Universiteit Gent

2007

Stepping Out of the Frame

Alternative Realities in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Verhandeling voorgelegd aan de

Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte

voor het verkrijgen van de graad van

Prof. Gert Buelens Licentiaat in de taal- en letterkunde:

Prof. Stef Craps Germaanse talen door Elke Behiels

2

1 Preface.................................................................................................................. 3

2 Historical Background: the (De-)Colonization Process in India.......................... 6

2.1 The Rise of the Mughal Empire ................................................................... 6

2.2 Infiltration and Colonisation of India: the Raj ............................................. 8

2.3 India, the Nation-in-the-making and Independence (1947) ....................... 11

2.3.1 The Rise of Nationalism in India ....................................................... 11

2.3.2 Partition and Independence ................................................................ 12

2.3.3 The Early Postcolonial Years: Nehru and Indira Gandhi................... 13

2.4 Contemporary India: Remnants of the British Presence ............................ 15

3 Postcolonial Discourse: A (De)Construction of ‘the Other’ .............................. 19

3.1 Imperialism – Colonialism – Post-colonialism – Globalization ................ 19

3.2 Defining the West and Orientalism............................................................ 23

3.3 Subaltern Studies: the Need for a New Perspective................................... 26

3.4 Postcolonial Literature ............................................................................... 31

4 The Breaking of Ties.......................................................................................... 35

4.1 Salman Rushdie: a Biographical Overview ............................................... 35

4.2 The Characters in TGBHF: on the Edge of Different Cultures ................. 37

4.3 Salman Rushdie’s Style as a Form of Breaking Ties................................. 41

4.3.1 Unreliable Narration........................................................................... 41

4.3.2 Intertextuality as a Mark of Globalization ......................................... 44

4.3.3 Alternative Realities: Rushdie’s Otherworlds.................................... 46

4.3.4 The Fine Line Between History and Fiction ...................................... 52

4.3.5 The Clash of the ‘Otherworlds’: East Versus West ........................... 57

5 When West and East Meet: Orpheus and Eurydice Versus Kama and Rati ...... 59

5.1 Origin of the Orpheus Myth....................................................................... 59

5.2 Origin of the Rati Myth and Comparison with the Orpheus Myth ............ 62

5.3 Mixture of Both Myths in ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ ...................... 63

5.3.1 Ormus as Orpheus or Kama? ............................................................. 65

5.3.2 Vina as Rati or Eurydice? .................................................................. 71

5.3.3 When East and West Meet… ............................................................. 75

5.3.4 The Role of Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant................................................... 76

5.3.5 The Role of Music in ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ ..................... 78

6 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 82

Bibliographical References ........................................................................................ 84

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1 Preface

In the past two decades the author Salman Rushdie has become the world-

wide famous symbol of the ambivalent position of the postcolonial author in modern

society. Born in India in the year of its Independence, Rushdie and his

contemporaries really have something in common with the ‘Midnight’s Children’.

This ‘Midnight generation’ is the first generation that will have known India only as

a free, independent country again. They are not familiar anymore with the actual

practices of colonialism, but they are nonetheless still very much influenced by the

consequences of colonialism – with regard to their personal lives as well as political

and economical life – in the early postcolonial period.

In the second chapter I will give a short overview of India’s history. The

starting point of this overview will be the rise of the Mughal Empire, because the

introduction of Islam in India is a crucial factor which today still continues to

determine India’s political life. Consequently, I will expand on the British infiltration

and colonisation of India and its struggle for Independence. I will continue this

historical overview with some information about the political climate in the early

postcolonial period by referring to the two foremost famous politicians in modern

Indian history, viz. Jawarhalal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.

India was not the first and only colonized country that became independent:

the twentieth century was characterised by a world-wide process of ‘decolonisation’.

Gradually, historians and philosophers started to question the way in which history

had been written before by the West, by the colonizers. Scholars like Edward Said,

Robert Young, and Homi K. Bhabha managed to develop new perspectives on

postcolonial historiography. In chapter three I will briefly introduce the most

important of them. I will also refer to the Subaltern Studies group – to which scholars

like Chakrabarty, Spivak and Guha belong – which sought to ‘write history from

below’ and which introduced some crucial ideas in the postcolonial discourse. As

history and literature/fiction are always interdependent, the Subaltern Studies group

also applied a lot of their theories to postcolonial literature and came to the

conclusion that its main goal should be ‘let the subaltern speak’ by ‘representing’

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them accurately. Postcolonial literature thus should give the subaltern minority their

place in history back.

Salman Rushdie has frequently been accused of not being able to represent

the subaltern Indian minority truthfully. The main reason for this is his elitist

position: although Rushdie is born in India he was educated in England and currently

lives in America. Because of this and because his literary style logically is strongly

rooted in the Western literary tradition, Salman Rushdie has been condemned heavily

by some Indian critics. Also the fact that he has chosen to write his novels in English

is a fact strongly opposed by those critics. Those critics argue that Rushdie has

become too much a product of globalisation and is thus incapable of truly ‘letting the

subaltern speak’.

However, in my dissertation I will try to investigate whether postcolonial

authors like Rushdie who have emigrated from their country of origin and who write

about it ‘from the West’ can serve as a means of bridging the gap that nowadays

exists between the two conflicting traditions of history writing, namely the Western

one and the Subaltern one. As the philosophers Foucault and Bakhtin and many other

theorists have claimed, we are always determined by our surroundings and the

context in which we live and understand history. According to those thinkers, it is

fairly impossible to ‘untie’ yourself from the traditional, cultural perspective by

which you perceive the world.

I will investigate whether authors like Rushdie (who have literally undergone

some sort of displacement or migration) have come the closest to ‘untying’

themselves and hence can function a means of bridging the gap between those

different perspectives. Indeed, Rushdie as a migrated author, disposes over a kind of

double vision: although he belongs to two different cultures at the same time, he

belongs to neither of them fully. In chapter four I will explain how Rushdie

constantly ‘unties’ himself from either perspective in order ‘to see the whole picture’

by exploring his writing style. Rushdie – in his contradictory writing style – keeps

making the readers aware of the existence of alternative versions of history,

alternative perspectives to look at the world. I will consider Rushdie’s masterly

manner of mixing elements from both Indian and Western culture as a way of trying

to ‘deconstruct the Other’. By this ‘other’ I not only mean the other image that the

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West has created in history writing to come to terms with its colonial history but also

the creation of the other image (of the still dominating West) by the Subaltern

Studies group.

In the last chapter I will show how Rushdie as a matter of fact manages to ‘let

the subaltern’ speak by offering alternative realities for the traditionally accepted

Western way of thinking. I will explore this into depth on the level of the basic story

line of his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

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2 Historical Background: the (De-)Colonization Process in India

At the heart of the idea of India there lies a paradox: that its component parts, the States which

coalesced into the union, are ancient historical entities, with cultures and independent

existences going back many centuries; whereas India itself is a mere thirty-seven years old.

And yet it is the ‘new-born’ India, the baby, so to speak, the Central government, that holds

sway over the greybeards. Centre-Stat relations have always, inevitably, been somewhat

delicate, fragile affairs (Rushdie 1992:41)

Because a complete overview of Indian history would take us too far, I will

limit my overview to the most influential evolutions with regard to the processes of

colonization and decolonization. By this, however, I definitely want to distance

myself from the imperialist view that colonized nations like India have no history of

their own. Anyway, in respect to postcolonial literature, it is for obvious reasons

mostly India’s colonial and postcolonial past which is more relevant. My main goal

is thus not to give an extensive and detailed overview of Indian history, but to report

those facts that are relevant to its (post)colonial history, as it is necessary to know the

colonial history of a country when one wants to speak about the postcolonial

literature of that country. I will start my historical overview from the introduction of

Islam in India, because it gave rise to the tensions that today are still underlying

Indian postcolonial society. In order to understand the political climate of India

today, the rise of the Islamic faith, and consequently the infamous Hindu-Muslim

rift, are thus still very relevant issues.

2.1 The Rise of the Mughal Empire

In the early history of India it was the introduction of the Muslim faith that

really shook the country to its core and would influence its history significantly. The

birth year of Islam is considered to be 622, the year in which the prophet Muhammad

fled to Medina, to become its spiritual leader. According to Wolpert (1997: 105),

“India remained blissfully oblivious to Islam’s existence during the first two decades

of that new faith’s vigorous growth”. However, from ca. 711 onwards Hinduism was

no longer the only religion: after the plundering of an Arab ship on the Hindus river,

an Arab force invaded Sindh and conquered Brahmanabad, which was back then a

part of Hindustan and belongs to present-day Pakistan. At the beginning, the Islamic

7

rule over Hindustan was fairly ‘peaceful’: in exchange for taxes, Hindus could

practice their own Hindu faith. It became more violent with the coming of the

“Sword of Islam”, Mahmud of Ghazni, who, according to Wolpert, “led no fewer

that seventeen bloody annual forays into India from his Ghazni perch, waging his

jihads at least as much for plunder as for the promise of paradise” (1997: 107). From

then on, autonomous Hindu power became more and more threatened every day;

Islam found its way into the heart of India. Constant battles divided and fragmented

India, not only politically, but also spiritually: in the early 16th

century, India was a

patchwork of different religious and political colours.

At this time, the former King of Kabul, Babur – the “tiger” – came to India “as

founder of the greatest Muslim dynasty in Indian history, as first pãdishãh

(“emperor”) of the Mughals” (cf. Wolpert 1997: 121). It was only in the second half

of the 16th

century, however, that the Mughal empire became somewhat unified

under the reign of Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbarn, the grandson of Babur. The

empire he led, was, according to Wolpert (1997: 127), further reinforced by his wise

government, for instance, trying to get the former enemies of his father’s empire on

his side.

Akbar’s unique achievement was based on his recognition of the pluralistic character of

Indian society and his acceptance of the imperative of winning Hindu cooperation if he hoped

to rule this elephantine empire for any length of time. First of all, he decided to woo the

Rajputs, marrying the daughter of Raja Bhãrmal of Amber in 1562, thus luring that Hindu

chief with his son and grandson as well to this capital at Agra, the start of four generations of

loyal service by that Rajput house in the Mughal army. That same year, Akbar showed his

capacity for wise as well as generous rule by abolishing the practice of enslaving prisoners of

war and their families, no longer even forcibly converting them to Islam. […] In 1564 he

remitted the hated jizya (non-Muslim poll tax), which was not reimposed for more than a

century, and with that single stroke of royal generosity won more support from the majority

of India’s population than all other Mughal emperors combined managed to muster by their

conquests.

According to Metcalf and Metcalf, this Mughal empire was characterized by a

distribution of powers. It was “operated by a hierarchic distribution of authority

among different levels of society”(2002: 28). By the 18th

century, however, the tide

seemed to be changing: While the Mughal empire lost most of its strength to regional

powers, the local communities were gaining economical and political influence.

8

2.2 Infiltration and Colonisation of India: the Raj

From the 17th

century onwards several trading enterprises found their way into

India, in their search for new resources. Trading companies from all over Europe –

Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, the UK – soon discovered the

possibilities of this ‘newfound’ land.

One of the most influential of these companies in respect to Indian history was

the British East India Company, also frequently called the John Company. It was

founded on New Year’s Eve 1600, by a royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I and

became one of the biggest trading companies in the world, its official name being

“The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies”

(Webpage of the East India Company). It was a joint stock company, which means

that “its members pooled their resources for joint trade rather than trading on their

own account” (cf. Bayly 1990). Its main founding intention was to favour trade

privileges in India and indeed, for 21 years it “effectively gave the newly created

Honourable East India Company (HEIC) a […] monopoly on all trade in the East

Indies” (Wikipedia: 2007). At first their interest was only of economical importance,

but gradually the company became also an influential military power.

With the collapse of the Mughal empire around 1707 (cf. Dalziel 2006) the

British influence in India started to expand. However, they still experienced some

trouble in Bengal, a region that is situated in the northeast of South Asia and is

nowadays shared by Bangladesh and India. In the Historical Atlas of the British

Empire, Nigel Dalziel writes that “in 1756 the British clashed with the ruling nawab,

Siraj-ud-Daula, who objected to the Company’s growing aggrandisement and to the

fortification of Calcutta”(2006: 36). However, this was quickly overcome, when

Robert Clive of the Company set up a conspiracy against Siraj in June 1757 (cf.

Dalziel 2006). After the defeat of Siraj, the Company’s power over Bengal expanded

vastly:

The Company emerged as undisputed master of Bengal, governing a population of 20 million

and receiving annual revenues of ₤3 million, sufficient to finance its large army and to

subsidize trading activities. Its position was confirmed in the Treaty of Allahabad (1765) in

which the emperor ceded the diwani, or civil administration, of Bengal and Bihar. […] The

British, whose power now extended to Delhi, became a major contender for supremacy in

India (cf. Dalziel 2006: 36/37).

9

According to Wolpert, “after 1965 the John Company sought to establish its rāj

(rule) over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa on as sound and permanent a basis as possible”

(1997: 187). Metcalf and Metcalf refer in this respect to the famous character of

Warren Hastings, who became “the first governor-general of the company’s Indian

territories” (2002: 55) in an attempt to restore the peace after the turbulent years of

the Company’s invasion in Bengal. Hastings was one of the most important figures

in the history of the East India Company because he was the first one who tried to

extend the Company’s economical and political power in a structured way.

The change from pure economical enterprise with some political power to a

more political enterprise with economical advantages came definitely with the India

Act of 1784. With this parliamentary act the Crown’s share in the company’s profits

and politics, and hence indirectly its influence in India, grew enormously. From now

on, the East India Company was under relatively strict supervision of the Crown of

England (cf. Wolpert 1997: 195):

Under Pitt’s India Act, the directors retained their formal patronage powers of appointment to

all Ranks of the company’s services, civil, military, and judicial, including statutory powers

to appoint the governor-general as well as the presidency governors of Bombay and Madras.

The crown, however, on the advice of the president of the board, was empowered “to recall

the present or any future Governor-General of Fort William at Bengal, or any other person”

in the company’s employ.

We might say that this act in reality prepared the way for “the full and direct

authority over India” (cf. Wolpert 1997: 194) which would take place some seventy

years later. According to Wolpert, “it was, in fact, Cornwallis […], who was to be

the true architect of John Company Raj” (1997: 195). Cornwallis seemed to be a firm

believer in the possibilities and even necessity of the British Empire in the world, as

he believed that “the Britons were the best qualified people to govern anyone” (cf.

Wolpert 1997: 195). It was “The White Man’s Burden”1 to govern those who could

not govern themselves. Furthermore, Metcalf and Metcalf refer to Lord Cornwallis as

a pure racist, who would even have claimed: “Every native of Hindostan, I verily

believe, is corrupt”. According to Metcalf and Metcalf, “this was to be the start of a

policy of racist exclusion in employment that was to characterize the Raj almost to

its end” (2002: 58). Soon, the British made their intentions about the future of India

very clear (cf. Metcalf and Metcalf 2002: 59):

1 Reference to a poem by Rudyard Kipling, viz. The white man’s burden.

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The last reform was that of Lord Wellesley (1798-1805), who founded the College of Fort

William at Calcutta (1802) as a place where incoming civil servants were taught local

languages prior to taking up their appointments. At the same time, the Company directors

established a college at Haileybury in England (1804) to provide fledgling civil servants,

required to spend two years there, with the rudiments of a general education before going out

to India. Thus was created the famed ‘steel frame’ of Indian administration, the Indian Civil

Service, in which the British, and many Indians, took great pride.

Because of the great British military organisational skills and because of the lasting

disunity among the many different Indian people, the conquest of almost the whole

of India was completed successfully by the 1850s. After several wars sparked by

Indian mutiny and rebellion, the East India Company “was widely blamed for

provoking the rebellion, and in 1858 the government of India was transferred to the

British Crown” (cf. Dalziel 2006: 78).

Under the Government of India Act, one of Her Majesty’s secretaries of state was vested,

through the cabinet, with full power and responsibility for the government and revenues of

India, thus inheriting the duties of both court and board (cf. Wolpert 1997: 237).

The British soon realized that, if they wanted to maintain order in this foreign

country in these turbulent times, they would have to make some indigenous allies as

well. According to Wolpert, “more than 560 enclaves of autocratic princely rule”

(1997: 240) existed throughout the years of British government. The British also

ceased their reform of legislation and made sure not to impose any social or religious

changes, which clearly reflects their anxiety about rekindling the mutiny and

rebellion. They did make some reforms regarding the army: More and more British

soldiers were recruited, so that in case of rebellion immediate action could be taken.

Modernizing measures, which were started by Dalhousie, were from now on

accelerated: especially postal and railroad services were further expanded. India and

the UK were now economically intertwined. While India proved to be a good

consuming market for products made in the UK, the import figures from India to the

UK increased rapidly. Tea, coffee, cotton, opium, indigo,… were the most important

export products of India in this period, providing the Empire with enormous

economical prestige in the world.

There was, however, an enormous racial gap between the native population

and the British, fed by the horrible memories both groups retained from the wars.

There was constant mutual distrust, and both communities became estranged even

more than was the case before the wars. Despite their economical interdependence

11

and (forced) collaboration, they were two communities that lived completely

separated from each other and that limited their contacts only to what was strictly

necessary. It is therefore hardly surprising that “several new forces of enduring

protest began to make themselves felt” (cf. Wolpert 1997: 249).

2.3 India, the Nation-in-the-making and Independence (1947)

2.3.1 The Rise of Nationalism in India

The influx of missionaries, the funding of English education, the opening of India to private

trade, and the continuing process of British unification and modernization, served only to

intensify Indian perceptions of their “native” differences, cultural, socioeconomic, and

political, from the officials who ran the Company Raj (cf. Wolpert 1997: 250).

Surendranath Banerjea, Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade,

Balwantrao Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale are some of the important

names in regard to this first public wave of Indian nationalism under the British rule.

These nationalist movements were, however, largely regionally based; there was no

such thing as one nationalist movement for all of India at that time. That came only

in 1885, with the foundation of the Indian National Congress, the first all-India

nationalist political organization. Chandra refers to the safety valve myth that

surrounds the founding story of this National Congress, i.e. the story that it was only

founded to “provide a safe, mild, peaceful, and constitutional outlet or safety valve

for the rising discontent among the masses” (1989: 61), so as to avert violent

revolution. Chandra, however, rejects this “myth” and replies to it that it “was not a

sudden event, or a historical accident” but “the culmination of a process of political

awakening that had its beginnings in the 1860s and 1870s and took a major leap

forward in the late 1870s and early 1880s” (1989: 71). Gradually the Congress

became more opposed to British rule, which turned the organisation into an

important instrument for preparing Independence.

After the first World War it was the character of Mohandas Karamchand

“Mahatma” Gandhi that became the symbol of the Indian struggle for independence.

Foremost he became famous for his advertising of non-cooperation and non-violent

resistance as the most powerful weapons to fight oppression. He became an

influential political and spiritual leader of the National Congress in 1921, from that

12

moment on his main goal being swaraj or “complete individual, spiritual, political

independence” (Wikipedia: 2007). Gradually he included in these non-cooperation

politics the swadeshi policy, which meant that a boycott was imposed on imported

goods, especially when they came from the UK. After spending two years in prison,

Gandhi came back to see that the great unity that had once characterized the

Congress under his leadership had crumbled down. In 1928 Mahatma Gandhi for a

second time launched a campaign for complete independence of India. At first the

British government chose not to respond, but as the protest grew stronger they

decided to negotiate with Gandhi, which resulted in the Gandhi-Irwin Pact in 1931

(Wikipedia: 2007). This pact had little to do with the actual transfer of power and by

order of Lord Willingdon – Irwin’s successor – Gandhi was for a second time sent to

prison, in an attempt to break his authority. That this attempt proved to be

unsuccessful, became clear when the 2nd World War broke out: in collaboration with

the Congress, Gandhi launched one of the most outspoken attacks on the British

presence in India, viz. the “Quit India Resolution”. This resolution gave way to a

mass protest in the streets of Bombay, where thousands of people were killed by the

police and thousands of others were arrested. Soon Gandhi himself became arrested

for a third time in 1942.

