2 Shibboleth

Chapattis or Bread? Alter-Natives

Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s 1955 short story, “Toba Tek Singh,” an allegorical retelling of the Indian partition that occurred in 1947, explores the dilemmas of identity in the wake of the traumatic division of countries and populations:

Two or three years after Partition, it occurred to the governments of Pakistan and Hindustan that like criminal offenders, lunatics too ought to be exchanged: that is, those Muslim lunatics who were in Hindustan’s insane asylums should be sent to Pakistan, and those Hindus and Sikhs who were in Pakistan’s insane asylums should be confided to the care of Hindustan.

Along with an elaborate parody of political processes, the story lampoons that other staple of modernity: the nation, and with it, ideas of language, home, and belonging, issues that Indian historiography usually addresses with reference to Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. Among the motley crew of lunatics, however, Manto mentions those whose dilemma at the moment of India’s independence and partition remains poorly recorded in mainstream history:

In the European ward there were two Anglo-Indian lunatics. When they learned that the English had freed Hindustan and gone away, they were very much shocked. And for hours they privately conferred about the important question of what their status in the lunatic asylum would be now. Would the European Ward remain, or be abolished? Would breakfast be available, or not? Instead of proper bread, would they have to choke down those bloody Indian chapattis [unleavened flat bread]?

The focus subsequently shifts to the story’s eponymous Sikh protagonist, but the passing nod to two players with bit parts in Indian national history—racially and culturally hybrid Anglo-Indians—invites consideration of the plight of those for whom the idea of a mother country was differently complicated than it might have been for Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs at the time of independence. It dramatizes, moreover, the conjugation of identity and belonging through the problem of daily bread. “Proper bread,” both an ingestible staff of life and a metonymic reference to colonial whites and their hybrid progeny, becomes an overloaded totemic symbol that is put into crisis by a consideration of the history of Anglo-Indians, the very differently “not quite / not white” subjects of colonialism, derogatorily referred to in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist as “half-baked bread” (43).

In the chapter “By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” in The Location of Culture, Bhabha examines the role that rumors played concerning the mysterious circulation of chapattis before the 1857 rebellion against the British in India. In his account of the rebellion, subaltern historian Ranajit Guha has examined the semiotics of the chapatti as opaque to the British but newly salient to the rebels in terms of an alternative language of insurgency. For Bhabha, the circulation of chapattis transforms the site of rebellion into one of cultural hybridity:

The organizing principle of the sign of the chapati is constituted in the transmission of fear and anxiety, projection and panic in a form of circulation in-between the colonizer and the colonized. Could the agency of peasant rebellion be constituted through the ‘partial incorporation’ of the fantasy and fear of the Master? (The Location of Culture, 206)

Bhabha locates the “archaic, awesome, terrifying” turn in the “old and familiar symbol” in the circulation rather than the ipseity of the chapatti in the traffic between colonizer and colonized as part of the historical event of the 1857 rebellion (202). He goes on to suggest: “The margin of hybridity, where cultural differences ‘contingently’ and conflictually touch, becomes the moment of panic which reveals the borderline experience. It resists the binary opposition of racial and cultural groups, sipahis and sahibs, as homogeneous polarized political consciousness” (207). Parama Roy, in a more corporeal turn, has located the chapatti story within the “digestive troping of rebellion and counterinsurgency” (Alimentary Tracts, 32).

The valence of “proper bread” and chapatti clearly vary with the enunciative context in question, a point that Bhabha correctly emphasizes. Guha notes that rumors were also circulating before the 1857 rebellion to the effect that natives of all ranks would be obliged to feed upon “the most impure of all food, ‘English bread’” (Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 263). The significance of bread as the staff of life with a key role in the Christian mass, moreover, imbues the leavened product with considerable historical heft, adding a biospiritual dimension to the reasons why the rebels massacred converted Christians and half-whites along with whites during the mutiny. The subscription to “proper bread,” as articulated by Manto’s latter-day Anglo-Indian lunatics, therefore, would have functioned as an alternative sign during the rebellion. The somatic and alimentary logic of the rebellion, and the ipseity of the chapatti is of obvious interest here, with the proviso that the existence of a community caught between sipahi (soldier) and sahib (master) complicates the reading of cultural hybridity in a mode that can only deconstruct readily available binaries. Absent from the record is the quandary of racially mixed Eurasians with divided loyalties in the mutiny. According to historical accounts, some Eurasians joined the rebels, others were killed along with Europeans, and those that were either dark enough or fortunate enough to have a native, usually Muslim, name in addition to a Christian one, managed to evade the wrath of the rebels.

In the context of these excluded characters caught in the middle, chapatti and bread signify as dually unheimlich in doubly discursive and biobodily terms. And yet, as Freud concludes, “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of Heimlich” (Standard Edition, 219). In the dissolution of categorical difference, the historically neglected Eurasian draws attention to contact zones within the nation, where bread and chapatti would have had variable salience, and we may have to confront the notion of a diaspora that never leaves home.1 The Eurasian Anglo-Indian and the converted Christian who sometimes passed as racially mixed constitute the excluded middle in the usual traffic between binaries, asking for a reckoning with hybridity that can cope with the experience of a community caught between them in ways that disturb the notion of a third space reliant on binaries for agential and political charge.

Bhabha’s stance on hybridity is perhaps clearest in some of the most widely quoted words on the topic in an interview with John Rutherford:

All forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “third space,” which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and in its place sets up new structures of authority and political initiatives. (“The Third Space,” 211)

Hybridity as third space, resident in the crisis of signification, becomes the navette in the encounter between colonizer and colonized, reworking the effects of the colonial encounter as the production of hybridization “rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions” (The Location of Culture, 112). However, the deconstructive, paleonymic shift in the understanding of the term “hybridity”—once used for racial hybrids—obscures a historically and discursively generated category of subjects in-between. Lost in the shuffle is their anxiety, their labor in crafting a livable cultural form, their stance toward chapattis as opposed to bread, no less born of the encounter between colonizer and colonized than hybridity as heresy.2 It is this group, moreover, that instructively troubles the staples of the postcolonial theoretical register—nation, hybridity, mimicry, and diaspora—both to underscore the deconstructive lessons we are already familiar with and to illuminate the limitations of binary thinking that persist even in deconstructive readings of these concepts.

At the moment of the coeval independence and partition of India, the question “Chapattis or Bread?” encapsulates a multivalent code. To a people “divided to the vein,” in Derek Walcott’s evocative phrase, the logic of national belonging founded in jus soli, jus sanguinis, or in religious affiliation, the ostensible premises for nation formation, would have been equally irrelevant (Collected Poems, 17). Given restrictions placed by the colonial government on migration to England, an option made available exclusively to the few who could afford the cost of the passage and subsequent board and lodging, claims to a home in the mother country were belied by classist colonial policies.3 Recognized neither in the national discourse of the former colony nor called to come home with the departing British, this was not a group that knew where home was as the sun set on the empire. While theories of the minus in the origin of the nation, critiques of its “linear narrative,” and arguments about “the liminality of the nation-space” describe their situation as well as that of many others, in the moment of decolonization Anglo-Indians were not offered even the fiction of national belonging (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 301).

For all the complexities of nation, culture, identity, and belonging, Manto’s lunatics unwittingly grasp the core problem posed by the historical date, August 14/15, 1947, in metonymic terms that are also material to survival: “Would breakfast be available, or not? Instead of proper bread, would they have to choke down those bloody Indian chapattis?” The problem of leavened or unleavened bread, memorably connected to the Jewish diasporic experience, moreover, is part of a narrative that draws attention to ingestive, spiritual, and cultural practices as conjointly consequential in understanding the abstract concept of identity. Chapatti or Bread? The question turns upon practices of ingestion, commensality, and arguably corporeal commitments that attend them, constituting the stuff and staff of life through habit, repetition, and familiarity in concrete “forms of existing” (Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 38). If cultural practices of dress, food, worship, language, and other habits of behavior comprise “the very stuff our identities are made of” (Žižek, “Tolerance,” 679), Anglo-Indian fictions of community are sometimes expressed in terms of cultural homogeneity with regard to these staples of group identity:

Eurasians throughout the East not only show a certain ethnic unity, but speak the same language (English) either as their father tongue or as a commercial advantage, profess the same faith (Christianity) and are conditioned by comparable traditions, prejudices and economic factors which have determined the general uniformity of their dress, food, domestic habits, social outlook and regard for their whiter masters. In fact, in Stalin’s definition of a nation as “a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture,” they could lay more claim to national status than many accepted nations. (Dover, Know This of Race, 34)

Coralie Younger cites prominent Anglo-Indian Frank Anthony’s assertion that “according to genetic law . . . where people of diverse origins are endogamous, they develop what has been described as homozygosity, that is, common customs, manners, culture and above all the cement of English” (quoted in Anglo-Indians, 43). While recognizing the commonalities of group identity, Cedric Dover, a prominent Eurasian Anglo-Indian zoologist and race theorist, rejects the idea of half-castes because “there are no full castes,” insisting that “there are only older mongrels and newer mongrels” (Know This of Race, 31). Instead of challenging essentialist thinking, the existence of racial hybrids has traditionally reinforced racial boundaries and vigilance against mixture.4 At the same time, moreover, homozygosity suggests that even hybrid communities police their borders and protect their proprietary lifeways.5 While we are all older or newer mongrels, we know that even newly hybrid communities monitor their communities and labor to distinguish themselves from others.6

In his 1954 novel Bhowani Junction, which is set around the partition and independence of India, British army officer and novelist John Masters articulates the predicament of Anglo-Indian identity through the voice of Patrick Taylor. Like other Anglo-Indians of the time, Taylor calls England “Home” (15),7 even when he knows that “we couldn’t go Home. We couldn’t become English, because we were half Indian. We couldn’t become Indian, because we were half English. We could only stay where we were and be what we were” (27–28). In 1956, the novel was made into a film starring Ava Gardner as Victoria Jones, a beautiful Anglo-Indian serving with the British armed forces, and Stewart Granger as Colonel Rodney Savage, a British army officer. George Cukor’s adaptation allowed the British officer to win her hand at the conclusion of the novel, whereas Masters’s account of the resolution of the love triangle in the novel describes her returning to Taylor, one of “her people” by virtue of the fact that “she’d tried becoming Indian—but she wasn’t an Indian. She’d tried becoming English—but she wasn’t English” (Bhowani Junction, 390). Although Savage fancifully imagines that “from Bhowani Junction the lines spread out to every Indian horizon for them,” the novel leaves the Anglo-Indian characters where it found them at the inception of the novel, at a junction rather than a destination (390).

Anglo-Indian communities challenge us to imagine a diaspora within the nation without a movement away from the birthplace, although the Anglo-Indian community is also geographically dispersed internationally in more conventional diasporic forms. Today, as a consequence of the convergence of new media with global diasporic movements, the presence of a virtual nation of Anglo-Indians on the Internet cleaves together otherwise sundered discourses of globalization and nationhood. Where the novel served as the vehicle for articulations of nations as imagined communities with collective addresses and addressees, Anglo-Indian presence on the Web invests digital nativity with the weight of history and proclaims a virtual nation without territorial coordinates.

