1The spectres I will speak of are framed by three things, the first understandably longer than the other two: (1) diaspora memory and colonial discourse, (2) food, (3) film. These will be presented as an extended footnote to a foundational literary passage of the old Indian plantation diaspora. The passage, as the title indicates, comes from one of two or three great novels in the English language written in the second half of the twentieth century. The novel in question is V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, in itself a spectre which haunts the Indian diasporic imaginary. I begin with the first of these spectres.

2‘Soft you, a word or two before you go’, opening words of Othello’s final speech,2 so magnificent in its poetry, so totally overpowering that they reverberate in our minds hours after the play has ended. But there is a subtext here, the subtext of the ‘Europeanization’ of the black fellow for whom the tragic ethos, or experience, can be articulated only through the embedding of the self into something else. Here this something else are the enlightened values of the Venetian state against which stand the metaphorical excesses of the Orient: the ‘base Indian, [who] threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe’, the ‘subdued eyes’ that dropped ‘tears as fast as the Arabian trees/Their medicinal gums’, the ‘turban’d Turk’, and he ‘circumcised dog’. Othello of course insinuates that he is none of these; he does not have oriental shame, a cultural consciousness about the self as a crucible of communal values; instead he has European guilt, an acute sense of personal responsibility, the stuff out of which emerges the consummate tragic character, one ‘that loved not wisely, but too well’ and whose ‘Europeannes’ made him ‘wrought’ and ‘perplexed in the extreme’. The speech haunts me, and has haunted me, ever since I learnt the art of criticism in colonial schools in my homeland. As a revenant it brings me back to a ‘whitening’ of sensibilities which leads us to a different reading of our colonial and postcolonial worlds and to points of view that come already structured or pre-formed: ‘white but not quite’.

3‘Five years have passed; five summers with the length/Of five long winters’, and again I return to a quotation written out in long hand for a manuscript in preparation on the diasporic imaginary. Yet again I frame that quotation. As a shopkeeper in The Chase Mr Biswas’ two years there were an absolute disaster. He fought with his wife Shama throughout the two years and hit her when she became pregnant for the third time. Shama leaves for Hanuman House, months pass and now that he feels the child has been born, Mr Biswas closes the shop door and cycles slowly in the evening towards Arwacas. It is getting dark, he rides without cycle lights (illegal, surprise, surprise, in the colonies, we are told), his stomach pains, though intermittent, are forever present, his mind is on edge. He reaches Hanuman House and sees people sitting in the verandah. The point of view should be Biswas’ and it is but there is critical over-coding at work here. Authorial ideology intervenes for the prose acquires a sharpness, a retrospective comprehensiveness as it tackles an ontological human issue, the meaning of life itself. It functions something like a tableau, a self-contained scene embedded in the text, with meaning well beyond its immediate context. Mr Biswas does not enter the House through the shop, which would have meant going past the men sitting in the arcade. He enters by the ‘tall side gate’ (174) and therefore observes the men askance, ‘slantwise’ so to speak, which again implies that even as he sees the men, he is not ‘conscious’ of them.

In the arcade of Hanuman House, grey and substantial in the dark, there was already the evening assembly of old men, squatting on sacks on the ground and on tables now empty of Tulsi Store goods, pulling at clay cheelums that glowed red and smelled of ganja and burnt sacking. Though it wasn’t cold, many had scarves over their heads and around their necks; this detail made them look foreign and, to Mr Biswas, romantic. It was the time of day for which they lived. They could not speak English and were not interested in the land where they lived; it was a place where they had come for a short time and stayed longer than they expected. They continually talked of going back to India, but when the opportunity came, many refused, afraid of the unknown, afraid to leave the familiar temporariness. And every evening they came to the arcade of the solid, friendly house, smoked, told stories, and continued to talk of India. (174)