2.3.2 Partition and Independence

Meanwhile, the dissension between the different religious groups – mainly

Hindus and Muslims, but also Buddhists and Sikhs – got out of control. Violent riots

broke out and according to Metcalf and Metcalf this is mainly the reason why “the

British increasingly lost both the power and the will to control events in India”

(2002: 207). Two main political parties came to dominate Indian politics: on the one

hand, the unionist Congress – now with its main representative Jawarhalal Nehru –

and on the other hand, the Muslim League. Under the guidance of the charismatic

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, the Muslims more and

more started to think about creating an own Muslim nation, especially after the

elections in the winter of 1945/46:

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[…] for the average Muslim voter, Pakistan came to mean two things at once. It was, as a

modern nation-state for India’s Muslim peoples, the logical culmination of the long process

of colonial Muslim politics. At the same time, however, as a symbol of Muslim identity,

Pakistan transcended the ordinary structures of the state. As such it evoked an ideal Islamic

political order, in which the realization of an Islamic life would be fused with the state’s

ritual authority (cf. Metcalf and Metcalf 2002: 211).

After the rejection by Nehru of the British plan to divide the provinces,

Jinnah and the Muslim League took immediate action (cf. Metcalf and Metcalf

2002), which resulted in the Great Calcutta Killing in August 1946. The result was

devastating: some thousands of people got slaughtered. Retaliations followed soon

and in 1947 the struggle for power in the Punjab was a reality. According to Dalziel,

“the only solution left was partition, overseen by the last viceroy, Lord Louis

Mountbatten” (2006: 131). The new Muslim nation Pakistan was born on 14th

of

August 1947. One day later, on 15th

of August 1947, Jawarhalal Nehru, who would

become India’s first Prime Minister, claimed the independence of a Hindu India with

the following words:

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem

our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the

midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will wake to life and freedom (cf. Metcalf and

Metcalf 2002: 216).

2.3.3 The Early Postcolonial Years: Nehru and Indira Gandhi

The first independent years of India became very turbulent for the country

and its first Prime Minister, especially with respect to Kashmir. According to Metcalf

and Metcalf (2002) Nehru now felt that he had to act violently to get a hold on

things. In that period Kashmir used to be a princely state with an Islamic majority but

a Hindu principal, which made the situation immensely complicated and delicate.

Moreover, Jinnah had sent his army of Pakistani citizens there, to occupy the capital

of Kashmir, Srinagar. After the battle for Kashmir, India considered Kashmir as a

part of India. However, because of the fear of another war, Kashmir was divided –

although not equally: India would get the biggest part – between the two countries.

According to Ali (1985) the biggest problem that Nehru and his successors had to

deal with was the great smorgasbord of religious groups: Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists,

Muslims,… were all united by territory.

14

In 1966 Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru Jawarhalal and

thus already from her childhood familiar with Indian national politics, became the

first female Prime Minister of India. She governed the country from 1966 until 1977

and became Prime Minister a second time in 1980 until her assassination in 1984.

She is mostly famous for one of the most controversial periods after Indian

independence, namely the Indian Emergency. Indira Gandhi had advised the

President, Fakhrudin Ali Ahmed, to proclaim this State of Emergency for India on

26th

of June 1975. The main reasons for this were the upcoming (violent) discontent

of the masses, the increasing opposition to the Congress’s power and the accusations

that Indira Gandhi would have committed fraud at the ’71 elections.

As a result of this state of Emergency, Indira Gandhi became very powerful, as

she could now ‘Rule by decree’2, defer elections and delimitate civil rights and

liberties at will. Thousands of opponents of Indira’s politics were arrested and put in

jail. According to Tariq Ali (1985), another disturbing consequence of this State of

Emergency, was the increasing power of Indira’s son, Sanjay. However, it was this

fact also that disgusted public opinion and it were mostly the actions of Sanjay – for

example, a campaign for forced sterilisation and the violent removal of the poor and

homeless in the major Indian cities – that outraged the people. Because of the

growing violence Indira announced in 1977 the elections, which she lost by an

overwhelming majority.

Morarji Desai of the Janata party3 succeeded Indira Gandhi but already after

two years accelerated elections were proclaimed for 1980, because of disunity within

the party. Gradually, because of the growing economical problems, the disunity

within the leading political party and the scandals that came to surround it, the tide

began to turn and Indira’s popularity underwent an enormous revival that nobody

had expected. On 3rd

of January 1980 Indira Gandhi was again elected as Prime

Minister of India, until her murder by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. This violent

death helped to reinforce the Indira myth, which would not easily fade away.

2 This is a kind of political law-making, whereby the lawmaker – which is often a single person – can

pass laws without discussion or opposition. (Wikipedia: 2007) 3 This political party was a coalition, founded for the elections of 1977, of the former members of the

Congress and the political party Jan Sangh, the organization of the mass (Ali: 1985).

15

The introduction to Ali’s book The Nehrus and the Gandhis (1985) was written

by Salman Rushdie, who refers to the mythological proportions the Nehru-Gandhi

family took on in Indian history. According to Rushdie, the Indians should fight this

myth with actual facts, namely that the family politics of the Nehrus and the Gandhis

left Indian democracy in a very bad condition. In Rushdie’s collection of essays

Imaginary Homelands: Critical Essays 1981-91(1992), there is also a small essay

about “the assassination of Indira Gandhi”, written in 1984 after Rusdhie heard the

news of the murder himself. In this essay Salman Rushdie promptly gives his own

analysis of what direction Indian politics after Indira should take. He especially

stresses the fact that only when the Congress will take more in consideration what

the local States want, is there a “glimmer of hope for the future” (1992: 42) of India.

In his novels too, we can sometimes find sharp criticism of Indira Gandhi’s politics

and the effects of it on India, especially in his novel Midnight’s Children, in which

the division between fiction and history becomes not at all easily distinguishable. In

Midnight’s Children Indira Gandhi is constantly being referred to as ‘the Widow’, a

woman with black and green hair. She is depicted as a menacing, cruel character:

But what I learned from the Widow’s Hand is that those who would be gods fear no one so

much as other potential deities; and that, that and that only, is why we, the magical children of

midnight, were hated feared and destroyed by the Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of

India but also aspired to be Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect, possessor of

the shakti of the gods, a multi-limbed divinity with a centre-parting and schizophrenic

hair…(2006: 612).

The narrator for example recounts how he has been captured on the Widow’s

command to undergo a sterilisation. In a sarcastic tone the implications of Indira’s

politics are described:

Test- and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing

themselves… but that was only a side-effect, because they were truly extraordinary doctors,

and they drained us of more than that: hope, too, was excised […] (2006: 613).

2.4 Contemporary India: Remnants of the British Presence

The British have been present and influential in India from around 1600 until

around the time of independence, which of course is the reason why still numerous

remnants of that influence can be found. The railroad and postal system which were

16

introduced and further extended are naturally still present in India. A lot of place

names still refer to the British presence.

The most obvious proof, however, is the language: English is still one of the 22

official languages of India. According to Wikipedia (2007), Hindi is the language

most spoken but English is, nonetheless, still frequently used. According to

Hohenthal (1998):

In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent ranks third in the world, after

the USA and UK. An estimated 4% of the Indian population use English; although the number

might seem small, out of the total population that is about 35 million people (in 1994)(Crystal

1995:101). Although the number of speakers of English in India is somewhat limited (as

compared to the total population), that small segment of the population controls domains that

have professional prestige (Kachru 1986a: 8).

One major reason for the still frequent use of English is that in a country that

hosts around 800 different languages, English can be very useful and welcome as a

means of bridging the language gap between those languages, as a lingua franca.

Annika Hohenthal describes how the use of “English serves two purposes” (1998),

referring to Kachru (1986). First, because language operates as “a tool for the

administrative cohesiveness for a country”. The second reason is that English

qualifies as “a language of wider communication” (1998). English is the dominant

language in the media: according to Hohenthal the “number of English newspapers,

journals and magazines is on the increase” (1998).

Also in education, English is still mandatory, thanks to the “Three Language

Formula”:

The Three Language Formula was developed for the educational load to be more fair, to

promote national integration, and, to provide wider language choice in the school curriculum

(Srivastava 1990: 43). According to the formula, people from non-Hindi areas study their

regional language, Hindi, and English. Hindi speakers, on the other hand, study Hindi, English

and another language (cf. Hohenthal 1998).

However, the English language in India underwent some significant changes,

all inspired by the local languages (cf. Hohenthal 1998):

South Asian English has developed to a more distinctive level than in other countries where

English is used as a second language (Crystal 1988: 258). English in India has evolved

characteristic features at the phonological, lexical, syntactic and even at discourse level.

Initially, these innovations were rejected by purists, but they are becoming increasingly

accepted: English is not anymore treated as a foreign language; it is part of the cultural

identity of India.

Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin also take this in account and consequently make the

distinction between English and english “as an indication of the various ways in

17

which the language has been employed by different linguistic communities in the

post-colonial world” (2002: 8).

Also in Indian fiction, English still is frequently used as first language, which

makes it kind of problematic in respect to postcolonial writing. As in postcolonial

literature the former colonized nation seeks to detach itself from its colonial past, the

use of the colonizer’s language to do so seems highly ambivalent. This truly seems to

constitute the paradox of the (Indian) postcolonial writer. Ashcroft, Griffiths and

Tiffin refers in this respect to authors like Rao and Achebe, who “have to overcome

an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacement of the pre-colonial

language by English”.

Postcolonial authors like Salman Rushdie have often been accused of ‘selling out’

because of their use of the English language as first language of his novels. Fletcher

in his Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie

acknowledges those contradictory response to Rushdie’s language choice and writes

that

[…] Rushdie’s use of English has seemed to some to signify acquiescence in the imperial and

neo-imperical design, while most commentaries agree that Rushdie undertakes the

“chutnification” of English, or the creation of a hybrid language to “de-colonize” English

(Rushdie’s own term) or disarm it through ironical use (1994: 4).

He consequently states that “if the imposition of a foreign language on a people is

seen as a form of oppression […] then Rushdie’s taking control of English and

bending it to his purposes” (1994: 4) makes a powerful statement.

What is more, according to Harrison paraphrasing Rushdie, “in parts of South India

[…] Hindi may feel more ‘colonial’ than does English today” (2003: 107).

According to Harrison,

Those drawbacks to the use of a former colonial language that seem inherent, […] must actually

be apprehended historically, both in terms of the continuous evolution of the language – not least

through its role in colonial and postcolonial encounters – and, […] in terms of the history of the

idea of language’s to (national) culture, identity, politics and so on (2003: 109).

Rushdie rejects the opinion of those postcolonial critics by who the “continuing use

of the old colonial tongue is seen as a fatal flaw that renders it forever inauthentic”

(1997: xii). He argues that English has become every much a part of India as has his

mother language Urdu, “the camp-argot of the country’s earlier Muslim conquerors”

(1997: xii).

18

Furthermore, Rushdie in his typical satirical manner silences his critics by

concluding that “many of the attacks on English-language Indian writing are made in

English by writers who are themselves members of the college-educated, English-

speaking élite” (1997: xiv).

19

3 Postcolonial Discourse: A (De)Construction of ‘the Other’

3.1 Imperialism – Colonialism – Post-colonialism – Globalization

When speaking of ‘postcolonial literature’, it is important to try and define

what is meant by the concepts of ‘colonization’, ‘imperialism’, ‘neo-colonialism’ and

‘post-colonialism’. As Harrison justifiably argues in his work Postcolonial criticism:

“The terms colonialism, imperialism and the postcolonial are used differently by

different writers” (2003: 7), which makes it relatively difficult to define them

accurately. Especially the concepts of colonialism and imperialism are very often

intertwined and therefore not easily distinguishable. In his book Postcolonialism: an

historical introduction Robert J.C. Young states that “both colonialism and

imperialism involved forms of subjugation of one people by another” (2001: 15), but

the form in which this is executed differs. In the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s

Dictionary we can find the following definition for the noun ‘colonialism’: “The

belief in and support for the system of one country controlling another” (2003)4.

However, for ‘imperialism’, the dictionary offers two definitions and adds that this

noun is often used disapprovingly:

1 a system in which a country rules other countries, sometimes having used force to obtain

power […] 2 when one country has a lot of power or influence over others, especially in

political and economical matters.

According to Young “imperialism in its nineteenth-century form was essentially a

French invention” (2001: 30), although it was soon to be imitated by the other

colonizing countries. Central to this practice of imperialism was the idea of the

‘civilizing mission’. This idea has since then constantly been used to legitimate the

practices of domination, subordination and exploitation.

Young goes on to mark the difference between colonialism and imperialism as

following (2001:16) :

Here a basic difference emerges between an empire that was bureaucratically controlled by a

government from the centre, and which was developed for ideological as well as financial

reasons, a structure that can be called imperialism, and an empire that was developed for

settlement by individual communities or for commercial purposes by a trading company, a

structure that can be called colonial.

4 Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

20

The online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2006) states that one

should turn to the etymology of both words to understand the difference between the

two. So, according to this encyclopaedia, imperialism is derived from the Latin word

for power and colonialism “involved the transfer of population to a new territory,

where the new arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political

allegiance to their country of origin” (Webpage Stanford Encyclopaedia of

Philosophy 2006). However, the encyclopaedia with this definition downplays the

economical aspect of this enterprise. Young therefore distinguishes two main

categories of colonisation: First, there are the colonies that were founded for the sake

of settlement, for example the settlements of British North America, New Zealand

and Brazil. Second, there are what Young calls the “directly (or indirectly)

administered ones, generally situated in the tropics, that were established for

economic exploitation without a significant settlement” (2001: 17). It is in this last

category that Young puts British India. We could say that in India both structures

were present, as its infiltration was initially a commercial question but it gradually

became part of a larger ideology of the British Empire too. The East India Company

at first was only interested in the economical advantages India could bring: ivory,

gold, spices, tea… Only after the ideological and political aspect also became

prominent, as the Company’s power after came in the hands of the British Crown.

From that moment on it was really a part of the enormous British Empire. During its

heydays, the Empire covered almost a quarter of the earth’s total surface and ruled

over approximately a quarter of the total population (cf. Wikipedia 2007).

The main problem, however, which complicates the matter of colonial and

postcolonial discourse is the enormous diversity of forms in which colonisation

appears (cf. Young 2001). It is this aspect also that makes any universal theory of

colonialism or postcolonialism fairly impossible. Harrison, however, resents the fact

that “postcolonial studies has been concerned mainly with European colonial

expansion since the Renaissance, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries” (2003: 7). Young criticizes in this respect also the work of Said and that of

Frantz Fanon, who “developed the analysis of colonialism as a single formation”

(2001: 18) and who based his theory on the work of Le Sartre. Although Young

21

admits that French colonialism was fairly homogenous, he also points to the fact that

in respect of British colonialism this never was the case. Young’s main critique on

Fanon’s work was that he tried to account for the phenomenon of colonialism in one

single universal theory. However, Harrison calls Fanon “a key figure in postcolonial

studies” (2003: 153). Harrison states that Fanon’s “own perspective on relativism

and universals is often misunderstood” (2003: 153). Harrison resents the postcolonial

criticism on the notion of ‘universality’ voiced by the authors of The Empire Writes

Back, who falsely link the concept of universality with ‘Eurocentrism’.

Young makes another very important insight for postcolonial discourse,

namely that “the apparent uniformity or diversity of colonialism depends very largely

on your own subject position, as colonizing or colonized subject” (2001: 18). That is

also why among the researchers there has been an immense discussion about the use

of the term ‘postcolonial’. Quayson states that “like postmodernism and

poststructuralism, postcolonialism designates critical practice that is highly eclectic

and difficult to define” (2000:1). Sanga also acknowledges the ambivalence of this

term and says that “postcoloniality refers to a condition as well as a predicament in

which formerly colonized peoples attempt to mark out their place as historical

subjects” (2001: 1). Harrison remarks that the term postcolonial to denote a culture

may thus “carry misleading implications concerning the cessation of imperialist

influence and interference” after independence (2003: 8). This is also the main

reason why Quayson prefers to use the unhyphenated version ‘postcolonialism’

instead of the hyphenated ‘post-colonialism’, which was “first used by political

scientists and economists to denote the period after colonialism” (2000:1). According

to Quayson the unhyphenated version thus marks a tendency and is hence seen as a

process.

According to Harrison, referring to Stephen Slemon, an accurate postcolonial

theory must always take the “radically fractured and contradictory” nature of the

postcolonial society (2003: 136) in account. Young consequently proposes that:

Many of the problems raised can be resolved if the postcolonial is defined as coming after

colonialism and imperialism, in their original meaning of direct-rule domination, but still

positioned within imperialism in its later sense of the global system of hegemonic

economic power (2001: 57).

Young’s vision consequently brings us at once to the concept of the globalisation.

Sanga describes in her book Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: migration,

22

translation, hybridity, blasphemy, and globalization the relation between

globalisation and the pre-existing forms of imperialism:

European imperialism of the past three centuries was in fact what presaged the globalization

of the modern world. […] The decline of one form of colonialism in the 1950s has led,

however, to another form of imperialism that manifests itself in the form of a cultural and

economic control of the once colonized world by the Western powers under the masks of

global advancement. Social theorists such as John Tomlinson rightly argue that what seems

to have effectively taken the place of imperialism is globalization (2001: 140).

Sanga furthermore explains the aspect of globalization by the example of the

postcolonial writer Salman Rushdie, who has become himself a “metaphor of

globalism” (2001: 7-8). Also Rollason states that “Rushdie, as an émigré with a foot

in both Eastern and Western worlds, is himself clearly both product and exponent of

that globalisation” (2001: chapter 3). Sanga further refers to the criticism authors like

Rushdie have received in respect to this postcolonial discussion by scholars like for

example Aijaz Ahmad. Ahmad accuses postcolonial theories of just being a tool of

the West for continuing to dominate the rest of the world. Sanga consequently

reformulates the critique of Ahmad on Rushdie for being a member of an elitist

group of emigrants whose work actually is Western of character. Ahmad refers also

to the fact that “literature that is independent of dominant Western influence, and is a

vibrant example of the new cultural production of the postcolonial world, has been

sidelined or overlooked” (cf. Sanga 2001: 9). In his introduction to The Vintage Book

of Indian Writing Salman Rushdie strongly opposes this accusation. According to

Rushdie, the reason why Indian literature not written in English has been overlooked

is mainly because in general the quality of that literature has been rather poor. I will

come back to this point, when I focus more in particular on Rushdie’s novel The

Ground Beneath Her Feet.

23

3.2 Defining the West and Orientalism

Postcolonial history writing has always been based on some key

conceptualisations, which have been constructed by scholars belonging to the

tradition of West-European history writing and which have become very

controversial in respect to the postcolonial discourse. The most striking ones are the

two opposing concepts of ‘the West’ or West-Europeans and ‘the Others’ or ‘the

Orient’, which all bear witness to the colonial way of thinking and which

postcolonial discourse seeks to reject.

In White Mythologies: Writing History and the West the author, Robert J.C.