The technologically enabled virtual Anglo-Indian nation has been convened through the diasporic spread of the population throughout the commonwealth. With about fifteen million crossing borders around the time of the partition, the passage of some half a million or so Anglo-Indian migrants to England and other settler colonies, however, constitutes one of the least remarked diasporas in South Asian history. Moreover, partition for this group could also mean division within one family, where some members of the family would go to the mother country or to other settler colonies while others would stay behind, decisions that depended in part on being the right color. One Anglo-Indian interviewee in Blunt’s research is reported to have said, “there are six different shades of colour in an Anglo-Indian family. And it often happened that those who could pass off as non-Indian and totally white [did so].” Another spoke of a son who “passes off as a European, blond, blue eyes,” refusing to recognize a brother who is dark-skinned (quoted in Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora, 44). Many Anglo-Indians who could afford the passage cast their lot overseas in England or in other commonwealth countries.8 A generation after independence, the narrator of I. Allan Sealy’s novel The Trotter-Nama, a chronicle of “Anglo” history, offers this elegiac comment: “not too many of us left and half of those waiting to leave” (574).9 There were some who were able to pass in mainstream-white countries, and deliberately disavowed their ties to India.10 In addition to shedding light on intraregional hybridity and diaspora within the nation without leaving a natal birthplace, Anglo-Indian experiences of passing into the mainstream call into question established notions of overseas diaspora founded in collectivity, family, connectivity, mourning, and memorialization. Given these frequently cited characteristics of diasporic communities, the individual passer who must forego all of the above belongs to an invisible diaspora. For all the documented diasporic passages, the most successful of all concern those who, armed with the shibboleth, chose to step across a line, and vanished undetected into an unarchived history.11 In disavowing nation, community, and the past, what does the successful space traveler teach us about other invisible diasporas lost to history in communities that now claim homogeneity and common origins? What were the hazards of border crossing, the labor of passing, and the biobodily toil and toll of mimicry and passing involved in disappearing into the mainstream?

This chapter turns to the picaresque passage of the half-English, half-Indian protagonist of Hari Kunzru’s novel The Impressionist in order to pursue several lines of inquiry arising from Anglo-Indian experiences in South Asian history. How does the discourse of the nation fare through the lens of the racial hybrid? What did it mean to be racially and culturally hybrid in the heyday of empire? How might we understand the concept of diaspora through populations with a tenuous sense of a territorial homeland? In the arena of race studies, the racial hybrid, destined to blend into one or an(other) mainstream (at “home” or in diaspora), is arguably the living embodiment of identity as that which is what it is, yet is changing; that which is changing, yet is what it is.12 To think race through Anglo-Indians after the concept has been undone in other academic discussions can be productively regressive, as in working backward from a mathematical solution to show the steps that precede the eventual blending away of difference from the mainstream. The gradual dissolution of the community into the mainstream, one by two by three, observable in the social realm and represented in literature, offers an available living lesson in hybridity as a shared condition in the longue durée of history. Given the scale of migrations taking place today, what might the Anglo-Indian experience of passing, hitherto studied poorly in postcolonial theory, teach us about the bioaesthetic dimensions of assimilation? If assimilation is the contemporary iteration of passing in modernity, as I propose, its aesthetic logic demands a reduction in the sensory impact of difference from the mainstream and closer approximation to its preferred forms of comportment, as I have discussed in the introduction.

Žižek notes, “what neighbor means today” is “the one who by definition smells. This is why today deodorants and soaps are crucial; they make neighbors at least minimally tolerable. I am ready to love my neighbors, provided they don’t smell too bad” (“Tolerance,” 680). The substantial literature on mimicry and camouflage in postcolonial theory demands a supplementary understanding of their biomaterial aspects. What kind of global body is under production in the assimilative projects of modernity? Despite the coexistence of various subjectivities, the rule of identity thinking manifests in terms of a demand for material compliance with the logic of modernity, which subtly rewards assimilation and punishes ideological, bodily, formal, and comportmental deviation from dominant eumemic forms. Although Kunzru’s novel is concerned with racial passing, the ideological, oral, visual, bodily, muscular, dietary, sanitary, and alimentary training involved in passing, akin to human dressage but all the way down to a bodily core, points to valuable lessons for grasping the relay between racial passing and cultural assimilation in modernity. Pran Nath Razdan, Kunzru’s fictional protagonist, with a talent for mimicry and a high success rate in producing convincing impressions of Englishness after fortuitously accidental bouts of requisite training, offers a textbook analysis of the habitations of identity, its mobilization of sensory, aesthetic, and formal impressions upon the world, and a recognition of the muscular deployment of the technology of the body in communicating these impressions.

Ab Ovo: Genesis, Floods, and the Big Bang

An elaborate charade mocking the ruse of origins and the imposture of what we think of as identity, the story of Pran (Hindi for “life”), the impressionist in Kunzru’s novel, begins in a flood with an exaggerated nod to two conflated genesis myths. Kunzru’s hero is conceived when a wandering, disoriented English forester with a “pink, perspiring face” is carried away by a monsoon torrent and lifted up into “the mouth of a cave” at a time when he has been adrift, looking for something, “something to fill a gap,” which “more conventional men would have identified . . . as woman-shaped” (The Impressionist, 3, 13, 4–5). The gap-shaped woman is Amrita, a wayward opium-addicted young woman who is making her way across the desert with her maid to a chosen husband after the death of her father, a Kashmiri broker. But, as the author notes, “the flood is imminent” (5, 11). Kunzru likens Amrita’s survival after the flood to the Hindu creation myth of Manu, the first man, floating above the ocean in a flood, and starting a new race in a story curiously reminiscent of biblical narratives of creation growing out of destruction. The flood, moreover, is also the torrent of history, for “the future is contained in that water. All the world is in the past” (12–13). Kunzru incorporates more secular origin myths in the first few pages for good measure. A version of the big bang theory is suggested in the following passage: “Fire and water. Earth and Air. . . . Collapse them in on themselves, send them spiraling down a tunnel of blackness to re-emerge whole, one with the all, mere aspects of the great unity of things whose name is God” (6). References to black holes and singularity in the unity of things evoke a conception of God as a cosmic, possibly comically inclined, physicist. This narrative is followed by the idea of origin in its more prosaic, earthly guise. Forrester, the forester, crawls out of the flood to confront “the mouth of a cave” (13). Soon “a fire flickers into existence” and the lustful young caveman stands before the “native mother goddess” (13). Before the young colonial officer, the “pearl-skinned man,” has had the wit or opportunity to recall “something to do with duty and India Office ordinances” that prohibit interracial mixture, the cave creatures “roll and claw” in sex that is “inexpert and violent,” mingling in the flesh until the “sweat and dust has turned their skins to an identical red-brown colour” (15).

After this violent, elemental conjugation, the currents of history wash away the unwitting father on a “tree . . . so freighted with wisdom and routine that it might as well be playing the National Anthem” (16). True to form for all those who returned to England after engaging in the sexual/textual carnivals of empire, the father disappears from the narrative. Amrita stands alone, “mother of the new,” as “the old world,” a “defunct world [is] swept off into oblivion” (14). In Amrita’s womb is the postcolonial subject, Pran, life.

Insemination/Dissemination

Before the hybrid picaro-to-be embarks on a diasporic career so marked by hypermobility as to stand as its very caricature, however, Pran is born into and located spectacularly within a family tradition founded in “the promotion of hygiene, tradition, cultural purity, cow protection and correct religious observance” under the aegis of his cuckolded, surrogate father, the Kashmiri Hindu Pandit, Amar Nath Razdan (23). “Heir to a fortune of many lakhs of rupees,” Pran is the only son of a cultural purist who has unwittingly raised a child not his own after his arranged marriage to Amrita ends with the latter’s death in childbirth.

In his first appearance in the novel, the fifteen-year-old Pran Nath Razdan is discovered in the act of surveying his domain, including a young servant girl who “has no idea of her peril” (21). Our first impression of Pran is an extended survey of his bodily and facial features: “so beautiful! So pale!,” his hair with a “hint of copper,” eyes with a “touch of green,” and “a covering of skin that is not brown or even wheaten-coloured, but white,” with a “perfect milky hue” (20). Pran’s light skin is plausible because “Kashmiris come from the mountain and are always fair,” but Pran’s “colour is exceptional,” “proof, cluck the aunties, of the family’s superior blood” (20). “Blood is important” to the Razdans, “one of the highest and most exclusive castes in all Hindustan,” and the Kashmiri Pandits link it readily with “their intelligence and culture” (20). As the scion of the purist family lustfully eyes the young servant, we are told, “the blood stiffening the bulge in . . . [his] pyjamas is of the highest quality, guaranteed” (20).

The mother of the imperiled servant girl, however, is none other than the maid who found Amrita in the pale man’s clothes after the flood and readily grasped the implications. Bribed to hold her tongue, the maid would have guarded the secret had Pran not turned out to be a spoiled monster now threatening her daughter’s chastity. Pran’s presumed father, a purist insistent on cultural, linguistic, social, dietary, and even sartorial hygiene—intolerant even of “the reckless combination of checks and stripes” in dress—has no armor against the assaults to his cherished notions of purity in the disclosures of the maid (30). Enfeebled by the all-difference-leveling flu pandemic that claimed millions of lives worldwide in 1918, the sick man learns the horrifying truth about having harbored “the bastard child of a casteless, filth-eating, left-and-right-hand-confusing Englishman” (39). The description highlights in particular those differences of culture that are written on the body. The Englishman’s beef eating is anathema to the cow protectionist, as abhorrent as the foreigner’s habits of excretion and subsequent cleaning, which do not honor the Hindu reservation of the left hand for this particular ablution. Expanding recklessly “on the theme of miscegenation . . . impurities, blendings, pollutions, smearings and muckings-up of all kinds,” the maid links the irresponsible spilling of seed to the disastrous plague gripping the entire city. “Finally, she produces her trump card: the battered photograph,” extracted from her mistress’s borrowed clothes, bearing the legend, “Ronald Forrester, IFS” (39).

The sepia image suggests that “but for the skin it could be an Indian face” (39), prompting the reader to recall fables of the shared Aryan heritage of the colonizer and colonized, and a mysterious diaspora whose origins remain disputed, its directional flows lost to antiquity and its remnants coded into links between the Indo-Aryan family of languages. What kind of disaster could have prompted that dispersal? Flood, plague, expulsion, violence, economics, or simply the desire to cross boundaries? Does that early scattering count as a diaspora, if it lacks recorded mourning, documented suffering, the availability of technologies of commemoration and links to the homeland, or the prospect of return? Centuries later, the nostalgia of European philologists during the colonial period for a shared racial affinity with a once-great civilization might be understood as a sort of misplaced nostalgia, not for a nation or geographical space but for a chronotopical zone in which past and present, Europe and Asia, could be selectively crimped together to produce both sameness and difference, and to allow Europe a civilizational vintage beyond its own borders and history, while alleging its degradation in its Eastern crucible.

