marginalization and exclusion in m.g. vassanji’s · marginalization and exclusion in m.g....

Marginalization and Exclusion in M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song

Arup Chandra Das Research Scholar

Department of Humanities & Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Patna

New Government Polytechnic, Patliputra Colony, Patna-13, Bihar, India.

& Dr. Smriti Singh

Assistant professor Department of Humanities & Social Sciences

Indian Institute of Technology Patna New Government Polytechnic,

Patliputra Colony, Patna-13, Bihar, India

Abstract The spread of global economy and cosmopolitan cultures has resulted in the emergence of different communities with different identities. The diversity of the world gives birth to the contradictions around the belongingness of the people in a nation like India. After migrating for better living, the migrants try to be at par with the new cultures and ethnicity and persistently belong to an ambivalent zone of in-betweenness. Their identity brings havoc in their attempt to adapt to the dominant cultures and thus creates gap between the developed and the developing, the dominant and the dominated, the coloniser and the colonized. Here comes the idea of marginality and exclusion of certain groups from the ‘mainstream culture’. M.G Vassanji as a writer of diaspora basically focuses on the problems of in-betweenness of his characters that get migrated from a particular group to some dominant groups and start dominating the marginals and the excluded. In ‘The Assassin’s Song’ (2007), Vassanji centres on the conflict between religious identity and the incorporation of dominant identity. The aim of the paper is to unearth in the novel how migration to the dominant communities affects the ethnic culture of the Indians and how communal riots and political corruption add fuel to the degeneration of the unity of particular groups. It will also focus on how postcolonial nation states with geographical borders bring about homogeneity to silence the excluded and the marginalized.

Keywords: Diaspora, Exclusion, Identity, Marginalization, Magic Realism, Migration etc.

The paper has been divided into six sections. The first section introduces the argument and keynote of the paper. In the second section, the idea of migration and ambivalent identity has been discussed. The third section deals with the communal riots, foreign invasion and political corruption. How the postcolonial nation-states create homogeneity with their geographical borders has been pointed out in brief in the 4th section. The 5th section is mainly about the silencing and subjugating the marginalized and the excluded. The last section concludes the paper.

www.the-criterion.comThe Criterion

An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165

Vol. IV. Issue III June 2013

1 Editor-In-Chief Dr. Vishwanath Bite

Introduction

The world has become so intense in global capitalism and economy that the postcolonial literature reflects the after-effects of globalization and cosmopolitanism. With the emergence of global multicultural identities, the consciousness about social and cultural hierarchy came into the minds of the people. It resulted in the process of exclusion and domination of certain ethnic groups and communities by certain other groups. The acceptance and celebration of the cultural hierarchy led to the personal dilemmas and identity crisis. In a globalized world, the postcolonial writers concentrate upon the themes of quest for identity, in-betweenness, aboriginals, the mimic people, and the people of transnationality. There are some writers who try to deconstruct the difference between the colonizer and the colonized. They start to write about the migration, immigration and political and cultural opposition in the decolonizing nations especially in the African countries like Kenya, Tanzania etc. Vassanji is such a writer who was born in Kenya, brought up in Tanzania and studied in the United States. He is a Canadian novelist whose identity fluctuates around three continents. He has written six novels where he depicts the situation of East African Indians. He examines how the lives of his characters are affected by migration from India to East Africa and from Africa to Europe, Canada or the United States. Like Sujata Bhatt who creates a treasury from variety of cultural traditions and is vigorously concerned with the dialectic of place and displacement, Vassanji has presented a hotchpotch, a ‘bricolage’ produced by transnationality through cultural interaction of the people in his novels. Writing with the motto of hybridity and in-betweenness, he has enriched the postcolonial literature a great.

Vassanji’s 2007 novel The Assassin’s Song is set almost entirely in India and here he unearths the past and presents both the Indian folk culture and myths. He depicts the lived experiences of the Guajarati people from the Indian perspective. The novelist here puts his protagonist in the deep historical context and thus measures the gravity of tradition in a modern world. The novel is the story of Karsan Dargawalla in Gujarat state in India who continuously suffers from the spiritual conflict between the normal life of a cricket boy and the life of a successor of a religious shrine. Karsan is torn apart because he is with the tension between the life of a man with exhilarating freedom in the United States and the religious life of a man drawn back to his ritual heritage of the Pirbaag. He has already known that he will succeed his father ‘Bapuji’ as guardian of a Sufi shrine (Pirbaag) and an earthly avatar of the 13th century mystic Pir Bawa – “I knew for certain that I was the ‘gaadi varas’, the successor and avatar to come at Pirbaag after my father”(Vassanji, 2). However, when he migrates himself for higher studies, he tries to ignore his religious legacy. He feels marginalized in the foreign countries because of his memory about the past allegiance. He is torn apart continuously between his present and past, light and dark, dominant and the dominated.