Young, discusses two main philosophical models of history that have been

dominating the western tradition of history writing and formulates reasons for

dismissing these models. First, he discusses the Hegelian model of history, which is

often applied to the process of colonization and is in fact a model of the ‘master-

slave relationship’ according to Young. The Hegelian dialectic is one that strives and

moves towards totality, which progresses to a better, more complete place. It starts at

one point in time and then moves forward (‘thesis’); During this process of progress,

however, it encounters confrontations (‘antithesis’). The thesis and antithesis

subsequently melt into a synthesis, after which the process will be repeated again

until totality is reached. Young launches a very important critique on this model,

especially in relation to the postcolonial history, namely that our view of history is

not at all neutral but that it relies on the view of history when Europe was a powerful

suppressor. He calls this “link between the structures of knowledge and the forms of

oppression of the last two hundred years” the phenomenon of “Eurocentrism” (1990:

2). Eurocentric ideology considers all non-European cultures as childlike, still stuck

in an earlier stage of development. Also in the Marxist model of history this

‘Eurocentrism’ is present, according to Young and it thus does not really offer a

sufficient alternative as it contains the same basic plot structure. Central in the

Marxist model stands the relationship between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’. According

to Young, much of the knowledge we have of the other, is actually more bound up

with ourselves and has little or nothing to do with the other. However, critics like

Quayson (2000) resent the claims that Marxist dialectic would be completely useless

in respect to postcolonial studies.

24

The point I want to make here is that from the point of view of postcolonialism, there is no

need to perceive Marxist and poststructuralist discourses as mutually incompatible. The

crucial index for evaluating any particular configuration of ideas is whether it provides ways

of getting out of confusing habits of thought (2000: 14).

According to Quayson, “Marxism did provide a prime anti-hegemonic discourse by

which to contest the West” but the main problem existed in the fact that

the rhetoric hardly ever matched with the practice, partly because the derivative ideology had

to take shape within contexts that were riddled with their exacerbated cultural contradictions.

Thus, in practice, the mobilization of the masses actually entailed the concentration of power

in the hands of a radical elite who turned out not to be very different from the Western

bourgeoisie they so vehemently criticized (2000: 15).

Quayson therefore advocates “a more culturally sensitive form of Marxism” (2000:

16).

Young also refers to another idea inherent in Marxist dialectic, viz. the

‘civilizing mission’ thought, which I have already referred to earlier on and which is

present in this Marxist dialectic (1990: 2):

To this extent, Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of

world history is simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism: it was Hegel,

after all, who declared that ‘Africa has no history’, and it was Marx who, though critical of

British imperialism, concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the

best because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating

the conditions for future class struggle there.

It thus brings to the question of colonisation a sense of morality, which of course

goes hand in hand with economical and political ideas about colonisation: It is ‘the

white man’s burden’ to bring civilisation to the childlike culture of the ‘others’, if

necessary with violence. The phrase became famous by the poem The White Man’s

Burden (1899) written by Rudyard Kipling, a British imperialist author who was

born in India:

Take up the White Man's burden!

Have done with childish days

The lightly-proffered laurel,

The easy ungrudged praise:

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgment of your peers.

According to Theo D’Haen (2002), Rudyard Kipling was one of the first writers of

empire to also emphasize the duties of imperialism and not only the privileges. He

was the first person who advocated the ‘civilising mission thought’ so clearly, which

made him the ‘ethical voice’ in times of imperialism. Although the bigger part of his

25

works are situated within India, Kipling always keeps defending English imperialism

which is why Kipling is often accused of being a thorough racist.

Salman Rushdie himself wrote an essay on this author in his Imaginary

Homelands. Rushdie criticizes the writings of Kipling on the basis of this intrinsic

racism his writing is characterized by. Rushdie claims that he has never been able to

read Kipling’s literature in a calm manner, because of the opposite emotions of anger

and delight it brings him. He also refers to the fact that the racism that can be found

in those writings is often downplayed by the West, because Kipling would have

merely reflected “the attitudes of his age” in his work. Rushdie cynically writes that

this excuse is outraging for “members of the allegedly inferior race” (1992: 74).

Young also stresses the fact that important issues like race and gender are not at all

considered in the Marxist view of history. In this respect it is thus more a narrative of

the western self. Young states that:

[…]the politics and theory of postcolonialism can be largely identified with the goals and

practices of so-called “Third World Feminism” (Park and Sunder Rajan 2000); with respect

to Marxism, the difference is that it incorporates predominantly non-western forms of

Marxism that have been developed to analyse the system and histories of imperialism and

colonialism, their aftermath and their persistence (2001: 58).

Young also refers to the work of Edward Said, who raises the term “Orientalism”.

According to Said this is one of the main deficits of West-European colonial history

writing, which he defines as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based

on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (1995:1). In his

introduction, Said refers to the fact that especially the French and the British have a

very long tradition of “Orientalism”. According to Said, the by “the West”

constructed concept of “the Orient” was used as a means for constructing an identity

for this “West” itself. It operated as an antidote for the West-European society and

culture, therefore being one of the “deepest and most recurring images of the Other”

(1995: 1). In other words it made it possible for the West to construct an “idea of

European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples

and culture” (1995: 7). Also Young refers to this historical notion of ‘Otherness’:

But in History, of course, what is called ‘other’ is an alterity that does settle down, that falls

into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the

same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns ‘its’ other. With the dreadful simplicity that

orders the movement Hegel erected as a system, society trots along before my eyes

reproducing to perfection the mechanism of the death struggle: the reduction of a ‘person’ to

a ‘nobody’ to the position of ‘other’ – the inexorable plot of racism (1990: 2).

26

Said pays special attention to a more historical and material definition, viz. “the

Orient” being “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority

over the Orient” (1995: 3). He refers to Foucault’s work The Archaeology of

Knowledge and the term d i s c o u r s e:

[…] without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the

enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even

produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and

imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period (1995: 3).

Robert Young also acknowledges the importance of the insights of Said but

nonetheless states that “Said cannot get out of the Hegelian problematic that he

articulates, and indeed tends himself to repeat the very processes that he criticizes”

(1990: 11).

3.3 Subaltern Studies: the Need for a New Perspective

One of the most influential theorists who prepared the way for the Subaltern

Studies group is Homi K. Bhabha. Bhabha was born in Mumbai in 1949 and is

currently a Professor English literature at Harvard University. He was the first one

who tried to create a dialogue between theories of colonialism and psychoanalytics.

In his thinking he is very much influenced by Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Said’s

Orientalism and Fanon. In his famous essay The Other Question: Stereotype,

Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism Bhabha describes the postcolonial

societies as characterised by both ‘ambivalence’ and ‘hybridization’. By

‘hybridization’ he means “the emergence of entirely new cultural forms” (cf. Eakin,

2001). According to Bhabha, different cultures ‘negotiate’ their way in to a global or

colonial encounter. Bhabha advocates that we desert the idea of ‘nations’ as nations

are – like literature – always constructed concepts, narratives. In the introduction to

Nation and Narration Bhabha explicitly stresses this idea:

Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their

horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation – or narration – might seem

impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political

thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the

West (1990: 1).

Bhabha consequently states that the concept of ‘nation’ is thus characterized by a

high degree of ambivalence “for the nation, as a form of cultural elaboration […] is

27

an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture as its most productive position”

(1990: 3). This ambivalence is definitely worth investigating, for “if the ambivalent

figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history […] then what effect does

this have on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationess?’” (1990: 2).

One of the most powerful and interesting insights of Bhabha is that “the ‘other’ is

never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we

think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves’” (1990: 4).

Although Bhabha is considered to be an important theorist in the postcolonial

discourse, he has often been criticised because of his extremely difficult and

inaccessible writing style. However, as Eakin points out in the New York Times,

He is credited with charting a new way of thinking about identity and cultural conflict. His

name merits an entry in the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. And he is one of

the most-sought-after speakers on the academic lecture circuit (NYT, November 17, 2001).

What is more, Bhabha also strongly influenced the work of what was later called ‘the

Subaltern Studies group’.

The Subaltern Studies group is a collective of historians and scholars from

South-Asian origin – and to some extent also scholars from all over the world

interested in the postcolonial South-Asian society –, who seek to construct a new

perspective on postcolonial studies. Some of the famous scholars that belong to this

group are Cayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, N.K. Chandra, Ranajit

Guha and Gayan Prakash. According to Quayson “the work of the Subaltern Studies

group was primarily designed to challenge the dominant modes of retelling India’s

past” (2000: 54). The term ‘subaltern’ was borrowed from the Italian political

philosopher Gramsci who used it to denote those who are subordinated by

hegemonic power and hence are denied a meaningful place in history (cf. Quayson

2000).

In Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies Dipesh

Chakrabarty explains what Subaltern Studies is really about and wherein its origin

lies. In order to enfeeble the critique on subaltern studies given by scholars like Arif

Dirlik, who claimed that Subaltern Studies merely use the same methods like the

British Marxists, Chakrabarty provides a “small history” of the Subaltern Studies

project. According to Chakrabarty, the Subaltern Studies grew out of a debate in the

1960s between two extremes in relation to the question about nationalism and

28

colonialism. First, there was the opinion held by Anil Seal, who claimed that Indian

nationalism had its origin in an Indian elite who had learned from the British rulers.

Second, there was the position of Chandra, who saw nationalism as an anti-reaction

to colonialism and as a bringer of unity among the people (2002).

The inconsistencies inherent in both these narratives gave rise to the

formation of a new generation of scholars, who called themselves ‘midnight’s

children’ and in 1982 the birth of Subaltern Studies was a fact (cf. Chakrabarty

2002). One of the main representatives of this early Subaltern Studies group was

Ranajit Guha, who accused the two former postcolonial narratives of being elitist, as

they did not recognise the power of the subaltern peoples for making their own

destiny. According to Chakrabarty, in this aspect there is indeed some

correspondence with the attempt to write “history-from-below” by scholars like

Thompson and Hobsbawn but nonetheless points to three main differences, in which

the “history-from-below” approach and Subaltern Studies prove to be distinct:

Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed a relative separation of the history of power

from any universalist histories of capital, a critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of

the relation between power and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of history as a

form of knowledge) (2002: 8).

Subaltern Studies instead advocates a theory which acknowledges the politics of the

people, of the masses, because of “the failure of Indian the bourgeoisie to speak for

the nation” (cf. Guha 2000: 5). Rosalind O’Hanlon states that

Their task, and that of all historians who write in the same idom, thus becomes one of ‘filling

up’: of making an absence into presence, of peopling a vacant space with figures – dissimilar

in their humble and work-worn appearance, no doubt, but bearing in these very signs of their

origin the marks of a past and a present which is their own (2000: 79).

Chakrabarty also refers to Guha’s rejection of any kind of ‘staging theory of history’

and of the use of the term ‘prepolitical’ to speak about the consciousness of the mass.

The term ‘prepolitical’ had been introduced by Hobsbawn to denote the

consciousness of the peasantry, which had not yet reached the political stage of

modernity and capitalism. According to Chakrabarty, Guha rejects this because it

merely reproduces “the same logic of representation as that used by the elite classes

in dominating the subaltern” (2002: 16). According to Chakrabarty – again referring

to Guha’s work – this of course also raises the “question of the relation between texts

and power” (2002: 15). In a Western tradition of history writing that relies on written

testimonies, what happens to cultures that have an oral tradition of passing forth

29

history? And as history is mostly written by the dominant in history, what happens to

the history of the subordinated? What happens to the history of those who do not

have a chance of delivering a written testimony of it?

It is in this respect that the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

is often being referred to. Because he was especially interested in the relationship

between power, language and knowledge and the relationship between the subject

and power his work is for obvious reasons applicable in the postcolonial discourse.

O’Hanlon also stresses the influence of Foucault’s thinking in Subaltern studies:

Yet it is Foucault, of course, who has constructed our most powerful critique here, not only of

Man as a universal category but of the way in which modern societies discipline and

subjugate their populations through the production, in the discourses of the human sciences,

of norms of thought and behaviour which lay down the sort of subjects that we are, and

prescribe to us the law of our being. […] With Nietzsche, Foucault exposes the obsession

with origins which underlies the search for a self-constituting universal human nature, for

‘the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession’.

With the dissolution of the universal human subject goes also, of course, the seamless

narrative movement of history, from the past to our present, which we continually attempt to

construct and to recognize ourselves in (2000: 94-95).

In his work The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault uses the term ‘archive’

and he is mostly interested in defining what constitutes those archives and how they

are produced. First, Foucault uses the term ‘historical a priori’: “the a priori of a

history that is given, since it is that of things actually said” (2006: 143). What

Foucault means is that “the domain of statements” is formed by all sorts of

knowledge, concepts and ideas and thus is far from neutral. It is in this context that

Foucault uses the term ‘archive’:

Instead of seeing, on the great mythical book of history, lines of words that translate in

visible characters thoughts that were formed in some other time and place, we have in the

density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own

conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use).

They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call

archive (2006: 145).

Foucault formulates the greatest difficulty with this concept of the ‘archive’: It is

impossible for us to describe our own archive, because it is exactly this archive

which provides us with the frame of rules by which we speak. So, according to his

theory, one can never fully untie himself from his own ‘archive’ and thus never fully

understand and describe the workings of it. Thus we should try not only to look at

what has explicitly been said but also to what has been implied with it: Chakrabarty

here refers to Eugen Weber:

30

In his well-known study of nineteenth-century rural France, Peasants into Frenchmen, Eugen

Weber provides a succinct formulation of this approach: “The illiterate are not in fact

inarticulate; they can and do express themselves in several ways. Sociologists, ethnologists,

geographers, and most recently demographic historians have shown us new and different

means of interpreting evidence (2002: 15).

Quayson also recognises this fact and formulates that because the Subaltern Studies

group really want to let the subaltern speak

they attend to non-conventional sources of historiography since the established documentary

accounts are noted to be completely contaminated by the perspectives of the elite classes in

whose interests the history of India had predominantly been written (2000: 58).

Thus to avoid an elitist approach of postcolonial studies, Chakrabarty refers

to Guha’s “metaphor of reading”, which reflects “the need for the historian to

develop a conscious strategy for reading the archives” (2002: 16). Chakrabarty then

refers to the perhaps most famous essay in respect to Subaltern Studies, namely

Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?. In this essay Spivak formulates a critique on

philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault and in her way of thinking she seems to be

related to Derrida. Her opinion on Subaltern Studies is also ambivalent: She both

acknowledges its importance and criticizes it. Although the Subaltern Studies group

justifiably focuses on Said’s notion of the ‘permission to narrate’, Spivak argues that

the theorists of this group do this “master-slave dialectic” (2001: 2201).

When these writers speak, in their essentializing language, of a gap between interest and

action in the intermediate group, their conclusions are closer to Marx than to the self-

conscious naivete of Deleuze’s pronouncement on the issue. Guha, like Marx, speaks of

interest of the social rather than the libidinal being (2001: 2201).

However, on the question whether the subaltern can indeed really speak she answers

fairly negative:

For the (gender-unspecified) “true” subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is

no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution

is not to abstain from representation (2001: 2202).

According to Spivak the problem is that all postcolonial studies prevent to depict the

subaltern as subjects in history. They are still subordinated, as ‘real’ subaltern people

are almost never heard. Spivak subsequently narrows her theory down to the position

of women in postcolonial historiography. According to Spivak, whether in colonial

or in postcolonial discourse, “the ideological construction of gender keeps the male

dominant” (2001: 2203).

If, in the contest of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the

subaltern as a female is even more deeply in shadow (2001: 2203).

31

Thus, the act of speaking is, according to Spivak, determined by the acts of hearing,

encoding, responding and interpreting. One does not exist without another. As we

can read in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism:

The historian who tries to recover the past should sketch “the itinerary of the trace” that the

silenced subaltern has left., should mark the sites where the subaltern was effaced, and should

delineate the discourses that did the effacing (2001: 2196).

Spivak received a lot of criticism after the publishing of her article. The main

critique launched on Spivak in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is

“that she leaves us no place to stand” (2001: 2196).

Her political pronouncements are unambiguous, but she steadfastly refuses to advocate

solutions beyond an openness to the other that can appear vague, undiscriminating, and

indeed theatrical. To continually dismantle one’s own assumptions seems itself an act of

privilege, a deconstructionist’s luxury that few can afford […] (2001: 2196).

However, despite of this criticism the fact remains that she has become one of the

key figures in the postcolonial debate who raised some very interesting and puzzling

issues.

3.4 Postcolonial Literature

The term postcolonial literature is especially reserved to denote the literature

of former colonized countries after their Independence, in which its writers seek to

both criticise the practices of colonialism and imperialism and give their country its

place in history back by clearly distinguishing their mother country from the former

colonizing country. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (2002), those

postcolonial literatures developed gradually, like national consciousness did. All

postcolonial texts have in a sense to do with migration, place, displacement,

domination and subordination.

In the work The Empire Writes Back, the authors distinguish four different

models that have been used to account for the vast variety of postcolonial texts. First,

they discern the “national or regional models” which account for the literature of

former colonized countries that followed the same developmental course as

American Literature did. These literatures have become completely independent, by

“national literary differences ‘within’ English writing” (cf. Ashcroft, Griffiths and

Tiffin 2002: 16). Consequently also the postcolonial literature of India can be

32

described in this way. A second category of postcolonial literature is referred to by

the authors as “the ‘Black writing’ model” (2002: 19): This model accounts for all

African postcolonial texts. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, these models

are “race-based models which identify certain shared characteristics across various

national literatures” (2002: 14). Third, they discern “wider comparative models”

(2002: 22), which try to account for postcolonial literatures by investigating issues

like the disjunction of language and place, thematic parallels, the relationship

between the colonizer and the colonized or the dominating and the dominated. A last

category of models are what Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin call “models of hybridity

and synchreticity” (2002: 32). ‘Hybridity’ refers to the fact that those postcolonial

writings are a collection of two different cultures: They borrow elements from both

the indigenous and the former colonizer’s culture, which gives them disposal over a

kind of ‘double vision’. In The Empire Writes Back the authors offer the following

definition for ‘synchreticity”:

Synchreticity is the process by which previously distinct linguistic categories, and, by

extension, cultural formations, merge into a single new form (2002: 14).

In the postcolonial writings that belong to this category the perspective shifts to ‘the

Other’ and “received history is tampered with, rewritten, and realigned from the

point of view of the victims of its destructive progress” (2002: 33). Their main

purposed is thus to reject the European traditional definition of history. In this

category we can thus definitely place for example Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s

Children.

I thus will focus here on Indian postcolonial literature, and more specifically

on the work(s) written by Salman Rushdie, probably the most famous Indian English

writer. However, there are plenty of other Indian postcolonial writers that are worth

mentioning. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997, edited by Salman

Rushdie himself, contains among others extracts from G.V. Desani, R.K. Narayan,

Anita and Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

and Salman Rushdie himself. In the introduction Rushdie (1997) states that the main

purpose of this anthology of Indian literature was to represent the best pieces of

Indian literature that were published in the first fifty years after the Independence. In

this anthology consequently four consecutive generations of writers make their

33

appearance. For the fact that all works included are in English, Rushdie makes the

following claim:

The prose writing – both fiction and non-fiction – created in this period by Indian writers

working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most

of what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India, the so-called ‘vernacular

languages’, during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, ‘Indo-Anglian’

literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world

of books (1997: x).

Rushdie even calls it “the achievement of the writers”, who like him work in English

and who are included in the anthology, that they have succeeded in finding “literary

voices” that are “distinctively Indian” despite the forged nature of English in India

(1997: xiii).

By the example of Salman Rushdie, I will attempt to answer Spivak’s

question in regard to the postcolonial literature. Although writers like Rushdie

themselves in the past have been accused of some form of elitism, I will try to

investigate whether through this postcolonial literature – although on the edge of

Western culture too – the subaltern can indeed speak. For, when we are indeed

incapable of ever untying ourselves from our own cultural frame of thinking, aren’t it

those authors like Salman Rushdie who have come the closest to untying them from

both perspectives? Or like Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, a character in The Ground

Beneath Her Feet says: “The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who

step out of the frame” (cf. Rushie 2000: 43). Harrison (2003) in this respect

importantly refers to Spivak’s notions of ‘vertreten’ and ‘darstellen’ in respect to the

representation of (subaltern) minorities. Both of these German words have the mean

of ‘represent’ in English, but each are used differently: ‘Vertreten’ is used in a

political context, whereas ‘darstellen’ is used to denote the “artistic senses of

depiction” (2003: 95). Harrison also acknowledges the importance of this difference

in regard to postcolonial writings and states:

Any writer may write about India, Algeria, or anywhere else, ‘representing’ it in the ordinary

literary sense, but only certain writers are eligible, it would seem to ‘represent’ it in the latter

sense, where literary ‘representation’ becomes linked to notions of authenticity, typicality,

and the ability to speak for others (2003: 95).