That once (allegedly) shared blood has since mingled with others, developed other genetic, epigenetic, environmentally influenced, culturally shaped body types that bear some resemblance with Northern cousins, but prompt even more horror in the confrontation of differences that have accreted over time. Differences that inhere in bodily uses of the left hand versus the right hand, for instance. The father malgré lui sees that “Pran Nath and the photograph are two versions of the same image,” that crucially, “This is not his son” (40). The very beauties of color and body that had made him beloved of the indulgent father are exposed in an instant as dubiously sourced and responsible for the boy’s ugly character. In an exchange the Eurasian Indian community might well recognize for its irony, given its disinheritance by fathers both real and allegorical, European and Indian, the schematic fate of the community reveals itself in the following “exchange” between Amar Nath and Pran: “‘Father?’ asks Pran Nath plaintively. There is no response” (40). Amar Nath has died of shock (and ironically of a caste, class, race-leveling influenza epidemic, his face the same blue-black as its other victims). Pran is cast out on the streets before his father’s corpse is cool. “‘Please!’ he begs. ‘Let me in!’” The door opens, but only to drop “a little sepia square in the dust,” a memento that will haunt him to the end—a personal amulet of bad luck that will consign him to perpetual wandering as a “nasty little half-baked bread” in the words of a beggar Pran had taunted in better days as heir to the Razdan fortune (43).

“Who are my own people?” asks Pran when told to go to his own by the beggar from whom he is obliged to beg for food after his eviction from his childhood home (44). The clue, of course, is in the beggar’s reference to half-baked bread, the metonymic identity bit pointing in the direction of the Anglo-Indian social gathering point and its cultural and commensal regimes. The stripling is sent to the Agra Post and Telegraph Club—an arch reference to the historical Anglo-Indian hockey association, “Agra Telegraph,” as well as to the Eurasian community’s customary employment in the post and telegraph services, along with the railways. The denizens of the Anglo-Indian Club think of England as home and swap stories about the “disgustingness of natives, the foul Indian-ness of native ways,” in “contrast to Home, to the Northern rectitude of English ways and manners” (47).13 But the club betrays its members’ mixed inheritance aromatically upon entrance: “Inside lingers a smell of fried food which cannot be eradicated, no matter how hard the cleaners scrub and polish. . . . There is still the smell of food fried in ghee, the rich unmistakable smell of India” (45). The women are betrayed by the single glass bangle accessorizing cotton, floral-print homemade dresses that look nothing like those real Englishwomen order from the Army and Navy catalogue “that arrives from Home once a season” (45). “Everyone knows none of them has been anywhere near England,” the English joke in the “better-smelling and more exclusive Civil Service Club.” Their “awful accents” and “chippiness” are mocked, as well as their devotion to hats and the solar topis sported, the English ladies joke, “Indoors. After dark. . . . What a chee-chee thing to do” (46). The English pronounce the “horrid blackie-whites . . . disgusting. . . . Chewing betel on the sly, their girls chasing after the Other Ranks, squatting rather than sitting when they think no one can see” (46; emphasis added). The bodyhood of perceived differences demonstrates itself not only in terms of color, feature, clothing, accent, and sound, but as much in the diet and in bodily postures of peeing, sitting, and shitting in privy situations.

Looking for his own, Pran runs into Harry Begg coming out of the club on his way to a date with fellow Anglo-Indian, Jenny, “who has fine features [and] . . . a complexion the color of parchment,” and is susceptible to the attractions of “other, whiter men” (48). Harry himself is “the skin colour of a manila envelope. Or a little darker,” and considers this “Not a bad hand really, compared to some,” alluding to the unpredictable results that the genetic lottery of interracial mixture can produce, referenced in a scurrilous limerick suggesting that a young lady’s affair with a “darkie” results in “an eightsome of twins / Two black and two white and four khaki” (47).14 Among Anglo-Indians, “Harry’s type” and Pran’s “own people,” are exceptional cases such as Skinner (subject of Vikram Chandra’s fictional Red Earth and Pouring Rain), Lord Roberts, “who commanded during the Boer war,” and Lord Liverpool, “yes the Liverpool who was PM” (48). Harry’s internal comment, “It is so bloody unfair,” as he thinks of those who were able to pass into Englishness successfully “before the advent of biologists and evangelists,” is more than a little ironic in its reference both to blood and to fairness and its link to color (48).

On an evening when he is hopeful of success in romance and feeling “noble and white . . . white as a tennis shoe,” the “little bastard [Pran] ruins it all” by grabbing Harry’s sleeve, “as if it is the most natural thing in the world” (48). “Hello,” says Pran “in treacle-thick bazaar English. ‘I am blackie-white like you. I am hungry. Do you have some food?’” (48). Harry sees that the boy “has an English face, a face one might even say was fine, in another place, in other circumstances. Its very good-looks and whiteness make Harry furious” (48). They “are probably of the same blood,” observes the narrator, “Harry and the street urchin, topped up to more or less the same degree, like two glasses of chai” (49). If anything, Harry is “somewhat luckier than him, knowing proper English and having some semblance of good manners” (49). Pran, spectral reminder of a repressed, tainted history and the effort required to climb “out of the clinging swamp of blackness . . . [through] twenty-three years of chippiness and hat-wearing,” is an unwitting agent of anagnorisis. The urchin’s dirty but whiter, better-looking face, and the outrageous call to kinship delivered in crude English shock the better-mannered, proper English-speaking Harry. Harry, called out from his reverie by a “ghost-face,” knows that he and the gormless, handsomer half-caste are of one mixed blood, the difference of “proper English and good manners” a matter of revisable form, not kind (The Impressionist, 49). Unsettled by the specular anomaly, he begins to thrash the boy who eventually flees, his hopes of finding his kin destroyed before he has even crossed the threshold of the Anglo-Indian club. The narrator does not tarry with Harry Begg, for there is other business at hand; the marginal character’s belittled hopes of success with the fair Jenny are left behind, although their faint echo may be heard years later in an ironic reversal when Pran’s English beloved chooses a black man with “passions, primitive emotions,” and the protagonist’s plaintive plea, “I am blacker than you think,” goes unheard because by then he has learned to pass as English and white (415–16).

Things Fall Apart

With his ejection from the threshold of the Anglo-Indian club, the boy’s crisis of identity escalates. Who is he? Neither here, nor there, his sort of hybridity offers little cause for “the celebration of cultural difference and fusion,” Marwan Kraidy identifies in Hybridity (1); nor does it seem to effect a subversion of colonial discourse, as Bhabha’s theory of hybridity suggests. Moreover, border crossing has proved dangerous, unpredictable, and violent so far. More violence is in store for Pran, as well as debauchery, emasculation, and lessons in form, formation, and re-formation. Pran’s next stop is even more disastrous, for the vengeful beggar he had mocked repeatedly sends him to a brothel, where he is drugged and beaten before he is sold into slavery. During his torture, with his very sense of self violently deconstructed, Pran handles his father’s photograph “as if it were a magical item” (64). The IFS (Indian Forest Service) officer’s unbearable whiteness looms before him like “an excess of light, a god, impossible to look on directly” (64). Meanwhile, the son is aware that he is losing something, “the pearl faculty, the faculty which secretes selfhood around some initial grain” (65). Against the talismanic wholeness of the “pearl-skinned man,” his is but “a spark, an impulse waiting to be reassembled from a primal soup of emotions and memories. Nothing so coherent as a personality. Some kind of Being still happening in there, but nothing you could take hold of” (15, 65). The narrator urges comparisons with cosmic forces exerted over millennia: “You could think of it in cyclical terms. The endlessly repeated day of Brahman—before any act of creation the old world must be destroyed. Pran is now in pieces. A pile of Pran-rubble, ready for the next chance-event to put it back together in a new order” (65). Equally, one might consider Fanon’s suggestion that colonialism “makes of the native an object,” with the “object man . . . broken in the very depth of his substance” as a precondition of his enslavement and reformation (A Dying Colonialism, 35).

In his next incarnation, “Pran-flux” is reassembled as a boy-girl living among eunuchs at the palace of the heirless nawab of Fatehpur (71). Here the hybrid undergoes further deprogramming at the hands of the head eunuch, who taunts him with the phrase “You are nothing” until he responds likewise (81). Pran becomes Rukhsana, meaning bright new dawn, a transvestite threatened with a hermaphrodite’s identity, “floating between worlds” (101), negotiating a middle passage between the sexes. Unwitting pawn in the drama of empire, Rukhsana observes the Orientalized figure of the nawab in his “silks, the jeweled Jodhpuri slippers, the string of pearls and the egg-sized finger rings [that] seem less true signs of power than elements of a particularly expensive fancy-dress costume” (102). The childless, bejeweled representative of the old order is engaged in a struggle for power with his younger brother Firoz, a new world cultural hybrid favored by the British because he “wears a tie and has promised to let them build factories” (106). The nawab’s palace is a hybrid of various Indo-European architectural flourishes, while Firoz’s lifestyle is a flamboyant demonstration of privileged cultural hybridity, his thoroughgoing modernity expressed in the installation of a private cinema and a reproduction of the Riviera in the northwest of India. At darkened film screenings, the cultural hybrid watches pornographic interracial fantasy films with titles such as The Yellow Man and the Girl, Three Little Negro Maids, Country Stud Horse, and Jazz Godiva (146), fingers his foreign lady guests, “and reassures himself that he is no cringing native, ignorant of the ways of the world” (78, 146, 115). The nawab appears before visiting dignitaries in opulent attire, while Firoz is “elegant in his sleekly tailored morning suit,” the embodiment of progressive modernity (153). The difference between the nawab and Prince Firoz is also captured in sonic terms: “In the evenings, as gramophone jazz competes with the call of the muezzin, the tension is palpable” (107).15

Who will the British representative Major Privett-Clampe choose as a successor? The sonic and aesthetic audit, coupled with Firoz’s investment in colonial style development, suggests that the younger brother is far more attuned to colonial interests. The nawab, denizen of an old world incapable of successful reproduction, knows that it is Firoz’s world that will succeed his, unless Rukhsana can be deployed for a little blackmail to expose the major’s depraved fondness for “beautiful boy-girls” (87). Emasculated, feminized, and chosen to bend over and hold the position as an offering for the British resident, Pran / Rukhsana / Nothing is destined to be royally, imperially buggered. The narrator comments: “Some may be tempted to view this as primarily a political situation. It is, after all, Pran’s first direct contact with the machinery of imperial government” (98). No less allegorical perhaps is the description of the racial hybrid as both buggered and unmanned, pimped, sold, sold out, used no less by India than by Britain. Beyond allegory, however, the boy’s “experience is still painful, like having a fallen log hammered up one’s backside with a mallet” (97–98).

Aspiration, Respiration

Racked by guilt over his unnatural desires, the major finds himself trying to make amends to his pretty protégé. Recognizing “some English” in the boy, the provenance of which he chooses to remain ignorant of, he rechristens the boy “Clive,” dresses him in his school colors, and coaches him to heed the call of his blood: “It’s calling to you through all the black, telling you to stiffen your resolve. If you listen to what the white is telling you, you can’t go wrong” (109). The major “feels romantically towards him”; we learn that “one of the few things which stuck in his head about the Greeks was their admirable tradition of man-boy love. . . . Now he knows for certain that a degree of white blood courses through the young man’s veins, this sense of being a mentor, a guide through the perils and pitfalls of life, is getting stronger” (131).

