Reviews for Inez Baranay
Neem Dreams
Baranay has risen above her feminine voice and foreigner perspective to strike a neutral unbiased language as far as basic values and issues are concerned. She uncannily conjures splashes of Indian reactions, attitudes or relationships with as much authenticity as she does the American, Australian and British ethos. What makes the novel endearing is the high voltage resonance of the poignant tales of the protagonists woven around the theme of globalisation, leaving a sea wave effect on the readers long after they have finished the read.
The Hindu, 21 November 2003
Sun Square Moon
Inez is a writer. She is a yogini. She has traveled the world telling her stories and her story here is about her art and her yoga, it is about awareness, about creativity, and about her journey through those worlds. It’s a story with a disarming honesty She scotches the rumour that yoga produces an empty head and a flaccid sex life. She brings her awareness from yoga to writing and takes it the other way as well. This is one of the few books on yoga that is not trivia.
Norman Sjoman,
author of Yoga Touchstone and The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace. http://www.blacklotusbooks.com/links/gate.htm
With The Tiger
Inez Baranay is very correct and vivid in her portrayal of India’s flavours of vadai, coffee and the music season. She exposes the experiences India offers foreigners seeking ‘nirvana’. Deccan Herald
The Edge of Bali
Baranay writes evocatively of the Bali landscape, raising serious questions within vivid description. New myths jostle with the old. The Sydney Morning Herald
Sheila Power: an entertainment
A rattling good read that defies that defies pigeon-holing into any one genre. Sydney Star Observer
Pagan
Pagan is brilliantly written. As well as being very readable, it offers a highly intelligent analysis of the themes of Australia’s 20th century cultural history. The Advertiser
Between Careers
Like good sex Between Careers gets better and better. The Sydney Morning Herald
Rascal Rain: a year in Papua New Guinea
Her experiences have resulted in a highly readable account of a world left behind by the 6 o’clock news. Cleo
all titles by Inez Baranay will be available as ebooks by the end of 2011 For full reviews and more please visit
A Passage to Neem Dreams
a meta-text: about the writing of Neem Dreams
by Inez Baranay
Copyright Inez Baranay 2011
Ebook edition
Cover design by Daniel Stephensen
License Note
The author is happy to offer a DRM-free ebook edition through Smashwords. This book is free. You can buy Neem Dreams and other books by Inez Baranay at Smashwords.
Contents
Introduction
1 How does a novel begin
2 The meaning of India
3 Reading A Passage To India
4 The narrative imperative: aspects of two novels
5 Travels with EM Forster
6 Discovering neem in FNQ
7 Mr Ketkar
8 Professor Nemesis
9 Neem travels Tamil Nadu
10 Creator & narrator
11 Pandora
12 Andy
13 Meenakshi
14 Jade
15 Three main drafts: issues in writing and rewriting: drafts, influences,
16 The writer’s setting: The Island, The City, The Coast
17 Appendices: Process Notes
References
Further reading
About the author
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Passage to Neem Dreams is partly a memoir about writing Neem Dreams, partly a critical study of my own novel.
Neem Dreams took several years and three main drafts. I had already been working on it for years when I was persuaded (without much difficulty if I recall correctly) to undertake writing a dissertation for a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia where I had begun to teach in the Creative Writing Program. My subject became the writing of Neem Dreams and included themes such as my research in India, representations of India by a non-Indian, issues in creating a novel, issues in fictive character and, as well, the ways yoga practice might be compared with writing practice. Writings that developed the yoga theme were collected in a separate publication, called Sun Square Moon: Writings on Yoga and Writing which was first published in India by Writers Workshop Kolkata (and now is available as a free e-book).
What follows in this book is a selection of writings that began as part of my dissertation (my PhD was awarded in 2003). Some have been previously published as journal articles or book chapters. (‘Further Reading’ gives links to pieces that have been published and are not all included here.)
What is Neem Dreams ‘about’? Let me quote from the following pages:
About India. About globalisation. About 300 pages. About mainly these four characters ... Neem Dreams is about Westerners in India, it’s about cultural exchange, it’s about how politics and myths, as well as personal products, are made, it’s about how globalisation works to perpetuate the powerlessness of the powerless… It will be about what its future readers and critics say it’s about.
This collection, A Passage to Neem Dreams, as its name suggests, courts the influence of EM Forster, both as the novelist who wrote A Passage to India (1924) and a still pertinent writer on the novel in Aspects of the Novel (1955).
I hope my A Passage to Neem Dreams may be of interest to writers, writing students, people with a particular interest in India, neem, memoir, or writers on writing, and perhaps even the general reader.
Inez Baranay
November 2011
1 How does a novel begin?
Stories have so many beginnings and no real ends.
How does a novel begin? The reader says, a novel begins with the first line. The reader says, a novel begins with the desire to read, the desire to read a novel, the desire to read a particular kind of novel, the desire to read this novel. Each of these desires has its own beginning, its own origins.
How does a novel begin? The desire to write has multiple origins, the desire to write a novel, the desire to write this particular novel.
How does a novel begin? The writer says, I always wanted to write a novel set in India, or, these characters insisted I write about them, or, neem appeared as the perfect trope. This is what the writer says when a short answer is called for and the next question already formed.
Neem Dreams begins with the sentence: It is the best tree in the world.
Beginning the investigation raises, first, the question of beginning. How did this novel begin? When can it be said that the writer has begun writing a particular novel?
How far back can you trace the germs, the seeds, the sprouting seeds that grow into a novel? What is its reason for being? Its cause? What are the novel’s origins, its sources, its derivation?