Thus, I will try to investigate if an author like Rushdie, who belongs to two different

cultures and at the same time does not fully belong to either of them, can indeed

really speak for the subaltern minority. As Rushdie himself seems to be convinced of

‘authority’ because he stated in his introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian

34

Writing that the Indian postcolonial authors, who like him work in English, are

“ensuring that India, or rather, Indian voices […], will henceforth be confident,

indispensable participants in that literary conversation” (1997: xv) with the world

which characterises literature.

35

4 The Breaking of Ties

4.1 Salman Rushdie: a Biographical Overview

It seems to me, more and more, that the fictional project on which I’ve been involved ever

since Midnight’s Children back in 1975 is one of self-definition. […] as an attempt to come

to terms with the various component parts of myself – countries, memories, histories,

families, gods. First the writer invents the book; then, perhaps, the book invents the writer.5

Salman Rushdie was born in Mumbai in a Muslim family on 19 June 1947 –

the year of India’s independence, which makes him thus something of a ‘Midnight’s

child’. At the age of fourteen he was sent to England to attend school there.

Meanwhile, when he was seventeen, his family moved from India to Pakistan. Later

on he studied History at King’s College Cambridge, which at once explains

Rushdie’s interest in the fine line between fiction and history. After graduating he

went back to his family in Pakistan, where he briefly worked in television. However,

after a while he returned to England, where he found a job as a copywriter in an

advertising company.

In 1975 his first novel Grimus was published, but it was only his second

novel Midnight’s Children, published in 1981, which would bring him international

attention. Salman Rushdie was awarded numerous prizes for this novel, including the

prestigious ‘Booker Prize for Fiction’ in 1981, and in 1993 Midnight’s Children

even received the ‘Booker of Bookers Prize’, which is an award for the best work

that ever won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the first 25 years. The novel recounts

the story of the generation of the ‘Midnight’s children’: The generation born in the

same night that Nehru proclaimed India’s Independence. Rushdie masterfully blends

history with fiction in a magical realist fashion. In 1983 his third novel, Shame, was

published and in 1988 Rushdie outraged the Muslim world by his fourth novel, The

Satanic Verses. Furious because of the allegedly blasphemous tone of the novel

against the Islam, the Iranian Ayatollah Kohmeini issued a fatwa – which de facto

equals a death sentence – against Salman Rushdie, who was forced to go into hiding

under police protection. This fatwa was issued on Valentine’s day 1989, which is

exactly the day on which The Ground Beneath Her Feet starts. Salman Rushdie,

5 www.contemporarywriters.com , Thursday, August 17, 2006. Copyright @ Booktrust, British

Council, the authors, the photographers. Produced by the Literature Departments of the British

Council in association with Booktrust.

36

however, kept publishing many books, including novels, collections of essays, a

children’s book and a travel narrative: The Jaguar Smile (1987), Haroun and the Sea

of Stories (1990), Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991),

East, West (1994),The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), Fury (2001), Step Across this Line

(2002) and Shalimar the Clown (2005).

Rushdie and his literature have, especially since the publishing of Midnight’s

Children and the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses, become the subject of

an enormous amount of critical essays. According to Keith Booker “there are many

reasons for Rushdie’s critical prominence in the West” (1999: 2). One of the main

reasons for this is that “Rushdie’s works match up extremely well to criteria of

literary quality that have been widely accepted among Western critics” (1999: 2).

Rushdie’s work is characterised by a strong sense of hybridity, as it is “rooted in both

the Indian and the Western (especially British) cultural traditions” (1999: 2).

However, according to Booker, this dimension of hybridity has also been a source of

controversy as well. A lot of the Indian critics deny that Rushdie’s work can ever be

representative of Indian culture and literature, because “Rushdie’s work (like

Rushdie himself) would be too extensively rooted in Western literary traditions”

(1999: 3). What is more, the fact that Rushdie has left his country of origin and

writes from the West frequently has been used to accuse Rushdie of elitism. Because

Rushdie is educated in Britain and now lives in America, a lot of the Indian critics

have argued that he lost the power to represent the subaltern minority. A lot of these

critics consequently accuse Rushdie of having become a Western product in the

process of globalisation.

I will mostly concentrate on Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet,

which was first published in 1999. In this novel Salman Rushdie reworks the famous

Orpheus and Eurydice myth by giving it a more contemporary setting and blends it

with its more feminist Indian version, namely the Rati and Kama myth. In doing this,

he not only makes the reader familiar with those two myths but also with the history

of modern popular music. The basic storyline of the novel tells the story of the

famous Indian rock star, Ormus Cama and his muse Vina Apsara, through the eyes of

a third character, Umeed Merchant. Umeed was a friend of Ormus and his competitor

for Vina’s love. When Vina disappears in an earthquake, it leaves both Ormus and

37

Umeed wrecked. In order not to forget her the narrator tries to reconstruct the story

of her life and the one of the love of her life Ormus Cama, who is supposed to be

“the greatest popular singer of all” (2000: 89).

Reviews of The Ground Beneath Her Feet have been both positive and

negative. One of the major critical assaults is that the novel is too superficial.

Rollason for example states that, although he can still appreciate Rushdie’s satirical

eclectic style, it is a shame that Rushdie’s characters are still “stuck firmly within the

Anglo-American rock-music mainstream” (2001: chapter 6). He claims that his main

disappointment lies also in the fact that the Orpheus and Eurydice myth is not

elaborated in more depth, which makes “the analogy […] at best rather forced, and at

worst downright vague” (2001: chapter 5).

Despite those accusations I have chosen this novel, because it shows in a

marvellous way how Rushdie keeps offering the reader alternative versions of

reality. Those critics who claim that The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a disappointing

and shallow novel, I believe, have seriously ‘misread’ it. First of all, critics like

Rollason who called the connection with the Orpheus/Eurydice myth too vague, have

clearly not picked up the references to its Indian variant, viz. the Rati/Kama myth.

Later on I will explain how Rushdie will play with those different versions of reality,

seeking to bridge the gap between the dominant Western view of history and the

subaltern discourse, which is all to often denied its place in history.

4.2 The Characters in TGBHF: on the Edge of Different Cultures

The three main characters in The ground beneath her feet all are characterised

by a strong sense of not-belonging. Both Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant and Ormus Cama

are born in India but both ‘untie’ themselves from their mother country and emigrate

in the course of their lifetime to England and/or America. Vina Apsara born Nissa

Shetty, the female protagonist, is perhaps the most prominent example of this not-

belonging. Vina Apsara was born in America, in a family of Greek-Indian migrants.

After the suicide of her mother her father sent her to relatives in India. Although of

38

Indian ancestry, Vina finds it hard to appreciate the country of her ancestors. In fact,

when she meets Rai Merchant at the beach for the very first time she even states:

I hate India. […] And there’s plenty of it to hate. I hate the heat, and it’s always hot, even

when it rains, and I really hate that rain. I hate the food, and you can’t drink the water. I hate

the poor people, and they’re all over the place. I hate the rich people, they’re so goddamn

pleased with themselves. I hate the crowds, and you’re never out of them. I hate the way

people speak too loud and dress in purple and ask too many questions and order you around. I

hate the dirt and I hate the smell and I specially hate squatting down to shit. I hate the money

because it can’t buy anything, and I hate the stores because there’s nothing to buy. I hate the

movies, I hate the dancing, I hate the music. I hate the languages because they’re not plain

English and I hate the English because it’s not plain English either. I hate the cars except the

American cars and I hate those too because they’re all then years out of date. I hate the

schools because they’re really jails and I hate the holidays because you’re not free even then.

I hate the old people and I hate the kids. I hate the radio and there’s no TV. Most of all I hate

the goddamn gods. (2000: 71-72).

In fact, Vina thus seems to blame India for not being America. Vina is depicted as

someone who, as a truly westernized subject has totally lost the connection with the

country of her ancestors. However, after returning to America she gradually starts to

appreciate her Indian heritage.

Also their family life is disrupted: Vina’s mother killed herself and Vina’s

brothers and sisters, after which Vina’s birth father sends her away. Umeed’s parents

also die at a fairly young age and Ormus has always been the outsider in his family,

his mother blaming him for the death of his twin brother and his father, who always

saw Ormus as a symbol of the decay of Indian youth, murdered by his older brother.

In short, these characters thus all seem ‘gifted’ with a sense of non-belonging.

According to Jaina C. Sanga, the theme of ‘migration’, displacement, (not) knowing

one’s place is a recurring postcolonial metaphor in Salman Rushdie’s work.

By calling into question normative constructions of home and exile, individual and nation,

history and fiction, and fantasy and reality, Rushdie’s writing enacts the complexities of

representing the postcolonial migrant experience (2001: 14).

Umeed, the narrator, seems aware of this sense of not-belonging himself,

when he formulates his belief that “in every generation there are a few souls, call

them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging” (cf. Rushdie 2000: 72).

What is more, in this semi-satirical passage, Rushdie’s narrator questions the concept

of ‘ties’ and even seems to make a strong political statement against western society

– inspired by Marxist socialism – that orders, divides and labels people:

For those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a

powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force,

so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not

really feel (2000: 73).

39

Umeed proceeds by giving an overview of human exploration of the continents, the

world and even space and concludes that “this is the species that kids itself it likes to

stay at home, to bind itself with […] ties” (2000: 73). However, immediately after

this, Umeed stresses the fact that it is his own subjective view and all that is therefore

not obligatory for the reader to believe, thereby undercutting his earlier strong

political statement. This offering of alternative, often contradictory opinions is

typical of Salman Rushdie’s writing, as we will see later on in the chapter about the

alternative versions of reality/fiction present in The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Umeed at one point in the text even seems to openly advertise the premeditated

‘breaking of ties’ in respect to one’s knowledge about the world. He starts by

pointing at ‘knowledge’ which has been widely accepted, namely that “disorientation

is loss of the East”. Consequently, he connects this ‘knowledge’ with the power of

language, which clearly marks the influence of Foucault, by saying: “That’s the

official version. The language says so, and you should never argue with the

language” (2000: 176). But whose language? Umeed criticizes this fact and goes on

by asking himself whether this whole concept of orientation, home, ties, knowing

one’s place isn’t “just the biggest, most truly global, and centuries-oldest piece of

brainwashing” (2000: 177).

However, Umeed Merchant is not the only character in the novel who

contemplates this detached state of not-belonging: also Sir Darius Xerxes Cama,

Ormus’s father, thinks about the concept of ‘outsideness’, in respect to his

comparative mythology. On page 42-43 the reader becomes a witness of the

discussion between Sir Darius and his fellow-scholar, the Englishman William

Methwold. In response to Sir Darius’s question about what happens to “the people

who just don’t belong”, the Englishman gives a rather startling imperialist point of

view:

Aren’t they, well, like waste paper, and all the stuff one puts in the bin? Aren’t they simply

surplus to requirements? Not wanted on the voyage? Don’t we just cross them off the list?

Cut them? Blackball them out of the club? (2000: 43).

The answer of William Methwold, I believe, can be read in two ways, which depend

on our understanding of ‘the ones who don’t belong’. We can read this not-belonging

in the sense of emigrants, like Salman Rushdie, who seem to fall in between two

40

cultures, not yet fully belonging to the culture of their new country and not anymore

to the one they left behind. In this sense it functions as a critique of both the

Subaltern Studies group and Western historians, who both seem to forget in their

overview the category of the ones who don’t belong in those two categories.

Another way of reading it is to consider the ‘ones not belonging’ as the subaltern

people, whose stories have been frequently ‘scratched’ out of history books and

whose place as subjects in history has been systematically withheld from them.

According to Sanga, it is just this aspect of migration that Salman Rushdie

vigorously attacks: “The Western metropolis must contend with its postcolonial

history as told by its migrants and incorporate this voice into the national narrative”

(2001: 17). In this sense we can probably read Sir Darius Cama’s fear of

Independence as a fear of not-belonging.

In respect to postcolonial studies, the sentence uttered by Sir Darius Cama

after this discussion seems to give an interesting reply, and seems to be one of the

thoughts that runs through the whole novel like a thread: “The only ones who see the

whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame” (2000: 43). That one could

have the possibility of really stepping out of the frame, proves that in the novel a lot

of importance is attached to the value of self-reliance or self-choice, the possibility of

making his own life and place in history. This idea of ‘self-reliance’ became a very

important issue in literature by the work of one of the earliest novelists in American

literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson used this term with regard to nineteenth-

century American literature – arguably still at a postcolonial stage – which he wanted

to stimulate to become independent for British literature. In this respect Emerson

wrote in his essay Self-Reliance:

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.

Society is a joint-stock company in which its members agree for the better securing of his

bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most

request is conformity. Self-Reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but

names and customs. Whose would be a man must be a nonconformist. […] Nothing is at last

sacred but the integrity of your own mind (2004: 535).

According to Emerson, by being more self-reliant “America must achieve its

literary and cultural independence” (cf. Cain 2004: 476). As American literature was

the first postcolonial literature written in English to achieve an independent status,

the connection of this notion of ‘self-reliance’ with Indian English postcolonial

41

literature thus is very relevant. That Rushdie is influenced by those first American

writers who ‘freed’ American Literature, is reflected by the names he gives the two

sons of Mull Standish, namely Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne Crossley and Mr. Waldo

Emerson Crossley.

Also Umeed, the narrator, clearly believes in self-reliance when he speaks

about choosing one’s own roots. By roots he means “not the ones we’re born with,

can’t help having, but the ones we put down in our own chosen soil, the you could

say radical selections we make for ourselves” (2000: 414). Dhar in this respect refers

to Rushdie’s own opinion about his “international connection”:

He writes that as an Indian living in London ( this in spite of his British citizenship), he is a

part of a larger group of migrant writers from all over the world, who have the unique

privilege of choosing their literary parents (1992, 20-21). (cf. Dhar 1999: 161)

These self-chosen roots definitely are depicted as much better versions of the roots

you are born with and according to which you are labelled by society, perhaps

against your own will.

4.3 Salman Rushdie’s Style as a Form of Breaking Ties

I will try to demonstrate the use and need for authors like Salman Rushdie, as

a connection between the two conflicting visions – the western biased and the

subaltern biased one – on postcolonialism, by focusing on Rushdie’s writing style,

which proves to be conceived by a mixture of influences. I will take a look at the

type of narration in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the intertextuality as a mark of

globalization and Rushdie’s use of alternative realities and the consequently blurry

and delicate line between fiction and reality.

4.3.1 Unreliable Narration

The term ‘unreliable narration’ was first used by Wayne C. Booth in his work

The Rhetoric of Fiction. This unreliability can consist in the emotional and

psychological instability of the narrator, the lack of information that narrator has

about the events recounted by him, or sometimes even in the deliberate purpose of

42

misleading the reader. Unreliable narration is a frequently recurring type of narration

in the novels written by Salman Rushdie. Not only in The Ground Beneath Her Feet,

but also in quite a few of his other novels. In both Midnight’s Children and The

Moor’s Last Sigh the story is told by a first person narrator recounting the events that

shaped his life, mostly so as to ‘tell the truth’, to write a small history of his – the

narrators are always male! – life. These unreliable narrators are always of subaltern

origin and the result of this first person narration is that it gives a strong sense of

subjectivity to the story, which thus makes it unreliable. The subjectivity

consequently is one aspect of why this type of narration is unreliable. The main need

to write down their histories felt by these narrators can be quoted by the words of

Saleem Sinai, the narrator in Midnight’s Children, who says: “I admit it: above all

things, I fear absurdity” (cf. Rushdie 2006: 4). As a result, the first person narrator in

these novels also always is at the centre of the story, is always one of its leading

characters: The narrator tells the story to add meaning to his life. For example, in The

Ground Beneath Her Feet, Umeed claims he wants to tell Vina’s story, but at the

same time he tells the story of his ‘liaison’ with her. If he wouldn’t tell this story,

nobody would have ever known what he meant to Vina. So, the fear of being

forgotten is definitely present.

From the start my place was in a corner of their lives, in the shadow of their achievements.

Yet I will always believe I deserved better. And there was a time when I almost had it. Not

just Vina’s body, but her attention. Almost (2000: 160).

And indeed, in telling the story of Ormus and Vina, Umeed also will

foreground his place in (their) history. He may have been a side character in the life

story of Vina and Ormus, but in this story he becomes one of the main characters.

Moreover, with Vina and Ormus dead and no other people around who ever knew

about their secret love-relationship, Umeed’s story is the only one that is left

available for us. There is no way of telling if his version of the facts is indeed what

happened. Moreover, the reader gets alerted to this fact when Umeed himself says

that “honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art” (2000: 213).

Another important warning sign for the reader can definitely be found in the opening

chapter of the book, when Umeed says “I, too, am compromised, no man knows

better than I how irredeemably” (2000: 22).

43

I believe that the use of this type of narration functions as a means of

underlining Rushdie’s belief in alternative versions of stories, in alternative realities.

I think everyone will readily agree that if the story would have been told by Ormus

Cama or Vina Apsara, it would look quite different. In section 4.2.3 I will elaborate

this presence of alternative storylines and versions of reality further. Even if Umeed

would indeed truthfully try to recount the story of Vina and Ormus, there are

numerous events he tells which he only heard from Ormus or Vina and thus has a

lack of knowledge of. Also the notion of relying on one’s memory is fairly

unreliable: one can not only fail to remember things, but even remember things in a

false way. Until today scientists have not yet managed to account for the workings of

the mind in the process of remembering. But what is agreed upon among those

scientists is that memories are unreliable. The narrator himself obviously is aware of

that fact, because he states that “we change what we remember, then it changes us,

and so on, until we both fade together, our memories and ourselves” (2000: 505). On

page sixty four there is a clear example of ‘failing to remember’, when Umeed tells

about the day he met Vina for the very first time:

But at once I halt myself. It is possible that I am pouring the wine of several beach weekends

into the bottle of a single day. Damn it, there are things I can’t remember. Was it on this day,

or another day? […] So much is lost (2000: 64-65).

This problematic issue of trying to remember things also is reflected upon when

Umeed states: “As I try to remember the exact sequence of events, I find that my

memory has become a silent movie” (2000: 13). As ‘remembering things’ has a

reconstructing function, it is very likely that the events in the past which are

‘remembered’ in the present are at least partly influenced by the knowledge the

narrator gained afterwards or by his emotions.

In short, Umeed’s story offers the reader just his subjective, perceived version

of reality. Umeed himself points at the immense variety of explanations and stories

when he says: “No shortage of explanations for life’s mysteries. Explanations are

two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find” (2000: 74).

Ironically enough, Umeed even uses the term ‘unreliable narration’, when he speaks

about his rejection of any system of belief: “They seem flimsy, unpersuasive

examples of the literary genre known as ‘unreliable narration’” (2000: 123). Thus,

although his story might be misleading the reader, the narrator sometimes seems to

44

make the reader deliberately aware of his unreliability. The reader consequently is

advised – although implicitly – of taking a critical stand while reading the novel.

In respect to the postcolonial debate, the choice of using unreliable narration

is of course not accidental.

4.3.2 Intertextuality as a Mark of Globalization

The Russian linguist Michael Bakhtin introduced the basis for the theory of

intertextuality by referring to the concept of ‘dialogism’: according to Bakhtin all

language appeared in a dynamic relation with the language that precedes and follows

it. A text thus never constitutes an isolated, independent unit but should be seen as a

part of a conversation with preceding and following texts or thoughts: all texts are

dialogic in nature. This quality of intertextuality both adds meaning to previously

appeared texts and gets shaped by those preceding texts.