Preparing him for yet another incarnation, the major makes him recite poetry, teaches him to distinguish between w and v (“It’s whence, not vence, you nincompoop”), and exhorts him to “listen to what the blood is telling you” (110). Language and speech were potent bodily markers of civilization for some early observers of the people of India. In his 1847 study of aboriginals in India, Hodgson established these links:

The more I see of these primitive races the stronger becomes my conviction that there is no medium of research yielding such copious and accurate data as their languages. Their physical and mental condition is exactly portrayed in their speech and he who can analyse it and separate the foreign elements, has the key to the amount and sources of their civilization. (On the Aborigines of India, ii–iii)

Listening to what the blood is telling him entails vocal revisions; to the color and face of English race and blood, Pran must add its sound, learning the subtle differences between /V/ and /W/. He must also add a certain posture, encoded in the angle and stance of his body, correcting the way in which he will hold his very backbone, until “the Major is inspired to shout, ‘Tally-ho!’” (The Impressionist, 111). Pederasty has given way to an alternative sort of homoeroticism, love of the same now taking the form of making Pran more like himself, in acknowledgment of the boy’s ambiguously sourced blood relationship to empire. Pran-Rukhsana-Clive recites “Gunga Din or The Charge of the Light Brigade, while he [the major] does something pedagogical in his trousers” (132). The martial and sonic poetics of colonial elocution link sound and arousal, emotion and erection, pedagogy and pederasty, until “eventually, in the way of things, Privett-Clampe’s noble fiction starts to coincide with reality, and even the trouser-fiddling stops. Clive’s accent improves and the Major contents himself with mistily watching his protégé as he stands up straight and declaims” (132).

The major’s bid for kinship, founded in the belief that a more historically proximate coupling has produced his “beautiful boy” (131), is more than an allegory for distant Aryan kinship, this homoeroticism more than a queer assault against sociosexual normativity; it is also desire finding root and expression through biobodily means and neuronal reward structures. This is the “carnal stereophony” of which Roland Barthes has spoken: “the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh . . . the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language” (The Pleasure of the Text, 66). As for Clive/Pran, “the poetry baffles him, with its stiffness and violence and thumping horseback rhythms, but he discerns that it is in some way responsible for Privett-Clampe’s importance, and the importance, of Englishmen in general, so he pays attention to it, hoping to divine its secret” and “gradually his English accent improves” (The Impressionist, 112). Along with the visual effects produced by “short trousers, a white cotton shirt, knee-length woollen stockings with garters to hold them up . . . a tie and a cap . . . decorated with the same pattern of blue and burgundy stripes,” Clive is learning to pass in his new sonic drag (109).

While Clive is acquiring the embodiments of English cultural identity to complement his racially hybrid inheritance, “the life of the palace continues” (113). Polo, tennis, and hunting events hosted by the eager princes bring together a disparate band of colonials, expats, eunuchs, and assorted freeloaders. The palace drama culminates in the primal site of the forest during a staged tiger hunt. In a carnival of desire and degradation, most of the company have the runs; the nawab is discovered naked with visiting British resident Sir Wyndham’s kleptomaniac wife, Minty; Firoz has soiled his underwear; and the major has been shot in a farce of Wodehousian if not Rabelaisian proportions. Sexual desire, shit, and violence are unleashed in the unregulated space of the jungle. Taking advantage of the chaos, tigers drugged for the hunt escape into the night and Clive slips away into the next section, titled “White Boy” (179).

Step across This Line: Border Talk

Discovered next on a buffalo-drawn cart rolling toward Amritsar, a city ravaged by violence in the wake of the Jalianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, is a “sahib [Englishman] who does not speak like a sahib,” so thinks its driver, but looks enough like one to pass the scrutiny of anxious “English Tommy guards” (The Impressionist, 179, 181). Infuriated by General Dyer’s decision to fire on peaceful protestors, the natives have been on a rampage. A white woman missionary foolish enough to “live among her flock” has been raped (so have a bunch of Anglo-Indian nurses, but that triggers no particular outrage), enraging the general, who is now determined to wreak punishment: “If they will behave like animals, they shall be treated as such” (184, 181, 185). A “round of public floggings” is accompanied by the order that natives at the scene of the crime crawl on all fours (185). At the border between different grammars of being and their mutually occult rules, knowledge of the right password can determine life and death. Pran is about to walk into a city that has sprung new, dangerous border points, and it is imperative that he possess the right shibboleth for safe passage. Blundering upon the scene, Pran “realizes with a rush of fear that . . . any moment now they will attack him, arrest him, make him crawl and grovel” (185). Unable to “force his mouth to form words,” Pran is spared momentarily by his silence (185). The sergeant on duty mistakes him for a lost English boy.

Pran asks himself, “How can they be so blind? How can they not tell?” (185). Somehow, “despite the sweat, the dirt of five days’ travelling in the same clothes, the way he holds his head and hands, the terrified expression on his face, they think he is one of them” (185). But for the fetish of skin color, Pran would have failed the crucial visual test, but he also understands the limits of visual information. “As soon as he speaks they will know,” he thinks (185). The regime of looking inaugurates a more complicated identity scan of the multiple texts the body makes available for examination. The sergeant demands confirmation: “Are you all right? Can you tell me your name?” Pran knows that he must confirm that he is not only visually but also audibly all right. Acutely aware that “one move will betray him,” the boy wills his body to reproduce the major’s lessons (186). The narrator has told us earlier that the boy has inherited or developed a talent for mimicry, albeit employed “in cruel parodies” of the physical disabilities of servants in the Razdan household, from which indulgent paradise he has been forever expelled (28). Having passed the visual color test, he must now play out the rest of the biosensorial mime: “he tries to hold Privett-Clampe’s voice inside his mouth,” producing the sound, vocabulary, and body stance of whiteness: “I am very well. I am going. Forthwith,” he says (186). Pran/Clive has not balked at the fricative of /v/ juxtaposed so dangerously close to the round-lipped sound of /w/ that has betrayed many an Indian English speaker’s inadequate instruction in received pronunciation, or indeed from the aspirated voiced plosive of “forthwith” that could easily have exploded his precariously dissembled identity. The choice and arrangement of vowel and consonant sounds is nothing less than daring: “I am very well. I am going. Forthwith” (186; emphasis added). Tongue, teeth, breath, aspiration are the life-and-death determining elements of identity at this crucial moment. Shibboleth or Sibboleth? Cogito ergo sum or not, it is clear that Pran’s life and future hang on a correctly apprehended sense of suspiro ergo sum, in such trivialities as where to let the plosive breath out and how to release the air of the fricative /v/ with audible friction. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator concludes: “People care about outward forms: the width of a cuff, the sound of the labial-dental fricative ‘v’. Becoming someone else is just a question of changing tailor and remembering to touch the bottom lip to the ridge of teeth above” (463). The orphic spell of sound and the glamour of grammar carry the day, and Pran turns the corner, beginning to run as soon as he is out of the solicitous sergeant’s sight.

The second test will be a contextual one at the station, where he warily approaches a train of white evacuees: “He is a trespasser, a black cuckoo in the nest. . . . The real English boys are all away in boarding schools at Home” (188). Given time to process his presence on the platform, the English women will know that boys of his age who look white in India are likely to be half-caste because they are not permitted to attend schools in England, with official policy specifically prohibiting their travel to England for higher education. As he shuffles along to evade detection, in this most fortuitous of accidental journeys a train puffs into the station. “In the midst of the confusion” that all trains bring in their train, soldiers focus on the transfer of goods by Sikh soldiers (who must be kept away from the watchful women fearful of rape), and Pran climbs aboard the train to Bombay (188).

Missionary Positions

Pran’s third attempt at passing at the “Independent Scottish Mission among the Heathen” on Falkland Road in Bombay is less successful (201). When he arrives at the mission claiming to be an English boy down on his luck, the pastor’s wife, Elspeth Macfarlane, sees right through him: “It was plain he was a mongrel, some Tommy’s child who had grown up on the streets, but he was fine featured and his manners were good” (203). His subsequent triple-header incarnations as “Robert” to Pastor Andrew Macfarlane, “Pretty Bobby” to the prostitutes on Falkland Road where the pastor has located his mission, and “Chandra” to India-loving Elspeth offer him opportunities for continuing education in “points of morality,” Latin, history, English grammar (204), and further accent reduction (or enhancement) until he develops “the prim inflections of an educated lowland Scot” like his mentor (192).

Tongue-in-cheek, Kunzru furnishes in the figure of his next teacher, Pastor Macfarlane, an amateur craniometrist “following in the footsteps of the great [Samuel] Morton,” who performed his measurements by filling skulls with “fine lead shot” (196). In that of his wife, Kunzru supplies a cultural hybrid in reverse who is assimilating to native ways in pointed opposition to her husband, who refuses to learn the local “gobble-gobble” adopted by sari-wearing, Marathi-speaking Elspeth. For Andrew, the gospel is clear: “English and Christ, Christ and English. Inseparable” (218). No “gobble-gobble” can adequately convey its sacred import or substitute for its “innately moral character” as “a route to God” (218). On account of his failure to learn the local language, the pastor’s message has gone unheeded in his parish; “after almost three years in the country, the Independent Scottish Mission among the Heathen had only two converts, both untouchable men who did odd jobs around the compound in return for food, and on Sunday often had to be dragged out of the paan shop on the corner to attend service” (219). Ambaji Elspeth, on the other hand, has chosen India, despite her initial response to the assault on her senses. We learn of her arrival at Apollo Bunder through the following sensationally charged description: “the hundreds of beggars tugging at her white cotton dress, the furnace heat and the alien smells all hit her like a dirty black hand slapping her face” (216). Following Andrew into “stinking alleys” (216), she had fainted at the delivery of racial difference through an excess of smells, sights, sounds, touch, and heat, leading at first to her blocking out “the nightmarish place in which she lived, holding it at arm’s length like a soiled rag” (217). During a difficult confinement and recuperation, she learns to love her adoptive country and its different ways, experiencing “the wild pleasure at sitting close to the floor and eating with her hands,” as she will come to love her adopted Chandra, who comes to her soon after the death of her sons (222; emphasis added). While Andrew holds himself aloof from the world that surrounds him, on her side of the compound, “men and women, Indians and Europeans, promiscuously mingled together” (226).

Andrew, on the other hand, dabbles in theories of “the superiority of the European mind to that of the Asiatic” (222–23). In a caricature of racial science, the reverend’s experiments in phrenology, craniometry, and lamprey grid measurements of facial angles, yield the following insights: “craniometry has revealed the foundation of British imperial domination of the world” on the basis that “differences in brain size correspond exactly to degree of civilization and capacity for rational thought throughout the world” (196).16 The narrator summarizes the findings of this primitive biobodily measure of racial intelligence and its implications thus:

The Indostanic group, to which most of the Reverend’s dead people once belonged, falls somewhere in the upper middle of this global league. At the top is the European, whose capacious 100-cubic-inch capacity gives him room for brain development far in excess of such benighted fellows as the 91-inched Peruvian or the savage 86-inched Tasman. Hence, Empire. (197)

Pran/Robert makes an intriguing subject for the reverend’s experiments: “To the Reverend his fine nose and thin, sharp lips appear strangely pure. For a mongrel, incredibly pure. Really almost too pure. Almost European” (197); “Robert,” he declares, “your taint of blood hardly shows at all” (197). The boy in turn looks through pictures “of noble Greek statuary and twisted soot-black nigger faces, and feels, as he often does, a peculiar relief at his resemblance to one and not the other” (197–98), experiencing something of the racial pride of those who are then in power. The reverend makes

note of the “unusual leucochroicity of the subject’s skin,” and wonder[s] whether perhaps the very fineness of the features, their uncanny quality, places them under the heading of one of the great Lombroso’s criminal types. The tendency to crime of the mulatto has, after all, been well documented in the Americas, and Robert’s peculiar disguised form of hybridity might conceal all manner of antisocial tendencies. His excessive care for his personal appearance and his enjoyment of tobacco certainly point in that direction. (198)

Suspicious, but finding him brighter than his own sons, he decides, “Let the boy stay, even if he is a hyphenate” (199). After this parodic nineteenth-century style examination rooted in a now-discredited science, Ambaji jokingly asks the boy, “How was your skull?” “Very good, Amba—I mean, Mrs. Mac—I mean, very good. I am almost English” (199). As she looks up sharply, he amends, “I mean Scottish,” in a wry comment on the intricacies of British identity (199).

