projects need the backing of capitalist enterprise.
The party encourages us to support such ventures. At least then some of
the bourgeois wealth will reach the needy masses.” (P 307) I am not for a
moment suggesting that Nair’s is a value-neutral account, but gently
reminding the reader of Ngugi’s conviction that “every writer is a writer
in politics.” But in Nair’s case, her politics does not get in the way of a
comprehensive treatment of the socio-cultural phenomena she chooses to
deal with. Furthermore her familiarity with three cultures has given her a
strong multicultural perspective. Hers is “an awareness of simultaneous
dimension, an awareness [that is] contrapuntal.” (Said 86)

One of the major endeavours of many migrant and diasporic

writers is their search for roots and identity. Anita Nair is no exception to
this. It is one of her preoccupations, evident from her fictional works.
Nair’s works are shaped by the active engagement with the dominant
cultural forms to establish a space for oneself. Occasionally her creative
endeavors are devoted in settling her crisis within her own self to
ascertain the cultural space which she wants to call her home which
perhaps is the dilemma of every kid whose parents have left their home
state for better employment opportunities. In an interview with Wollok,
the author admits: “in India people maintain an identity because of the
language they speak. Though you might be Indian, you feel that your
roots are in the state where you were originally bom. So Kerala is home
for me; everywhere else is just a place to live”(P 63)

On the one hand she adores her native land Kerala, but on the other
she seems to be disturbed by the inherent politics of the place. Within the
parameters of her own hometown, she is an outsider who makes a few
sporadic visits. And it seems very likely that the cottage built by her in
Mundukottukurrussi is to battle this deep insecurity within the recesses of
her heart and perhaps reinforce this link to her roots and foster a sense of
belongingness. It is the impending diasporic consciousness and insecurity
of being thrown out of the host state that makes a person invest in one
handful of soil (Kerala Kaumadi interview) in the land of their
forefathers. A similar sentiment of joy is expressed by Salman Rushdie in
his collection of essays Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981-1991 on being claimed by his land of birth, Mumbai. “I felt as if I
was being claimed, or informed that the facts of my far away life were
illusions, and this continuity was the reality.” (154) It is the same need to
reclaim her identity in Kerala which is depicted in Anita Nair’s fiction
through characters like Mukundan and Koman. And perhaps it is the
same longing for one’s own land that has compelled Nair to stay back in
India rather than choose any other foreign location to comfortably
emigrate to like most of the Indian English writers do after attaining their
initial bouts of success in the literary world.

For Anita Nair, writing is a compulsion and an earnest attempt to

understand many things about life, society and human beings. Her ideal
writer is a scavenger who collects material from everywhere. Her
allegiance is to mainly Indian writers like Premchand, Rakesh Mohan,
and M.T. Vasudevan Nair. Anita Nair expresses her disdain for artists
who dilute an art form for cheap publicity, “I would have found it haul to
In, with myself if, to ensure publication or greater acceptance, 1 chose to
write in a way that wasn’t mine. If I allowed myself to be persuaded into
introducing certain elements that might make my book more saleable or
change my storyline to make it more acceptable. Whatever form one
chooses to write in, artistic integrity demands we retain honesty and not
masquerade it as something else”.
Nair feels a deep sense of disenchantment towards those who
trivialize art for filling their own coffers. And this disgust is reflected in
Roman’s criticism of Sundaran, the kathakali artist who had reinvented
himself by false claims to add greater charisma to his reputation as a
classical Kathakali artist.

Classical art requires art from the audience. You need to

educate yourself, and it takes time to reach a level where you
can understand the artist’s interpretation. Naturally this means
that the audience is limited and the rewards even more so. So
when I see someone like Sundaran butchering Kathakali to
ensure greater popularity, to the extent that all that is noble and
brilliant and complex about it is removed, I find it repugnant.
 He is playing to the gallery, providing light entertainment
disguised as classical art. (Mistress 417)

Nair’s views on feminism are expressed in her fiction and in her

interviews. She vehemently opposes being labeled as feminist. Her
analysis of gender relations concern with gender issues is not to start a
social revolution but simply to hold mirror to the society we live in.
(Interview)

Unlike most self-declared feminists who theorize about the

condition of subaltern women in the comfort of the metropolitan
academy, Nair sets out to understand the experience of victimage and
make meaningful generalizations about this condition. For her it is all
about translating these theories into reality by methodical and painstaking
ground work. Nair’s scathing attack on feminist theoreticians is voiced by
Smriti who lashes out at her mom Nina in Lessons in Forgetting:
You are an academic. You do not understand what women's
studies ought to culminate in. I do. It has to translate into real
life solutions. Do you know what is happening to women in
India? You sit in your pretty little house with your labeled
kitchen jars and a room full of books and think it is
emancipation. Empowerment has to come from within. (P 123)

