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Literary Review
Imperial politics in the progressive gaze
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`Progressive' intellectuals like Günter Grass and Pier Paolo Pasolini, torchbearers of the Left who, for decades, defined the rhetoric of political discourse in their countries, mirror the imperial hegemony of the First World while simultaneously denouncing it. By refusing to enter into a relationship with what they describe, by refusing to lose themselves in the unknown and let themselves be changed, they deny differences and the evolution of a hybrid discourse, says ILIJA TROJANOW.
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I HAVE chosen to concentrate my critique on Günter Grass' Show Your Tongue, his narrative of a six-month stay in Calcutta, not because I believe that this is a uniquely failed book, but because I find it typical of the genre of travel writing in the West, even when written by progressive intellectuals with leftist leanings. The racism, the confident supremacy among the narrow-minded cynics is well known and well documented. But authors like Grass, who proclaim empathy, warrant a closer look. I draw my arguments from a reading of a wider variety of travelogues but, due to the constraint of space, I will cite only Grass and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film-maker who was also one of the most outspoken Marxists among West European authors, and who wrote a book called L'odore dell'India (The Breath of India). Generally speaking, there seem to be three strategies of dealing with the so-called Third World in contemporary travel accounts, which I have tentatively named prejudice, authority and domination.
Prejudice
In the old days, the blank spaces on the maps were filled with mythological creatures, with cannibals and camels, with the dome of Xanadu and the treasure of El Dorado. Then, in the 18th Century, the chaos of the world was forced into categorical order, decisively through Carolus Linnaeus' systematic taxonomy of nature. The myths were encroached upon, first along the coastlines, then — yard by bloody yard — throughout the mainland. Finally the greedy maps encompassed everything and their mentors began to believe that, not only could they perceive and understand everything they could chart, but they could also paint the ``virgin territory'' according to their own tastes and expectations.
While the travellers of the 18th and 19th Centuries, pre-empting colonialism, often found beauty, richness, fertility and virginity, the postcolonial contemporary traveller is quick to spot ugliness, disorder and banality. In the 19th Century, the bounty of the discovered worlds was to be praised. Today, the absence of civilisation and progress is regarded as a major disappointment, and therefore the unruly and unwilling Third World has to be treated with derisiveness. The mood has changed from one of plunder to one of rejection, from optimism to negation.
Right from the beginning of Show Your Tongue, it is evident that India has bitterly disappointed Günter Grass. It does not conform to his expectations, therefore it must be condemned. Since the locals do not behave the way they are supposed to, they are scolded. The author turns into a merciless prosecutor, who presents every deviation from his prejudice as evidence. Even the neighbour's duck is called to the witness stand, for its ``quack sounds like quartered laughter''. Diligently, the author collects everything ugly. In the meat market, a dog ``tries to swallow an unborn lamb or kid.'' Coconuts look like severed heads. The fruits are piled up to a ``growing skull heap, a Golgotha. Later crows on it, more and more crows pealed from the sky. Blackness at season sale prices.'' Near a river he sees young men carrying a dead woman on a bier to the cremation ground. A regular sight in Mumbai too. The public presence of death. A procession of grief through lively streets. As if the dead could say goodbye to the world and the world to the dead. For me, personally, a beautiful image, because it stands in such stark contrast to the taboo role of death in Germany.
Grass, however, throws down the gauntlet of social criticism: ``Each of the young men carried a watch — the glittering watches, the paid ululation.'' Grass is fascinated and disgusted by one particular aspect of Indian everyday life: the omnipresent excrement. In slightly less than a hundred pages, he describes more shit than some people will see in all their lives. Everything is covered in shit, the slums, the railway stations and even the beach, which understandably gives him indigestion on his after-dinner walk. A truly scatological orgy. Is India really one big shit-hole or is this perception due to the aseptic origin of the author? Is there a cultural difference between people who wipe their bottoms with their hands and those who use toilet-paper? What about the availability of private and public toilets? Such questions elude Grass. For, he has discovered the excremental perpetuum mobile. In all these seemingly endless descriptions of filth, he does not deem it necessary to note even once the personal cleanliness of the people. No mention of slum-dwellers leaving their homes in freshly washed and crisply ironed shirts and trousers. For this vital element of dignity might have diluted the dismal picture which he is so determined to paint.