Migration and Identity

The question of identity ‘who am I?’ is always a problematic question with different types of possible solutions. ‘Identity never became a problem, it started as a problem’ (Bauman, 2004). The problem emerges because of too much of migration and immigration of man for better living and consequent attachment with different people of different voices. Thus a





single identity represents different facets and arenas of identities. Multiple identities are often confusing and problematic. In such a situation a man cannot have a stable identity. He may take refuge to his past memory and try to find some roots of his being. Identity crisis is thus a form of alienation and disorientation. In Vassanji’s novels, the protagonists are often found busy in finding out roots in the traces of history unknown to them. Every quest of them is accompanied by some sort of journey.

The story of the novel begins with the journey and the arrival in Gujarat of the Sufi Nur Fazal. ‘His name he gave as Nur Fazal of no fixed abode’ (6). The writer models the holy saint after the legendary characters in the Indian history. The basic purpose behind his introduction of Nur Fazal as an entirely fictitious character is undoubtedly his intention to reveal the nuances of postcolonial crisis of ambivalent identity amidst the themes of migration, otherness, detachment, abstraction etc. Vassanji introduces the character through the portrayal of his voyage and journey leaving the community torn apart by the foreign invasion. ‘He was reminded of a home in the north and the west now being ground to the dust under the hooves of Mongal horses and drenched in the blood of his folks and his loved ones. He remembered his spiritual master whom he’d left there, at whose instigation he had taken on this long journey’ (7). ‘And so Nur Fazal, the Sufi departed the city with his followers travelling southwards, until he arrived at a peaceful, welcoming place where he chose to settle, which came to be called the Baag, or the garden’(24). The Sufi’s purpose of his voyage is to search for the mystery of his existence. After the communal riot, he is seen to be torn apart because of the dilemma between the centre and the periphery, the central and the marginal.

Homelessness and the search for home include what we call departure and exile from the crude reality and this is a prominent discourse in postcolonial theories. Postcolonial Diaspora incorporates the expressions of alienation, powerlessness, longing for the homeland, loss of identity and subjugation. “Diasporic epistemology locates itself squarely in the realm of the hybrid, in the domain of cross cultural and contaminated social and cultural regimes” (Mishra, 1996). Vassanji himself being a migrant always tries to depict the system of hybridized cultures, beliefs, and religions. For this he brings into debate the conflict between the superior and the inferior, the colonizer and the colonized. The conflict is a part and parcel in Edward Said’s discourse on Orientalism (2003). The colonizers have the legitimate power and the knowledge by the help of which they even conquer the native self and treat them thereby as the ‘Other’. The oppressed often feel some kind of imposition in their celebration of knowledge, creed, likes and dislikes. Getting confused with the ever conflicting question of identity, they are often tortured between the opposite poles of who they had been and who they have become. Therefore, in this novel neither Nur nor Karsan is satisfied with their own belongingness. They wanted to become something else but colonial circumstances have made them different. Karsan didn’t want to become a Sufi always thinking of the supreme and preaching the followers, but all he desires is to be ordinary and play ‘first class cricketer’. “I would have my embroidered black satchel round my soldiers and in my hand perhaps some cricket paraphernalia- leg guards, gloves, ball. Cricket was everything” (30). “I would soon pickup bat and ball and stroll outside to join my friends who would already be at play...” (31).