4This is a post-indenture scene to be placed after 1917. If we read the work as a roman à clef we can be a little more precise with dates, placing the scene in the early thirties. The assembly is of old men, men marked by labour and hardship (cane after all is ‘bitter’ as both Sam Selvon and David Dabydeen tell us), men who may have saved a few shillings and who continue to live in the surrounding cane fields for the urban/country divide is virtually non-existent. They do not sit, they ‘squat’, a difficult, and for those unused to it, a painful way of sitting by bending one’s legs and throwing one’s arms over the knees, as one did squatting on pit latrines. Their bodies have not entered modernity although the sacks on which they squat, made of jute, and used for exporting sugar, connects them to industrialization and to the great port of Calcutta from which they had embarked on their journeys. They smoke tobacco mixed with marijuana in a clay bowl (cilam), a primitive peasant hookah; their head and neck scarves a carryover of cold winters in the Indo-Gangetic plains. To Mr Biswas, always reading customs and people via instrumental reason, they look foreign, perhaps even comic. Hanuman House is a space which makes for sociality; it is, with the store closed for the day, a free space which can be shared for purposes of a collective recall. The space though is not theirs (for they will soon have to walk back to their huts and humpies); it is a site of memory where time could be stilled and the homeland memorially reconstructed. But the phrase which lingers is the ‘familiar temporariness’ of the metonymic ‘space’ which now they could not leave. The present, though unbearable, has become familiar, has a reality about it, it has meaning invested in it because through labour a consciousness of history has been created, work done, forests cleared, shops built. The past, India, exists only as discourse, not as felt or lived presence. The past—and India too—is imaginary; it creates being without a body and too much of it makes life unbearable. So it is recalled in snatches, in a short space of time each evening in the arcade of Hanuman House. But the recall is narrated through a particular mode of realist representation as the point of view is framed in a borrowed colonial discourse. The question we ask, after Foucault, ceases to be a simple one of what is remembered, as a phenomenological act, but ‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject-positions?’ (Foucault 1980: 160). A spectral discourse haunts the colonial/postcolonial imagination and we are never freed from it.

5So the first of these ghostly spectres is a matter of discursive representation—the acquisition of a subject position from within a colonial discourse. This is also the first of the mediating principles, Othello’s Europeanization: not the imaginary as such in the plantation diaspora but its literary construction. Since everything about India was effectively alien—its high culture languages, religion, art and so on—and since, on the other hand, the colonizer’s culture will soon be everywhere in the educational system (culminating in the ubiquitous curriculum of the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate) what developed was a borrowed sensibility, a way of understanding the world, which this diaspora internalized in a very unselfconscious fashion. The writer finds a place in realist colonial discourses from which to speak. We sense this in Naipaul’s first published novel The Mystic Masseur (1957).

6The Mystic Masseur begins with the narrator being taken to the home of Ganesh Ramsumair, a mystic masseur, for treatment for a swollen foot. The foot remains untreated in spite of Ganesh’s home-made medicine (which the narrator was asked to take three times a day— but never after meals) and finally it is a trained doctor who removes the abscess. But what the narrator remembers is Ganesh’s library in a house which was no more than a thatched hut. Ganesh Ramsumair, who had ‘surprised everybody by passing [the Cambridge School Certificate] in the second grade’ (Naipaul 1957: 18), was the proud owner of a huge library of some 1,500 volumes. The moment of revelation, which is also a statement about the centrality of books in the colonial and postcolonial indenture (plantation) imaginary, needs to be cited in full.

‘Leela, ’ Ganesh said, ‘the boy want to know how much book it have here.’
‘Let me see, ’ Leela said, and hitched up the broom to her waistband. She started to count off the fingers of her left hand. ‘Four hundred Everyman, two hundred Penguin—six hundred. Six hundred, and one hundred Reader’s Library, make seven hundred. I think with all the other book it have about fifteen hundred good book here.’ (11)