As Edward Said says in his book Beginnings:
In each of the following relatively innocuous statements the sense derives prominently from a common sense understanding of the concept of ‘beginnings’: ‘Conrad began his career with Almayer’s Folly’; ‘Pride and Prejudice begins with the following sentence’; ‘Pope began to write at an early age’; ‘Before he began to write Hemingway would sharpen a dozen pencils’; ‘This is what one ought to do at the beginning’; ‘Civilization can be said to have begun in the Near East’; ‘As soon as he began to know Odette better Swann started to suspect her’; ‘From beginning to end Flaubert was ever the artist’. Of quite another order of meaning are such statements as ‘In the beginning was the Word’ or ‘In my beginning is my end’. (Said 1975: 4)
And so on. Researching beginning was an encounter with the first of several themes that revealed their potential to monopolise the whole of this dissertation.
I began to write when I was a child.
The writing of Neem Dreams begins with the writer’s origins, the early addiction to reading and writing, the meaning of reading and writing in her life. Perhaps it begins with the family though not all writers’ families are at all alike and they all produce writers. This writer was born elsewhere and came to live in an Australia that was very elsewhere.
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was a book of my childhood. Poor sickly Mary’s parents died of cholera in India but still India was somewhere you came from and missed, memory of rain and wind-chimes, and it had set you free to go to your secret garden.
I read Kipling’s Kim as a child. India was a place of characters you longed to encounter, adventures and experiences extreme and extremely desirable, of knowledge mysterious and profound and yet available to you if you were only there, a place a child could wander about in, protected and connected and working for some mysterious higher purpose.
Neem Dreams begins with a desire to write about India, to set a novel in India. And that desire can be seen as the desire to possess, to make a mark, especially these days when we have post-colonial language in which to wonder about desires like these. It begins with the desire for elsewhere, a desire that is as constant a part of the writer as her height and eye colour.
I began my career with Between Careers.
Neem Dreams begins with the writer’s own history of writing and publishing; the books that have already been created, teaching her to write and preparing her to write Neem Dreams. It begins with all the re-inventions of the desires to write, become a writer, to re-discover writing.
Before I begin writing I make a pot of coffee.
Neem Dreams begins when its characters begin to take on a life, that famous life-of-their-own moment in a fiction-writer’s life. The writer becomes pregnant: there is conception, not always consciously, there is quickening, there is growth into birth.
Each character claims to be the beginning of Neem Dreams, each character with their own origins, their struggle to breathe, grow, astonish you, be understood, fulfil their destiny.
Neem Dreams begins with the desire to write about yoga in a novel. It begins with the practice and study of yoga and it begins with the discovery or habit of finding fiction the place to search for - what can we call it? - call it truth.
What we call the beginning is often the end. (‘Little Gidding’, Eliot 221)
Another beginning is the anti-patents arguments in the neem patents issue. Sympathy and indignation are aroused. It begins with the kind of things that arouse sympathy and indignation. Indignation and more: anger, anguish, loathing at the increasing domination in our world of the culture of transnational corporations, and all that that implies. Sympathy for all the movements and philosophies that name and challenge this. Socialism, environmentalism, eco-feminism, and later, the movement against corporate globalisation. What can you do? What is your duty? You are a novelist. Put it in a novel.
Beginnings imply not only origins but causes. Aristotle famously said there are the four causes, the material, formal, efficient and final causes. A novel will encompass all those things. The writer’s body, the tools she uses, the established form of the novel, the offering of the novel to the world: all these are implied in attention to the beginning. The beginning implies the end.
The beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional production of meaning. (Said 1975: 5)
My childhood included Christian religious teachings so I always knew this about the beginning:
In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1)
And while I have never succeeded in understanding quite what that is supposed to mean, nor taken the Bible as authority, still, it points to a powerful idea that the world itself is based on language. We talk of ‘reading’ the world.
It begins when you first go to India, breathe in the air of Bombay, dizzying with its masala of petrol fumes and all those spices, cardamom, cumin, fenugreek; of promise and experience, something you have always longed for without knowing what it is.
The novel began in the sixteenth century. (Said 1975: 5)
A novel begins with all the novels you have read before, which begin with all the novels before that.
(To begin. …But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest – for example the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both – must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that for the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.) (Calvino 1982a: 122)
From beginning to end I was always a writer.
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning. (Eliot 221)
What is between, is narrative.
Of all the beginnings, the oldest of these is India.
2 The meaning of India: early travels
I play the game knowing I am the game. That, is the meaning of India. (Rao, R. 1996: Introduction)
This was for aeons the future. That you would be in India. That suddenly you would have to be here. On every level, you tell yourself, it’s the next thing to do. Suddenly a certainty rhyming with a tickling little joy. (Neem Dreams )
I’ll always be homesick wherever I am. You wrote that line a long time ago and it often re-occurs to you. Always homesick, always missing some place. What are you homesick for? A particular house on its particular property? A city, a region? Being only a walk away from a decent café, being where the whereness of where you are makes you stop still, astounded by the beingness of being here. It’s not one place. You get homesick for nature, you get homesick for culture. You get homesick for not hearing your own language around you all the time or you get homesick for running into a decent conversation most days.
You’re homesick for how a place used to be and you’re homesick for how it is going to be, namely with you back in it.
One of the places you are homesick for is India.
India. The way you always say it. The very word, the sounds that say India. The syllable of intrusion, introdirection, consuming, in. The tongue caressing the palate, a deep-stroking nnn. Arrested on a dental stop: d. Swooning on a widening exhalation of sensation and wonder eee-aahh. Iinnddiiaa, say it, let it roll in your mouth, tasting of cloves and quinine. (Neem Dreams )
But what do you mean by India? You’ve only been to a few parts of it, it is a vast land, part of a vast sub-continent, famously various. You know the notion of nation is a construct of recent history; it’s not a nation you want to go to, it’s not even exactly a country.