Rushdie’s work is and has always been characterized by a high degree of

intertextuality: his work is related to texts and influences from both Indian and

Western culture. In fact, on the level of the basic storyline, The ground beneath her

feet is based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth on the one hand and its Indian

equivalent, the myth about Rati and Kama on the other hand. Salman Rushdie takes

up these myths and in an inventive fashion alters them. In chapter five I will bring

these two myths and the way they are represented in the novel into focus. For now

we can note that, throughout the novel there are a lot of references to Greek, Roman

and ancient Indian mythology: Orpheus and Eurydice, Rati and Kama, Helen of

Troy, Dedalus, Medusa, Odysseus… Furthermore, throughout the novel Rushdie

refers to famous figures from both Indian and Western political life like Mahatma

Gandhi (2000: 28), Indira Gandhi (2000: 192), Sanjay Gandhi (2000: 228) and Sir

Winston Churchill (2000: 88). He refers to famous writers like Aristotle (2000: 82),

Giovanni Battista Vico (2000: 83), Novalis (2000: 101), Nabokov (2000: 112), Milan

Kundera (2000: 380) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (2000: 209).

As The Ground Beneath Her Feet is largely about music, it should cause no

surprise that there are numerous references to world-famous songs, artists and bands.

Rushdie explicitly refers to artists like John Lennon (2000: 282), Manfred Mann

45

(2000: 281), Garfunkel (2000: 156) and Mick Jagger (2000: 282). For example, the

title of chapter twelve, “Transformer”, also is the title of a famous Lou Reed album,

and the song Ormus hears his brother Gayomart sing the melody but of which he can

not understand the words appears to be the hit Blowin’ in the Wind by Bob Dylan.

However, Rushdie also makes use of recurring characters from his own work:

Characters like William Methwold (from Midnight’s Children), Homi Catrack (also

from Midnight’s Children) and Aurora Zogoiby (from The Moor’s Last Sigh) all

return as minor characters in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (cf. Rollason 2001).

Another proof of this intertextuality in The Ground Beneath Her Feet can be

found in the playing with names. This occurs at various places in the novel: Rushdie

then not always uses the name to refer to that actual historical person in history but

uses it in a different context as the name of a character in the novel. It thus extends

the function of referring to, it serves as a means of characterizing the character. For

example, the combination of the names Darius and Xerxes in the name of the

character Sir Darius Xerxes Cama refers to two famous characters in world history.

Darius is the name of the king who ruled the Persian empire in the 6th

-5th

century

B.C. and Xerxes was his son and successor. As a matter of fact, the Persian empire

was at its height during the reign of Darius I (Wikipedia: 2007). In Rushdie’s novel,

Sir Darius Cama, belonging to the upper echelons of British-Indian society, seems in

fact an upholder of the British presence in India. What is more, on looking upon the

cheering Indian crowd in the stadium when he is preparing for his match of cricket,

Sir Darius thinks:

The country’s imperial overlords, observing the bawdiness of the populace, could only feel

disappointed at the continuing backwardness of those over whom they had ruled so wisely for

so long. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, walking out to bat, wanted to cry aloud, “Brace up! Do

yourselves justice! The British are watching!” (2000: 28).

It seems that Sir Darius has been completely brainwashed by British imperialism. He

even refers to Britain as “the mother country” (2000: 88), which is a quite ironical

thing for an Indian to say. The references in his name to the Persian Empire thus in a

way seem to serve as a satirical pun on his love for the British Empire. Also the

characterization of the main character, Ormus Cama, can be seen as some form of

intertexuality, but in an implicit way. However, more will become clear when

speaking in detail about the characterization of the main characters below.

46

The consequence of this high degree of intertextuality is of course that the

reader has to be aware of those intertextual references in order to fully grasp the

novel. All these references, in accordance with the unreliable narrative perspective,

give the reader the task of ‘doing his homework’. One should not take the offered

story for granted but read it very carefully, evaluate and examine it. As a matter of

fact, not only the reader’s understanding of the story but the whole story itself

changes with and depends on the degree in which the reader grasps these intertextual

references. Thus, alternative versions of the story become visible according to the

understanding of those references. Rollason states that it is exactly this openness of

novels that the linguist Roland Barthes designated as “the death of the author” (cf.

Rollason 2001). According to Rollason (2001), Barthes meant by this notion “that

the literary text henceforth belonged not to its writer but to its reader, who now had

the right to interpret its words multiply and at will”. It is with the same kind of

reading-strategy that the reader is invited to explore Rushdie’s otherworlds and

alternative realities.

4.3.3 Alternative Realities: Rushdie’s Otherworlds

In his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet Salman Rushdie constitutes an

interesting intertwining of two conflicting myths, namely the Orpheus and Eurydice

myth and the Rati and Kama myth. Those two myths have the same basic structure

and theme, viz. the loss of love and the quest of the one lover to try and bring his lost

love back. However, the main difference lies in the gender-roles. In the Orpheus and

Eurydice myth, it is the man who descends to the underworld in order to save his

love. In the Rati and Kama myth, its Indian Hindu variant, it is the woman who

undertakes the quest of bringing her love back. The Indian variant is thus much more

feminist than its Greek-Roman equivalent. Those two myths in essence offer two

different, alternative versions of the same basic narrative structure. When Clark in

his work Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds, writes that “the myth of

Orpheus and Eurydice […] fails to fulfil expectations or challenge readers with

anything startling or new” (2001: 199), I think he does not pay enough attention to

the tensions created by the dynamics between the two myths and especially to the

47

brilliant way in which its Indian variant, the Rati and Kama myth, complicates and

challenges the gender-roles. According to me, Rollason (2001) makes the same

mistake. In chapter 5 I will elaborate further on the presence of those two conflicting

myths in the novel.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, however, does not only offer alternative

versions on the level of the basic storyline, but there are even explicit references to

the existence of alternative realities, which I will call ‘other worlds’. I should remark

that I will not use this term in exactly the same sense of Clark (2001). Clark defines

those ‘other worlds’ as “the overlapping realms of cosmology, mythology, and

mysticism” (2001: 3). What I will call other worlds are the ‘alternative realities’ that

are offered by the author, not only to the reader, but also to the characters in the

novel. Although these alternative realities also can be situated in the realm of

mythology – like is in fact the case with the two alternative love myths mentioned

above –, these ‘other worlds’ can thus be manifested in various ways.

In the novel itself it is the character of Ormus Cama, the Indian rock singer,

who first becomes aware of the existence of those different worlds. In its description,

that ‘other world’ ironically enough seems to bear a lot of resemblance to modern-

day American society: “the place is swarming with people” who are “in too much of

a hurry”, who indulge themselves in promiscuity, eat greasy food with ketchup that

dribbles down their faces and who are “laughing too loud, crying too hard” (2000:

98). The mentioning of “the Herald Tribune” seems indeed to confirm the fact that

the narrator is indeed describing one side of American society. In this description

obviously a critical judgement is made of this American society.

Furthermore, when Ormus states that in this ‘other world’, “John Kennedy

got shot […] and Nixon’s president”, “East Pakistan […] seceded from the union”,

“the British aren’t in Indochina” and “Lou Reed’s a man” (2000: 350) it becomes

clear that Ormus is describing our non-fictional world! By this, the distinction

between the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’, stories and ‘history’, becomes very fluid and

blurry. This perfectly shows Rushdie’s love for confronting the reader with

contradictions and making the evident disappear. In an interview with The Guardian

of 1999, Rushdie admits this fact and says about this:

48

It’s called The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and the ground is shaking and uncertain and

unreliable. I thought, do it to the reader as well, just progressively pull the rug out.6

I will examine this fine and intriguing line between history and fiction in more detail

in chapter 4.3.4.

As I have already said, Ormus is the first character who perceives the

existence of that ‘Other World’. In the beginning, however, Ormus only becomes

aware of this alternative version of reality or ‘otherworld’ in his dreams. In this

world of dreams it is the ghost of Gayomart, his dead-born twin brother, who invents

the songs. The metaphor of the ghost is a recurring one in (post)colonial literature.

Generally, it symbolizes the haunted past of former colonizing countries. The ghost

then comes back to haunt people who have been engaged in any form of colonialism

or who seek to cleanse the official version of history from all untruthfulness. A

famous example is Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost. In this novel the main

character, haunted by a skeleton, tries to let victims of a political murder by the Sri

Lankan government ‘speak’ by searching for the truth. In this search for the truth,

however, she intends not only to let this one victim speak but to recover the history

of all those who disappeared in the Sri Lankan postcolonial period.

By searching and following his brother into this other world, Ormus can hear

the melodies and vowel sounds of those songs but not the words. What is more, it is

exactly in the existence of this other world that Ormus will find his own musical

power because as we can read in the novel “in Gayo, Ormus found the Other into

which he dreamed of metamorphosing, the dark self that first fuelled his art” (2000:

99). This ‘doppelgänger’ theme is in fact a very important feature with regard to the

construction of those ‘other worlds’. In the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s

Dictionary (2003) the following definition is offered of the noun ‘doppelgänger’: “A

spirit that looks exactly like a living person” or “a person who looks exactly like

someone else but who is not related to them”. What is more, not only Gayomart and

Ormus are ‘doppelgängers’ but so are Vina and Maria, who seems to be her ghost

image, and even Vina and Mira, the look-alike whom Ormus will falsely mistake for

his lost love. In respect to those ‘other worlds’, Ormus and Gayomart can be seen as

6 Wollaston, Sam, “Bombay Mix” in The Guardian, 2 April 1999.

49

two alternative versions of one person, who each seem to be wound up in different

dimensions or realities.

At first, Gayomart does not pay much attention to his living twin brother but

gradually Gayomart’s behaviour changes: from the moment Ormus arrives in

England his brother no longer runs away in his dreams but comes up to him in a

menacing, almost evil way:

Ormus is appalled by the hostility in Gayomart’s glittering grin. Why do you hate me, he

asks. Why do you think, his brother replies. I’m the one who died (2000: 281).

The situation changes dramatically after the car accident Ormus has in

England: from now on, although his brother seems to have escaped, he is able to

perceive both worlds at the same time. Through each eye Ormus now has access to

another world, and thus in this way disposes of a kind of double vision. This accident

thus seems to have a lot of significance and more particularly where this accident

takes place, namely England. It seems that, only after his acquaintance with the ‘real’

England after migrating, Ormus does acquire this double vision.

However, we might say that his ability of looking into the otherworld has

been announced already when he is on the plane to England. It is here namely that

the character of Maria makes her first appearance, right after he “passed through the

membrane” (2000: 255). This “passing through the membrane” is described by Rai,

the narrator, and signifies the moment one becomes a foreigner (2000: 418). The

young Indian woman seems to appear as from nowhere and comes up to Ormus,

talking to him about their endless nights of making love, kissing him and telling him

that she will be “every woman” he has ever wanted, “of every shape, of every race,

of every wild proclivity et cetera” (2000: 256). After the accident, when Ormus

Cama lies in a coma, Maria reappears as the nurse. About this appearance, the

narrator says that “she seems to materialize from nowhere” (2000: 315). Again Maria

starts talking to Ormus about their past love life and even starts making love to him.

Although Lady Spenta Cama, Ormus’s mother takes all kinds of safety measures to

prevent her from coming, she keeps returning. Maria herself claims that she comes

from “his secret world” (2000: 317). After Vina has awoken Ormus from his coma,

Maria keeps coming regularly but “Vina’s presence guarantees Maria’s absence”, so

that this Maria character seems to belong to another world.

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In her conversations with Ormus, Maria refers to their “life in the otherworld”

and talks about how “realities are in conflict” (2000: 326). It thus seems that in

Ormus those two different realities are heading for a clash with each other. It can be

suspected that Maria and Vina are two versions of one and the same person. The

narrator also points to this fact when he says that Vina “feels injured by the very

existence of this Other, it offends her” (2000: 324). He even states that “Other-hatred

is for Vina the mirror image of self-love”, which actually sounds very similar to the

critique of Western history-writing voiced by the Subaltern studies group.

Maria uses the metaphor of earthquakes to explain the battle between those

two alternative versions of reality:

Two worlds in collision. Only one can survive and so on. In the end this world will crumble

and fall and et cetera and we will be together at home for ever and I will make you mad with

joy et cetera et cetera et cetera as you must already know (2000: 326).

Earthquakes are connected to human “Fault”. They are “the means by which the

earth punishes itself and its population for its wrongness” (2000: 327). They are

consequences of the upcoming clash between the two different worlds, a clash in

which one of the two worlds possibly will disappear because it is not strong enough

to survive. Ormus Cama seems to be the only one in the novel who is aware of this

upcoming clash, and it fills him with fear:

If each of us has alternative existences in the other continuum, which of our possibilities will

live on, which will disappear? If we are all twins, which twin must die? (2000: 389)

Indeed, after the release of Ormus’s predicative earthquake songs, a series of

earthquakes shakes the world. The narrator tells us that “the 1980s had been a bad

time for the whole faulty earth” (2000: 450-451) and sums up the list of earthquakes

that took place in the 1980s: Algeria (1980), Mexico City (1985), San Salvador

(1986), India-Nepal (1988), China-Burma (1988), Armenia-Turkey (1988),

Tajikistan (1989). What is more, the narrator starts his story in the novel on the day

of the earthquake in 1989, again in Mexico. The narrator states that this earthquake

“measures a full nine on the Richter Scale, which is to say: as bad as it gets” and a

“XII on the Modified Mercalli, meaning complete destruction” (2000: 471). Vina

Apsara dies in this earthquake, which is described by the narrator as “the first great

calamity to be caused by the collision of worlds described by Ormus Cama […] the

beginning of an unimaginable end” (2000: 471).

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In the following years, Ormus starts to wear an eye patch, in order to be able

to control his double vision. Whenever he takes off his eye patch he is able to

perceive the other world and Maria comes to visit him. However, on the morning

after he marries Vina Apsara, he seems to have lost his double vision.

The years passed and the otherworld did not return, Maria no longer came to see him, and

with the passage of time he began to have his doubts about its existence; it began to feel like

a trick of the mind, a mistake. It was like waking from a dream; into happiness (2000: 436).

This, however, does not make Ormus feel at ease, he changes his musical style and

writes pieces, which are named “Sounds of the Otherworld”. The narrator says that

“the longer the otherworld remained hidden, the more fearful he became” (2000:

437). From that moment on, Ormus Cama starts to think that “the otherworld is the

next world […] the world that will succeed our own” (2000: 437).

Towards the end Maria also starts to visit Rai, both in his photographs and his

dreams and tells him: “Do you remember when we were lovers? Do you remember

our wonderful first night of love? No […] you don’t even remember me, do you, you

bastard” (2000: 448). The fact that Maria visits both Ormus and Rai, confirms two

things: First, that Maria indeed can be seen as an ‘other worldly’ version of Vina and

second, that also Ormus and Rai (a.k.a. Umeed) seem to be depicted as each other’s

‘other’. That this is a fact of which Rai is aware becomes clear when he states that

“the great man lost a twin brother, but (without knowing it) gained me. I’m his true

Other, his living shadow self” (2000: 386). Near the end, Maria appears one last time

in a photograph and afterwards it is her caretaker who explains on camera to Umeed

what has happened:

The worlds heading for collision, already it has begun, the earthquakes, you have perceived

their meaning, I think. Your friend Ormus feared the worst long ago, it damaged him, I am

sorry. He envisioned the end of your line. But the truth is, your line is stronger than we

believed […] Whole areas are devastated, torn and shredded, just no longer there. Where

they were is now a non-being that drives people mad. Incomprehensible nothingness

(2000: 507-508).

Essentially, Ormus’s disposal over a kind of double vision after the car

accident seems to bear a lot of similarities with the life of the postcolonial author

himself. As Sanga states, Rushdie himself writes with a “double vision” as a result of

his migration, his status as “an insider and an outsider in both worlds” (2001: 15).

Sanga characterizes this double vision as both plural and partial: “plural because his

writing contains aspects from several cultures, and partial because the writing does

52

not fully ascribe to either culture” (2001: 15). It is exactly because of his not-

belonging and writing from the margins that “Rushdie authors and questions the

unequal relations between peoples, races and languages” (cf. Sanga 2001: 17).

Maybe also herein lies the strength of the postcolonial author. If we assume that one

can never truly escape the context and the surrounding world that shapes one’s

thoughts, one’s writing, one’s worldview, can’t the postcolonial author function as a

solution for bridging the gap? This a valuable question that should definitely be

raised in postcolonial literary studies. Is it true that “double exposure: like Kirlian

photography, it becomes a new kind of truth” (2000: 420)? However, the main

question remains whether writers like Salman Rushdie, who have gradually become

a “product and exponent of that globalisation” (cf. Rollason 2001: chapter 3) are

indeed capable of letting the ‘subaltern speak’ through their work. Does the one who

steps out of the frame indeed see the big picture, or does one perspective ultimately

disappear behind the other one? Later on I will try to formulate an answer to this

question, by examining the dynamics between the Orpheus-Kama myth and the role

of music in the novel.

4.3.4 The Fine Line Between History and Fiction

When studying postcolonial literature – and frankly, any kind of literature –

one should always keep an interest in history too, as the two always – although not

always apparently – go hand in hand. As T.N. Dhar states in his work History-

Fiction Interface in Indian English Novel (1999): “It still remains true that man’s

very being is intimately connected with history” and

Even though the mode of representing and understanding it has become problematic in recent

times, his knowledge of himself and the world he inhabits continues to be largely shaped and

very often conditioned by his understanding of what it was like in the past (1999: 9).

According to Dhar it thus is a mistake to merely compare historical facts in a novel

with what really happened in history, an attitude of which he accuses traditional

historians. In this we can see the influence of Bhabha who stated that in respect to the

(post)colonial debate it is far more interesting to investigate how ‘truths’ are

constructed than to investigate how true they are. Because of the recent discussions

in respect to issues like postcolonial discourse, for example under influence of the

53

Subaltern Studies group, “the modes of history-writing have changed radically and

the boundaries between history and fiction are no longer as tight as they were

thought to be” (1999: 27). Harrison also acknowledges this fact and states:

The work of narrative fiction […] can never be wholly or ‘purely’ literary; it ‘always is, it

says, it does something else’, to repeat Derrida’s phrase. […] The critic wanting to assess the

ideological work that a given piece of fiction has performed must recognize, however, that

literature can frame ideological and historical material in different ways, and that particular

readers’ responses will have varied historically (2003: 147).

So, according to Harrison, when reading a novel accurately, the reader must have

some degree of awareness of “the contexts and modes of recognition” and “the

historical conventions of reading and literature as such” (2003: 147). According to

Dhar, the Indian historiographic metafictional novel by Salman Rushdie explores,

questions, challenges and criticises history and “accepts that there can be several

valid views of the past” (1999: 168).

Dhar characterizes these metafictional novels as self-reflexive works in which

the authors “use the modes of parody and magic realism to contest the very idea of

realism as a reliable method of representing reality” (1999: 168). The magical realist

novel thus either offers an ‘alternative reality’ of the past or questions the generally

accepted version of history (cf. Dhar 1999). A lot of critics have condemned Rushdie

and his followers for writing in this magical realist style and the literary critic Pankaj

Mishra even referred to this style as an illness of the post-independent era, which he

called “Rushdie-it is”. Central to all this is Rushdie’s belief that any kind of historical

reconstruction or remembering is de facto fragmentary. Dhar acknowledges the fact

that Rushdie’s work is characterized by a “tone [… that] suggests that our incapacity

to see things in their wholeness is something to which we are condemned; we just

cannot write a full and total account of anything” (1999: 170). Rushdie makes the

reader also constantly aware of that fact, for example by means of the ‘unreliable’

narrator Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant. Any version of reality, every story thus naturally

contains the narrator’s biased remembrance of that reality, which makes the

distinction between fiction and history indeed quite problematic. Dhar refers in this

respect to what he calls “the crux of the whole enterprise of history-writing”, viz.