Though the displaced people in Vassanji’s novels are found to retain their original being, they often fail to recognize the value of their native culture. For this simple reason, Karsan, the professor in Canada marries a girl of Christian culture and suffers separation from her later on. The moment he comes in contact with the foreign culture and attitudes of the colonisers he forgets his legacy, reverence for his ancestry, and all his ties of childhood. According to Homi Bhabha, the influence of multiple cultures brings in their mind a kind of tension between their identity stasis and the demand for its change and mimicry provides a compromise to the tension. Ashcroft (2002) claims, “Mimicry of the center is the periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their origins in attempt to become more English than the English”. Living in America, the Indians often forget the Indian tradition and heritage and their mission of life. This is a lashing satire upon his/her own personality and identity. Going to America Karsan even adapts to the colonizers’ cultures and attitudes and tries to colonise the Indian attitudes by way of neglecting his near and dear ones and subjugating their demands and expectations. He is tormented within when he is reminded of his mission of life as a Sufi through the repeated letters of his father. He has his mind writhed within- it’s twisted…it’s whirling round and round inside me… (254). He feels guilty for his diversion to follow his appointed mission- “Am I no longer your son, even a disobedient one?” (254).

Karsan is thus a victim of the postcolonial representation of the self and anti-self, the light and dark, the superiority and inferiority. In his letter to Bapuji, Karsan acknowledges his retreat from the complexities of and strain in the dilemmic situation he is in. From the zone of ambivalence, he takes a retreat and desires to live the life of an ordinary man. Postcolonial complexities have coerced and misled him. Karsan wanted to be ‘someone who likes to find out about new things, marry the girl he wants, follow cricket and baseball’. He therefore identifies himself ‘simply as an ordinary secular Indian studying in America’ (259- 260). He imagined for himself a life ‘free of the burden and expectation of tradition…’ (271). The interesting thing about Karsan is that living in the tradition of diverse cultures or hybridity as we call it, he marries a girl whose origin and background also reflect cross-cultural effects and therefore he fails to get adjusted to his married life. Like a migratory bird which feels loneliness because of the new situation and circumstances, Karsan also feels alienation and deafening silence after Marge (his wife) and the Padmanabhs (his parents-in-law) had abandoned him. He had his tragedy on the doorstep of his life – a ‘kind of misty darkness’. His sadness is more aggravated when his son dies.

The tragedy in the life of a simple boy is caused because of the diversity in the goal of his life. This diversion is caused basically by the colonizers who by the superiority of their power and knowledge always interfere in the day-to-day life of the Indians. Interestingly enough, the foreigners even take interest in the treasury of the ancient holy manuscripts. The story of the discovery of the Sufi’s identity is a result of cross-cultural study and curiosity of the foreign people about the ancient manuscripts in India. Professor Ivanhow being a Russian while researching found the ancient manuscript at Pirbaag and came to know that Nur Fazal was one of the assassins (Ishmailis) who maintained the mountain fortresses in Western Iran and were penchant for murdering their enemies.





Like Nur Fazal Raja Singh is also a victim of quest for identity. He was ‘always on the roads of Gujarat who seemed never to have reached to his home in Punjab’ (36). To highlight his own predicament Mr. Singh launched in to his favourite ditty- “My shoes are Japanese- my Pantaloons Englishtanee my red topee may be Russee/ but fear not the heart is Hindustani” (36). These lines reflect the author’s discourse of the queer nostalgia or the search for home with the Hindustani thought in heart and mind. Raja Singh’s homesickness is best reflected in his own words when he says that you must explain ‘no doubt, to Hindustan you must definitely return, where ever you go…’ (37) The quest for identity in the Indians is best hinted in the simple but favorite question of Karsan- “Raja Singh, tumahra ghar kanha hai?” (37).

