A Diasporic Mythography: Myth, Legend and Memory in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora

By P.M. Biswas

A Diasporic Mythography: Myth, Legend and Memory in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora is a collection of essays on how diasporic Indian authors living in the West use myth and legend to reconnect with India.

Looking at works from Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Suniti Namjoshi and Vikram Chandra, the analysis will

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913387501

P.M. Biswas

Pooja Mittal Biswas is the author of nine books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, with her ninth book, a collection of poetry, due to be released by Cordite Books in 2023. She has been reviewed and interviewed in The Age, The Australian and ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, and has been anthologized in both The Best Australian Poems and The Best Australian Poetry. Pooja has written for Writer’s Digest and has been widely published in literary journals such as Meanjin, Cordite, TEXT, Hecate and Jacket. Biswas is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney, where she was awarded the Stanley Sinclair Bequest Scholarship for poetry. She is a sessional academic teaching Creative Writing at the University of Sydney, and she also teaches several writing courses of her own design at Writing NSW, Writers Victoria and the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education. She has been invited to speak at literary festivals such as the Emerging Writers’ Festival and the National Young Writers’ Festival. While still living in New Zealand, she was selected as the country’s national representative for UNESCO’s Babele Poetica project.

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ACADEMIA LUNARE

A Diasporic Mythography

Myth, Legend and Memory

in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora

P.M. Biswas

Cover Image: Radha and Krishna Walk in a Flowering Grove (recto) ca. 1720.

Text © P.M. Biswas 2021

First published by Luna Press Publishing, Edinburgh, 2021

A Diasporic Mythography © 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owners. Nor can it be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

www.lunapresspublishing.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-913387-50-1

INTRODUCTION - A Diasporic Mythography

Mythography (from the Greek μυθογραφία—mythografia, writing of fables from μῦθος—mythos, speech, word, fact, story, narrative, and γράφειν—graphein, to write, to inscribe)¹ is the creation and accretion of myths, each building upon the other in a slow, sedimentary accumulation of historicisms and newly acquired modernisms, where the passing of time turns those very modernisms into historicisms. Mythography is the eternal cycling from history to myth and myth to history, in which every individual myth makes and is made by history. It is virtually impossible, given the dialogic nature of language itself (Bakhtin, 1981), for any myth not to partake of the ones before it. In that sense, every myth is a record of journeys, both cultural and geographic, tracing back to a distant origin that can never be returned to, but which remains vibrant in the myths that keep its memory alive. To the Indian diaspora, India—the homeland—is this yearned-for origin.

As all myths are journeys in progress, every mythography can loosely be termed as a diasporic mythography—there is no human myth that has not in it some element of an odyssey, be it physical or psychological—but in this book of essays, I will be focusing on the mythography of the contemporary Indian diaspora, which will reveal in its inner workings the very dialogic evolutions that preoccupy myth as a whole. I will argue in favor of three major points: first, that the Indian diaspora is a crucible for mythmaking, in which psychology, history and postcolonial politics are inextricably entwined; second, that the nature of the diasporic mythography reveals an essential human need to connect to an origin, however mythical it may be; and third, that no connection to an origin is possible without a simultaneous revisioning of the destination, and of the current geospatial and sociopolitical condition of the diasporic mythographer. The authors studied in this book will be consulted as mythographers, each contributing a new understanding of the diasporic experience and culminating, by the end of the book, in an interconnected whole that will comprehensively document the contemporary diasporic Indian mythography, including the postcolonial ramifications of such a mythography.

Throughout history, there have always been portions of the human population that have been essentially diasporic—whose search for a better life in one sense or another has propeled them across the globe, from pastures to hunting grounds, from villages to towns and across national boundaries. However, the nature of the diaspora has altered considerably in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as globalisation and postcolonialism have begun to fundamentally shift the socioeconomic power dynamics of the modern world. The Indian diaspora, in particular, has found a new foothold for itself; currently, the international census of the Indian diaspora numbers at more than 17 million (Parekh, Singh and Vertovec, 2003, p. xi), enough to comprise a nation in and of itself. Additionally, while the Indian diaspora had begun mostly as a disparate and socially disadvantaged group of indentured laborers in the 1830s, its demographic is now composed almost entirely of educated and moderately affluent professionals (Parekh, Singh and Vertovec, 2003, p. xi), no longer identifiable as subaltern, and thus entirely capable of speech.

It is no wonder, then, that the literature produced by the Indian diaspora has also flourished. In the last four decades, beginning in the 1980s with such seminal books as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, there has been an explosion in literature written by the Indian diaspora. Consequently, there has been a corresponding rise in academic interest as to the nature of that literature and of its methodologies. However, no book-length study has yet to focus on the importance of mythmaking and revisioning to the Indian diaspora. This collection of essays concentrates on the use of myth, legend and allegory by diasporic Indian writers, both as a means of re-establishing their connection with India and as a means of self-validation. In other words, I will attempt to prove the existence of a diasporic mythography, in which the myths of the homeland are brought to bear upon the realities of the diasporic experience, and vice versa.