Faced with such diversity, we can legitimately ask if India is indeed a nation. …On the one hand, India is a conglomeration of peoples, cultures, languages, and religions; on the other, it is a territory under the dominion of a state regulated by a national constitution. …India, as Jayaprakash Narayan once said, is ‘a nation in the making.’ (Paz 75)
India is that and more, it’s a place we need to be more than that. Raja Rao puts it best:
This exaltation for India, which we Indians ourselves share with others objectively, historically, spiritually, is not an indication by any means of the truth of India, but of the need for an India. (Rao 1996: 17)
It is 1980. You are returning to Australia after eighteen months ‘away’, though going to Europe had itself been kind of returning – place of your birth and ancestry – and you’d had parts of a hope you’d end up staying away.
It is the longest period you have been away from Australia and your first trip to Europe since you left it as a baby with your parents, refugees leaving the shattered Old World for, and it’s not quite a choice, The New World.
Now you have been to Hungary, your father’s birthplace, Switzerland, your mother’s, Italy, where you were born, some parts of Italy, and you looked hard in Italy for an offer you couldn’t refuse, one that would mean staying. You’ve been to Spain and Morocco, where life was flavored with all the intensity, strangeness, adventure and wonder you still persist in feeling life should always provide. There was cosy Amsterdam, echt gezellig through a long winter: real snow, a fur coat, warm cafés. You are leaving your first mature true-love affair. You’ve made new friends, re-connected with a few old ones. You have discovered you are an Australian. You have written the first draft of your first novel. You’ve turned thirty and now you can no longer put it off, are no longer able to say, Not yet, one day. Now you’re hearing, Now, it’s now, even, Now or never. You’re going back to Australia, not knowing where you will live, how you will earn money, sure you will write, no clue how it’s going to be.
You really don’t want to get in a plane in Amsterdam and get out a day later back in Sydney.
The cheapest air-fare back to Australia is with Indian Airlines, offering a stopover in India. A friend from Sydney visits. Jude will remain in Europe, live in Paris. (‘Why did you leave Australia?’ ‘The men.’) She tells stories about her recent travels in India: holi (an annual holiday, coloured paints thrown about in the streets) in Jaipur, a temple in Puri, the markets where she bought these intriguing little handcrafted toys. She wears a dark red silk pajama-type outfit and says you can get these all over India. It was 1980. Such were our choices.
Their pride, their city, the city of multiple millions, glittery and complex and mean and charming, ruled by a three-headed goddess. Politics, Commerce and Culture flourish in these dark and twinkling miles of movie studios, international agencies, copywriters, the seaside circus promenade, slums and shanties and street people, the crowds of men you saw coming in from the airport yesterday - India! I'm here! - at 2 a.m. on even then-crowded streets crackling with rude vitality, the existence of marginal things in extraordinary proportions. (Neem Dreams )
Gulping in the odorous air, I can just see you as you arrive for the first time in Bombay: the years in Southeast Asia made you a sucker for the dizzy delight of spiced breezes, spiced fuel exhaust, spice in the stenches and perfumes of a place that is so very other you almost feel at home.
The Scent of India is the title Pier Paolo Pasolini gave his travel diary. He describes looking at some Indians on the night of his arrival (it was 1962):
Along the little embankment which contains [the sea] there are some cars parked and near to them, are those fabulous beings without roots, without consciousness, full of ambiguous and disturbing meaning, but endowed with powerful fascination, who are the first Indians with experiences, experiences which desire to be exclusive, like mine. (Pasolini:10)
No one could say it like that these days, even think it, for our gaze has become much more self-conscious. He is talking about the beggars and the homeless, and you can’t not talk about them, for although they are among India’s greatest clichés, there are clichés that it is worse to avoid than insist on.
Steadying her parcels in the jolting rickshaw, wondering what the comforting thought can be, but among the beggars of India she is only feeling the same dumb things.
Observe the Indians, they’ll chase a beggar away, they’ll tell you beggars have bank accounts, then they’ll throw coins in the bowls of the beggars who line the entrance to temples. The right beggars, the wrong beggars.
Only give to the ones who are crippled. Only give to the ones who’ll never be able to get a job.
As if the able-bodied beggars were unemployed because of their own defects.
Weren’t they reaping karma?
As if this were consolation. As if you believed that. As if they did. (Neem Dreams )
Pasolini’s first night was spent, of course, at the Taj Mahal Hotel, a Bombay landmark, almost as famous as the distant monument it is named for. The Taj Mahal Hotel is also described in Octavia Paz’s In Light of India, also near the beginning:
If this book were a memoir and not an essay, I would devote pages to that hotel. It is real and chimerical, ostentatious and comfortable, vulgar and sublime. It is the English dream of India at the beginning of the century, an India populated by dark men with pointed mustaches and scimitars at their waists, by women with amber-colored skin, hair and eyebrows as black as crows’ wings and the huge eyes of lionesses in heat. Its elaborately ornamented archways, its unexpected nooks, its patios, terraces, and gardens are both enchanting and dizzying. It is a literary architecture, a serialized novel. Its passageways are the corridors of a lavish, sinister, and endless dream. A setting for a sentimental tale or a chronicle of depravity. (Paz: 9)
And in Anthonio Tabucchi’s fictive travel memoir, Indian Nocturne, the luxury of the Taj is in contrast to the squalid slums he has been exploring until now:
The only inhabitants of Bombay who take no notice of the ‘right of admission’ regulations in force at the Taj Mahal are the crows… [T]he Taj is not a hotel: …it is a city within a city. …I watched the women and the jewels, the turbans, the fezes, the veils, the trains, the evening dresses, the moslems and the millionaire Americans, the old magnates and the spotless silent servants. (Tabucchi 21–5)
But you, the way you travel is stay somewhere cheap and go to the best hotel for a drink. You too watch people in the lobby at the Taj for hours, browse in its lustrous shopping arcade, eat your first masala dosa in one of its restaurants. That Japanese woman you met on the excursion to the Elephant Caves invites you for a drink in her room at the Taj. This is your established travel modus operandi: relishing being alone and striking up brief acquaintances here and there. Weren’t you in love at the time? You like to travel alone nevertheless. I remember the way you used to ponder whether brevity was the price of intimacy or intimacy the price of brevity.