Communal riots, foreign invasion and political corruption

Vassanji in this novel talks about not only the migration of the Guajarati people but also the cause of their homelessness. Gujarat is such a place which is fraught with many foreign invasions and subsequent communal riots between the Hindus and the Muslims. The novelist, however, has extensively borrowed the technique of magic realism from the Latin American writings in order to depict the scenes of war and political violence. Magic realism is the term first applied to literature in the 1940s by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) to combine both the mundane and the fabulous. It is a technique associated with Latin America which incorporates the imaginary or mythical elements into realistic fiction. Like the Latin Americans Vassanji has represented the Indian society repeatedly unsettled by foreign invasion and political corruption. In fact, postcolonial literary tradition presents the postcolonial nations associated with the degeneration of civic nationalist unity and the nation states broken apart by the separate communal movements. Vassanji depicts the scenes of the war between our India and ‘cunning enemies’ China through the technique of the magic realism. He tries here to sugarcoat the political violence within the layer of the familiar affairs like Mansoor’s birthday and other some domestic events. Like Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (1981), Vassanji also draws our attention to the Indo-Pak riots or the Indo-Pak division, ‘the subcontinent was cleaved into India and Pakistan on the map’ (160). Nur’s father reminds of the proceedings ‘for centuries we have lived together in this community; now they have become foreigners? Traitors?’(154) ‘The name of Pakistan arouses many emotions among them raw hatred and contempt’ (159). The gruesome picture with China is recollected by the trickling memory in the context of the homely affairs like the celebrations of the birth of the child. In the year 1962, ‘the nation was at war against monstrous cunning enemies…what dharam did they have they who ate dogs and the rats’ (80). ‘While the rest of the nation was tense with the war, anxiety, the devotees of the Child had celebrated a thanks giving with ceremonies and prayers’ (89). ). Like Nur Fazal, Arjun Dev is also a victim of the darkness and the negligence perpetrated by the after-effects of the foreign invasion. He is a member of a community of refugees of Afghanistan who became homeless because of the end of the reign at the hands of the infamous Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna and the sweeping attack of the Mongol in Asia. Karsan, in a familiar tone has mentioned the double calamity of the wounding of the Bapuji and the wounding of mother India because of the bloody wars and communal disharmonies. Thus the novelist very subtly blends the familiar and the





political, the lights and the serious, the homely and the national in order to bring about cultural and social homogeneity.

But India as a subcontinent is diverse in nature and its heterogeneous culture is the reason for the loss of native tradition and civilization. ‘Our civilization had possessed rockets and nuclear bombs thousands of years ago. What was Shiva’s trisul but a missile; Vishnu’s garuda but a rocket? That had been our Golden Age’ (113). But the scene changes with the influx of global nations and multiple cultures. Our traditional glories have been exploited by the governance of the colonizers or the Britishers. What Macaulay in his educational ‘Minute’ had expressed that “we must at present do our best to form a class (in India) who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”(Macauley, 1835). His blowing words introduced the seeds for the impact of the western culture on the minds of a class of Indians. This way colonization took place in India and now we have continuously been stripped off our honour and prestige because of the colonizers’ brewing cynicism and ridicule upon us. Vassanji finds truth in the fact that we have given the legitimate power to the Westerners by wasting our glory as we have paved the way for Afghan Mahmud to destroy and plunder the temple of Somnath and for Alauddin khalji to drag the sacred lingam all the way to Delhi (113).

In fact our internal conflict related to politics, economics and religion is so intense that it makes convenient for the invaders and colonizers to rule and make us mere slaves in their hands. Vassanji shows how the Indian politicians add a fuel to the communal riots- ‘we are too complex as a nation, too raw as a people’ (307). The politics interfere in the realm of secular religion. ‘In 1714, a bloody riot occurred in Ahmadabad during Holi celebrations’. The writer very subtly points out the reason behind the ‘recurring communal conflagrations we call riots’. The reasons are ‘economical; the past atrocities of Muslim armies; manipulation and instigation by the colonizing power, Britain; ditto by cynical Indian politicians; etc’ (308). The novelist questions the system of inter-communal violence and how the ghastly violence can take place in the state of the Mahatma.

Homogeneity

However the author takes turn from the stark reality of the communal violence and tries to focus on the homogeneous nature of or unity in India. The author visualizes the fact that Pirbaag is the ideal of the middle path between the two, the Hindu and the Muslims. “We are neither and both. We bow neither to Kashi nor to Kabba et cetera” (93). This is quiet reminiscent of the Bhabha’s hybrid third space where people oscillate between centre and the periphery, the home and homeless. This ambivalent site is where cultural meaning and representation have no ‘primordial unity or fixity’. (Bhabha 1994). In The Location of Culture (1994) Homi Bhabha points out that the dominant discourse constructs otherness in such a way that it always contains a trace of ambivalence and anxiety about its own authority.

The search for identity is always fraught with this ambivalence. The problem of identity results into the division of society into groups which not only interlock but also remain





separate. However, the hostility between castes and states is limited when the ‘Nation state attempts to homogenize all the diversity’ (Bauman, 2004). As Patrick Savidon (2003) writes in the modern version of the world, “the other is first of all viewed as same. This means that... to me. From that standpoint, differences will be reduced and similarities will be promoted”. ‘Globalization leads to a generalized deterritorialization of problematic (financial, economic, technological, ecological etc). These are deployed on a global scale, and the borders, having become permeable if they still existed at all, no longer stop anything, which means that they no longer guarantee anything, and certainly not identity’ (Benoist, 2004). In a subcontinent like India the boundaries are blurred for the people belonging to different cultures often harmonise their customs and beliefs with different religions of different communities. The image of Pir Baag is ambivalent and blurs the image of a nation with diverse beliefs and religions. ‘Although Pir Baag harbored the precious memory and the grave of a Muslim Pir and the question of Hindu and Muslim had never arisen before for its followers’ (51).‘There is nothing to choose, Karsan, we have been shown our path in which there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, nor Christian nor Sikh just the one. Brahman, the Absolute. Ishvar. Allah. God’ (310).

