No Longer at Home
Of late the charming novels of Tishani Doshi, a Chennai-based young Indian writer in English, have had me occupied. Doshi happens to be the child of a mixed, inter-racial marriage, with one foot in her father’s country, India (Chennai), and another in her mother’s country, the U.K (Wales). As such, she typically writes about home, belonging and identity in an era of brisk movement and migration, troubling in the process the neat division between inside and outside, home and abroad. A sentence in her first novel The Pleasure Seekers (2010) testifies to this: “There’s no such thing as home. Once you’ve forsaken it and stepped out of the circle, you can’t ever re-enter and claim anything as yours. It was always going to be like this: when you walked down the cobbled streets of one city, your mind was always going to be in the folds of another (227).”
Now I don’t know why, but that sentence about the layered and conflicted nature of belonging put me in mind of Ganeswar Mishra, Odia writer and English professor, who passed away on this day – 9 August – five years ago. He expressed similar sentiments – and more -in a work written almost a decade before Doshi. Here is a sample: “What’s wrong in daydreaming? It’s not only if one is born in a country that one can belong to it. You have left the Caribbean and made England your home, and see how strong my weakness is for the England that ruled my country for two hundred years.”
The work in question is Chithi Jorina Pain (Letters for Jorina), which came to light when the complete fictions of the author were brought out in 2015, shortly before his death. It was originally serialised in Ekabinsha Satabdi, (an Odia literary and cultural magazine no longer published) some twenty years ago, but had not been put together in book form. It is an unusual work that hovers between fact and fiction and is presented as a series of eleven letters from a man from Odisha – who is, of course, Ganeswar Mishra in a fictional guise – to his eponymous friend – a woman – in England.
At Home in Diaspora
Chithi Jorina Pain is perhaps to be regarded as the piece de resistance of contemporary Odia literature’s rather small and significant postcolonial corpus. The fact may not, of course, be evident from the sample I have just cited. It might even seem to invite censure for its outpouring of Anglophilia, which is a colonial rather than a postcolonial trait.
But we will miss the point about the Doshi lines – and about the lines from Mishra– if we forget that one of the consequences of travel and movement, whether forced or unforced, is the possibility of the discovery, like in the act of translation, of the other within the self. This in turn leads to the suspicion of borders as arbitrary. The act of border control then turns out to be the handiwork of an oppressive nationalist ideology.
Mishra’s sentence continues on to deliver its vital punch: ‘In the twentieth century aren’t narrow-minded nationalist and clannish ideologies falling into ruin like old fortresses (Letter 7) ?’ There is no mistaking the postcolonial gesture here. Any political reordering of our given world must originate in a desire – Doshi’s perceving, Mishra’s ‘daydreaming’ – to redraw the boundaries.
Letters: The Fine Work of Balance and Contrast
As such, in Chithi Jorina Pain Alok Das treats her correspondent Jorina McCarthy to a series of fascinating vignettes about his home state, Odisha. In an implicit challenge to the colonial worldview, Das’s letters celebrate India’s traditional culture, literature and tradition and highlight the bonds of friendship, community and the strong religious faith and nature-love that have sustained it for ages. The letters simultaneously chip away at the values of individualism, consumerism and technological progress with which the West has sought to conquer traditional cultures and to make them in its own image.
The centrepiece of this contrast between a traditional Odisha and a modern and progressive England lies in the portrayal – in Letter 8 – of two deaths: one of Alok Das’s grandma in his native town of Jahanpur (read Puri) and the other of Marlene Hewitt in England. Where grandma’s death witnessed a communal outpouring of grief, Marlene died a solitary death, with no one to mourn for her. Reflecting on the two different deaths, and, by implication, on two different kinds of living, Alok Das rightly concludes: “Alienation of this kind is the ultimate truth of Western civilization and thought! The helplessness and isolation that lies hidden beneath the glitter of outward appearances comes to the surface at times, as in the case of Marlene’s death. … I thought once again of my grandma. She too had died at the age of seventy-five, but how different from Marlene’s were her life and her death!”
Bridging the Cultural Gap
Having thus redrawn the map, it remains for the author Ganeswar Mishra to create a level playing field by collapsing the conventional opposition between the East and the West. Alok Das’s friendship with Jorina McCarthy of England is already a move to bridge the cultural gap. Their intercultural friendship, as that between Alok and Doireann of Spain recounted in the last letter, is proof that humans can forge connections across cultural differences. For that they have to look past the surface differences of cloth, colour and costume. It is only then that they can be cosmopolitans, true citizens of the world, at home in their native habitats and also unafraid to travel the world. This is the realization of Alok Das. It is the last will and testament, as it were, of the author Ganeswar Mishra.
Last Word
For a quaint-looking and hybrid work that captures for posterity an antiquated and idyllic Dinapur (read Bhubaneswar), a town minus mobile phones, fast cars, pubs, coffee bars and swanky hotels of today, Chithi Jorina Pain is also a record of the soul of Odisha and of the enduring global vison of Odia literature.
(Chithi Jorina Pain has been recently translated into English by Paul St-Pierre and Himansu S. Mohapatra as Letters to Jorina. It has a foreword by Jagannath Prasad Das. The publication is forthcoming. The present write-up is a condensed version of the introduction by Himansu S. Mohapatra and is reproduced here to commemorate the 5th death anniversary of Ganeswar Mishra.)
(Himansu S. Mohaptra is a former Professor and head of the department of English, Utkal University)