“that all accounts are bound to be incomplete”. Also the narrator in The Ground

Beneath Her Feet seems aware of that fact when he says that

54

Reason and the imagination, the light and the light, do not coexist peacefully. They are both

powerful lights. Separately or together, they can blind you. Some people see well in the dark

(2000: 147).

Another typicality of the metafictional historiographic novel is, according to

Dhar, the tension created by the “opposition between the official and non-official

views of the past” (1999: 174). In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the narrator also

contemplates this opposition, when he tries to describe the first meeting between

Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. Umeed tries to recount this first meeting and

criticises the world for changing the story according to its need for mythology:

Many different versions of the first encounter between Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama are

presently in circulation, thanks to the clouds of mythologisation, regurgitation, falsification

and denigration that have surrounded their story for years (2000: 90).

Ironically enough, the narrator himself only retells the story according to what he has

heard of it from Ormus or Vina, because he himself was not even there! What is

more, in his version of the first meeting the narrator purposely foregrounds the role

of Persis Kalamanja, the girl Ormus’s mother had picked out for marriage, in the

whole story. The main reason for doing this, according to the narrator himself, is to

give Persis the place in history she actually deserves, as she has been constantly

erased from it in the version of the story as Vina and Ormus themselves recounted it.

So, basically, even the account of the events told by the two people who were

actually there has its flaws. About the conflict between the officially accepted

version and its non-official variants the narrator further states that

Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as

often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are

asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives (2000: 199).

Although The Ground Beneath Her Feet is not so explicitly concerned with

Indian history as novels like Midnight’s Children and Shame, there are passages in

the text where the narrator’s relation to the history of his country of origin becomes

clear. The novel is situated against the background of world history but with here and

there specific references to Indian history, especially when the narrator explains his

reasons for migrating and leaving India, which he compares with a divorce:

“Freedom, then? Not exactly. Not quite a liberation, no. It feels like a divorce”

(2000: 248).

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The narrative starts with the birth of Ormus Cama in 1937 and ends in the late

1990s, when Rai is the only survivor of the three of them. Through the narrator’s

description of the day of Ormus’s birth and especially Sir Darius Cama’s way of

thinking, the reader gets information about the Indian historical background,

especially in the first half of the novel. For example, the cricket game scene is very

important because it implicitly bears witness of the turbulent years before Indian

Independence. There is an explicit reference to the historical Mahatma Gandhi and

the reader is made aware of the tensions between the nationalists and the unionists by

the description of the cricket game. The reader is informed of the nationalist attitudes

toward this game of cricket, which the nationalists accuse of being a

Communally divisive, anti-national throwback, in which men of colonialized mentality

performed like monkeys for the amusement of the British and gave unhelpful assistance to

the policy of divide-and-rule (2000: 28).

A little bit later, we can read that “these were demoralized, rudderless days for the

smart set that revolved around the British Presence in India” (2000: 49). We can find

a reference to the “Quit India Resolution” made in 1942 and the riots that followed

(2000: 49). However, the reader only registers those events through the eyes of Sir

Darius Cama, who apparently was in favour of the British. The author here strikingly

makes use of focalization: the events are depicted in the way Sir Darius Cama

apprehends them. The reader thus only perceives one version of history, namely the

one seen through the eyes of someone who opposes Indian Independence and whom

the narrator describes as “a natural leader of men caught in a dead end of history and

deprived of followers” (2000: 52). About this end of the British Empire, the narrator

tells us merely that it was “one of the greatest upheavals in the history of nations”

and that the people all had to “deal with the uncertainty of the modern” (2000: 62).

The narrator tells the reader also about “the year of divisions, 1960”: the year in

which Bombay State was divided into Gujarat and Maharastra, the state of which

Bombay would now become the new capital. That the narrator is not at all pleased

with all those divisions becomes clear when he states:

You can’t just keep dividing and slicing – India-Pakistan, Maharashtra-Gujarat – without the

effects being felt at the level of the family unit, the loving couple, the hidden soul.

Everything starts shifting, changing, getting partitioned, separated by frontiers, re-splitting,

coming apart. Centrifugal forces begin to pull harder than their centripetal opposites. Gravity

dies. People fly off into space (2000: 164).

56

A little while further the narrator describes the political situation of India around

Christmas 1963. This India is described as “a nation in dire need of guidance” (2000:

192) after the death of Nehru:

Jawaharlal Nehru was dead. His successor, Indira Gandhi, was little more than a pawn in the

hands of the Congress kingmakers, Shastri, Moraji Desai and Kamaraj. A fanatical gang of

political bully boys, Mumbai’s Axis, was on the verge of seizing control of Bombay, and

Hindu nationalism was sweeping the country. There was a general feeling that things were

going too fast, that the national railway train was roaring ahead without a driver, and that the

decision to drop international tariff barriers and deregulate the economy had been too hastily

taken (2000: 192).

There are also a few references to the Emergency period, which had an

enormous impact on Indian history and which the narrator describes as “the

earthquake that people remembered, the earthquake that gave us the shock that shook

our confidence in who we were and how we had chosen to live” (2000: 218). The

earthquakes are thus connected here more specifically to Indian politics. However,

in spite of those references to Indian history, they merely appear in this novel as

background information and are not as crucial to the story as is the case in for

example Midnight’s Children. As Rollason justifiably notices, Rushdie at one point

in the novel abruptly shifts the centre of the story to the West, viz. first to England

and later on to the United States, “with virtually no subsequent revisiting of the

subcontinent” (2001: chapter 1). Thus, according to Rollason, “the reader watches

East being replaced by West as the epicentre”(2001: chapter 1) of the story.

Salman Rushdie himself offers the reader a kind of ‘fictional’ account of the

world’s rock music ‘history’ by telling the love story between Ormus and Vina.

Rushdie mixes fiction with history in a masterly fashion. He refers to the greatest

historical rock singers like Lou Reed, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, etc., whereby he

sticks relatively close to history but even this is a matter of perspective: incapable of

giving a full-sized overview of rock history, the author only chooses the rock stars

that he considers to be the most important ones. Thus, by making a selection of rock

artists he constitutes his particular version of the history of rock music. What is

more, by making the fictional Indian rock singers Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara the

greatest singers of all times, Rushdie dramatically alters this rock ‘history’. Rushdie

takes the history of rock music, which has traditionally been accredited to the West,

and makes it subaltern, thereby offering the reader an alternative reality:

57

So according to Ormus and Vina’s variant version of history, their alternative reality, we

Bombayites can claim that it was in truth our music, born in Bombay like Ormus and me, not

“goods from foreign” but made in India and maybe it was the foreigners who stole it from us

(2000: 96).

4.3.5 The Clash of the ‘Otherworlds’: East Versus West

When we attempt to read The Ground Beneath Her Feet as a postcolonial

critique of the continuing influence of Western imperialism, a very interesting

interpretation comes to the surface. As I already mentioned earlier on, the otherworld

Ormus describes bears a lot of similarities to our historical reality, dominated by a

Western point of view. Ormus refers to the fact that in that otherworld Kennedy is

murdered in a shooting and Lou Reed is a man. All those aspects refer to major

events in world history, but all of them are distinctively western. However, in the

‘real’ world of the novel, the perspective of the world’s events seems to have shifted

more to the East. First of all, in that world, the world’s greatest rock stars of all time

are Indian! So interestingly, the invention and culmination point in the world’s rock

history is situated in the East. With regard to the discussion about history writing in

the postcolonial era, those two different worlds are depicted throughout the whole

novel as if heading for a clash in which one of the two worlds will disappear. This

makes it very easy to understand those two different realities as the competing

western view of history and the Eastern one, as a battle between two opposing types

of postcolonial discourse. Maria, the girl who comes to Ormus in his ‘visions’ and

who apparently belongs to this western other world, is the first one who explicitly

refers to those “two worlds in collision” (2000: 326). She is also the one who points

out that only one of the two will survive. With regard to postcolonial studies this

makes in fact a very interesting case, when we consider those two worlds as two

kinds of postcolonial discourse fighting to obtain a dominant ‘voice’ in world

history. The battle then seems to be about taking one’s place in history. Ormus

Cama’s thoughts upon hearing Jesse Parker sing the song he invented accurately

describes what is at stake: “Someone was stealing his place in history” (2000: 99).

Maria - with a kind of western imperialist self-confidence – predicts that it

will be Ormus’s world, and thus the subaltern discourse, that will “crumble and fall”

(2000: 326), whereas the western hidden discourse will rise to the occasion and rule.

58

The earthquakes that shake the eastern reality seem to be precursors of the oncoming

clash with its western equivalent. Surprisingly, by the end of the novel it becomes

clear that it is the western world that proves to be the weakest and disappears.

Salman Rushdie hence lets the subaltern discourse prevail, as this discourse is the

only one that remains after the confrontation of the two. By making the subaltern

discourse as the only type of discourse that remains Rushdie thus seems to make a

powerful statement with regard to the postcolonial debate. This notion of ‘the East

overcoming the West’ also returns in Rushdie’s introduction to The Vintage Book of

Indian Writing. In respect to postcolonial subaltern literature Rushdie declares that

what seems to be the case is that Western publishers and critics have been growing gradually

more and more excited by the voices emerging from India; in England at least, British writers

are often chastised by reviewers for their lack of Indian-style ambition and verve. It feels as if

the East is imposing itself on the West, rather than the other way around (1997: xiv).

59

5 When West and East Meet: Orpheus and Eurydice Versus Kama and Rati

5.1 Origin of the Orpheus Myth

The myth about the lovers Orpheus and Eurydice is world-famous and has

been a recurring theme in both art and literature. The story is one of the most

compelling mythical stories from ancient times, which has proven to be a great

source of inspiration for composers, painters and writers and has hence appeared in

numerous adaptations. The singer, poet and lyre player Orpheus was, according to a

few surviving texts, born in Thrace, i.e. the Northeast of Greece, around the twelfth

century B.C. It is said that he was the son of the muse of the art of epic poetry,

Calliope, and King Oeagrus of Thrace. However, many other ancient writers were

convinced that he was actually the son of Apollo, the god of medicine, healing, light

and truth and the supposed leader of the muses7, who gave him the lyre at his birth.

Orpheus definitely seemed to have inherited the god’s musical talent, because from

when he was young, he was able to speak through his music to nature, animals, trees

and even rocks. The story goes that all of nature was under his spell when he played

music. That is also why, according to a lot of ancient writers, he is regarded as the

founder of the eldest metre, the hexameter8, and as an ancestor of both the poets

Homer (ca. 8th

century B.C.) and Hesodius (ca. 700 B.C.). He fell in love with the

tree nymph Eurydice, but the day they married she was haunted by the beekeeper

Aristaeus, who loved her too. In her flight from him, she got bitten by a snake and

died. When Orpheus received the bad news, he immediately went down to the

underworld, trying to bring his Eurydice back from the dead. He crossed the Styx9 ,

managed to move Hades and Persephone, the vengeful gods of the underworld, and

convinced them to let Eurydice go back with him to the world of the living.

However, there was one important condition: he had to promise not to look back to

his love until they were out in the light, back in the human world. When they were

7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo

8 http://www.in2greece.com/english/historymyth/mythology/names/orpheus.htm . According to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexameter, this used to be the standard metre used by both Romans and

Greeks, existing of six metrical feet per line. Also Ovid’s metamorphoses, to which Rushdie

frequently refers, was composed of hexameters. 9 In Greek mythology, this was the river which was believed to be the frontier with the underworld.

60

almost at the border, Orpheus was torn apart by doubt and fear and looked back,

whereupon Eurydice immediately fell back into the underworld, never to return.

After losing his Eurydice for a second time, Orpheus wandered for seven days on the

riverbanks of the Styx, trying to convince the ferryman of the underworld, Charon, to

take him back to the underworld but without success. About the ending there is a lot

of speculation: the story goes that after he has lost Eurydice for the second time,

Orpheus retreats into the woods and spends his days playing music and enchanting

all nature. His heart forever broken, he refuses all love declarations of other women

and becomes the first pederast, which causes an outrage among the local female

population, the Thracian maenads. In a bacchant orgy, they try to kill him by

throwing sticks and stones at him, which refuse to hit him because of his enchanting

musical talent. Furious, the maenads consequently throw themselves on Orpheus and

tear him apart. It is said, that after his tragic death, the muses collected his body parts

and buried them. His head, still singing, fell into the Hebrus river and drifted towards

the island of Lesbos, which became the centre of lyrical poetry. His lyre became a

constellation and his soul descended to the Elysium, where it was forever united with

the soul of his Eurydice.

I recounted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice here as it is written down in

the version of the Roman poet Virgil, because it is this version which Salman

Rushdie seems to follow in his novel. Rollason (2001) states that although the story

of Orpheus is originally Greek, only the Roman versions by Virgil in the fourth book

of the Georgics and the slightly younger one by Ovid in the Metamorphoses are the

only two versions that have survived. However, although no complete Greek account

of the story is thus extant, the name of Orpheus is referred to by some ancient Greek

writers too: Rollason (2001) refers in this respect to Euripides and Plato. Literary

critics, however, have discovered that the myth of the death of Eurydice, as we all

know it, was only added much later and thus did not appear in the original story of

Orpheus. Rushdie himself brings this to the reader’s attention when he claims:

The name Eurydice/Eurydike means “wide-ruler”. The first recorded use of this name in

tellings of the Orpheus story occurs in the first century B.C.E. It may therefore be a relatively

recent addition to the tale. In the third century B.C.E. she was called Agriope, “savage

watcher”. This is also one of the names of the witch goddess Hecate; and of wide-ruling

Queen Persephone herself (2000: 499).

61

The character of Orpheus later gave way to a sort of cult in the sixth century B.C.,

whose members were called the ‘Orphics’ (2001). Orphism10

seems from then on to

have been a kind of religion in the ancient Greek world, in which especially the gods

Hades, Persephone and Dionysus were adored.

Since Virgil took up the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, there have been

numerous adaptations of this myth, especially in drama and music. Wikipedia(2007)

lists more than ten different operas that are dedicated to or at least inspired by the

Orpheus myth. The most famous ones or adaptations are by composers like Haydn,

Gluck, Monteverdi, Offenbach, Rossi and, more recently, Philip Glass. However,

also in popular music there has been a lot of interest in the Orpheus myth: Nick

Cave’s song The Lyre of Orpheus and former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett’s

modern opera for guitar Metamorpheus are only two examples of this. In drama one

of the most famous adaptations is probably Orpheus Descending, a play written by

Tennessee Williams who was also the author of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A

Streetcar Named Desire, which mostly became famous in its 1951 film version

starring Marlon Brando. Orpheus Descending retells the Orpheus myth in a modern

1950s American setting. Some even say that the movie Moulin Rouge actually bears

a lot of similarities with the Orpheus and Eurydice myth (cf. Wikipedia 2007)11

.

Salman Rushdie is hence by no means the first author inspired by this myth. As I

already mentioned earlier on, Rushdie takes up the Orpheus myth but nonetheless

changes it dramatically. I will consider those references to the Orpheus myth and

Rushdie’s changes to it in further detail later on. Rollason interestingly reads the use

by Rushdie of the Orpheus myth as a way of revisiting the ‘death of the author’

theme.

For that tale ends with the spilling of a poet’s blood: Orpheus is killed by a vengeful band of

would-be followers. Such is the mythical destiny around which Rushdie has consciously

woven his new fiction, ten years on from the fatwa (2001: introduction).

10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/orphism 11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus

62

5.2 Origin of the Rati Myth and Comparison with the Orpheus Myth

The ancient Greek-Roman myth about Orpheus and Eurydice definitely bears a

lot of similarities with a myth in Hinduism, viz. the Rati-Kama myth. This myth is

written down in the fourth Veda, the atharvaveda, dated around 1500 B.C.

(Wikipedia 2007), which would in fact make it older than the Orpheus myth. The

Vedas are considered to be the oldest texts in Hinduism and maybe the oldest

surviving scriptures ever. They are subdivided into four different books: the Rig-

Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda and the Atharva-Veda. It is in this last book

that the myth of Kama and Rati can be found. In this myth the Hindu god of love,

Kama, is turned into ashes by the god Shiva for disturbing his meditation. Rati,

Kama’s wife and the Hindu goddess of lust and passion, manages to convince Shiva

to give her back her husband. However, Kama is restored only as “a mental image,

representing true love and affection, and not just physical lust”12

. What is more, in

the Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Myth we can find that Kama is described in

Atharva-Veda as “the primeval stir or impulse at the beginning of creation” (cf.

Dallapiccola 2002: 109), which clearly connects him with the mythological figure of

Orpheus, who is considered to be the creator of music.

Although there is thus a strong sense of similarity between these two myths,

there is also one major difference, viz. of who saves who: in the ‘Western’ myth, it is

the man Orpheus who will go back to save his beloved, while in the Indian myth of

Rati and Kama, it is the woman who tries to bring her beloved back to life. Thus, the

Indian myth is much more feminist in tone. Also the role of the ‘bringer of death’ is

very distinct: in the ancient myth, the nymph Eurydice gets killed by a snake while

running away from Aristaeus. However, in the Hindu myth, it is lord Shiva, a god,

who, deliberately, out of revenge, kills Kama. Salman Rushdie in this novel

constantly plays with these two different views on the same basic myth. There is a

constant dynamic between these two alternative storylines. In this respect, Salman

Rushdie shares his interest in the similarities between Indian and ‘Western’

mythology with a lot of scholars, like Max Müller, who tried to connect famous

‘Western’ myths to their ‘Eastern’ equivalent. Especially during the Empire, there

12

http://www.webonautics.com/mythology/kamadeva.html

63

was an increasing interest in those matters: in 1784 the Asiatic Society of Bengal was

founded by Sir William Jones. According to Metcalf and Metcalf (2002: 61), “the

society dedicated itself above all to study of the religious and cosmological texts of

Indian antiquity”. These scholars tried to discover the relations between Sanskrit,

Latin and Greek myths and texts, their main goal constructing a history for India.

Central to this history was the momentous discovery of a past, through shared ‘Aryan’

linguistic ties, that linked India with Britain itself. As Jones wrote, between Sanskrit, Greek

and Latin there existed “a stronger affinity than could possibly have existed by accident”,

hence all three had “to have sprung from some common source”.

However, this did not mean that the British stopped believing in their own

superiority. Although there seemed to be a linguistic relationship between the two, as

far as the British were concerned India was politically and scientifically still in its

infancy. Salman Rushdie often refers to this affinity between the great ‘stories’ in the

world. Moreover, in his children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, this belief

constitutes the very core of the novel. In this book all the stories in the world

circulate in one big sea, influencing, changing and reaffirming each other constantly.

Also Sir Darius Cama and his fellow scholar William Methwold, two characters in

The Ground Beneath Her Feet are intrigued by the relation between the Indian and

‘Western’ myths.

Sir Darius Xerxes Cama had in his younger days fallen under the influence of the German-

born Scholar Max Müller, whose work in comparative mythology had led him to the

conclusion that all the ancient myths of the Proto-Indo-European or Aryan cultures –

Zoroastrians, Indians, Greeks – were in essence stories about the sun (2000: 40).

As I mentioned already, Max Müller was a German scholar who became famous for

his comparative mythology and his studies of the Indian Vedas, which are, according

to Müller, to be situated around 1500 to 1200 B.C. ( Wikipedia: 2007) and which are

supposed to be the oldest written texts of Hinduism.

5.3 Mixture of Both Myths in ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’

That Salman Rushdie’s novel The ground Beneath Her Feet has at least been

inspired by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth already becomes clear by looking at the

table of contents of the book: chapters with names like ‘The Keeper of Bees’,

‘Legends of Thrace’, ‘Goat songs’ and ‘Beneath her feet’ all bear witness to this.