There are those three Canadians also staying at the YWCA, you smoke hashish in their room and discuss being in India for the first time. The girl was freaked out. There was a discussion I recall whenever I contemplate young travelers, about what kind of local people they meet – people in service, usually, not other students and professionals. ‘You’re travelling out of your class,’ seems to be a sudden, stunning insight for one of the boys. He lends you a volume of James Morris’ enthralling history of the British Empire, remember, and you mailed it back to Canada.
Your memories of Bombay have been layered like a palimpsest by subsequent times in that city, layers that bleed into each other.
Take a train and bus to Goa as the boat does not operate in this season. In Goa the beach has been closed, lashed by wild seas and the monsoon deluge. A lot of the guesthouses and restaurants are closed down too. Very few foreign tourists remain in this popular tourist area, a few junkies too wasted to go anywhere. Find a guesthouse; no one else seems to be staying. Electricity blackouts are frequent and everything is sodden, clothes, bedsheets, books, whether it rains or not. Have a long solitary dinner at a private house discretely advertising this service, on a spacious wooden verandah looking into a huge tree, course after course of exquisite Goan Portuguese cooking. The matriarch sits with you a while and gives you a recipe and tells you that Indians do not like the hippies. It interests you that you are not seen as a hippie. You are wearing a cotton sweater from Florence. You used to wear long Indian dresses as a student.
The guesthouse is some distance from the restaurant area. Experience an unforgettable ecstasy, finding your way back in pitch darkness, your senses sharper than normal in the black wet brilliant night, an intense aliveness that is the monsoon.
Your gold-coloured umbrella, bought in Venice and mended in Amsterdam, is much admired; Indian umbrellas generally do not withstand winds and rain of this force. Ah, so while the handcrafts are enchanting, the factory goods are shoddy in this pre-free-trade era, foreign pens and batteries desirable. Browse in antique shops and buy a couple of little brass things, a lamp and a pot (what happened to them?) and a miniature Mogul-style painting, painted not on canvas, not on bone, but on ivory, which you still do not realise it is wrong to buy; a painting you will accidentally destroy in Sydney when in a fit of housecleaning you wipe it over with a wet cloth and smear the paint. A Dutch woman, loud and hostile, tells the proprietor I have a shop too, in Europe and there we do not bargain, we have one price, the same price for everyone! Take buses to towns and markets. Have dinner at a restaurant, on another large verandah looking onto dripping trees. Here you talk to the most charming, witty boy, ten years old, Francis, who works there, lives there as a general kind of waiter and servant. Later he turns up the music and you dance, you two. He’s good. Another night you are joined here by a party of wealthy, well-travelled young Indians, jet-setters, who talk with brittle verve of the conveniences of marriage and money – how dashingly confident they are – and somehow the boy’s remarkable quality is in the spotlight and one of the men announces he is going to pay to send the boy to a very good school. What do you say, Francis? What do you say to this good man? You have often wondered about the sequel to that now dream-like moment.
In Jaipur in 1980 there is that boy who meets you at the hotel gate each morning to show you the streets and markets, a young unofficial guide, practising his English, maybe training himself in being increasingly indispensable to tourists. People are standing around a man calling to a cow that trots inside this circle and the cow occasionally breaks its orbit to go towards one of the people. They hand over money when it does. At one point the cow comes towards you. What did he say? you ask your guide, who seems embarrassed as he replies that the question was: Who is the richest person here? This is meant to be a demonstration of the cow’s credentials, you are the only white tourist here, everyone assumes you fit the bill, but do we believe it was the cow that had picked you out?
There were other, many other, ways to get your fortune told – a bird in a cage could pick out a card for you; a man could read your palm and so on: perhaps this is part of what people mean when they talk of India’s ‘spirituality’.
India is a promise of spiritual treasures. What are spiritual treasures, where is the possibility of accumulating spiritual treasures so that death will not be the degrading process he has witnessed but something else he can not imagine? Who is he now, to think these thoughts? (Neem Dreams )
Images that yet fresh images beget.
India is a text to be read: you could not have said this in these words then. Or maybe it is a text that one can only attempt to read:
India was a text that I was unable to unravel, a book I could not read. (Cronin 2)
In Jaipur too there are very few tourists. The heat is searing, the rain has not yet come. A scion of a jewelry empire takes you out sightseeing and dining. You look at photos of Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor wearing jewels his business has provided. And you hold in your hand an enormous diamond, for the first time seeing the point of diamonds, while he tells you it will go to the girl he will marry and he is intent on marrying a European.
These images that yet fresh images beget.
Six years later you are back in India. One day you are leaving the mountain resort of Gulmarg and your hotel finds a taxi you can share to return to Srinagar, share with a man from Jaipur and his blonde Italian wife. Kashmir is a long way from Rajasthan, but look. She wears the huge diamond, in the simplest setting, on her right hand. It takes you a moment too long, you missed the moment you could have said, Hey, remember? Maybe he did too.