Silencing the Marginalised

However in a homogeneous nation state like India, the indigenous people continue to suffer from marginalization, exclusion, poverty, hatred and subjugation. The protagonists in Vassanji’s novels are often marginalized and therefore alienated and silenced. In sociology marginalization is a term that refers to the process of being alienated and relegated to the fringe of society. Business dictionary defines marginalization as the process whereby something or someone is pushed to the edge of a group and accorded lesser importance. This is prominently a social phenomenon by which a minority or subgroup is excluded and their needs are denied. Social exclusion is thus a process by which our society fails to keep all groups and individuals within a single corpus. Many communities experience marginalization and the aboriginal communities often lose their homeland and are excluded due to economic political and religious reasons. Women in a patriarchal set up are marginalized and are denied their access to the mainstream of society. Vassanji while portraying the strands of postcolonial picture never forgets to touch upon the feminist discourse or the patriarchal form of society. The women in society often feel powerless and bereft of identity because of the masculine dominance and superiority. Here also Vassanji depicts the wretched lot of the women who are merely utilized as those who appease sexual hunger of the men. Rupade Rani, the virgin mother of Pirbaag cures the secret sexual diseases of the women for which they suffered in the dark corners of their houses. “Such is the lot of women”. “They are hostage to their husband’s love” (138). To the men the women are mere parasites who only depend upon the will of the men. Nur Fazal can be treated an agent of patriarchy because he has married several times in his long life and created many prominent descendants including Jaffar Shah, Balak Shah etc. The mother of Karsan is also a victim of patriarchal system of society. When she was sick ‘how easily she was given away by her family, like a reject… (338) This shows that the patriarchal system has stopped taking the responsibility of the women who are under the custody of their husbands. By way of reflecting upon the issue of





women’s subjugation and dominance, Vassanji thus makes a link between Postcolonialism and the Third Wave Feminism because both focus on the deconstruction of the basic duality between the empowered and the powerless, light and dark, the colonizer and the colonized.

Conclusion

Vassanji depicts the problems of identity and one of the ways to solve it would be to rescue the equitable traditional and identical root that one does possess in society. The multicultural outlook and the cultural diversity can be positive in the life of a common man if he or she does never forget to respect his or her own culture, sect, ethnicity, religion and power. What Vassanji wants to imply here is that there may be geographical borders, group formations and cultural differences in the nation state but, there should not be any homogenizing discourse of nationalism that often tries ‘to silence the marginalized and the dispossessed’(Dasgupta, 297). This novel has been credited by Khushwant Singh as ‘a novel that I rate among the best I’ve read’ because of its capacity to assimilate everything into the postcolonial discourse.

Works Cited:

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin eds. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge, 2002. Bauman, Z. Identity. Cambridge: Polity press. 2004. Benoist, de Alain. On Identity, The Journal of Modern Literature. Telos, Summer, 2004 vol. 2004 no. 128 9-64 Bhabha, H.K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. 1994. Dasgupta, Sayantan. “Society and Political Environment in S. Selvadurai’s ‘Cinnamon Gardens’”. Anxieties, Influences and After: Critical Responses to Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism.ed. Bakshi et al. New Delhi: Worldview Publications. 2009. Macaulay, Lord. “Minutes on Indian Education”, 17th May 2011 from http://www.vvv03.org/ Minutes.pdf.online Mishra, Vijay. ‘New Camps for Old Diasporas Migrancy Border’, Interrogating Postcolonialism, Text and Context. Shimla: IIAS, 1996. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage,1981. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Penguin, 2003. Savidon, Patrick. La reconnaissance des identities culturelles comme enjeu democratique. Rennes: presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003, p 234 Vassanji, M.G. The Assassin’s Song. India: Penguin, 2007.





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