More than two thousand years ago, Horace claimed that they change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea (Epistles, I.11.27). Nonetheless, I contend that a change of sky does, in fact, culminate in a change of mind; it results in a hybridisation of the mind, particularly in our modern world where diasporic cultural identities are both more fluid and fractious, more dynamic and unpredictable (Reis, 2004, p. 53) than they have ever been before. Since hybridisation [is] a process involving traversing (Gunaratnam, 2014, p. 3), hybridisation is inevitable for the traversing, travelling diasporic person. The farther they traverse, the more driven they are to participate in mythmaking, in telling stories about their origins to themselves and to their children, so as to bridge the gap between their new sky and the old, far across the sea (sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical) of experience. They tell these stories as a means of reconciling themselves to their inevitable hybridisation, such that they may survive in a new land while still remaining connected to their roots.

These myths become more than stories; they become modes of rediscovery and remembrance, of collective cultural belonging. In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie aptly describes what might be one of the most potent motivations behind the use of myth and legend by diasporic Indian writers, whose physical and cultural alienation from India means that it is impossible for them to recover precisely that which was lost; that they will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind (Rushdie, 1992, p. 10).

This sense of closing an unbridgeable gap is perhaps one of the reasons why a considerable number of writers from the Indian diaspora use mythmaking to reconnect with India. Indeed, diasporic mythmaking is quintessentially Indian; the importance of diasporic loss as a creative impetus—and as a narratological trope—can be easily understood by surveying the great tales of India. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana both share the theme of homelessness, of a longing for a home that has been left behind. In the Ramayana, Rama is exiled from his kingdom and forced to endure years of living in the wilderness. Krishna, in the Mahabharata, is raised by adoptive parents in a foreign land, before he returns to rule his kingdom as a young man. The diasporic sense of loss and longing can be said to drive each of these epic narratives. Even the state of hybridity that is experienced by members of the diaspora can find parallels in the Puranas, where hybrid gods such as Garuda (a god who is half-bird, half-man) are described in detail. In fact, the Hindu god of literature is himself a hybrid; Ganesha is the elephant-headed god of writing, whose head is literally hunted for across the world before it is restored to him.

It is human nature to try to find oneself through storytelling and through fiction. Stories of travel are often used as metaphors for spiritual transformation, salvation or restoration. Thus, it is not surprising that Indian myths and legends, themselves so rich in diasporic narratives, should be used by diasporic writers as a means of remembering and re-visioning India.

Constructing a personal narrative based on myth and legend is not, however, an effort on the part of the diasporic writer to create a new national mythology (Reder, 1999, p. 229). This would be impossible for any single writer to accomplish, were they to even try. Instead, by using historical legends, religious epics and non-religious fables, writers of the Indian diaspora can create imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind (Rushdie, 1992, p. 10). It is inevitable that the diasporic gaze is fragmentary, and thus cannot perceive the whole (of India, or of any nation). In using myth as a metaphor, diasporic writers do not intend to—and, indeed, cannot—write a definitive, globally acceptable mythology for India. Instead, the timeless nature of myth can serve to make a writer even more aware of the temporal, spatial and psychological limitations of reality. A myth provides only a facsimile of completeness, by joining beginning and end (origin and destination) in a satisfactorily rounded narrative—but the very act of creating or participating symbiotically in that narrative makes it a self-consciously incomplete process, possible only because of a sense that one is dealing in fragments, in the shadows of vanished bodies, missing shapes. Threaded between the homeland and the N-point is a tenuous connection of acknowledged and self-professed loss, in itself guaranteeing that despite any individual myths that might claim otherwise, the mythography itself remains in a state of perpetual incompletion (and, thus, continued efforts towards completion). No amount of mythmaking will recover fragments already lost; no facsimile of completion will make it real.

This is not to say that writers who use myth and legend feel overtly constrained or pessimistic. In fact, a mythical, magical realist or allegorical narrative can provide its own freedoms. As Michael Reder explains, the use of myth and legend frees the writer to suggest a new mode with which Indians may come to terms with their own personal and cultural pasts (Reder, 1999, p. 229). This mode is the transformation of a national culture into a personal mythology, and one that resonates with the homeland even as it is independent of it.

If the Other is a dual entry matrix (Lacan, 1982, p. 164), as Lacan suggests, then the existence of the Self does in fact depend upon the existence of its apparent binary opposite, the Other. When travelling or settling abroad, members of the Indian diaspora undergo an ‘Othering’ that is both literal and metaphorical. In literal terms, their passports are stamped and checked by security officials, and they can only traverse geographical and political borders if they are permitted to do so. The currency of identity (consisting of citizenships, visas, residency permits and the like) must change hands several times before it is deemed valid—and this makes it virtually impossible for members of the diaspora to remain unaware of their essential Otherness. As Bhabha notes, the Lacanian dual entry matrix leads to a state of inner hybridity (Bhabha, 2004, pp. 74-75), a hybridity that only becomes more multifaceted the further one travels away from ‘home.’ Understanding this duality is necessary if we are to avoid the increasingly facile adoption of the notion of a homogenised Other, for a celebratory, oppositional politics of the margins or minorities (Bhabha, 2004, p. 75).

In my essays, I argue that this celebratory, productive hybridity can be arrived at via a re-absorption of traditional myths and legends—an act of remembrance that is simultaneously an act of creation for writers of the diaspora. The search for Self, after the Othering experienced in the West, is often externalised and articulated through fiction—and myths, being some of the oldest fictions in existence, provide the perfect crucible for self-discovery. In a sense, this journey of self-discovery can be compared to the walkabout of Indigenous Australians,