This is in 1986. Your second trip to India begins with a month at the Yoga Institute at Pune. By now you have realised that yoga is in your life like writing is. The final draft of your first novel, now called Between Careers, is already years old; it has not been published yet but there is ‘film interest’ and you have embarked on the amusing experience of meetings with film producers and film funding bodies. You have published some short prose and have a half-year New Writer’s grant. It’s eight thousand dollars, and it is way cheaper to spend six months in India than stay in Sydney. Actually you can make this sum last most of a year if you spend most of the year in Asia. You sub-let your little flat in Elizabeth Bay. You spend two months in Bali before going to India, not travelling, staying in only two places and writing every day.
At first the Institute in Pune is overwhelming. You have met B.K.S. Iyengar in Sydney in 1984, interviewed him for a radio program. Are you a guru? you asked him then. Now you touch his feet.
You touch his feet and would never regret it. You are not the kind to go bowing to gurus, having seen a few of them by now. You spent two or three years doing every kind of New Age therapy – weekend workshops in the power of acknowledgment, chanting, rebirthing, psychic osmosis, past lives therapy even. Everything that is useful and wise in any of these (a bit in some, a very little bit in others) is found in yoga and far more, far less of what is faddish and silly.
I now renounce personal growth. (Neem Dreams )
In a little blue temple at the top of the road near your hotel there is chanting and bell-ringing and the striking of gongs. You have joined Kay here in Pune, your yoga teacher. You share meals and memories and the awesome quality of the teaching at the Institute, go sightseeing and shopping and talk trustingly about your families.
Six weeks on the houseboat in Kashmir follow.
Two long pieces on Bali, two long pieces on India, and the novella and short stories you write on this trip will be published in the short prose collection The Saddest Pleasure in 1989.
So you have begun to create your India but barely. One day there will be a novel.
There must be a novel. There will always be a novel in your life, life and novel forming each other, being formed by each other. Perhaps you are trying to approach truth and reality, perhaps you need to create a world you control, perhaps it’s what stops you going mad; you will investigate, later, why there must be a novel, but, back then, even on your first trip to India, you know there must be a novel.
You go to Ladakh and stay there another six weeks, but you have never since published an account of this rather more extraordinary time. This area, its lunar landscape and Tantric Buddhist culture, was previously accessible only to hard-core trekkers but a road was recently built from Kashmir, a rough two-day journey. You are based in Leh and trek to sleep on stone floors in faraway gonpas; you attend festivals replete with possession and supernatural events; they have only recently had to accommodate the addition of touristic spectators.
The tourists’ shopping needs are accommodated by an influx of Kashmiri traders, whose presence adds new tensions if you are inclined to notice them.
You spend more and more time at the Centre for Ecology in Leh, reading books on Buddhism. You begin to do voluntary work with Helena Norberg-Hodge with whom you record long interviews that will never be seen. (Her own book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh appears a few years later.) As I write this piece, the colour magazine supplement in a weekend newspaper has an article on Norberg-Hodge’s current visit to Australia. Your fascination with questions of culture and tourism and ecology were given voice in your Bali writings earlier that year; here this fascination is enriched. Does tourism destroy other cultures or revitalise them, does it destroy environments, change them, destroy them, what relationships are possible between tourists and locals, what kind of culture is tourism itself?
You meet Tibetans who live in Leh, and hear their stories of the escape from Tibet when the Chinese invaded. You vow to tell these stories when you return.
But when you return you can’t place your essays on the Tibetans in Ladakh or the Ecology movement there and anyway you fall into that post-India condition: a more intense than usual feeling of being displaced, a period of disorientation (‘loss of the East’ as Rushdie reminds us [Rushdie 1999: 176]), of maladjustment, even a kind of derangement, ridiculous exaggerations of response (hating shops where you can’t bargain, hating streets without crowds and too many white people). It’s horrible when you can’t get a job and it’s horrible when you have to work at anything but writing.
Years later you create a character in a novel who had spent seven years in Tibet and was fiercely dedicated to its cause but this novel (Sheila Power 1997) was a camp satire and Tibet had become a cliché of celebrity endorsement. People can read the character Saul as a send-up of fashions in rich Americans’ liberal concerns but he is meant to be a romantic hero (soul) albeit in a fakey melodrama world. I would like to think that the odd reader will begin to know and care about Tibet’s plight, and even that that will make a difference. How horrible this world is.
(And of course there is more to be said on the way the West makes Tibet a supernatural exception to customary knowledge of the way the world works, the way it needs to make Tibet a fantasy land of universal natural wisdom, as I am reminded, as I write this piece, by reviews of two new books on Tibet [Orville Schell’s Virtual Tibet and Isabel Hilton’s The Search for the Panchen Lama].)
You try to return to India several times in subsequent years. You try to arouse interest in non-fiction book projects: you propose to retrace the journeys of Isabella Bird, an eccentric nineteenth-century solo woman traveller; you propose to visit a range of Westerners who have made India their home. Doesn’t happen.
But you do manage to go in 1995. By this time, you already know quite a lot about your India novel. More years have passed, you’ve been suicidal and you’ve been blissful, you don’t live in Sydney any more, you have been to Papua New Guinea and the USA, you’ve published five books. You are going back to India, again with the assistance of a grant, and travelling specifically for the novel. The next two trips to India are the neem travels.
3 Reading A Passage to India
Another kind of travel to or within India had begun long before I set foot in the country.
I first read E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (APTI) sometime in my student years, my teens. I was then reading a novel by a living writer. Any memory of this first reading has long dissolved. It seems that certain moments have always been unforgettable – Mrs Moore meeting Aziz in the mosque, a crazed Adele tearing out of the caves, the courtroom scene, the crowds that… But I begin to cite unforgettable moments known from subsequent and recent readings. It is impossible now to tell exactly what effect or impression that first reading had.