The reverend’s conflicted response to hybridity is informed by textbook ambivalence and desire. In his first mission in Assam, the twenty-four-year-old Andrew “fell, he fell hard,” “the tropical climate . . . doing its evil work, dissolving Europe in heat and moisture, turning this man of God into a sensuous thing, a streaming naked body fronted by a bobbing, straining cock,” and causing him to give in to the temptation of sex with a mission girl, little Sarah; “It happened once, twice, a third time. No more. By then he was revolted at himself” (227). While his superior, Reverend Gavin, attributes Sarah’s swelling belly to “some failing on her part, yet another event in the tribe which had taken place outside or beneath the limits of European understanding,” “a pale creature” is in the making who will in time haunt the mission, “always there, playing in the dirt, clapping its chubby hands. Accusing him” (228). She is one of many of her type in the

villages near to the big tea plantations where whole families of half-breed children lined up to watch the missionaries ride past. Boys and girls of various sizes holding hands in front of their huts, each one bearing the tell-tale crook nose or jug ears of the Plantation Manager, or the Engineer, or the District Medical Officer. (228)17

Andrew is advised to find a suitable wife; he assents but adds a test to temptation by deciding to “walk among the harlots, make his home in the most depraved place he knew” (229).

Haunted by his own depravity, Andrew finds in scientific discourse a grid upon which to map and assess his poorly understood desires and fears:

He wanted to know the exact shape of his sin, and found it in scientific books. Andrew Macfarlane of the Leucodermi, cymotrichous of hair and mesocephalic of head, had coupled with Sarah [whose name is not even her name] of the Xanthodermi, exotically leiotrichous but woefully brachy-cephalic [short wide head]. Their daughter was a collapse. A blur. (230)

With the birth of his legitimate sons, “gradually her [Sarah’s] face was obliterated” (231). Forbidden access to the pleasures of his wife’s pregnancy-damaged body, however, he remains obsessed with sex, his body a quivering monument to physical desire. His psychocognitive map is crowded by rivalrous texts and images. Among them is this passage from a book on the science of ethnography, Daniel Garrison Brinton’s 1902 text, The Basis of Social Relations: “These are the signs of racial inferiority: simplicity and early union of the cranial sutures. Wide nasal aperture, with synostosis of the nasal bones. Prominence of the jaws. Recession of the chin. Early appearance, size and permanence of ‘wisdom’ teeth” (quoted in Kunzru, The Impressionist, 231). Equally powerful is the bodily present text of temptation: “These are the parts of women. High foreheads. Eyes rimmed with kohl. Breasts fastened into tight coloured blouses. Bare stomachs. Red sucking mouths, open, waiting” (231). Sexual/textual merging is suggested even in the sound of the word for congress: “Fucking. Make the shape of the word with your red mouth. Lower lip flicking off the teeth, breathy vowel guttering in a strangled click of the throat. Fuck. Fucking” (231). Mixture obviously horrifies the lustful and conflicted reverend. Objecting to natives as monkey people, he perceives his wife’s interest in them as reminders of the temptation of physical consort, with animals at that: “It was like watching one’s wife debasing herself with a dog or a horse” (233).

Enraged by his desires and haunted by conflicted discursive and bodily texts, the reverend is eventually driven to a violent episode the author describes thus:

The missionary toils over a splayed girl. Nails dig hard into brown skin. English words. Gibber gibber glub-glub. Screaming. He makes a fist. All the years. Hits hard. Harder. . . . Men came and pulled him off. Brown men who smelled of sweat and garlic and punched his stomach and cut his face. (232)

In due course, tormented by his conflicted desires, his wife’s behavior, and the call to violence, he finds a convenient repository for his ugly feelings. It is one that has served many a European racist anxious to project hatred outside the self by finding, locating, and confining it to its most extreme manifestation in the Holocaust, thereby placing the self at some distance from it:

All sorts of ideas were stewing in his head, Old Testament images of blood and revenge. The Kaiser wiped them out, or rather redirected them, the Illustrated News caricature of the bloodthirsty monster in a spiked helmet doing the work the people of Bombay had never managed, rendering the forces of darkness single and visible. He began to hate the Germans with an overwhelming passion. (233)

But with the arrival of Pran / Clive / Bobby at the mission, “It was as if a ghost had come to haunt him. To have to live so close to the thing he feared most: white yet not white, a diffraction both of his dead sons and his monstrous daughter” (234). The reverend responds by embarking on the boy’s education with new missionary zeal, in a move uncannily reminiscent of the boy-girl-loving major: “Soon he was teaching Robert to write and speak proper English, and giving him the rudiments of culture” (234).

Bobby begins to study texts on race, learns to mimic regional British accents, and practices passing on English newcomers at the Bombay port (237). He tries on different names—“Peter Walker. John Johnson. Clive Smith. David Best but call me Bestie”—and colonial occupations: “I work for a petroleum company. A rubber company. The school board. A department store” (245). He sees how racial typing and categorization work: “The thing is, they believe him. They hear an accent and see a face and a set of clothes, and put them together into a person” (245). But “he soon learns that looks and accent are not enough” (249). There is more:

There is, for example, the question of smell. Like everyone, Bobby has always wondered about the grim English war against cookery, their inexplicable liking for tasteless slabs of meat, unspiced vegetables and sweetened concoctions of flour and fat. A conversation with a naval rating reveals the side-effects of a diet devoid of garlic and onions. Bobby is pretending to be a man of influence, heir to an Edinburgh import-export business. The sailor snorts with laughter and tells him frankly that, money or no money, he stinks like a wog. Unless you sort yourself out, lad, you’ll die a bleeding bachelor. Bobby is too intrigued to be offended. What do wogs smell like? Is there a typical English smell? (249)

Determined to follow the olfactory trail, Bobby bribes a servant at Watson’s hotel to let him sniff white laundry: “Face buried in burra mems’ smalls and burra sahibs’ dirty shirts, he finally puts a name to it. Rancid butter. With perhaps a hint of raw beef. The underlying smell of empire” (249–50). The body’s habitual traces not only look and sound out their difference; they also leak out through its pores. In his earlier incarnation as Clive, Pran had stumbled on the smell of Englishness at the Amritsar railway station:

The place is packed with people waiting to be evacuated. A stench of sweat hits him like a fist. . . . The stink of their bodies, suddenly isolated from all the other stinks of India, is shocking. One attar note smelt raw on a perfumer’s glass rod, nasty and unblended. Pran has been taught the rhyme. Fee-fi-fo-fum. Be he alive or be he dead. This is the smell of Englishmen, an incitement to the mob, the ogre, to attack. (187)

Along with bodily lessons in biochemistry, Bobby is learning about the sociocultural mannerisms and phrases—what I have referred to earlier as identity bits and metonymic aesthetics—with which to stitch together the impression of English personality:

Calico arms. Wooden head. A hat and a set of overheard opinions. How perfectly impossible it is to grow a good lawn in India. The positive moral effects of team sports. The unspeakable vileness of Mr Gandhi, and the lack of hygiene of just about everything. Lay them out one by one, like playing patience. It does not matter if you believe them. Belief is nothing but a trivial sensation in the stomach. (250)

Belief is a gut feeling; identity is biology, chemistry, culture, genes, but also engineering and architecture, “built according to blueprints of class and membership” (251). Finally invited into the colonial Majestic club by an unsuspecting new arrival from England, Bobby joins “a sea of pink faces,” and by way of further dress rehearsal, experiences the thrill of whiteness: “tersely ordering a gin and tonic and taking a white man’s pleasure in the brown man’s deep salaam” (252). When he sets his sights on the reigning English beauty, Lily Parry, he suffers his first rebuff. At the first opportunity they have to be alone, she confronts him: “Right, you. What the hell do you think you are doing?” (263). A stunned Bobby learns that Lily has not only seen through him, but is, moreover, the far superior passer. “You poor little half-and-half. You don’t have a clue, do you?” she asks (265). Outside the orbit of detection, she slips into a more familiar argot: “What are you after, yaar? Go on, you can tell me.” “As she talks,” the narrator observes, “her voice, her clipped English accent that is so very like his own, has changed, slipped, thickening, warming. All the Northern ice and suet falling away” (265). She leaves him with a useful tip: “Don’t do that with your head. It’s a dead giveaway. The two cardinal rules are never to waggle your head, and never let them see you squatting on your heels. All right?” (265).

The drama of biological re-formation is played out on the corporeal bearings of Kunzru’s fictional hero. Armed with his genetically accidental looks, newfound sensitivity to diet and the smell test, accent training and other education provided by the pedophilic major and the missionary lover/hater of native women, and coached in the fundaments of desirable body stances furnished by his fellow passer, Pran/Bobby is ready to embark on his next adventure.

The Truest I/Eye: Bridge-Man

The next opportunity for passing is presently made available to the aspiring impressionist when he runs into country-bred, England-bound Jonathan Bridgeman in a tense moment of anticolonial and labor unrest. Mrs. Macfarlane is arrested for Bolshevist sympathies, and Bobby fears he may soon be homeless. At this point, “it is not a good time to look English in Bombay,” and Bobby has to explain “who he is,” presumably in a native tongue or in Indian-accented English, when belligerent men “try to block his way” (275). The city is deserted, except for a “second-generation drunkard,” the intoxicated Englishman Jonathan Bridgeman, discovered in conversation with a cow: “Steak, you idiot! Jerky! Stew! . . . I don’t give a fig for your bloody Cow Protection Societies . . . I’m going to eat you, you pig of a cow” (276). Jonathan has never been sent Home for schooling because of an irresponsible alcoholic parent whose belated discovery of temperance is finally accompanied by a late-breaking desire that his son attend one of England’s great universities, pending remedial schooling in “Blighty” (280). Jonathan is on the razzle, looking for one last fling before he embarks on the dying-man’s errand. “I don’t mind telling you,” he confides to Bobby,

my balls are like two ripe melons. Tried to get my leg over with a little half-caste nurse on the train, but she wasn’t having any of it. Told me she would pull the emergency handle, frigid bitch. One would have thought she’d be grateful, but there really is no pleasing some of them. (280–81)

Bobby obliges him with a visit to Madam Maria Francesca’s Goa House, where he is duly supplied with more liquor and a more accommodating half-caste. Before the evening is over, they are set upon by intoxicated rioters on the rampage who are enraged at the sight of ironically described “Sisterfucking feringhis” (283). Bobby flees as the Indian-bred Englishman is beaten, returning later to collect Jonathan’s wallet, passport, and hip flask. As he turns the corner onto Falkland Road, he sees that the mission is on fire. Turning his back on it, Bobby decides to embark on the voyage and education intended for Jonathan.