It is perhaps this awareness and exposure that Nair possesses,

which makes her stand apart from many of the other women writers who
deal with subjects of routine oppression and retaliation in a hackneyed
fashion. Further, the themes Anita Nair selects for her novels form a
diverse and sumptuous platter. Nair cannot be quintessential typecast as a
writer who works on gender specific issues or caste inequalities prevalent
in the society. She indulges in diverse themes like dislocation, politics in
rural villages, clash between aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to name just
a few. If on one hand, she deals with integrity in art forms inMistress, on
the other in Lessons in Forgetting she deals with the nuanced life of the
page three crowd. Nair’s fascination with a wide range of issues might
suggest that her works merely present the veneer of social life in Kerala.
Like any novelist who takes her work seriously, Nair seeks to understand
certain socio-cultural phenomena in their totality. She evinces a keen
interest in the dynamics of the family as an institution. Her works are a
lucid commentary on the changing dynamics of the family as a social
unit. The East West encounter, a recurring theme in Indian-English
fiction from the past six decades, too surfaces in her works, gently
educating her reader on the Orientalist tendencies persistent even after
half a century of Independence. Koman, in Mistress, succinctly puts forth
the author’s views on this issue:
Visitors from other countries come here, look around, see the
lack of amenities, and are pleased. This is the India they were
expecting. Cochin is too commercial, they tell me. Why do
people in Madras and Bangalore ape west so much, they ask me.
What would they like us to do? Spin thread with Charkhas? Read
by lantern light and drink buttermilk instead of Coke? We can’t
remain in dark ages merely because it adds to the atmosphere. (P
260)

Being a student of English literature Nair is familiar with the

debates and literary wars going around in literary circles, and her novels
also touch upon the theme of marketing and exoticization of India for the
western audience. She unmasks the diasporic writers and academicians
who commodify India, its flavours, traditions and local colour for the
sake of wealth and prestige. In Lessons in Forgetting Nina, a third world
academic who migrated to a privileged Western location becomes a so
called subject expert on the historical facts and situations of India: “Nina,
at faculty parties and her publishing dos talked at length about Indian
spices and miniatures and kathakali and the chola bronzes, all of which
she only had a fleeting knowledge of. When she was applauded for her
expanse of erudition, she would say with a newly cultivated breathless
laugh, ‘But oh, I am an Indophile!’ (PP 150-51) Nair’s zero-tolerance for
hypocrisy indicates her commitment to the task of decoding the culture
that she holds dear even as she distances herself from some of its
questionable practices.

Another task that Nair has taken upon herself is bursting the myth
of Kerala as a development model. The international acclaim of the
Kerala model of progress as the ideal developmental formula for the
Third World has put that State in an enviable position. Nair shows the
true visage of caste and material culture which has mushroomed as a
consequence of which ordinary people gasp for a breathing space.
Mistress highlights the marketing gimmicks adopted by the hoteliers and
tourist agents in Kerala (which can be extended to its writers too) who try
to promote their business ventures. For instance, when Shyam sets up his
Near the Nila resort, all the staff who worked there, including his wife
Radha are given strict instructions to learn by heart, information about
Ayurveda, kathakali, kalaripayattu, Kerala cuisine, the Thrissur Pooram,
Mangalore tiles and the Ambassador car (the popular mode of transport in
Kerala until recently). He goes to the extent of bringing an elephant to the
resort just to give the resort a Kerala ambience. On being questioned by
Radha as to why the elephant is brought to the resort, he audaciously
answers: “I fixed this deal with the elephant’s owner. My guests will get
to see an elephant really close, perhaps even feed him a handful of
bananas. It all adds to the atmosphere.” (19) I would like to mention here
that this type of exposure of vulgar commodification of the Kerala culture
has rarely been attempted by any of the regional writers of repute. The
regional writers are more involved in popular local issues concerned with
the region like plight of Malayalee community in the Persian Gulf,
corruption within the State, gender issues and so on.

Nair does not stop with criticizing the stereotyping of life in

Kerala. She attempts to portray the identity of Kerala culture in all its
complexity. Nair strips the culture of her origin of its borrowed
sophistication to bare its distinguishing features. The depiction of
Malayaleeness thus starts with the eating habits of the Malayalee. In The
Better Man, care-taker Krishnan Nair’s recipe for chicken curry is
presented in such detail that even a reader might be tempted to try it out
in his/her kitchen. Nair expresses her joy in ‘food writing’ in the
following manner: “Food when written about skilfully can add zest and
flavor to even a dull book.” (Nair 148) she manages to reinvent a new
language which is idiomatic even as it absorbs the flavour of the culture
of Kerala. Like Roy, Anita Nair’s fiction is sprinkled with abundant
Malayalam words which lend credibility to her portrayal of life in Kerala.
She has used a number of highly evocative words like ‘kathivesham,’
‘Pettikaran,’ ‘Malian,’ ‘Chutti,’ ‘Naku’ etc. in her novel Mistress which
are symbolic words used in the dance-form of Kathakali.

