The Eternity of Return

For Father Stan Swamy

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my parents sometimes used a Bengali term, ‘bilet pherot’, to categorise a certain kind of person: the returnee from England. It translated literally into ‘England-returned’. They used it with an ironical inflection, to invoke the glamour of a lost world. The term was out of date. Its glamour had been created in the crucible of colonial India, possibly in the late 19th century. Bengalis from the educated middle and upper classes began going to England from then onwards to pursue the ‘professions’— law and medicine, to which Bengalis added engineering. In contrast to Gandhi, who was bilet pherot too, there seemed to have been relatively little anxiety among Bengalis by the end of the 19th century about the loss of caste that transcontinental travel entailed. I’m not sure why this is so—partly it could have to do with the fact that groups like Young Bengal had already flirted, in the 1830s-1840s, with losing caste at home. The young medical students who’d travelled to Britain as stowaways in the same period had outlived the acuity of their caste anxieties. Tagore, who went to London to study in 1878, anyway belonged to an outcaste branch of the Tagore family. His unhappiness in London—where he never completed his degree—came from homesickness and what Naipaul called the “colonial’s raw nerves”. The alienation of life in the colonial centre and the stupidity of colonialism troubled the young Tagore more sharply than any loss of caste might have. So he came back—but not, strictly speaking, as a bilet pherot, because, to be a bilet pherot you needed not only to return from England, but with something: a degree. According to those conditions, Tagore’s journey was a wasted one.

My father went to England in 1949, and my mother joined him in 1955. They were already émigrés of a sort, having lost their homes with Partition. After spending several years doing nothing in London, my father, pushed by my mother, finally acquired professional qualifications in accountancy and company law. They returned in 1961, a year before my birth. My father took up a job in Bombay; my mother conceived. She moved temporarily to her brother’s house just before my birth. So, by chance and through luck, I was born in Calcutta. When I look back on this series of events and movements, I feel happy that Calcutta and I came together when we did. It’s not that I don’t like Bombay, the city in which I grew up, or that I look down on those who are born in London. It’s just that India seems to have been an inevitability before I was born, and that Calcutta was meant to be my first port of call. The decisions involved in our arrival—by our parents and maybe even ourselves—exceed our conscious attempts to plan our lives. Why take the trouble to be born at all, asks Jibanananda Das in his poem ‘Suchetana’, when life is—to go back to a definition an uncle of mine used—such a “mixed blessing”? For Jibanananda, the return to existence was half-justified by what only the experience of existence could give access to: the touch of early-morning dew.

Arriving at some point in the house of
birth, drawn to earth and the world,
Knowing it might have been better
not to come;
Having arrived, I’ve grasped the
deeper reward
In touching the body of dew in the
luminous dawn …

In my case too, it seemed I’d decided that, if I should take the trouble to be born, I might as well be born in India.

But why India? Why arrive here? I can’t recall the logic of that pre-natal bit of the decision-making. The Chinese used to say, probably expressing some Buddhist prerequisite: “To be free of existence, you have to be born in India.” According to this view, it’s not easy— at least if you’re in the relatively small queue for nirvana—for the soul to get a passport and visa to this place. The puzzling presence of a billion people in this country makes you wonder if they were all granted entry here because of their soul’s desire for liberation. But Jibanananda makes no mention of mukti; it’s the pain and inevitability of return that concern him, and what he’s interested in is the ‘deep compensation’ (‘gobhiratara laabh’) that India, or Bengal, comprises: a physical immediacy, for which dew is a metaphor. It’s the physicality of life—or of India, or of Bengal—that makes it, against better sense, desirable.

I have conflated ‘life’ with ‘India’. I may come back to the conflation later. For now, let me return briefly to what it was that caused people like my parents to make their way back—a journey their descendants today would find, counter-intuitively, astonishing. Why return to India when you’re in Britain? (To me, of course, the opposite question is the valid one: why stay in Britain when you can return to India? Replace ‘Britain’ with whichever Western nation is appropriate.) The obvious reason, for my parents, was homesickness. The other reason was the pride that generation felt, a pride with little room to breathe in Europe. The third was that they had, ostensibly, succeeded in what they’d set out to do. This legitimised their return. Besides, they had no future in Britain. A contemporary of my father’s said to me that he realised after he’d completed his doctorate in history at the School of Oriental and African Studies that he’d be able to do no more with his degree in England than get a job as a clerk in the railways. Those who completed their projects returned; it was rumoured that those who didn’t hadn’t finished theirs, and fear of disgrace—of perceived unfulfillment—kept them from going home. They became clerks in the railways. In the hierarchy of that system (generally; not always), those who went back home had succeeded; those who didn’t had failed. It’s the obverse of our world today.