7Everyman, Penguin, Reader’s Library books made their way into British Council Libraries in the plantation Indian diaspora with Everyman collection, the ultimate prize. Its titles covered every major work of world literature; its ownership signifying elevated taste. Before the narrator leaves the hut, Ganesh gives him a copy of his first published booklet, 101 Questions and Answers on the Hindu Religion, Ganesh’s first attempt to be a writer so that his name could be placed alongside the red, blue, green, brown and yellow Everyman dust jackets. The achievement—which reflected rote-learning and plagiaristic transcription of the worst kind but which is rendered with gentle comic irony— finally leads Ganesh Ramsumair to mimic the colonial absolutely as the narrator recalls at the end of the novel:

‘“Pundit Ganesh!” I cried, running towards him. “Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair!”’
“G. Ramsay Muir”, he said coldly. (215)

8To read The Mystic Masseur, for which the ‘source text’ is none other than Ganesh Ramsumair’s own autobiography ‘The Years of Guilt (Ganesh Publishing Co. Ltd., Port of Spain)’ (14), is to enter into the mystique of the English language and its literature, its publishing practices and its valued genres, which came to this diaspora through a very English educational system. It is also to recall other experiences. In my Fiji homeland the Methodist Minister of my primary school transformed himself quite magically, for so we felt, from Ramji Ramnarayan Devaki (a string of Hindu gods) to Reverend Ramsey R. Deoki. Ganesh’s aunt, The Great Belcher, speaks accusingly to him: ‘you sitting down here, scratching. Scratching not like hoeing, you know. It can’t grow food’. To which Ganesh replies, ‘I ain’t scratching, man. I reading and I writing’ (110). The act of hoeing is linked to plantation labour, the hoe being a key implement for sugar cane cultivation. Against that act (which the aunt considers as real labour) Ganesh offers the act of writing as his real vocation. The power of writing, this bookish knowledge, which was prized above all, in the end also contains within it an incipient anglophilia, a nostalgia for the Pax Britannica which Naipaul also carries. The diaspora identity is marked by an inherent contradiction: at once anti-colonial and at the same time so firmly located in colonial discourses. It is this contradiction, which informs the literature that has emerged from that quarter and it is precisely the contradiction that is at the heart of Naipaul’s art.

9In a work published thirty years after The Mystic Masseur, Naipaul writes from near Salisbury, in Albion’s druidic shore with its pre-Christian Stonehenge and the ‘Fairies of Albion’ (after William Blake), about himself, his origins in a faraway Caribbean island, his engagement with the English language and the challenge facing the colonial writer when confronted with the great discourse of imperialism, the discourse of Romanticism which captured at once an energizing poetic movement as well as the high point of European expansionism. The book he produces is an autobiography styled as a novel in five parts and it carries a title, which Apollinaire gave to one of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, The Enigma of Arrival (Naipaul 1987). In it a traveller arrives by ship in a city only to find upon returning to the quayside that the ‘antique ship has gone’ (92). The plantation diaspora also found that the ship had gone, and we were left on the wharf to gather our goods in a gunny sack and make some sense of our lives. Bereft of an adequate language, without the social organization of village life, we struggled to find meaning in our lives. For those with a creative imagination, hope came from the colonial masters themselves, which is why, as we read Naipaul, we are struck so much by his ‘Englishness’ and this Englishness is not to be confused with a perverse racism, the celebration of the white man; instead it is the condition of plantation quotidian life. This is what we are.

10The novel opens with a disarmingly simple sentence, ‘For the first four days it rained’ (11) but what strikes us for purposes of our argument are the explanatory references to words and meanings—to know that ‘avon’ means a river and ‘hound’ any dog, and ‘both ‘Walden’ and ‘shaw’ meant wood’ (13), to be able to clarify that Kent’s speech, ‘Goose, if I had you upon Sarum Plain, I’d drive ye cackling home to Camelot’ (King Lear II. ii. 80-81), lost to textual critics including the formidable Kenneth Muir, refers to geese making their way from Gaul to Rome: ‘Sarum Plain, Salisbury Plain; Camelot, Winchester—just twenty miles away’ (22). These thoughts lead to a craving to connect with an even earlier language, to seasons captured in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: ‘Bot þen hy-es heruest, and hardenes hym sone, /Warnez hym for þe winter to wax ful rype’ (‘But then the harvest season (autumn) hastens on and encourages it at once, warms it to ripen for fear of the winter’) (II. 521–2). They require a peculiarly English sensibility. They confirm a bookish, monkish knowledge, the mastery of which is one thing; a ‘rawness of response’ to the country quite another.