64

Actually, already when looking at the cover of my edition of the novel13

, there is a

reference to this myth: the cover is decorated with an Andy Warhol-like depiction of

lyres.

Salman Rushdie refers to this ancient myth in his contemporary piece of

literature –the events recounted in the novel are situated in the second half of the 20th

century –, which also means that he adjusts the myth to the contemporary setting.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet takes us on a journey through the history of rock

music: its Orpheus is not an ancient Greek lyre player, but a rock star, Ormus Cama

and so is his ‘Eurydice’, Vina Apsara.

There are a lot of references in the text which allude to the Orpheus myth and

adaptations of it. Already in the opening chapter, ‘The Keeper of Bees’, the narrator

even makes an explicit reference to Virgil: Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant asks the reader if

he knows “the Fourth Georgic of the bard of Mantua, P. Vergilius Maro” (2000: 21),

which is the volume in which the ancient writer for the first time took up the story of

Orpheus and Eurydice. Also in this first chapter, and in fact before the mentioning of

Virgil, there appears a reference to another famous adaptation of the love story: the

opera Orfeo by the German composer Gluck (2000: 12). In this passage, Vina Apsara

sings the part of both Eurydice and Amor, the goddess of love. Rushdie, however,

indicates Gluck’s deviation from the original story: Gluck changed the ending of the

story, because he thought it unacceptable to send the people home with a bad feeling.

In Gluck’s version love will triumph over death, but the reader immediately gets the

feeling that in this story there might not be a happy ending, as the narrator states that

“the earth began to shake just as she finished” (2000: 12). Umeed Merchant, the

narrator, also explicitly refers to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth when he explains

why he is telling us the story:

I have chosen to tell our story, hers and mine and Ormus Cama’s, all of it, every last detail,

and then maybe she can find a sort of peace here, on the page, in this underworld of ink and

lies, that respite which was denied her by life. So I stand at the gate of the inferno of

language, there’s a barking dog and a ferryman waiting and a coin under my tongue for the

fare (2000: 21).

However, there are not only references to the Orpheus myth, also the Hindu

myth of Kama and Rati is referred to. In fact, Vina Apsara compares herself to the

Hindu goddess Rati when she states: “So let’s never forget I was the one who fetched

13

Salman Rushdie, The ground beneath her feet, London. 2000. Cover designed by Lucy Albanese.

65

him out of the underworld, (…) like that Hindu goddess” (2000: 323). For Ormus

Cama, the reference to Kama, the Hindu god of love, is clear: Cama is Kama.

Rushdie’s novel is a constant intertwining of these two myths and as a consequence

it is not at all clear what part the different characters take in the novel: there seems to

be a constant question of who saves who and who tears who down. The three main

characters – Ormus Cama, Vina Apsara and Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant, the storyteller –

circle around each other and variably seem to take up different roles in the story.

Like Rai says at the end of the first chapter in a kind of explanatory introduction:

Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. But Aristaeus,

who brought death, also brought life, a little like lord Shiva back home. Not just a dancer, but

Creator and Destroyer, both. Not only stung by bees but a bringer into being of bee stings.

So, music, love and life-death: these three. As once we also were three. Ormus, Vina and I.

We did not spare each other. In this telling, therefore, nothing will be spared. Vina, I must

betray you, so that I can let you go (2000: 22).

5.3.1 Ormus as Orpheus or Kama?

Already from the beginning of the story, there are text elements that link the

character of Ormus Cama with the mythical figure of Orpheus. Ormus Cama was

born at ‘Apollo Bunder’, which at once evokes the question of the fatherhood of

Orpheus: was King Oeagrus the father of the mythical lyre player, or was it the god

Apollo? The choice here for ‘Apollo Bunder’ seems to reflect a preference for the

divine version of the story, providing the character of Ormus Cama with a kind of

divine sense that nowadays too surrounds most of the contemporary pop ‘gods’.

Ormus is described by the narrator as

a musical sorcerer whose melodies could make city streets begin to dance and high buildings

sway to their rhythm, a golden troubadour the jouncy poetry of whose lyrics could unlock the

very gates of Hell (2000: 89).

In short, Ormus Cama is described as a modern-day rocking Orpheus. In the novel

Ormus Cama is consequently represented as a melting pot of the most famous figures

in the world’s rock history: Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, etc. are all

implicitly or explicitly present in the characterization of the male protagonist. At a

time when the ‘West’ had lost most of its religious sense, pop stars and movie stars

became like a divine surrogate for this loss of religion. Everyday-people became

godlike by their celebrity status.

66

As we grow, we lose our belief in our progenitor’s superhuman nature. They shrivel into

more or less unimpressive men and women. Apollo turns out to be Oeagrus, god and Joseph

the carpenter end up being one and the same. The gods we worship, we discover, are not

different from ourselves (2000: 58).

Ormus Cama apparently bears his main physical and emotional resemblance

to the ‘King,’ Elvis Presley, which is also indicated by the numerous puns and word-

plays by the author on the subject. Growing up, Ormus Cama’s movements are

characterized by “the increasing explicitness of his pelvic thrusts and the dervish

thrashings of his arms” (2000: 89), a movement well-known by Presley’s admirers.

Elvis ‘The King’ Aaron Presley was born 8th

of January 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi.

The narrator explicitly refers to Elvis’s background when he ironically enough warns

the reader of imagining Ormus

As a mere echo, just another of that legion of impersonators who […] rendered grotesque, the

fame of a young truck driver from Tupelo, Miss., born in a shotgun shack with a dead twin

by his side (2000: 89).

He too, like Ormus Cama, thus was the survivor of a partly dead-born twin: his dead

brother was called Jesse Garon Presley. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the name

of Jesse reoccurs not accidentally as the name of the singer Jesse Parker, who Ormus

furiously accuses of being the thief of his song ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Also here Salman

Rushdie plays with names: the last name ‘Parker’ is a reference to the name of Elvis’

manager, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. This playing with names becomes very clear on

page ninety one:

But of course there were imported American magazines, and Ormus could have seen pictures

of Jesse Parker (perhaps alongside the sinister figure of “Colonel” Tom Presley, his manager)

in Photoplay or Movie Screen (2000: 91).

Also in the description of Ormus’s physical appearance, there seems to be a lot of

resemblance with ‘The King’:

The baby-cruel curl of his upper lip, or the thick black hair hanging in sensual coils around

his brow, or the sideburns that were straight out of a Victorian melodrama (2000: 89).

Although the birth stories of Ormus Cama and Elvis Presley are very alike,

the death of the protagonist is more similar to the one of yet another legend in the

history of music: John Lennon. The famous lead singer of the immensely popular

band ‘The Beatles’ was murdered on 8th

of December 1980 in New York, shot near

the entrance of his building when coming home.14

Ormus Cama dies in the same

14

http://www.johnlennon.com/site.html

67

way: he is shot near to the entrance of his home, the ‘Rhodopé Building,’ by a

woman dressed like Vina Apsara. Also the last words that Ormus Cama utters are

identical to the famous last words uttered by John Lennon on the way to the hospital.

To the question whether he knew who he was, John Lennon answered ‘yes I know’,

which are the exact last words Ormus Cama utters before he dies. Ormus Cama’s

love of fresh bread and fondness of baking his own are also a features he has in

common with the legendary John Lennon.15

The utopian worldview by which

Ormus’s music is characterized also seems to be influenced by the ideological aspect

which is to be found in a vast majority of the songs written by Lennon. The song ‘It

shouldn’t be this way’ of Ormus evokes the same kind of utopian, ideological way of

looking at life as do Instant Karma! and Imagine, Lennon’s major hit songs. What is

more, like Ormus, Lennon too was threatened with expulsion from America. The

main reason for this was his criticizing of the US government’s share in the Vietnam

war, a criticism he could not voice as a non-citizen of the US. This resemblance is

reflected clearly in the warning Ormus receives by an US official for the ‘dangerous’

political content that his songs contain:

We have some concern about certain lyrical content. There is naturally no question of

infringing any individual’s First Amendment rights, but the songwriter if we understand it

correctly is not a U.S. citizen. A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to

piss on his host’s best rug (2000: 381).

Furthermore, the relation between Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara is depicted in at

least as mythical a way as the relationship of John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono.

Under the influence of Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s music got more and more obscure

and experimental. In October 1965 they released their album Two Virgins, whose

cover showed a full frontal naked picture of ‘Johnandyoko’. Also Ormus and Vina at

one point in the story appear, although not completely naked, in a very similar

manner on the cover of their album Doctor Love and the Whole Catastrophe:

On the sleeve he and Vina posed in the fig-leaved nude, like classical statues wearing shades.

Like mythical lovers, Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice, Venus and Adonis. Or a

modern pair. He was Doctor Love and she, in this reading, was the Whole Catastrophe (2000:

422).

The resemblance of Ormus to Freddie Mercury, the famous lead man of the

legendary band ‘Queen’, lies not so much in appearance as in origin: Mercury, born

15

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ground_Beneath_Her_Feet

68

Farrokh Bulsara16

, was a child of Parsi parents and became one of the greatest pop

icons in the history of the UK. Both Ormus and Freddie Mercury thus are of Indian

origin and become famous Anglo-Indian singers. What is more, both of them keep

their Indian descent a secret from the outside world. Also the name of the woman,

Maria, who secretly visits Ormus Cama and tries to seduce him but seems to belong

to another world, could be linked to the persona of Freddie Mercury: his closest

girlfriend was called Mary Austin. The pirate radio station for which Ormus works

upon arrival in the UK is called ‘Radio Freddie’ and is located on a bark called the

‘Frederica’. Anyone familiar with Salman Rushdie’s work knows that this will not be

a coincidence.

Another major influence on the Ormus character is Bob Dylan, much admired

by Salman Rushdie. Christopher Rollason stresses the importance of Dylan as a “key

influence on the figure of Ormus” and refers to an interview in the Salon in which

Rushdie himself would have stressed the importance of Dylan’s music in his

personal life (2001). Rollason refers to the numerous quotations and references to

Dylan’s song that are present in the novel. According to Rollason, references can be

found to at least eleven different Dylan songs: from Blowin’ in the Wind to

Everything is broken and Mr. Tambourine Man. However, Dylan and Ormus also

seem to bear a lot of resemblance in respect to their personal life: for example, the

car crash of Ormus will remind the Dylan fan of his “motorcycle accident of 1966”

(cf. Rollason 2001). Also the anti-establishment character of Ormus’s songs seems to

be something he inherited from Bob Dylan, according to Rollason.

Further there are numerous references to other great idols of the emerging

rock scene in the second half of the 20th

century and all these are needed by Rushdie

to construct a new, contemporary rock setting, renewing the ancient Orpheus

character in a rock ‘n roll version of it. Because Salman Rushdie accredits all those

features of the famous ‘western’ rock gods to the Indian rock singer, Ormus Cama,

he thus sort of ‘rewrites’ the history of rock music and makes it something of

subaltern origin. “Just as England can no longer lay exclusive claim to the English

language, so America is no longer the sole owner of rock ’n’ roll: that is Ormus’s

unstated sub-text” (2000: 378).

16

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Mercury

69

Also the murder of Ormus can be linked with the Orpheus myth: after the

oath Ormus makes to Vina, namely that he will not touch her until their marriage in

ten years, Ormus turns down all other female candidates that are prepared to fill

Vina’s shoes. Just like Orpheus turned away from love after the death of his beloved

Eurydice. This, however, was also the reason why he got killed in the end by the

maenads. In the end of the novel, Ormus too will get killed by a woman, dressed like

Vina, probably for rejecting her. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet the narrator

explicitly makes a comparison to the death of Orpheus:

Ormus, holding himself aloof from all blandishments, even engenders violence in some

women who think it unreasonable of him to deny himself, who espy in his rejection of them

an insult to red-blooded women everywhere. Threats are received, and the policing of VTO

concerts, as well as security at the Rhodopé Building, is stepped up as a result. Such bacchic

fury is one part of the temper of the times (2000: 393).

However great the number of textual references to Ormus being Orpheus, it is

not at all clear whether Ormus plays such a heroic role in The Ground Beneath Her

Feet as does Orpheus in the classical myth. This fact is also frequently stressed in the

voice of the narrator, Umeed Merchant, who was also hopelessly in love with Vina

Apsara and had a secret ‘liaison’ with her. It is true that when Vina disappears for the

first time after the house where she lived with the Merchant family burned down,

Ormus claims that he wants to “follow her beyond the grave” (2000: 169) but these

remain merely words. When he hears that she is still alive he claims that he will go

after her, no matter where and no matter what it will take:

“I’m going to find her,” Ormus repeatedly swore. “No limit to where I’ll go. To the ends of

the earth, Rai. And even beyond.” (2000: 78).

But in the end, it takes him quite a while before he manages to tear himself away

from India and start his pursuit of Vina. At first the narrator offers two main reasons

for this: it wasn’t easy in these times to travel with an Indian passport and “after that

there was the problem of foreign exchange”(2000: 178). However, some pages later,

at the beginning of chapter seven, the same narrator weakens his own defences on

Ormus’s behalf by saying:

I must confess that I never completely accepted the passport/foreign exchange explanation of

Ormus’s non-pursuit of Vina. Where there’s a will, etc. (…) “I’ll follow her to the ends of

the earth”, he boasted, but he wouldn’t even go as far as the airport (2000: 189-190).

70

Further on this same narrator also downplays the role of Orpheus in ancient

mythology, when he speaks about the suicide of his own father after the death of his

mother. He does not refer explicitly to the character of Ormus Cama, but one can not

help but notice that there seems to be a hidden accusation present behind this

apparently ‘neutral’ statement.

There are those who say that the songsmith Orpheus was a coward because he refused to die

for love, because instead of joining Eurydice in the afterlife he tried to drag her back to the

life before; which was against nature, and so failed. Judged by this standard, my father was a

braver man than the Thracian lyre player (2000: 206).

Especially when Vina disappears for a second time – and this time forever – in the

earthquake, Ormus does not really give evidence of a heroic behaviour. At first, he

resorts to narcotics and sex with Vina look-alikes in order to try and keep his

memory of Vina alive. In the end, rather than follow Vina into death he prefers to

bring her back alive in the form of the look-alike Mira. There is nothing heroic about

it. He does not save his love, quite the other way around: the mirror image of Vina

keeps him from dying. Also Vina’s father criticizes his son-in-law for searching the

“easy way out” by using narcotics and indulging himself in the whole business of

Vina look-alikes, when he says:

If he wants to be with my poor girl so much, then why not be a man and shoot himself in the

mouth. Yeah. Why doesn’t he just blow his head off and to hell with everything. Then they’ll

be together until the end of time (2000: 497).

The narrator in this respect refers to Plato, who condemned Orpheus for the same

reason. Also Plato called Orpheus a coward because he refused to die for love. Again

the narrator connects this vision of a cowardly, weak Orpheus with the image of

Ormus when he says:

Orpheus, the despised citharode – the singer with the lyre, or let’s say, guitarist – the

trickster who uses his music and wiles to cross boundaries, between Apollo and Dionysus,

man and nature, truth and illusion, reality and the imagination, even between life and death,

was evidently not to austere Plato’s taste. Plato, who preferred martyrdom to mourning, Plato

the ayatollah of love (2000: 498).

However, this non-heroic and passive role in respect to his pursuit of Vina – as

opposed to his leading and mythologized position in the history of rock music –

together with his one minute stay in the world of the dead after the car accident

connects him more to the role of Kama, the Hindu god of love, who appears in the

Rati/Kama myth. But the most obvious textual reference to the fact that Ormus is

connected to the mythological Kama by the author is of course his name, Cama.

71

Ameer would conflate Ormus Cama and Vasco da Gama – “Ormie da Cama, your great

explorer, discovering you like a new world full of spices” – and it was a short step from

Gama to Gana, song, and between Cama and Kama, the god of love, the distance was even

less. Ormus Kama, Ormus Gana. The embodiment of love, and also of the song itself (2000:

125).

Here the author clearly connects the persona of Ormus with both Kama and Orpheus,

by calling him both “the embodiment of love, and also of the song itself” (2000:

125). The narrator even explicitly compares Ormus’s life with the character of Kama,

the god of love:

So also Ormus Cama, exiled from love by the parents whom he had failed to transfix with

love’s arrow, shrivelled by their lack of affection, is restored to the world of love by Vina

(2000: 148).

I therefore would conclude that in terms of physical appearance and in terms

of Ormus’s position in history as the pioneer and even inventor of rock music Ormus

is indeed depicted as a modern-day version of Orpheus. Just like Orpheus could

enchant the whole world with his lyre-music, so Ormus enchants all the world with

his rock music. However, in terms of his relationship with Vina he bears a lot more

resemblance with Kama, the god of love. He does not save his love, on the contrary,

he is saved by his love for Vina. Moreover, in his relationship with Vina, Ormus is

depicted as a impotent, weak version of the mythological Orpheus character.

5.3.2 Vina as Rati or Eurydice?

And Vina’s story, with its echoes of the high old yarns of, oh, Helen, Eurydice, Sita, Rati and

Persephone – tall Vina’s tall tale, which in my circumambulatory way I am hastening to tell,

certainly had a tragic dimension (2000: 58).

There can be found a lot of passages in the novel where allusions are made to

the resemblance of Eurydice’s story to the one of the female protagonist of the novel,

Vina Apsara. Vina Apsara was the name she chose for herself after running away

from Piloo Doodhwala, leaving her old names – Nissy Shetty, Nissy Poe and after

going back to India Nissy Doodhwala – and thus her past behind. The two words

‘Vina’ and ‘Apsara’ result from Indian culture: ‘Vina’ being an Indian instrument.

The Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Legend gives the following definition of the noun

‘Vina’: “a seven-stringed bamboo lute with a resonance gourd placed at one or both

ends” (cf. Dallapiccola 2002: 201). Interestingly enough, the word ‘Vina’ appears

72

also in Sanskrit where it – according to the web encyclopaedia Wikipedia (2007)–

has the meaning of ‘to long for’, ‘to hope for’, ‘to wish’ and ‘possibly, some sort of

sexual position’. This last meaning makes the allusion to Rati, the goddess of lust

and passion, of course fairly obvious. The idea of ‘lust’ actually can also easily be

found in the characterization of Vina. The narrator, Umeed, in fact often refers to the

fact that Vina always spoke a lot and freely about sex. In interviews the female

singer would share all the details of her sex-life with the worlds, which often made

Ormus uncomfortable. Also the fact that Vina does not believe in monogamy,

although she loves Ormus, also can be read in this way. Vina thus really represents

‘lust’ in the novel, whereas her love Ormus Cama seems to represent love.

‘Apsara’ too comes from Sanskrit, namely from ‘apsaras’, referring to a kind

of water nymph in Hindu mythology.

The apsaras are divine beauties, the dancers of the gods, who dwell in Indra’s paradise,

svarga. Mistresses of the gandharvas and, occasionally, of men, they can assume any form at

will. […] Heroes who fall in battle are swept away by the apsaras to svarga (cf. Dallapiccola

2002: 26).

The narrator also explicitly refers to the origin of these two words and in doing so,

adds a kind of warning on behalf of “that under-age nymphet” (2000: 96) Vina,

thereby linking these strongly marked elements from Indian mythology and culture

to the more ‘Western’ ancient myth of the death of Eurydice. In Vina’s full name

both myths thus seem to be connected:

Vina, the Indian lyre. Apsara, from apsaras, a swanlike water nymph. (In Western terms, a

naiad, not a dryad.) Look out, Vina. Nymph, watch your step. Beware the ground beneath

your feet (2000: 55).

Already the title of the novel makes the reader aware of the connection between

Eurydice’s ending and Vina’s. For both death will come from ‘the ground beneath’

their feet: Eurydice will get bitten by a snake that crawls in the grass under her feet,

while Vina will even completely disappear in the ground during the earthquake.