What did remain was a sense of the India Forster depicts, and a sense of the possible attitudes to it. There are four main English characters in APTI and they might stand for the available attitudes of foreigners-abroad, especially of the English in India. They could be seen as examples of types it was possible to identify with, or types by which you could identify foreigners in India.
Adele is eager to embrace the experience of India, with a naïve passion to see the ‘real’. Yes, they were already saying that, in the 1920s or earlier: ‘the real’. The search for the real place in the place has become a predominant convention of travel.
It seems at first that Adele is the one who is going to form some kind of real relationship with the place or people, but her naivete and ignorance are quite a match for her goodwill. And, in spite of her Bloomsbury connections, her conventionality is a match for the implicit desire struggling for expression against the sexual repression some critics emphasise. At the caves, whatever happens or does not happen there, whatever the cause of her distress, Adele immediately runs to her ‘own kind’, the imperial British.
Mrs Moore – she’s the one with the immediate natural sympathy towards India, instinctually behaving with sensitivity and respect in her first encounter with Aziz in the Mosque. Maybe she’ll have a real relationship there, find the real, but she leaves the place, does not appear to defend Aziz and disappears as a person in the narrative to become a mythical ‘Esmiss Esmoor’.
Ralph is the imperialist Britisher to his bootstraps. He is squirmingly hateful, unfailingly true to that role.
‘We’re not pleasant in India, and we don’t intend to be pleasant. We’ve something more important to do.’ (Forster 1954: 50)
This is the attitude inherited or re-invented by the transnational corporations that play their part in Neem Dreams. I suspect that Foster the writer enjoyed creating Forster the author (or implied narrator) who permits himself to comment:
One touch of regret – not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart – would have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution. (Forster 1954: 50)
Or is that Mrs Moore’s comment? Forster’s focalisation often implicates the implied narrator in the viewpoints of Mrs Moore and especially of Fielding.
Fielding, the English schoolteacher, has ‘gone native’, at least in the eyes of the other English. Fielding lives among Indians and makes clear his distance from the prejudices of The Club. He is open to a brotherly friendship with Aziz. Fielding’s basic decency, his unposturing naturalness, are established. If Fielding inevitably feels (as what outsider does not?) frustration, it is not due to xenophobia, but a more complex mismatch of temperament. And he does get frustrated:
There seemed no reserve of tranquillity to draw upon in India. Either none, or else tranquillity swallowed up everything, as it appeared to do for Professor Godbole. (Forster 1954: 77)
(Godbole is the Hindu sage in APTI.) Fielding becomes impatient with what he sees as the ‘exaggerated phrases’ – and implicitly, the emotionality, the vehemence – expressed by Aziz:
‘Yes, but the scale, the scale. You always get the scale wrong, my dear fellow. A pity there is this rumour, but such a very small pity – so small that we may as well talk of something else.’ (Forster 1954: 266)
Fielding is essentially English, embarrassed by the wrong note, the wrong scale, universalising his sense of what scale is wrong. The author might be revealed in Fielding’s character, exploring his own responses to India.
Incidentally – or not – Forster biographer P.N. Furbank points to another character as identifiable with the author:
Forster’s profoundest portrait of his young self is Ralph Moore in A Passage to India – Ralph, whose brief apparition at the end of the novel is so moving and central to the book’s design. Aziz gets the impression, at first, that the timid, strange-looking Ralph is ‘almost an imbecile’. But there is ‘one thing he always knows’ – he knows when people are being unkind; and with this sureness over spiritual and human matters he is the agent of such reconciliation as there is in the book. (Furbank 1977: 262)
Nirad Chaudhari dismissed the novel, saying, ‘Both the groups of characters in A Passage to India are insignificant and despicable’ (Rutherford 71). Both Aziz and Fielding do have their silly side, but are not so easily dismissed, being complex characters, whose doomed struggle to attain an ultimately impossible friendship is conveyed with sympathy for both.
These types recur throughout English fiction of the Raj, for example in Paul Scott’s quartet of novels, The Raj Quartet, which was made into a popular television drama series The Jewel in the Crown in the early 1980s, at which time its apparent debt to APTI was noted by critics (Spurling 274, 344).
But even Forster could not write outside certain lines that were firmly drawn. There is not even the suggestion of an idea of a more intimate long-term relationship between an Indian and an Englishman. Let alone an Englishwoman.
Forster’s own homosexual experiences in India inevitably formed part of his knowledge but would have been unthinkable as subject matter. Even in 2001, V.S. Naipaul, the Caribbean-born writer who has published extensively on his own travels in India, on the eve of being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, derided Forster’s writing on India, employing homophobic language to do so:
[Naipaul said:] ‘Forster, of course, has his own purposes in India. He is a homosexual and he had time in India, exploiting poor people, which his friend Keynes also did.’…
Asked whether Forster had contributed anything to the understanding of India, Naipaul was withering. ‘He encouraged people to lie. He was somebody who didn’t know Indian people. He just knew the court and a few middle class Indians and the garden boys whom he wished to seduce.’ (Kelso 2001; see also Advani and H.S. Rao)
These comments were widely discussed at the time; well-known Delhi publisher and author Rukun Advani commented on the irony of Naipual’s prize coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the publication of A Passage to India: Naipual, of Indian origins, ‘stands for…elite, White, European heterosexual civilisation’ and his vision of India is ‘excoriating, condescending, snide and mercilessly fault-finding’ (Advani 2001). The Englishman Foster, on the other hand, offered a vision that was ‘world-tolerant, humane, sympathetic, androgynous, eclectic and genuinely cosmopolitan’ (Advani). (I will return to Forster the writer.)
The central question of APTI is not ‘What really happened in the caves?’ The central question, broached in its first pages, is ‘Can an Englishman (a Westerner, we would say now) and an Indian be friends?’.