11Not surprisingly, the artist pauses to examine Jack’s father-in-law, ‘a figure of literature in the ancient landscape’. ‘He seemed a Wordsworthian figure’, writes Naipaul, ‘bent, exaggeratedly, going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude (20)’, ‘the subject of a poem Wordsworth might have called ‘The Fuel-Gatherer” (26). This knowledge could only come to someone who understood the English literary tradition albeit with the ‘nerves of the stranger’. The challenge is enormous, the discourse of romanticism so hallowed, the legacy of the English language, as received in the colonies, so frighteningly complex. This diaspora, descendants of illiterate peasants with neither high culture nor tradition, the flotsam and jetsam of history, panic-ridden and traumatized, this diaspora in embracing the occupation of writing has to out perform the master, which is why the literature of the old diaspora carries in it a consciousness of the great tradition of English writing. Writing in English is in itself a homage to the colonizer’s language even when, in the case of so many writers, Naipaul included, the demotic invades the dominant discourse. The point is made, without this kind of theoretical explanation by Naipaul himself.

12To read Naipaul is to understand not only our diasporic selves but also our half-lives; lives to which were denied the vibrancy of other socio-racial life-worlds around us because in the end we remained ‘afraid of the unknown, afraid to leave the familiar temporariness’, afraid to move out of our secure and confined constituencies. ‘The familiar temporariness’ designates lives that remained incomplete, lives that were in halves, lives that belonged nowhere, that could not be grounded in either geography or epistemology. We needed a house, a home:

But bigger than them all was the house, his house.
How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated. (Naipaul 1961: 12-13)

13For Biswas’ father ‘fate had brought him from India to the sugar-estate, aged him quickly and left him to die’ (15). Colonial education had taught his children otherwise, the Protestant work ethic was there for everyone and individualism was the answer to Indian fate. The house—the central trope of the book—and the possession of it, marks out this diaspora in ways rather different. In owning it, one lays claim to a portion of the earth. Ownership, belonging, the land being ours through act of labour, these become the cornerstones of life. It has always struck me how the new diaspora from New York to Perth own homes differently, reflecting values of a different, late modern, ‘materialist India’: ‘India is hard and materialist’, writes Naipaul (2007: 45, 193). Differently, therefore, in the sense that owning a house is a sign of success, of having made it; a sign of material well-being, the bigger the better. In Naipaul’s novel, home marks a belonging, an inalienable right, an experience which, transformed into art, signifies something more than brick and tile or Lysaght iron and wood; home suggests an ownership through naming and transforming the landscape. And yet how very ‘English’ Naipaul’s prose is; the balanced phrases, the economical language; the build-up to the two key words: ‘unnecessary and unaccommodated’. Yes, unnecessary and unaccommodated, for we were unwanted, the detritus of indenture history, always struggling to be meaningful. Which is why we turned to the language of the Empire—an alternative road laid bare for us in the letters of the ‘bound coolie’ Bechu, the surprisingly literate indentured labourer in Guyana in the last few years of the nineteenth century whose work has come to light through the impeccable scholarship of Clem Seecharan (1999)—blasted that discourse open and accommodated ourselves.

14I return to our primal scene in the arcade of Hanuman House where men sit squatting, reminiscing in a displaced vernacular which, for them, is an ancient language which connects, unlike the growing patois/creole around them, with the absent homeland. But what of Mr Biswas? We turn to the second spectre.