Throughout the whole novel, when speaking of Vina Apsara, there is a recurring

sense of doom, as to announce this terrible death.

I’m not saying that he was carried by demons down to some ancient supernatural inferno. No,

no. But chasms did open. They can, and did. They consumed his love, stole his Vina from

him and would not give her up. And they did send him, as we shall see, all the way to Hell

and back (2000: 54).

The ground which once was believed solid is thus now described as deceiving, as

something you can and should not rely on.

73

The ground, the ground beneath our feet. […] The tunnels of pipe and cable, the sunken

graveyards, the layered uncertainty of the past. The gaps in the earth through which our

history seeps and is at once lost, and retained in metamorphosed form. The underworlds at

which we dare not guess (2000: 54).

Despite her terrible death Vina Apsara is not only depicted as a destroyed person.

She is also frequently depicted as the Destroyer, the one destructing force that also

tore the others down during her lifetime.

Dionysiac goddesses: that’s closer to my personal experience. What I know about is Vina.

Vina, who came to us from abroad, who laid waste to all she saw, who conquered and then

devastated every heart. Vina as female Dionysus. Vina, the first bacchante. That, I could buy

(2000: 61).

Vina is thus not only compared to Eurydice, mostly in relation to her ending, but also

to the god Dionysus and the bacchants. In this depiction of her, the love and death of

her Orpheus, Ormus, seem to be united. She is not only the love of his life that will

encourage him to undertake a journey to the underworld to save her, but she is also

the one who in the end will destroy him. In this respect, the narrator raises another

possible interpretation of the Eurydice story when he states:

Did Eurydice – of whose origins we know little, although the official version is that she was a

wood nymph, a dryad – actually bubble up from the Underworld to capture Orpheus’s heart?

Was she an avatar of the Queen of Darkness herself, hunting for love in the illuminated world

above? And therefore, in being swallowed by the earth, was she merely going home? (2000:

499)

Here the author typically offers the reader different possible versions of one story. In

this version of the Orpheus story, Eurydice is thus absolutely not depicted as the

passive being she is believed to be in traditional classical literature.

However, apart from some little textual references to Eurydice and the

resemblance between Vina’s death and Eurydice’s, it becomes difficult to connect

the figure of Eurydice with the female protagonist of the novel any further, a fact to

which also the critic Rollason (2001) points. Despite of those textual references to

Eurydice, I believe that Vina holds a much stronger position in the novel than

Eurydice does in the myth. In the novel, the narrator refers to a discussion he had

with Vina exactly about this theme:

A man is for power and a woman is for pain. I’ll say it again. Orpheus lives, Eurydice dies,

right? Yeah, but you’re Orpheus too, I start to tell her. It’s your voice that’s making the

enchanted stones of the city rise deliriously into the blue, that causes the city’s banks of

electrical images to dance (2000: 460).

74

As I already mentioned before, Vina compared herself with the Hindu

goddess Rati, who brought her love Kama back from the dead after he was killed by

the god Shiva. Indeed, in the novel Vina also brings Ormus back alive after he died

for one minute. Ever since the car accident in England Ormus had been in a coma for

months. When Vina arrives Ormus is dying but on hearing her voice he awakes

again. Thus, although she does not have to go on a dark quest in order to save her

love it is indeed Vina who saved him and brought him back alive. She whispers his

name “at which he opens his eyes; it’s as simple as that” (2000: 321).

Indeed, the Rati-interpretation does more justice to the character of Vina than

does the Eurydice version. About Eurydice we have little or no personal information,

besides from the fact that she was a tree nymph who married Orpheus and died from

a snake bite. Because of this, Eurydice is hence constructed as a very passive

character. Moreover, she seems to be just a side character to set the actual story about

Orpheus in motion. Vina, on the contrary, is a much stronger character: in her

relationship with Ormus Vina was definitely the more dominant person. She was the

one who demanded her sexual liberty, who refused to marry him and finally set the

date. What is more, in the story it is Vina who brings Ormus back alive, which makes

her a kind of female Orpheus. However, I believe Vina’s powerful position bears

more resemblance with the goddess Rati, who saves her husband Kama after he was

destroyed by the god Shiva.

However, the Eurydice-like death of Vina in the end seems to undermine the

strong position of Vina in the story. It thus becomes not at all clear how Rushdie

supports the feminine in the novel. Keith Booker in this respect refers in his

introduction to Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie to critics like Ambreen Hai who

find that in his novels “Rushdie’s representation of the feminine is marked by a deep

ambivalence” (1999: 8). Hai questions Rushdie’s “contradictory efforts to conjoin

discourses of colonialism and gender”, which of course shows the influence of

Spivak’s essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? According to Booker referring to Hai

For one thing, […] Rushdie uses figures of female artistry in changing and contradictory

ways to represent his own postcolonial artistic and political work, and borrows or competes

with what he sees as strategies of feminist revision to enable or situate his own postcolonial

narration. For another, in relation or addition to these representations, Rushdie attempts

feminist work by questioning certain patriarchal norms and recasting or foregrounding

cultural and social injustices toward women. Thus he also seeks to transform the categories of

both the feminine and the (formerly) colonized (1999: 8).

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5.3.3 When East and West Meet…

It is interesting to investigate what happens when those two alternative

versions of the same basic myth ‘clash’ in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Which

version of the myth will ‘overcome’ the other one: the Western Orpheus/Eurydice

myth or the feminist ‘Subaltern’ Rati/Kama variant? Just like the two ‘other worlds’

that are heading for a clash as I discussed earlier on in chapter 4.3.3., also the two

alternative myths of Orpheus and Rati are bound to be confronted with each other.

Also here Rushdie masterfully mixes and plays with these two possible alternative

storylines. According to me, those two different possible variants of the same basic

myth again seem to serve Rushdie’s purpose to offer the reader different possible

views and versions of reality.

Although there are more explicit references to the characters of Orpheus and

Eurydice, they seem only apparent in the surface structure of the novel. In spite of

the numerous references to the myth as described by Virgil and its adaptation by

Gluck and the characterisation of Ormus as Orpheus there is little resemblance on the

level of the basic story line. Although Vina’s death in the novel is by the narrator

always being compared to the death of Eurydice, more similarities can not exactly be

found. As Rollason points out, “the reader will […] search in vain for an episode that

might approximate to Orpheus’ descent into hell and his attempt to undo his

consort’s death” (2001: chapter 5). From this point of view, it becomes clear that the

Orpheus myth only is not sufficient as a means for explaining the underlying

structure of the story of Vina and Ormus Cama.

I have pointed to the fact that the basic story line, despite the numerous

references to the Orpheus myth, much more resembles the plot line of the Indian

Rati/Kama myth. I have also stressed the fact that an analysis of the role of both Vina

and Ormus in the story ultimately seems to lead to the conclusion that the

Ormus/Vina couple bears much more resemblance with the Rati/Kama couple than it

does with the Orpheus/Eurydice couple. So, on the level of content the novel seems

to be more inspired by the Indian variant, which thus seems to be much more crucial

to the story than the Orpheus myth.

Again it seems that Rushdie in a way lets the Eastern variant ‘prevail’.

Moreover, I believe that the main and only reason for referring to the Orpheus and

76

Eurydice myth is to make the reader acquainted with the basic story line and theme,

viz. the story of bringing back alive the lost love. Rushdie relates to the Western

variant to make his western readers aware of its Indian equivalent. The myth of

Orpheus is world famous and it is very unlikely that the western reader would not

know or at least never had heard of the story. However, its Indian variant is not so

famous among western readers. This in fact is a way of ‘deconstructing otherness’:

by connecting the western Orpheus myth so closely with the subaltern Rati myth

Rushdie shows his readers that this ‘other’ culture is not so very different from our

own.

5.3.4 The Role of Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant

The major complication that rises when we consider the position of Rai in the

story is the fact that he is both narrator and one of the three main characters in the

novel. As I discussed earlier on, the type of narration clearly underlines the

ambiguous position of Rai. This unreliable narration makes it very difficult for the

reader to understand the actual role Rai had in the lives of both Ormus and Vina.

Actually, for most part the reader has to rely on how Rai positions himself within the

story of their lives.

Rai himself compares his role in the love history of Vina and Ormus with a

character in the famous Orpheus and Eurydice myth, namely the snake.

He loved her like an addict: the more of her he had, the more he needed. She loved him like a

student, needing his good opinion, playing up to him in the hope of drawing forth the magic

of his smile. But she also, from the very beginning, needed to leave him and go elsewhere to

play. He was her seriousness, he was the depths of her being, but he could not also be her

frivolity. That light relief, that serpent in the garden, I must confess, was me (2000: 113).

In the Orpheus myth the snake is the one who brings death and takes Eurydice away

from the lyre player Orpheus. However, in the novel Rai more than once stresses the

fact that Vina was the one that kept coming back, searching for him.

[…] Vina, whatever she said or didn’t say, kept coming back to wherever I was to be found. I

was her favourite thorn; she couldn’t get me out from under her skin (2000: 229).

As I mentioned already earlier, Rai seems to be constructed as Ormus’s

‘other’ in his relationship with Vina, a fact of which he himself is very much aware.

77

Vina is the one who keeps “bouncing” from Ormus’s to Rai’s bed, choosing who she

wants to be with for that moment (2000: 337).

On closer inspection, the position of Rai seems to bear a lot of similarities

with the position of the postcolonial author like Rushdie himself in the world. In the

story Rai is constructed as an outsider: although he plays a (minor) role in the lives

of both Ormus and Vina he belongs to neither of them completely. As Vina’s lover

and Ormus’s friend Rai knows both their worlds, in which he is just a side character.

Rai openly acknowledges this fact when he states: “from the start my place was in a

corner of their lives, in the shadow of their achievements” (2000: 160). The main

goal of the whole story told by Rai in fact seems to be an attempt to ‘put things

right’. Maybe he does this also to ‘write himself back into history’ because he feels

that after the death of Ormus and Vina, like the girl Persis Kalamanja, he seems to be

effaced from their life stories: “Persis complained of having been erased from the

record by Ormus; I could say the same of Vina’s treatment of me” (2000: 299).

In this respect we thus can easily compare Rai’s position with the position in

which an emigrated postcolonial author like Rushdie finds himself. One of the

characters condemns the fact that Umeed and his parents are converts and says

Religious conwersion, it is like getting on a train. Afterwards, only the train itself is where

you are belonging. Not departure platform, not arrival platform. In both these places you are

totally despised. Such is conwert (2000: 70)17

.

Basically, this description can also be applied to people who migrate and leave their

mother country behind. And indeed, emigrated from his mother country and migrated

to a culture that is not totally his own, the postcolonial author Salman Rushdie is all

too many times denied his place in either of them. Indian critics claim that he has no

right to speak and try to represent the ‘subaltern minorities’ because he chose to

leave his Indian culture behind and sold out to the West. Western critics often

criticise him for the same reason.

17

Rushdie purposely lets this character speak in this way. The man is as he says himself “a man of the

people” and maybe that is why he speaks English with an accent and a lot of grammatical errors.

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5.3.5 The Role of Music in ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’

One of the main critical remarks Rollason makes in his article Rushdie’s Un-

Indian Music: The Ground Beneath Her Feet is that this novel by Salman Rushdie

lacks power. According to Rollason, this lack of power is mainly due to the fact that

the author only refers to typical Western rock music. According to Rollason, this

seems to imply that Rushdie now lets the West prevail over the East.

Indeed, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet the history of rock music constitutes

the central story frame within which the other storylines are situated. According to

Rollason (referring to Carla Power 1999), Rushdie has opted for this theme for two

main reasons: first, Rushdie himself is a well-known rock’n’roll fan and second

because

Rushdie can himself be considered “a household name […] literature’s first global celebrity –

as famous as a popstar” (2001: chapter 3).

More importantly, by making music his main topic, Rushdie makes his novel

accessible to anyone. Everybody loves music and everybody has at least heard of the

famous pioneers of rock history, which makes it a topic of universal importance. The

main reason for this universality is the crucial role of music in our lives. In the novel

itself the necessity of music in everyday life, namely as a means of uttering one’s

fears, hopes and dreams, is frequently emphasized. The narrator for example clearly

connects the mentality of a generation in a time of war with the music that generation

produces:

[…] because in this dark time it’s the rock music that represents the country’s most profound

artistic engagement with the death of its children, not just the music of peace and

psychotropic drugs but the music of rage and horror and despair. Also of youth, youth

surviving despite everything, in spite of the children’s crusade that’s blowing it apart (2000:

265).

An intrinsic feature of music is the power it has to move people: music has the ability

to change people’s minds, to start a revolution, to make people fight for freedom and

to influence their political consciousness. Governments generally are well aware of

the power of music. Testimony of this is for example the fact that in Iran all western

music is banned, even in movies18

. The Iranian Prime Minister Mahmud

Ahmadinejad claimed that the ideas advocated in western music are contradictory to

the Islamic character of Iran. Ahmadinejad accused western music of being a means

18

http://www.radio.nl/2003/home/medianieuws/010.archief/2005/12/102030.html

79

of imperialistic western thought to gradually invade the country. A similar accusation

can be found in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, when Umeed states

In India it is often said that the music I’m talking about is precisely one of those viruses with

which the almighty West has infected the East, one of the great weapons of cultural

imperialism, against which all right-minded persons must fight and fight again (2000: 95).

As I already mentioned earlier on, numerous references can be found to the

greatest popular singers of the twentieth century. Bob Dylan, Freddy Mercury, Elvis

Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Lennon, Diana Ross, The Everly Brothers, Lou Reed,

Mick Jagger, Manfred Mann, Brian Epstein, Louis Armstrong, Simon and Garfunkel,

Shirley Jones, the Driftwoods, Bo Diddley are only some of the names of famous

characters or bands that are referred to. All of these indeed refer to the world’s rock

history, but all are Western stars, which prompts Rollason to say that

VTO’s music, and, therefore, the greater part of both Vina’s and Ormus’ musical production

is, from the textual descriptions and the sources and analogies named, clearly a textbook case

of mainstream Anglo-American 60s/70s stadium rock, bereft of any “Asian” input other than

the two stars’ national origins and the piece of trickery that is the “Gayomart conceit” (2001:

chapter 8).

At first sight this seems indeed problematic when we assume that Rushdie believes

that in literature “the East is imposing itself upon the West” (cf. Rushdie 1997: xiv).

The idea of two worlds in collision after which the subaltern one is the world that

will survive would not make sense if Rushdie at the same time would let the West

prevail with regard to music history.

It is in this respect that Rollason critically asks himself the question: “What,

in fact, is Indian about these two – apart from their origins?” (2001: chapter 8).

According to Rollason

The Reader will search in vain for any but the most superficial references to any

subcontinental musical tradition, be it erudite, folkloric or popular (2001: chapter 8).

Rollason hence deplores that Rushdie does not treat the topic of ‘world music’ with

more intensity. Although Vina’s music towards the end of her life moves to this kind

of ‘world music’, “Rushdie’s treatment of a potentially interesting theme proves

disappointingly superficial” (2001: chapter 9). Rollason states that

Essentially, the notion of “world music” entails an openness to musical dialogue and

cooperation on a footing of cultural equality, whether the collaborators are all from third-

80

world or “exotic” backgrounds or, as in the Buena Vista case19

, hail from both sides of the

first/third world divide (2001: chapter 9).

According to Rollason, Rushdie has “missed a golden opportunity” by not paying

more attention to the phenomenon of ‘world music’, which makes The Ground

Beneath Her Feet a bit of a disappointment:

We could have had an Indian Buena Vista Social Club; what we get is VTO, playing born-in-

the-USA rock’n’roll while laying claim to an Asian “authenticity” that derives from literary

sleight-of-hand alone (2001: chapter 9).

However, I do not believe that the fact that Rushdie merely refers to Western

famous rock stars weakens my earlier interpretations of the clash between the

alternative realities in the novel. As I pointed out earlier on, the clash between the

two other worlds can be read as a clash between the two different types of discourse

which occur in the debate about postcolonial historiography. In The Ground Beneath

Her Feet the main character Ormus warns the world of this oncoming clash. In the

end Rushdie lets the subaltern world and discourse overcome this clash. The hidden

western world, however, disappears in the clash.

However, I do not believe that the fact that Rushdie positions his Subaltern

Indian characters within a Western rock music setting undermines this theory. On the

contrary, I even believe it clearly reinforces the connection I make between those

battling realities and the postcolonial debate. By taking the whole history of western

rock music and making it something subaltern, Rushdie seems to make a much

stronger argument than if he had made all musical references Indian. Instead of just

referring to Indian influences, Rushdie takes the western rock history as we know it

and turns it into an invention of the Subaltern world. He does this by claiming that

VTO, the rock band of Ormus and Vina, was the greatest band of all times:

And in the whole half-century-long history of rock music there is a small number of bands, a

number so small you could count to it without running out of fingers, who steal into your

heart and become a part of how you see the world, how you tell and understand the truth,

even when you’re old and deaf and foolish. On your deathbed you’ll hear them sing to you as

you drift down the tunnel towards the light: […] VTO was one of those bands (2000: 157).

By making the Indian band VTO the best rock band ever, with a greater musical

force than the famous Western examples like the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Elvis ‘The

King’ Presley, Rushdie makes also the world’s rock history distinctively subaltern.

19

Rollason here refers to “The Buena Vista Social Club”, a Cuban/American band which was founded

in the 90s.

81

This is what Ormus and Vina always claimed, never wavering for a moment: that the genius

of Ormus Cama did not emerge in response to, or in imitation of, America; that his early

music, the music he heard in his head during the unsinging childhood years, was not of the

West, except in the sense that the West was in Bombay from the beginning, impure old

Bombay where West, East, North and South had always been scrambled, like codes, like

eggs, and so Westerness was a legitimate part of Ormus, a Bombay part, inseparable from the

rest of him (2000: 95-96).

Just like the British colonizers forced their history or their versions of history upon

India, Rushdie now forces his version of rock music history upon the West through

his novel.

82

6 Conclusion

From all this, I hope it has become clear that accusing Salman Rushdie of

selling out to the West is all too easy and not at all fair. I verily believe that it is

exactly because Rushdie can draw on both Indian and Western culture that he is in

the position of bringing the two perspectives and cultures closer together. For, if it is

indeed the case that we can never fully untie ourselves from our own context,

migrated authors like Rushdie, because of their ‘displacement,’ seem definitely to

have come the closest to seeing ‘alternative perspectives’, to knowing both worlds –

the western and the subaltern one – equally.

Critics who accuse Rushdie of being unable to let the subaltern speak in his

novel The Ground Beneath Her feet because of his western writing style and the

western musical and literary references in his work have clearly missed the point

Rushdie is trying to make. According to me, Rushdie uses those western references

to bring us closer to an understanding of that subaltern world and perspective: by

relating to aspects of western culture and comparing them to their subaltern

equivalents Rushdie makes the western reader aware of the fact that this culture is

not so very different from our own.

It is no coincidence that Rushdie uses the theme of music to make his point,

after all music has an enormous universal power: everybody listens to it, everybody

sings it, and it tells us a lot about how we perceive the outside world. Rushdie first

introduces the world-famous Orpheus myth to introduce his characters. However,

this all stays relatively on the surface of the text. Underneath, the Indian myth of Rati

seems to be stronger and more crucial to an understanding of the love story between

Vina and Ormus. Rushdie thus lets the ‘subaltern’ version of the story prevail.

Also by making Vina and Ormus, two Indians, the greatest rock stars ever,

Rushdie lets the subaltern perspective on things prevail. By calling VTO better than

Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Elvis Presley together, Rushdie makes a very powerful

argument. I believe this argument is so strong exactly because Rushdie refers to the

history of rock music, of which the West has frequently claimed to have invented it. I

think Rushdie advocates a project of ‘untying yourself’ from your traditional

perspective of the world in order to become aware of alternative realities in history.

83

Beware the ground beneath your feet, beware the alternative realities the world can

offer you.

84

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