The next scene places Bobby/Jonathan at the “stern rail of the SS Loch Lomond” on its way to England. During the passage, he has the pleasure and anxiety of being mistaken for an available “spare man” by all the disappointed Englishwomen who have failed to find a husband while in India (290). His experience with Amanda, one of these “Returning Empties,” supplies further confidence in his project of passing: “Her smell, her colours, even the texture of her hair, are all tiny victories to him, and, as he stands at the rail with her scent in his nostrils, each time he lifts his cigarette he feels like an explorer” (291). She, too, is emblematic of the incarnate text of England that he must study and master.

Once in England, he is introduced to further ingredients of Englishness: “Everywhere Jonathan finds the originals of copies he has grown up with, all the absurdities of British India restored to sense by their natural environment.” Mirroring Martin’s observations about climate and culture, Bobby offers his own theories about the English character and way of life. He sees “the need their climate instills in them to pad their blue-veined bodies with layers of horsehair and mahogany, aspidistras and antimacassars, history, tradition and share certificates. Being British, he decides, is primarily a matter of insulation” (299). Kant had argued that races were differentiated in our original ancestors by four germs or seeds (Keime) containing in potentia a range of racial characteristics. The actualization of these characteristics would be determined by geographical and climatic conditions (Anthropology). Hippocrates, Aristotle, and others also posited theories of physical difference caused by temperature, geography, and climate. The narrator’s comments about climate considerations in the formation of Englishness reveal a fluid notion of their significance in the development of biocultural dimensions of identity, reflected in cultural practices that may have developed largely to warm the body struggling against “the fug of . . . dampness” (The Impressionist, 298). Plants (aspidistras) and protective covers from the East (antimacassars) also seem to be attempts to cozy the English room with imported elements of warmth that have nonetheless been domesticated to convey an aggregate English surround.

The boy’s next stop on his way to Oxford finds him in another quintessential English location as he “walks into the oak-panelled entrance hall and for the first time smells the combination of carbolic soap, mud and boiled cabbage that is the unique aroma of the English boarding school” (306). The shoe is on the other cultural foot, the nose in another place with other smells, what Bhabha calls the “truest eye” of the migrant—and other sensory and cognitive faculties—eagerly taking in the new environment (The Location of Culture, 5). In a joke that seems to go on for too long, Dr. Noble, orchidist and headmaster of said school, “is discovered in the act of hybridization” (307–8). An arch disquisition on hybridization follows, with further allusions to early theories of race and the development of the concept of species based on herbarium material in the Linnaean schematic. Dr. Noble explains:

Though the bees in our gardens transfer pollen indiscriminately from flower to flower, still we do not find crosses between dahlia and delphinium, or between geranium and gentian. Why? Because their essential natures are different. Just as it is with flowers, so it is with boys. Each boy has his essential nature, and yours, Mr. Bridgeman, is historical. Surely, as observers of creation, we must look upon these boundaries as a good thing? Were there none, the flowers would lose their identities in a hybrid swarm and nature would be in a desperate mess. (309–10)

One recalls Kant’s similar advice against mixture on the grounds that it “gradually extinguishes [race’s] characters” and “is not beneficial to the human race,” even though “nature aims at assimilation” (Anthropology, 182).

At school, the changeling passes successfully as Jonathan, secure in his adopted identity until a sudden visit by a hitherto unknown great-aunt Berthilda. The threat of family “instantly drains this pretence of all reality and, with it, drains him of personality, anima, of the power of speech and action” (319). But the lady turns out to be no lady, and poses no credible challenge to Jonathan’s identity, which she cannily intuits to be false. She herself neither smells nor sounds right, insufficiently processed into acceptable, educated Englishness. Dr. Noble registers several objections to her: “Apart from the smell, there are her undisciplined vowels, which slide around her palate entirely uncurbed, and her weird habit of making her crusty skirts rustle and crack beneath her haunches by shifting around on her chair” (320). The original English native is clearly not the best specimen of Englishness and a poor match for its better-crafted copy in Pran/Bobby/Jonathan. For a certain kind of pretender, “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86), but the racial hybrid with the right perceptible affordances may pass for English more effectively than the alleged original. However implausibly, our hero not only passes, but in doing so exposes the class-tethered and aesthetically contrived construction of Englishness.

The aunt’s uncouth behavior convinces Dr. Noble and the Bridgeman family lawyer to have no further contact with her, and the boy’s secret is secure. Noble adopts the boy eagerly, becoming yet another useful mentor. To help him fit in better, he recommends that Jonathan develop an interest in sport: “I suggest cricket” (332). But the boy is hit by hay fever, “as if the English countryside is taking revenge, making some point about people who belong, and people who may pretend but whose bodies betray them” (334). On Founders Day, the foundling wanders the school halls alone, looking at photos of old school teams, one from 1893 featuring F. M. V. Bridgeman, “Father of” (336). He hurries away from the disturbing reminder of his imposture and “so does not see, standing slight and school-uniformed beside eleven white-clad figures, a pale boy with a large leather-bound book. According to the legend he is R. A. Forrester, scorer. [Like Bobby/Jonathan.] If you were to look closely, you would see that his eyes are misty with hayfever” (336–37). It is the English body of his father that has lent him this genetic legacy of unbelonging to the countryside. Unathletic, but “a good enough historian,” “Jonathan Bridgeman” makes it to that bastion of elite educational opportunity: Oxford.

Ahmad has written that “the figure of the migrant, especially the migrant (postcolonial) intellectual residing in the metropolis, comes to signify a universal condition of hybridity and is said to be the Subject of a Truth that individuals living within their national cultures do not possess” (“Postcolonial Theory,” 371). Pointing to Bhabha’s assertion, pace Rushdie, that “the truest eye may now belong to the migrant’s double vision” (The Location of Culture, 5), Ahmad complains that

most individuals are really not free to fashion themselves anew with each passing day, nor do communities arise out of and fade into the thin air of the infinitely contingent. Among the migrants themselves, only the privileged can live a life of constant mobility and surplus pleasure, between Whitman and Warhol as it were. Most migrants tend to be poor and experience displacement not as cultural plenitude but as torment. (“Postcolonial Theory,” 373)

Although Ahmad’s observations are valid in broad terms, Rushdie and Kunzru both emphasize the price of border crossing in The Satanic Verses and The Impressionist. Bobby as “Bridgeman” between two cultures and races is poised to make trenchant comparisons from the privileged perch of migrancy, but only after he has stolen an identity and colluded in a murder by abandoning the original to a riotous mob. A string of outrageously advantageous accidents combined with daring opportunism have permitted this unusual stance. Bobby/Bridgeman’s truest I/eye is hard won: it has involved murder, deaths, theft, abandonment of his adoptive family, lies, secrets, deceit, and ruthless exploitation of unbelievably fortuitous opportunities. The violence through which this double vision has been gained requires a reassessment of those tenets of hybridity and diaspora that unwittingly glamorize border crossing and minimize its challenges and suffering, alongside its capacity to deform and alienate the self from itself until it begins to release its repressions in destructive forms.

At Oxford, Jonathan slides into outright racism in a rejection of his past. His peers speculate about him at Barabbas, “he has some odd ideas about civilization . . . racial ideas” (The Impressionist, 342). We learn that he is into theatrics and, ironically, is cast in the role of traitorous Iago in the college production of Othello, with an English boy playing the Moor in blackface. Jonathan’s self-fashioning continues:

In this latest version of himself he has been sure to emphasize everything that is honest, true and English. He is seen to frown upon novelty, and to deplore the current decline in social standards. In literature he is a Georgian, and in politics a Tory. He speaks little of his family, but lets it be known that he comes of old Gloucestershire farming stock. He is, in every possible way, the average undergraduate. (345)

To disarm residual suspicions, the changeling’s approximation of whiteness requires its corollary, taking its distance from his “hidden layer” by embracing the empire that has produced him, in the psyche and in the flesh (346). In a debate on the motion, “this House believes Americans are Humans,” he is recorded as making “a long and otiose statement of the White Man’s mission to ‘farm the world,’” and advised to “avoid appearing hysterical in the future . . . to remain relevant” (346–47). His views garner disapproval from many of his peers but also result in an invitation to tea by the duce of the Oxford Fascisti. A caricature of the anxiously assimilated migrant, Bridgeman identifies with positions that target the very vulnerability and lack of power that generate his anxiety in the first place.

Bridgeman’s unrelenting desire for whiteness finds its human object in a blond beauty in due course of time. She is “Elgar and tea roses . . . rolling fields with drystone boundary walls . . . willow trees, fruit cup, sunset over”—fragments of landscape, martial imperial music, and classic summer drinks agglomerated in a multisensorial symphony of Englishness that links beauty and metonymic aesthetics with civilizational and political power. “Brimming with the aestheticism of it all,” he decides that Astarte Chapel is “the pattern, the type, the very essence of the English girl”; in this, she is something like Chamcha’s upper-class wife, Pamela, “Bloody Britannia. Warm beer, mince pies [and] common sense” (The Satanic Verses, 175). The “quintessentially English” girl, he finds out, has been named Astarte after the Phoenician goddess of love and fertility by her father, an anthropology professor. Jonathan, soon to be Johnny to “Star,” reads that “the sacrificial death and resurrection” of her male lover “is taken to symbolize the regenerative cycle of the earth,” an unrecognized clue to his impending fate (The Impressionist, 353).

Under the influence of the bright and volatile Star, Pran-flux is about to be buffeted by the vagaries of this capricious representative of Englishness. Star straddles the antipodes of the classic liberal English position, romanticizing those who are in “contact with the earth,” echoing Fanon’s phrase in Black Skin White Masks, while disdaining those who are in contact with the earth but savages because “they’ve never even seen a bath,” for example (The Impressionist, 358, 363). Civilization, according to her, “is the problem” because it has stifled the Western natural self, but Star can only sustain this position until it comes to lavatory and toilette facilities (358). Invited to join Star’s father on an expedition to Fotseland, a location that had made his reputation as a professor, Johnny observes that anthropology “is the very highest mark of civilization.” Professor Chapel’s lectures represent to him “the end of a long journey, a hard climb up to a giddy elevation from which it is finally possible to survey the world and the people in it. All the earth is available. Everything and everyone has a place” (375). Confronting his own repressions, Jonathan/Johnny is reminded of his racially and culturally mixed body as a site of betrayal: “As the Professor speaks about taboos or marriage customs, Jonathan looks around the hall, afraid of catching an eye or seeing a smirk on the face of someone who knows—who understands that he is called to blackness and savagery by his tainted blood” (382). Knowing that his “only connection to [Star] is through her father,” “Johnny” abandons his designs of joining the civil service and exerting the empire’s “civilizing influence on other races” (358), choosing instead the classificatory impulse of anthropology without understanding the connection between the two, or the psychological sources of the impulse in the professor’s obsessive compulsive disorder, or the judgmental voyeurism that has replaced natural and repressed curiosity about the body and its range of expressions.