15To Mr Biswas, the ancient men are not the centre of his consciousness as from his point of view their presence is noted as ‘foreign’ or ‘romantic’. His centre is the surroundings within the house. Walking past the innumerable children of Hanuman House eating, his eyes finally fall on daughter Savi eating her food on an enamel plate: ‘curried beans, fried tomatoes and a dry pancake’ (Naipaul 1961: 175). Food, linked as it is to survival, to the corporeality of being, to existence, works rather differently from memory, which for the old men in Hanuman House can be easily transformed into a romantic discourse of recollection. It seems as if food marks a departure, suggests a translation of the past into the present. In this translation, food has its own ontology, its own origins in everyday life which explains why it has a different kind of evocative power. In eating one constructs a different narrative. I recall Sam Selvon’s words in his opening address to the ‘East Indians in the Caribbean Conference’, University of the West Indies, Trinidad 1979:

In all my years in England, I never came across the kind of curry we ate in Trinidad, and I searched all over London for a dhal pourri, and never saw one until an enterprising Trinidadian started up a little cookshop. (Selvon 1987: 18)

16The passage is cited as well by Sharmila Sen in her essay ‘Our Flavour is Greater’ (2007) and it is worth examining her reading of indenture cuisine from the point of view of the homeland Indian. For Selvon, the dhal pourri has meaning well beyond cuisine, it connects with one’s past, one’s body, one’s yearning, and one’s desires. ‘Dhal pourri’ is not just food, it is overdetermined in the sense that an entire historico-cultural indenture complex morphs into it. Not so with Sen for whom, as is to be expected, nothing equals memory of Darwanji’s dhal pourris in her native Calcutta. Against Darwanji’s delicately scented, tongue-teasing spicy creations, the Trinidadian equivalent already contaminated by its very spelling (‘with its excessive h, l, o and r’ (163)) was ‘vaguely spiced, the dough soggy… [and unlike Darwanji’s] perfect little golden brown discs crisped at the edges, the Trinidadian dhal pourri was large, floppy, and pale in color’ (165). Years before Sen, in 1991 to be precise, I too was taken to dhal pourri shops in Port of Spain by my Trinidadian hosts Sybil and Prem Ratan, and my recollection of the taste is so different. The dhal pourri connected me not to anything in India but to my own childhood in Fiji. The taste was exactly the same, the same excess of lentils, of onions and garlic, the taste of masala which was used for all food regardless of whether it was meat or vegetable. Sen recoils from eating it, and finds culinary satisfaction only when in a restaurant run by a fellow Bengali émigré or in the home a fellow Indian working in Trinidad on contract she finds a cuisine which is authentic Indian. What is it then which connects food with ‘networking’, the feeling of belonging to a wider plantation Indian community? I pause to reflect on this yet again.

17In theorizing the diaporic imaginary (Mishra 2007) I had noted that food in V. S. Naipaul was part of routine acts, their monotony so totally unrelieved and their nutritional values non-existent. But what I had done beyond this was suggest the extent to which indenture cuisine grew out of the limited possibilities available to people who were given a standard ration. This ration was uniform throughout the plantation diaspora and by all accounts seems to have remained unchanged during the eighty-year period. A handwritten document in the Mauritius Indian Immigration Archives gives us an account of the rations. Written by H. Burton, the Colonial Emigration Agent in Madras, the document shows that a labourer’s ration, the so-called dietary scale, was made up of rice, salted fish, vegetables, onions, tamarind (seven times a week); ghee (six times a week); dhal (lentils, five times a week); oil; and mutton (half a pound or around 250 grams twice a week). Add to these flour, sugar, salt and tea and the rations were complete. The rations produced a standard indenture cuisine which has remained unchanged to this day. I grew up on precisely this, monotonous, unchanging diet for the first seventeen years of my life.