However exploring the identity of the contemporary Indian woman

remains Nair’s major area of interest which she does with maximum
panache. There is a tendency to ghettoize women’s writing manifest in
the facile focus on domestic issues like trivialities of everyday life,
victimization and non-intellectual existence. Namita Gokhale in Gender
and Literary Sensibilitysays that a woman writer must learn “to rise
above the malcontents of women” and “women’s identities” brand and
observe the “joint and mutual predicament of the race” (PP 64-68). In a
fast-changing techno-savvy world, where frozen eggs, test tube babies,
cloning and petri dishes threaten to usurp woman’s biological role leaving
her to be a free human being, Nair beautifully explores the rapidly
transforming identity of Indian women especially the modem urban
women. She shows how in contemporary times, unlike the stereotypical
notion of one woman being another woman’s greatest enemy, the
boundaries between women are slowly dissolving helping them co-assist
each other in finding their identity. And I feel, one of the most important
perspectives which Anita Nair’s fiction has given the readers is the
glimpse of prospective benefit a sense of sisterhood creates in women.
Nair also addresses the battles and conflicts of interests women writers
have to face during the process of writing. She poses the following
question:

How does one harmonize a literary life with a family life? Both
require involvement. Both demand dedication. Both need the
luxury of time. If she chooses to be a good housewife, the writer
in her suffers. And if she chooses to put her writing above all
else, she is seen by family and society as a cold, wilful and
selfish woman. She can expect little support and hardly any
encouragement. And yet she continues to write because as all
writers or creative people will tell you, the need to create is
paramount. (Nair 131)
 In terms of characterization, her characters are subversive and they
delineate human plight in all its naked reality projecting their desires,
manipulations, fears, inhibitions, ruthlessness and hunger for power. Her
characters, thus, go much beyond the traditional roles assigned to women.
Her ideal of strong woman is not the one who fights against the world and
opens the pandora of feminist platitudes, she is someone who has the core
of steel to fight the vagaries of life. But her strength lies in painting the
canvas with the new picture of the contemporary woman who withstand
the storms which destiny inflict on her without falling apart. Meera in
Lessons in Forgetting is one character who seems to gain admiration
both of the author as well as Prof. Jak. It is very much evident in Prof.
Jak’s line of thought “something in her manner, filled your admiration.
You approved of women who didn’t give way to their weight of their
disappointments. Women who held themselves together.” (140) Her
women characters do not fit into the stereotypical good or bad woman
images. They are grey characters who fall a prey to temptations, make
mistakes and finally live their life on their own terms, after a period of
introspection. Meera and Kala Chitti in Lessons in Forgetting, Radha
inMistress, Valsala in The Better Man and Akhila in The Ladies Coupe
are unpredictable. They subvert the very structure of the patriarchal
society. The male characters too are subversive in the sense that they are
shown possessing characteristics stereotypically associated with women
like being weak and vulnerable at times, being emotional, jealous etc. We
find Mukundan, a well-educated government servant in his fifties going
weak in his knees when he is confronted by his patriarchal father
Achuthan Nair.

Indian English writers like Anita Nair are now more accurate about
the detailing and recording of the places, historical facts because they
know that once the book is out, it would be under close scrutiny of the
critics who would review the book considering all these aspects. And of
course who isn’t aware of rich economic rewards a good review can fetch
in terms of soaring up of the sales of the book. A lot of these writers
spend a lot of their hibernating periods researching topics extensively for
their book, which is well reflected in their works. It took Anita Nair
almost six months of intensive research on the dance form of kathakali,
the various bhavas and rasas in the dance form to gather enough
materials that she could transmute into her fiction. In her nonfiction book,
Good Night and God Bless (2008) she gives a brief account of her
discussions on the kathakali techniques with the Late Asan
Gopalakrishnan, Assistant Professor in Kerala Kala mandalam before
actually incorporating the Kathakali techniques in her novel Mistress. She
writes of how “the months spent under his tutelage was my introduction
to how a master can shape one’s thoughts. Not just in his sphere of
expertise but in all of life.” (PP 255-56) Ironically, it is difficult to find
the regional writers working into so much of graphic detailing of the
locale because they invariably write for a home-audience who are already
familiar with the sounds and sights and tastes of that particular
environment

The power of modem literature lies in its willingness to give a

voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social and individual
consciousness. Anita Nair’s unique socio-historic location, her versatility
with different cultures, delineation of themes, her representation of
women all make her fiction an interesting document on the Kerala reality,
the caste gender dynamics of contemporary Kerala in particular. As
Satchidanandan says: “Literature becomes important not when it
reproduces established values, given truths or readymade slogans. It is