It takes the whole long complex novel to come to the mournful conclusion: ‘Not yet’. The possibility of such a friendship, Forster thought, could only be entertained when Indians were citizens of their own independent nation, a view emotively expressed in the novel’s last page by Aziz:
Aziz…cried: ‘Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most…we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then’ – he rode against [Fielding] furiously – ‘and then…you and I shall be friends.’ (Forster 1954: 317)
Independence was not achieved until nearly twenty-five years after Passage was published.
Edward Said, who says:
I have always felt that the most interesting thing about A Passage to India is Forster’s using India to represent material that according to the canons of the novel form cannot in fact be represented – vastness, incomprehensible creeds, secret motions, histories and social forms… (Said 1993: 241)
also says that Forster’s treatment of the political reality is evasive and somewhat patronizing; while APTI is an imaginative triumph:
it is also true that Forster’s India is so affectionately personal and so remorselessly metaphysical that his view of Indians as a nation contending for sovereignty with Britain is not politically very serious, or even respectful. (Said 1993: 246)
Aziz is the young Indian doctor whom Adele accuses. He is politicised, as we would say now, by his arrest. He comes into the novel already bitter about the English and after the trial goes to live in an Indian-ruled state and proclaims the ‘Quit India’ movement. (Independence would not necessarily have seemed imminent then.) The struggle for Indian Independence has become one of the twentieth century’s most resonant stories; at its centre is the figure of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the century’s outstanding personages.
Forster chose not to mention Gandhi and the many events of his Satyagraha movement in APTI, an omission that places the novel curiously not quite in its time. Quite likely the thought of bringing in Gandhi and the Gandhians would have threatened to turn Forster’s novel into something else, something that could not be contained in the novel. Forster was not an unpolitical writer; his sympathies are very clear in APTI, as they are in his other novels. Although he made a few false starts between his first trip to India in 1912 and beginning to write APTI in 1922, Forster was looking for the sculpture in the stone, not for the stone. Gandhi might have been part of the stone that must be chipped away.
In Neem Dreams Jade gazes at a statue of Gandhi, for her a landmark for finding an air-conditioned coffee shop:
The traffic circles a high pedestal set in the centre of a large intersection. On it rest the feet of the statue of a man. Wearing his simple loincloth, leaning on his staff, barefoot and penniless, commanding the hearts of millions of Indians and millions of others, shaming into retreat the imperial battalions that rule his country in their supremacist dreams. Look him up in the book.
Jade stops a moment, shades her eyes and squints up through the cacophony of blaring horns and blasts of petrol-laden exhaust fumes. She knows who that is, he’s really famous, the famous great soul, she once saw the movie, and the statue is the landmark and right over there, thank heaven, is the Indian Coffee House.
They mocked him as a half-naked fakir; his body is now a sacred text. He ensures the world’s headlines can not resist these brilliantly succinct gestures – a handful of salt gathered from the sea at the end of a long march, the spinning wheel that makes the simple cloth which is all he wears to Buckingham Palace. Indian salt belongs to Indians. Indians won’t be made to buy foreign cloth. The spinning wheel is the icon of Indian pride and resilience and self-sufficiency, of swadeshi. He is the icon of a universal philosopher saint. He is the icon of unassailable defiance and ahimsa, the way of non-violence. He looks down the length of the road, its saviour, its guardian angel, its compassion and tenacity, presiding at the intersection.
They still argue about him. It was a Hindu extremist who shot him dead, and he is still not Hindu enough for some. For others his so-called simplicity is a display of antique quaintness that creates an image of India that is never going to help the project of an internationally respected modern state. His non-violence is naïve in a world where nothing is won without armed struggle. His schemes were never going to solve the nation’s problems. His voluntary poverty makes a mockery of real poverty – remember how they said it costs a lot of money to (Neem Dreams)
Gandhi’s legacy will resonate in Neem Dreams’ last chapters, with the mid-1990s demonstrations against the transnationals explicitly having a historical connection with Gandhian politics of swadeshi and swaraj (self-sufficiency, self-rule) of the Independence movement.
Even today you cannot spend any time in India without discussing Gandhi. I’ve listened to writers on post-coloniality discuss the need for a Gandhian leader in other post-colonial countries (Aboriginal Australia included). The qualifications, demurrals and even opposition to Gandhi’s politics have their exemplar in the famous dispute between the Mahatma and one of India’s greatest literary figures, Rabindranath Tagore:
Tagore versus Gandhi was the cherisher of beauty versus the ascetic; the artist versus the utilitarian; the thinker versus the man of action; the individualist versus the politician; the elitist versus the populist; the widely-read versus the narrowly-read; the modernist versus the reactionary; the believer in science versus the anti-scientist; the synthesizer of East and West versus the Indian chauvinist; the internationalist versus the nationalist; the traveller versus the stay-at-home; the Bengali versus the Gujerati; the scholarly Brahmin versus the merchant Vaishya; and most prominently of all, the fine flowing robes and beard versus the coarse loincloth and bald pate. …Theirs was one of the great debates of the twentieth century. Gandhi has dominated it in the history books, in the universities and on the movie screen. But India has espoused Tagore’s ideas far more than it has Gandhi’s. (Dutta and Robinson 237)
Tagore, like Gandhi, was inevitably involved in the struggle of India for self-rule. Since I read the 1976 best-seller Freedom at Midnight, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, I have been fascinated by the story of Indian Independence.
There might be a comparison with the Holocaust, that other massive twentieth-century event of extremes and atrocity. And a day after first writing this thought, I hear a publisher say, in a discussion of Indian literature on the radio, ‘Indian novels are full of Partition; it’s like the Holocaust’.