As Johnny will learn from the English cartographer George Marchant once he reaches West Africa, “it is all more or less a question of latrines” (432). The logic of the latrine is a substantial force in separating the British from their imperial subjects. At the nawab’s tiger hunt, we recall that Imelda, a European woman “works out how many hours she is away from the nearest flush toilet, and begins to cry” (171). In unusual moments of “gastric awareness” following a mass intestinal outbreak, the European visitors are reduced to undeniable bodily states. Sir Wyndham observes the hapless Imelda in something he has never seen: “a woman in the act of excretion.” As he watches her “with mingled horror and fascination,” he thinks, “Minty [his wife] must do that. God” (170–71). Linking perversions and zoomorphic degradation, Freud speculates that “as long as smell (or taste) is dominant, urine, feces, and the whole surface of the body, also blood, have a sexually exciting effect” (The Complete Letters, 279). In the “sensational” scene of the hunt when Pran/Rukhsana first confronts formal representatives of empire and the native ruling class, Kunzru comically conjoins blood, sex, and dysentery as various characters are discovered in “varying states of undress,” and nervously discharged bullets bloody more than one participant, yoking coprology and copulation together. Anus, nose, sexuality, and the organic sources of repression feature prominently in Freud’s celebrated exchanges with Fliess. In one letter, he writes of “the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive—by a process still unknown to me.” Freud speaks without pretensions to politesse in explaining the links between civilization, psychology, and organic repression: “To put it crudely, the memory actually stinks just as in the present the object stinks; and in the same manner as we turn away our sense organ (the head and nose in disgust), the preconscious and a sense of consciousness turn away from the memory. This is repression” (The Complete Letters, 279–80). The basic functions of the body and its eliminative practices, postures of squatting reminiscent of these functions, the smell of other places linked to what is taken in and put out by the body, constitute the fundamentals of classification and repression of what is alienated from the self in the process of becoming civilized. Bodily practices, toilet facilities, and smells become grist for the classificatory mill in sociocultural versions of theories of evolution.

Prior to his departure with Professor Chapel’s expedition, when he comes across the Fotse Village exhibit at the Empire exhibition in Wembley, Jonathan confronts blackness in “all its horror.” The embodiments of blackness and associated savageness on display prompt Pran/Jonathan’s fear of being thought not quite / not black, a fear that finds its expression in a scatological metaphor as he recalls a repressed past in which he and those with the “dull sooty skin” would both have been far from the giddy elevations of anthropological study, consigned instead to the cesspits of civilizational hierarchy: “It was like staring into the toilet bowl, looking at what he had expelled from himself” (The Impressionist, 381). On their way to Fotseland, the party stops in Paris to visit Star, who has a further shock in store for the young man who has begun to fancy himself as explorer “Beau Bridgeman” (399). The merry young girl takes him to a nightclub, “a mongrel place” where he sees “Negroes cutting through the crowds like they own the pavement” (410). “The black men, with their canes and silk shirts, seem like a bad omen” to Johnny, who is waiting to propose to Star with an engagement ring in his pocket (410). He feels that “it is as if Africa is already reaching out towards him, before he has made sure of his foothold in Europe” (411). Star is busy romanticizing the blacks. Listening to “black” music, Star comments, “So sad. You can tell how much they’ve suffered,” locating them in a past no longer available to the West. “They have something, don’t they? Something we’ve lost” (412).

In his essay “On Jazz,” Adorno observes that this sound “is supposed to subject the over-stimulated Western nerves to the vitality of blacks [Negervitalitat]” (471). Explaining that what the Führer banned as Negermusik, the occasion of the essay, was in fact not even jazz as produced by African Americans but rather a sort of European production trading on its novelty value, Adorno, writing in 1936 as Hektor Rotweiler, uncovers its blatantly commercial appeal to repressed primitivism. Although the music featured at the club is part of African American cultural contributions to the entertainment scene in Paris between the wars, Adorno’s perceptions are borne out in Star’s muddled relationship to otherness.

As Johnny is preparing to propose, a black man appears and begins to kiss his beloved “full on the lips”:

He is kissing her. This man. Kissing. Her. Kissing Star. And he is (this cannot be, this absolutely is not happening)—black. Black as night, as tar, coal, pitch, liquorice and the suits of funeral directors. Black as a Bible, his skin shining in the candle-light like something made of polished wood. The palms of his black hands contrastingly pink, his thick lips pressed on hers, kissing her, kissing Star. Kissing. Star. Black man. Star. (The Impressionist, 413)

In prose redolent of the rhythms of the ambient music, the narrator communicates the thrusting, rebarbative implications of Star’s (and colonialism’s) capricious logic. Flustered at being caught out in what is evidently a concealed relationship, Star struggles to explain, “Sweets is different. He plays the piano. You should hear him play. He’s wonderful. And he’s different. Exotic. Strong. I’ve never met anyone like him” (414). Mouthing words that Fanon would mimic in Black Skin, White Masks—“meet my black friend . . . when people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color” (116), Star is rehearsing the position familiar to this day and captured in the exceptionalism accorded to some despite their color, but in this case also because of it. “Different? To whom?” asks Johnny, “To me?” (The Impressionist, 414). Star’s response leaves Pran-flux in a familiar rubble: “Yes, Johnny, to you. Come on. I know you, Johnny. I feel I know all there is about you. Gloucestershire, Chopham Hall, Oxford, blah blah blah. You’re very sweet, but you’re exactly like everybody else” (414–15). Against this textbook caricature of upper-class Englishness, Star demands primitivism: “I want passion, primitive emotions. I want to be in contact with the origin of things. . . . He knows about things. He actually shot someone once. And his family were terribly terribly poor. Things like that happen to Negroes. That’s why they have soul” (415). When Johnny complains that he has soul, Star explains: “English people have a soul, which is why we go to church on Sunday, but we haven’t got soul. Sweets explained it to me. It’s about music and suffering. And it’s something to do with food as well, but that’s slightly different. Anyway, you don’t have it and Sweets does” (415). Johnny pleads with her, “I love you and though I may not be as black as him, I’m blacker than you think. Honestly. I’ve got soul, Star. I have” (416).

The narrator has warned us earlier in the text about the capricious Star: “Later, when he is wiser to the ways of Miss Astarte Chapel,” he will learn that “relations with her are composed of a series of dyads, positive and negative held together by a strong bond” (357). In this capsule-form introduction to ambivalence, Kunzru locates the contrary drives of fear and desire, loathing and longing characteristic of the colonial impulse. When Star eventually consummates her desire for otherness, it will be with the forgotten Prince Firoz—a figure that accords with what Bhabha describes as “a reformed, recognizable other” (The Location of Culture, 86)—as much as his “asset liquidity and breeding,” qualities that Star, “like any well brought-up English girl . . . has been taught to rate” more highly than “mere attractiveness” (357). In the meanwhile, our itinerant protagonist has had a rude awakening. Everything he has built his identity upon—the idea of the Great Chain of Being, a stepladder to climb upon—has been shattered: “When you have organized your whole life as a ladder (with, for example, something shining and white at the top, and sticky blackness at the bottom) there are consequences when someone kicks it away” (417). In a “state of collapse,” Jonathan realizes: “This is what happens. This terrible blurring is what happens when boundaries are breached. Pigment leaks through skin like ink through blotting paper. It becomes impossible to tell what is valuable and what is not” (417).

Hominidae: In and Out of Africa

The last segment, titled “The Impressionist,” finds the shape-shifter in West Africa. On this journey, Beau Bridgeman, the romantically imagined adventurer, is in for further adult education. Colonialism and the civilizational structures associated with it are about to be exposed to him as motivated by an undisguised economic bottom line:

All his preparations for Africa, from his studies in the university library to his conversations with Professor Chapel (and further back, through history lessons, head-measuring, poetry reciting . . .), have shown him the same edifying picture: a lone adventurer, heroically inscribing the English character on a blank land. Instead he is to be some kind of tax inspector. (433)

Born in the rough middle of the cultural color spectrum, having traveled to its aspirational polar end in whiteness, the impressionist is now bound for a reckoning with the opposite pole on the spectrum of racial identity. He is about to discover his truest eye/I somewhat belatedly, not in the assimilative move to the humanity encapsulated in whiteness as the top of the civilizational chain but rather in a journey toward the most urgent objects of its civilizing mission, those who stand at the nadir of its classificatory regimes, the “sticky blackness at the bottom” (417).

The abstract recipients of colonial attention and its epistemological exertions, it turns out, are no “mere possessors of beliefs or participants in social organizations. Instead they seem irreducibly, disquietingly physical. These abstractions breathe, eat, talk and laugh—laughter that he can kill by walking into the room” (433). Occupying the vestments of colonial authority in a persona that Star has described as “so English” (324), Jonathan recognizes the deception and pretense of authority at the same time that he understands the bodyhood of the natives and his impact on their bodily expressions in his presence. He also comes to understand the mechanics of prejudice as he observes it among the West Africans who are no abstract clump but riven by their own aesthetic preferences and standards; the porters, for instance, dislike the Fotse because “they are heathens and eat forbidden food” (451). If anything, their humanity and sameness with the visitors inhere not least in their internal differences and plural ways of bodying forth their beliefs and anxieties. Like the colonizers, the sample population is internally diverse, invested in boundary tests of religion and diet, prone to prejudice, apt to engage in displays for visitors, and able to revise their codes and structures in dynamic engagement with the course of history.

Indeed, the Fotse appear to have changed substantially since Professor Chapel’s last visit. To the annoyance of Professor Chapel’s colleagues, the Fotse are no longer available as specimens of insulated primitivism. Lacking in necklaces, combs, and status marks, Fotse laborers brought in by Europeans to build a road look nothing like their erstwhile counterparts who “were supposed to be pristine” (448). Chapel and the visiting expedition are not greeted with “the customary party of women singing lilting traditional songs of welcome” (447). Farms are deserted. The Fotse have retreated to the caves, a practice Chapel insists is completely unprecedented. Instead of “a docile, joyous people, almost untouched by the ills of modernity,” this is a suspicious group that wants the professor whose work “has made them world famous” to go away (448). Chapel ascribes the change to those who are too keen on “getting the natives working.” They “haven’t a thought for science. . . . All you can ever get them to talk about is their blasted tax base” (449). Jonathan’s naive question, “If they want us to go . . . shouldn’t we go?,” is answered with stares that suggest he is quite mad. In the ensuing silence, the Fotse begin to emerge from their caves. The team will have its anthropological opportunity after all.

After a ritual exchange, however, “the Fotse avoid the white men completely” (452). Frustrated at the native’s performative noncompliance with Professor Chapel’s pedagogic descriptions of their practices, some members of the party take issue with the professor: “Is there actually anything they did before that they still do now?” sneers Marchant. Marchant’s expectations of synchronic stasis in Africa, Professor Chapel’s pedagogic understanding, their collective blindness to their own practices, and the administration’s repurposing of science for profit are of a piece with Edward Said’s descriptions of professional Orientalism. Kunzru’s exposure of the colonial mission, its knowledge structures, and its dissembling the motivations of economic greed answers tragedy with the tools of comedy.