SOMETHING CHANGED IN the 1970s to turn migration to, and settlement in, the West into a plausible ambition. It was the discovery, by Indians, of America: a belated consequence of Columbus’ misdirected journey. The US claimed to be a free country besides being a rich one; the word was out that Indians didn’t face racism there. I once heard a South Asian novelist—an innocent—say at a reading that Indians were considered ‘white’ in America. I thought of Wole Soyinka’s poem ‘Telephone Conversation’, where the potential job interviewee explains to the white woman who’s about to disconnect when she realises he’s black that he is actually, in part, fairly pale: ‘Palm of my hand, soles of my feet/ Are a peroxide blonde.’ I heard that desperation in the South Asian novelist’s placid declaration. However, by this time, 1996, Indian middle-class migration was already a success, the notion of ‘pherot’ had been thrown out of the window, and elite Indian settlements were coming into place in America. It was clear that Indians with PhDs needn’t be clerks in the railways in the US; they could ‘rise to the top’. There’s a historic opportunism to the Indian migration from the 1970s onwards to America that makes it unique, and different from other migrations outwards from this country: a self-focused embrace of the privileges that the new country offered and a denial of its politics, unless politics presented itself to the brown man as yet another privilege and route to ‘the top’. In certain ways, it made that migrant class conservative and apolitical, unlike its counterpart in Britain or Africa. Perhaps all migration to America had been historically opportunistic. The only groups that missed out on the opportunism and its wide-eyed mythology comprised those who inhabited America indigenously, and those who went there without choosing to: slave labour abducted from Africa. It could be for this reason that African Americans have had an even more abject history than Black South Africans under apartheid: in South Africa, other ethnic groups, not least the Indians, were integral to the fight for equality, just as white English activists contributed so decisively to anti-racist movements in Britain. In America, all racial constituencies except the African Americans and American Indians were migrants, and all migrants embraced the opportunism of the idea of a ‘free country’ in preference to solidarity. This was the background, too, to the romance of Indian migration in the 1980s, the coming into being of the ‘diaspora’, its success, and its literature and preferred genres.

The Bengali language was my mother’s way— besides the sari she was wearing—of reasserting everything about herself that was at once modern, culturally and intellectually unique, and universal: seemingly incompatible registers that the English unconsciously believed it was only their privilege to possess—that you had to be a European to be both culturally particular and a prototype of the universal

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Around this time—the time of the emergence of this romance—I was in London as an undergraduate. Although Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, and, as prime minister, part of an irrevocable change that was coming over Britain and the world, London was a dour city with large areas of inner-city deprivation and racism permeating not only institutional policies but everyday lives. I was deeply unhappy. The unhappiness had to do with the obliteration of my history that being in London entailed. Once, when my mother and I were walking up Tottenham Court Road towards Tesco’s (she’d come from India to be with me), I said something to her in English, and she smiled and said in Bangla, “Let’s speak to each other in Bangla, otherwise these people”—a man had just walked past—“will think we don’t have a language of our own.” She pointed this out maternally, without defensiveness or prickliness. The Bengali language was her way—besides the sari she was wearing—of reasserting everything about herself that was at once modern, culturally and intellectually unique, and universal: seemingly incompatible registers that the English unconsciously believed it was only their privilege to possess—that you had to be a European to be both culturally particular and a prototype of the universal. To speak in Bangla was my mother’s way of refuting this; it was also meant to send out a challenge to passing English pedestrians, to prick their bubble of universality, to trouble them not only with the incursion of difference, which is easy enough to compartmentalise, but with the possibility that there were other legatees of the universal (with all its accessory inheritances, such as language and conversation) than themselves. This is the pride I referred to earlier: not a pride in difference, but in one’s place and history in the world. It’s in this sense that Achille Mbembe invokes Fanon: “I am not Black, Fanon declares, any more than I am a Black Man. Black is neither my first name nor my Last name, even less my essence or my identity. I am a human being, that is all… .” To be white, or Black, or Indian is not to be an essence; it’s to have that rare privilege—the privilege of a vantage-point unique to your history, a vantage-point that makes available certain things while shutting out others. What vantage-point did being Black offer, for instance? In a 1970 documentary, James Baldwin reminded his English interviewer standing before the Place de la Bastille in Paris: “None of you know yet who this dark stranger is… I’m not at all what you think I am.” Coming from Baldwin, one of the implications of this is: “You see, I know your culture as well as you do, while you don’t know mine.” It’s only at moments such as this that we excavate our awareness of our power, of the histories of cosmopolitanism we belong to, or in what sense we’re inheritors and creators of the ‘universal’.

Baldwin’s observation reminded me of something my mother said to me in Bombay on hearing an English colleague of my father’s mispronounce an Indian word (I was a child then), a remark prescient of what she told me on Tottenham Court Road: “See, we know their language so well, but they can hardly speak ours. We know both ours and theirs.” This points to the number of vantage-points that being Indian affords at least some of us: something that I can’t dream of exchanging for the reliability and the safeness of being English, or French, or European American, however desirable and wondrous those identities may be. I can’t imagine exchanging my vantage-point of the world for another.