I have European parents and was born in Italy officially a displaced person. Any child brought up in Australia in the 1950s, as I was, could remain somewhat clueless as to the enormity and recentness of Europe’s devastation, but when I finally travelled to Europe in my late 20s I realised something of the extent and the immediacy of its effects, even on those born post-World War 2. There might be some clues to my passionate interest in Indian Independence in the step removed from a historical relationship with India.
There would be a different affect to your interest in India if you had a British Raj ancestor. In Neem Dreams Jade assumes the only reason a guy like Andy has turned up in this remote southern hamlet is a search for an ancestor’s story.
‘I love your accent,’ said Jade, understandingly. Things were looking up: how about this, a dishy Englishman? Looked like Ralph Fiennes. Here, of all places. Andy had come to trace an ancestor from The Raj, of course, she realised, a long-time ambition that had become an obsession; he was engrossed in the life of a stiff-lipped pukkha sahib in a solar topee and military boots, driven by long-irrelevant notions of born to rule and propriety and decency, with a pale English wife who wilted in the heat, no, thrived… (Neem Dreams)
While the memory of the precise time and circumstances of my first reading is lost, I can smell the pink roses in the houseboat in Kashmir where I first re-read APTI (and, incidentally, first read Hindoo Holiday, which I quote as epigraph for my story ‘Snow-capped Peaks’, written there, (Baranay 1989b: 53-64) not knowing of Forster’s connection with its author Ackerley).
My next re-reading was twelve years later, in 1998. Neem Dreams was well advanced. I had begun this project by reading and re-reading fiction set in India and it became clear that APTI was the ur-novel of the English – or the European, or the Westerner – in India. (Perhaps Siddharta is another, but let’s leave that aside). A non-Indian, certainly an English-speaking non-Indian, cannot write a novel set in India without knowledge of A Passage to India. Decades of scholarship continue to address it; it is interesting how often the book is cited in the most recent bibliographies of post-colonial studies. A Passage to India fits Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic as a book that is always being re-read rather than read (Calvino 1982: 125).
APTI is continually re-read not only passively, but is constantly re-evaluated, its concerns re-posited in terms contemporary with new readings:
From A Passage to India on,
‘books about India’ have been more accurately books about the representation of India, with each offering variants of the peculiar logic through which a failure of representation becomes transformed into a characteristically Indian failure. …[T]he narrative is not brought to rest with the melodramatic rape trial and Adela’s recantation, but is impelled into a description of the Indian’s ugly failure to apprehend a European sensibility and the seductive qualities of his continuing ignorance. (Suleri 245, 249)
On my own re-reading I noticed that neem trees are mentioned on the very first page. That’s the kind of thing a writer is happy to take as a sign.
The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes and pepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible and in their turn hide the bazaars. (Forster 1954: 9)
What becomes visible, what becomes hidden: this might be seen as a theme of both A Passage to India and Neem Dreams.
4 The narrative imperative: aspects of two novels
How do I begin to write a novel? There’s an idea that begins to obsess. Themes and images begin to weave into each other: characters, phrases, words, sounds: a collection of fragments that desire union in a single entity. What will bring it all together? What is it I am looking for, mentally shuffling these fragments, re-arranging them, building on them, combining or discarding them?
My method in Neem Dreams was similar to the one Graham Greene describes: travelling, gathering fragments, and puzzling at how they fit together until one day a story becomes apparent (Greene 1981: passim).
My novels rarely start with a story. Incidents and events, yes, people and places too, and the insistent need to be at work, writing, writing something to be read. But these are not sufficient to make a novel.
‘Yes – oh dear, yes – the novel tells a story,’ admits Forster in Aspects of the Novel (Forster 1955: 26). The tone is mournful, it is a regretful voice, the admission is reluctant.
Question: What does a novel do? Answer: It tells a story, of course! The reply may be made, surely is most often made, with vague indifference or with brisk insistence. Or, indeed, with a refusal of a simple answer.
But we regret the fact, Forster and I.
Why the regret? When I began to call myself a writer I referred to ‘short prose fiction’ and ‘long prose fiction’ rather than ‘short stories’ and ‘novels’. It was the seventies, and everything we did and were was being re-defined. It was modernism being new again.
Forster was writing in the era of early modernism. Modernism means experimentation in content and form, it means stream-of-consciousness and fractured chronology. It means using not the language of the past, not the language of formal address but the language you hear. It means that you can decide the novel does not need narrative.
Lionel Trilling identified modernism as ‘the disenchantment of our culture with culture itself’ (Cahoone 391). Forster, while not as formally experimental as his contemporary Virginia Woolfe, was a modernist; he questioned the apparently obvious cultural imperatives.
Neem Dreams is written in the present era, widely called post-modern, and no one who lives in it cannot know how extensively this term has been interrogated. My own tendency is to favour the idea of post-modernism as the modernism of the late twentieth-century. This is in spite of also entertaining a tendency to think, as Ihab Hassan says:
Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Unimaginable that Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments. Certainly it is not the Dehumanization of the Arts that concerns us now; it’s rather the Denaturalization of the Planet and the End of Man. We are, I believe, inhabitants of another Time and another Space, and we no longer know what response is adequate to our reality. (Cahoone 395)
These days we contemplate the real possibility of post-human existence (a possibility explored by contemporary novels such as Michel Houllebecq’s sensational Atomised). Hassan’s comments resonate. Still, not knowing what, if any, response to our new reality is adequate, a novelist begins a response by writing a novel. And comes up with that strangely unyielding fact: the novel needs a story.
It is characters and settings (Forster calls them people and places) and their interaction that engender a novel; it is particular themes, issues, contentions; it is the language you want to use, and, also, it is your sense of your place within the culture you inhabit, a need to find and express this.
But you must find the story.
That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it were not so, that it could be something different – melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form. (Forster 1954: 26)
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