Authority/competence
The pervasive negativism is not backed by any research, the locals are never given the chance to speak directly to the reader. Nonetheless, the author claims ultimate competence, omniscient authority, without justifying this claim in any way. The reader is led to believe that what Grass sees is all there is to see. Indian reality is ordered from the position of an infallible deity. The painted picture hangs in front of the reader's eye as an absolute truth. This amounts to what Mary Louise Pratt calls ``The King-of-all-I'' attitude. Compare this to Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now, in which Naipaul relativises his impressions of a slum by asking a slum-dweller to describe what he sees, thus dissolving the Western myth of the slum into a multi-facetted representation. Driving through the countryside, Grass, on the other hand, lectures from the comfort of his Ambassador taxi: ``Children collecting fire-wood. Village girls with nose-rings. It is said that one or two members of each family daily have to walk several kilometres. Therefore the many children. That is why forests are being destroyed, that is why nothing grows, except children.'' It's as easy as that: population growth and ecocide are explained in two sentences, and a testimony to the general impotence of India is offered on the side.
Note the elegant phrase ``it is said'', which frees Grass from the task of getting out of the taxi and asking the girl how many kilometres a day she walks in search of firewood. The author simulates a general overview. Having spent hardly two months in India, Pasolini writes, ``Khajuraho is the only beautiful thing in India. The most sublime.'' He goes on: ``I had the impression that Indians do not concern themselves with serious religious problems.''
This last quote shows that the paternalistic attitude allows generalisations about continents, which no author would dream of making about provinces back home. Grass has the chutzpah to claim that ``even Denmark is more mysterious than India, because the unfathomable is nothing but tasteless superstition, this so-called religion.'' And Pasolini states: ``It is true that the Indians are never happy. They smile often, but it is a smile of gentleness, not of happiness.'' A second quote: ``Their whole religion is in this one gesture.'' And further: ``Every Indian is a beggar.'' And the funniest: ``Indians are physically not capable of listening to any other music than their own.''
Arrogance
Both Grass and Pasolini (but also the famous Paul Theroux, who manages to spend months in a country without speaking to any knowledgeable local) have a low opinion of Indian intellectuals and hardly enter into a dialogue with them. At a meeting with artists, Grass encounters only ``half-witted chit-chat''. And Pasolini states that Dom Moraes ``is the only modern and energetic voice''. When Grass visited Calcutta for the first time in the mid-1970s, he scolded a group of local poets who had invited him to a reading, that it is most inappropriate to write lyrics in a town that should only provoke anger and wrath. More than 10 years later, he meets a team of sociologists and complains bitterly that they showed no interest in his precious thoughts on the museum he had just visited: ``Falsification of history? These people have other worries.'' He dedicates only three sentences to the Bengali film, although directors like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen have spent a lifetime producing exactly those critical and moving portraits of misery, destitution and sorrow that Grass expects of Indian artists.
Domination/distance
Grass never enters a contact zone where the meeting of differences could evolve into a hybrid discourse. Instead, he propagates a dominant language, a language steeped at the same time in the rhetoric of solidarity and indignation. The indignation is cultivated, it is kept burning. After a heavy rainfall in Calcutta, he writes ``Every thought of the low-lying slums makes me angry.'' But isn't this indignation an end in itself, a calming of the bad conscience? How does it help the reader, how does it help the slum-dweller? ``All our consumer democrats should spend two nights in a slum, in order to get fed up with their damned wealth.'' Evidently, an author who is sick of the consumer society has composed a fantasy of indulgence. But this fantasy is light-years away from the aspirations of the slum-dweller, who is saving up for a TV, on which he can admire the local and foreign consumers and the consumer goods for which he is striving.
Grass misses the chance to enter the realm of the foreign. Indignation stands in his way. After six months he has hardly experienced anything. He has not changed, he has not reflected the shifting perspectives of known and unknown, of local and foreign. Grass never loses himself in the uncertainty and insecurity of a new dimension. He tries to describe something without having established a relationship with it. It's as if he were describing a person he does not know. As a logical consequence this person is reduced to the role of a victim, of a will-less figure in the stranglehold of a roughly sketched system, which is recognised through its consequences (dirt, shit, superstition), not its causes. Consider Pasolini's phrase: ``Black and grey heaps of hunger and hopelessness.''
Both Grass and Pasolini were torchbearers of the West-European Left. For decades they defined the rhetoric and direction of the political discourse in their respective countries: Germany and Italy. This was highlighted by the Nobel Award to Günter Grass last year. Therefore both authors would certainly reject any notion that they have not yet rid themselves of concepts and attitudes which pertain to the colonial era. Even if they are unconscious of it, their monopolising literature mirrors the economic and political hegemony of the First World, while simultaneously denouncing it. Thus the progressive and the imperial gaze go hand in hand. The greatest critics of imperial politics have themselves written imperial travelogues.
The writer is a German novelist, currently resident in Mumbai.
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