To me, being an Indian citizen means nothing (I’m not a citizen when I write or sing) and a great deal, because I know (though it was granted to me inadvertently for being born here) it’s a privilege which is hard to come by

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ONE WAY MY parents located their memories of England—treasured memories—after returning to India was to situate them in a critical awareness without sacrificing any of the memories’ dimensions of spontaneity and wonder; to, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s sense, ‘provincialise’ them. This made any number of local and universal histories come into being simultaneously: as mortals become immortals and immortals mortals, Europeans became local and Bengalis universal and vice versa. The ‘provincialising’ expressed itself through jokes, prejudices (sometimes unnecessarily harsh ones) and observations. The prejudices didn’t translate to racism because they circulated privately, making, paradoxically, human beings of both the English and the Indians through acts of stereotyping and mockery. Some of this distancing vocabulary of mockery has faded away as we’ve succumbed increasingly to a single world order, but some of it survives in the memory: the histrionic horror at the European use of toilet paper; concern at the intermittent nature of English washing habits and personal hygiene; puzzlement over the smell ‘their’ overcoats gave off in the winter months; exaggerated dismay over the quality of English food. My parents’ generation also admitted there was much to admire in the English; but, contextualised in the private discourse about toilet paper and food, the admiration articulated itself as an expression of a discovery, of an assessment that went against the grain, rather than an acknowledgement of a prefabricated notion of superiority. The jokes were an act of provincialising; the admiration was an assessment by equals of equals. Of course, the English didn’t know about these jokes. The jokes were part of the worlds, languages and vantage-points Baldwin and my mother claimed were unavailable to the European or white person. On the other hand, ‘we’ knew all ‘their’ prejudices about ‘us’. This knowledge gave ‘us’ the advantage in fashioning a truer sense of universal history. Within this discourse I place anecdotes related by my mother about her years in London. How, for instance, she and her brother, sitting in the Tube, couldn’t stop laughing because the man opposite looked like Stalin; my father saying to my mother, when they encountered rudeness on a trip to Europe, that “Continentals” were slightly rustic—the Bengali word he used was ‘gainyya’—in comparison with the more urbane English; my mother’s ingenuous question to an English colleague in the India Office, who was showing off a cauliflower to adoring Indian colleagues, “But Mrs Jones—what will you do with it?” and her dismissive reply, “Why, boil it, of course!” All these are unmalicious, pointed acts of provincialisation.

It’s moot whether to be Indian means to be especially able to access an unusual number of vantage-points. What is the history of ‘being an Indian’? The ‘diaspora’ has made our sense of it fade as, in the last five decades, we’ve tried, or have been forced, to assimilate and succeed in a unipolar world. Our modernity, going back to the late 18th century, comprises a rich awareness of it, of knowing, despite, or even through, our political losses, what our colonising conquerors didn’t; of knowing more richly, deeply and heterogeneously than them. But the awareness goes back much further, at least to, and possibly beyond, Amir Khusrau in the 13th century: Khusrau, who chose to call himself Turk e Hindustani precisely because the multitude of vantage-points which that self-proclaimed identity encompassed required a new coinage or definition.

INDIA EXCITES NOT because of its national history, but because of the kind of text it is. This is evident in Khusrau’s ebullient approach to Hindustan as bricolage. It is, primarily, a text without clear demarcations between the inscribed and the uninscribed, the literate and the unlettered, the musical and the non-musical. It challenges itself at any given point of time, as when the authors of the Gita warn worshippers against thinking that studying the Vedas can guarantee spiritual knowledge, or when Dalit poets criticise another Dalit poet for accepting an award named after Saraswati. It’s not easy to reduce a text to a national category.

To have had anything to do with this text, this work is a privilege—to have been brought into being by it; to be among those, living and non-living, human and animal (woman, man, insect, crow, mountain, building), who bring it into being. I largely live here to be part of this ‘work’. It’s not because India, or Calcutta, has helped me ‘succeed’, or taken pleasure in whatever ‘success’ I have. I’d say the opposite; that the India I know and have lived in has been as opportunistic in its interests—personal, political and cultural—at home as it is abroad. If I’m invited to give a talk here, it’s because a few people who didn’t know me personally in the West, in Britain in particular, gave me recognition at a certain point in my life. I would say much of the attention you get in India, as well as the indifference, is governed by self-interest. Yet I live here, and devised ways of spending most of my time here even after going abroad to study in 1983, to the extent that, not only have I never had any intention of getting citizenship from the countries that gave me recognition, I don’t qualify for permanent residency anywhere else. I failed to fulfil the necessary obligations. To me, being an Indian citizen means nothing (I’m not a citizen when I write or sing) and a great deal, because I know (though it was granted to me inadvertently for being born here) it’s a privilege which is hard to come by. I don’t give it much thought because I didn’t have to earn it. Maybe its value was overt to my parents because they were born in the age of empire; it was in colonial India itself that they and their contemporaries converted subjecthood to a powerful sense of citizenship of an India that had been and was to come. I respect Indians who have earned, and for various reasons were compelled to earn, their citizenship abroad. For me, my constant return journeys to India and my resumption of life here is like a replay (undertaken hundreds of times by now) of the moment of my birth. In a sense, I had no choice in the matter; yet, as with the poet of ‘Suchetana’, it was desire that made me return.

About The Author

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri is an author and musician. His most recent book is Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music

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