In a comic reversal, the tragedies of history returning as fabulous farce, the Africans are engaged in their own representational practices. “Jonathan stares at Africa with uneasy recognition” (417). Here hawkers vend dolls: “Jonathan looks down at the carvings. They are Englishmen, little painted colons in white uniforms, with bulbous topis on their heads. Their features stand away from their faces, eyes and mouths and noses sharp and oversized. Their stiff poses give them a formal, hieratic quality” (425). Hieratic is a cursive writing system used in the provenance of the pharaohs in Egypt and Nubia that developed alongside the hieroglyphic system. The author’s reference to hieratic representation invites consideration of the stiffness of the body rigidified to represent a fixed identity. In the reversed gaze of Africa, it is the visitors and their ways that seem exotic, and by turns absurd and threatening. Following the rift between different members of the expedition, the anthropological gaze is turned on the anthropologists in a farcical description of a “feud conducted in the traditional British manner” (453).

When the visitors fall victim to diarrhea—like the hunting party of another crew in the jungles of India where Pran was Rukhsana—the members of the expedition use their thunderboxes, fighting over the right to use them. The Fotse observers report to their chief, “curiously enough, even at the height of their affliction, none of the white men think of doing their business in the bushes. The spiritual significance of the boxes is, they suggest, penitential” (465). Speculation, judgment, evaluation, and oversignification, it would seem, are not the exclusive preserve of one group. Moreover, the visitors’ irrational adherence to the propriety of the onomatopoeically named thunderbox designed for what the English describe euphemistically as the urgent call of nature, is a product of their investment in repressing behavior they are ingrained to associate with animality, despite serious illness in a life-and-death situation. Peristalsis must be resisted and the bowels must not move, while control overtakes urgency until the right receptacle and confined structure allow for a response to bodily demand. The rigid, repressed response to the urgent call of nature underscores the extent to which “the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged forms,” as Adorno notes in Minima Moralia (15).

Stumbling upon a Fotse performance, Jonathan and Gittens, another member of the visiting expedition, find, along with a ritual dance in which the spirit of the ancestors ostensibly inhabits the dancers, another tableau that gives them pause:

The women they are inhabiting move with a rigid, pompous gait, swinging their arms swiftly to the side, or holding them behind their backs. One clutches something square in its hand, slapping it and waving at the audience. Others hold sticks, jamming them against their shoulders and aiming them like rifles.

“My God,” breathes Gittens. “I think that’s us.” (The Impressionist, 455)

“At once resemblance and menace,” the performance reveals not just the ruse of authority but its real bodily threat and force for a people whose way of life is about to change as never before in the face of its armed colonizers (The Location of Culture, 123). In the glare of the Fotse gaze, the visitors confront not what they have come to find—the other—but how they are perceived as threatening others, one with the technologies of conquest and destruction. The new predatory animal in the jungles of Africa, the colonizer is provided a mirror in which hunger for profit disguised in the language of development, humanity, and globalization is exposed. In making us privy to some of the spectacles uncovered in the bidirectional gaze, Kunzru unsettles our perspective. Descriptions of the Fotse’s speculative and leveraging practices, for instance, invite comparison with the FTSE index, a point hammered home by further references to Lifi “winning the hand of the sky princess Neshdaqa” (The Impressionist, 367). Studying the Fotse is not only “like visiting our own distant past,” as Gittens puts it, without having fully understood the lesson on offer, but also akin to the visitors’ present and their future indicated in speculative practices that can destroy whole economies and ways of life overnight (467).

Jonathan, the only traveler with an eye for the complexities of the situation, is accused of lacking “team spirit” when he reiterates the obvious: “Don’t you think they’d rather be left alone?” (468–69). Failing to hear the right response from his team, he retreats, struggling for awareness in a narrative that never permits him the coherence of a character with a past and present united by consciousness. In a surreal state between dream and imagination, “he becomes aware that cables and wires are strung between every object and person in the darkness around him, forming a single interconnected mechanism,” a vision that suggests the world wide web of virtual and real globalization where none are free of history at the end of history. At the same time, “he imagines the Fotse as their huts are bulldozed and they are marched toward their new settlements by the side of their new roads” (469). Asking himself if he got lost a long time ago, he abandons camp the following day on an ostensible census survey, and embarks on his final avatar: having begun as a nomad after his unhappy expulsion from the Razdan household, he ends as one.

By the end of the novel, no longer named, the protagonist, “he,” leaves camp, falls sick, and is tended by a Fotse healer who covers him in mud, “which dries, caking him like a new kaolin skin” in an image reminiscent of another itinerant traveler, “three years after the beginning of the new century,” who is lifted into a cave and after congress with Amrita, “the mother of the world,” finds that “sweat and dust has turned their skins to an identical red-brown colour. The colour of the earth” (473, 3, 15). These references, reminiscent of those associated with funeral services, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” are drafted here for a sense of new times and new beginnings, as new worlds await their inception from what we could construe as a gesture toward humanity’s common ground. The desert and dust of Rajasthan and the sand dunes of Western Africa are crimped together, as are time and space in an alternative history and alternative temporality to suggest a saga that has been unfolding beyond our limited perspective.

Before the protagonist’s destiny is revealed and the narrative is concluded, Kunzru makes arch gestures to a utopian society evocative of Hardt and Negri’s multitudes on the one hand, and on the other to key tropes in the work of Deleuze and Guattari: the war machine as a grassroots affair, and rhizomatic, nomadic, and intermezzo states of being. Kunzru’s joke is to ascribe these visions of a “new society”—“how men have imagined this beauty”—to Fotse conceptions of a premodern rather than a postmodern utopia (474–75). Despite the temporary victory of the multitudes who have “no head, no centre,” and who rise up in a bid to “destroy sorcery forever,” however, (475), the new times are upon the Fotse and they promise to be “bitter” (456). As the “grid of roads creeps closer, spawning villages of roofless concrete houses which as yet have no inhabitants” (479–80), Africa, and the Fotse with it, are about to become a “historical part of the World”; their “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit” as yet only “on the threshold of the World’s History,” due for an appointment with a future they did not imagine or invite (Hegel, Philosophy of History, 99). As the Fotse healer draws out the traveler’s evil spirit, Kunzru leaves us to ponder what it might be like to have the European spirit, arguably der Geist seiner Zeit (Hegel’s conception of the spirit of one’s time) exorcised? What possibilities might emerge if the journey rather than the destination, itinerant being rather than teleologically driven becoming, were to determine our meaning of identity?

Pran / Rukhsana / Clive / Bobby / Robert / Chandra / Bridgeman / Jonathan / and the nameless “he” has been reduced to a shambles, along with any idea of a progressive history enacted through the body and person of the suggestively named “Pran.” In refusing priority to postmodern conceptions of a nonhierarchical imagined beauty, Kunzru seems to demand from us a double vision of space and time outside the dominant narratives of history and commandeered space. At the beginning of the end of history for this part of Africa, what might it look like to step outside of history and imagine not the future but the past? Trade, nomadism, hybridity—Hausa being a prime example of a language produced by these supposedly postmodern, postcolonial developments—are phenomena that can be imagined avant la lettre—la lettre européenne to be precise. The Fotse appear to have knowledge not only of water-borne diseases but also a sense of the future through speculation, betting, leveraging, and hedging the odds. They have conceived of a new society through an appealingly egalitarian, liberal aesthetic. What else could this dying world have known that we will never know because we could not perceive them as a historical part of the world? Kunzru entertains us with the notion that non-Western others have conceptions of beauty and order as well as a sense of the un-beautiful. He nudges us to remember that primitivism had to be invented to validate the superiority of Western forms, that the world has gone about its business for a long time before Europe’s entry into global trade, and that the “discovered” world is also internally riven and diachronic.

A similar drama of perceptions is performed by and through the personae of Pran-flux. If he is an aslant, unexpected symptom of the changing, unsettled body of culture, he also comes to rest in freeze-frames of being before he takes new shape, urging upon us a consideration of identity as process as well as product. The aesthetic logic of Kunzru’s narrative traffics in deliberately short strokes. In distinct segments that will never add up to a whole, each identity bit performs the narrative teleology of a short story in a series that cannot be sustained over time to allow for the coherence we expect from the novel and its treatment of character. Episodic, akin to the characteristic short brush strokes of the impressionist movement, the narrative places Pran-flux in situations that permit dramatic rehearsals of various subject positions: heir to a purist nation; half-caste hybrid flotsam; transvestite object of pederasty; ward to a mission divided; opportunistic pimp, procurer, pretender to Englishness; country-born expatriate finished at public school and ushered into Oxbridge circles; anthropologist invited to be tax collector; subject stripped of dominant ideology; nameless nomad. Each of these short-lived identities is bristling with sensory appeal, full of sensory receptivity, making and receiving impressions and judgments, discovering new boundaries and new passwords. What is this art of fragments intended to communicate? Although the narrative exposes the hollow fictions of race and the notion of identity itself as compositionally fragmented, the thoroughgoing deconstruction of Pran portrays more than the deflated postmodern soufflé of identity. It asks us to engage in a serious consideration of the world of forms and appearances—a phenomenal world, to indulge an easy pun—in which the effects produced by what has materialized in, on, and through the body are what create the impression of a boundary with other collective bodies. Pran-life has become a dead thing subject to the rigor mortis of empty form, or what I have referred to in the introduction as the sclerosed form of life that once lived more freely. At the terminus of this sketchy treatment of identity, where journeys are not at an end, the author also leaves us to ponder who might we be, or who might we be like, outside the guiding spirit of imperial modernity and its teleological narrative. At history’s alleged end, this appears to be a futile exercise. We are already consumed in a globalized world by anxiety about what looks right on the world stage, and what is the correct passe-partout in the new times.

In considering the question of identity beyond the anxieties of the moment, the culmination of Pran-flux’s picaresque passage in Africa prompts a final, outrageous question: Does the purported origin of hominids in Africa and their subsequent scattering and evolution into different races count as diaspora on a breathtaking, spatio-temporally telescopic scale? Does nomadism articulate a different vision of migrancy than diaspora? Pran/Bridgeman has been reduced to a shambles in Africa, where he had hoped to locate himself at a “giddy elevation from which it is finally possible to survey the world and the people in it” in a possessive, classificatory, imperial gaze (The Impressionist, 375). Instead, his truest I/eye reveals not only the advent of new times but a recollection of other new times through a fugue on the theme of beginnings and ends. This fugue joins his deconstruction and the narrative of return to Africa, long thought to be the origin of animal/human life, and later the first hominid. Whether or not Africa is the birthplace of humankind, in a paleoanthropological view, the nomads of yesteryear, to be confused neither with the Orientalized productions of colonial anthropology nor the hopeful metaphors of postmodern theory, have been afoot long before the break in time, long before the global migrants of modern times. The novel’s bewildering conclusion attempts to stir us into recollection of a possibility that existed once upon a time. That may have been the first of all diasporas so lost to antiquity that it lacks the capacity even to haunt the present into anamnesis of a shared past as the imagined prospect of a shared future. In historical time, sooner or later, however, the nomad who “has no thoughts of arriving anywhere” will come to a border somewhere in the future when only the right shibboleth will permit safe passage (481). Shibboleth or Sibboleth? Pran-life hangs in the balance between them.