Breakfast: black tea, roti with fried or curried vegetables or a chokha (roasted aubergines)
Lunch: boiled rice, dhal with bhaji (vegetables)
Dinner: roti and tarcari (curried vegetables) with black tea [often the same as breakfast]
Weekend lunch: usual weekday lunch with fish and/or mutton

18I have called this indenture or girmit cuisine. The dhal pourri grew out of this cuisine as flour and lentils were used to create a more exciting roti where the dhal was used as filling. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms this is a ‘taste of necessity’, which is to be distinguished from a ‘taste of luxury (or freedom)’ (Bourdieu 1984: 178). The former signifying ‘barbarity’, the latter ‘freedom’ in terms of the old Kantian distinction. As cultures became richer they moved away from taste of necessity to taste of luxury with better cuts of meat, filleted fish (only people with a taste of necessity eat fish head for instance), thicker gravy, an emphasis on presentation and the like. The plantation diaspora too has shown signs of this trend with more luxurious food being consumed, meats baked or grilled, potatoes roasted and local vegetables incorporated into their food. What has remained unchanged though is the order in the ‘menu’ itself and what is eaten when. Two passages may be cited here. The first is from Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge:

[Indians in Trinidad would throw out] almost everything Indian at first, and would slowly gather back into their lives only those relics that were essential for survival… [eating] sada roti, tomato chokha, wearing gold churias at weddings, drying mangoes for achar and kuchela…. (29)

19The second is from V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel lecture:

For example, we ate rice in the middle of the day, and wheat in the evenings. There were some extraordinary people who reversed the natural order and ate rice in the evenings. I thought of these people as strangers…. (Naipaul 2003: 188)

20Ramabai Espinet and Naipaul, of course, understand something, which Sharmila Sen does not. For Sen the situation is quite bizarre since she wonders why Trinidadian Indians have not opted for a cuisine or taste of luxury given their considerable rise in standard of living. For Espinet and Naipaul, Selvon’s journey in search of that elusive dhal pourri is so perfectly normal, in fact so normal that it need not be theorized at all. In Naipaul’s novels bhaji and roti appear often enough to suggest the necessity of food, not something to be enjoyed but like much else about plantation life to be accepted. As Mr Biswas tilts a plate of food on Owad, the younger god’s head, we read, ‘The plate slipped off easily, leaving a few grains of rice sticking to streaks of lentils and oily, bubble-ridden trails of curry’ (Naipaul 1961: 120). The plantation diaspora created no sense of collective eating as eating took place in snatches with women left to eat the remainders. I have this lasting image of my mother sitting alone on the floor with an enamel cup of black tea, burnt rotis and curry grated from the bottom of the pot in an enamel plate with a ring of blue around it. Each evening she sat alone and ate, and then in a bucket washed the dishes. The image is not unusual, it may even be one of Indian women generally, but in as much as what my mother ate was the cuisine of necessity even when our material conditions were changing for the better, the image has a very special plantation diaspora meaning.

21In Hanuman House Mr Biswas finally locates his wife Shama whose first query is ‘Have you eaten?’ Reference to food syncopates time (‘they might have parted only the hour before’) but it also leads to the way in which the plantation diaspora made its own distinction between ‘taste of necessity’ and ‘taste of luxury’. Here ‘luxury’ becomes appetising food ‘reserved for religious festivals’ (176), food ‘excessively rich’ which was followed a day later with ‘plain food’. But the food which was excessively rich remained a variation on girmit food: pourris instead of rotis, rich pumpkin curry with mango kuchelas, potatoes stewed in peas and thick with curried gravy, flour transformed into halva or gulgulas. The ingredients remained the same; ghee, that ultimate oil, the source of nutrition but also diabetes and cardio-vascular disease, did the rest. To eat rich food all the time was seen as a kind of ‘carnal indulgence’. For the Indian diasporic imagination food then figures as a complex sign of attachment to the homeland and yet a significant departure from homeland cuisine since apart from girmit food there was also Ramlogan’s rum. The old men in Hanuman House ate this food, which marked their difference and indeed their alienation from the homeland. Even as it connected them through names of food, it disconnected them through taste as rations imposed on them a limited set of variables such that there was a limit to the possible combinations. The difference also created precisely the declaration which Sharmila Sen makes into the title of her essay: ‘Our Flavour is Greater’.

22A colonial pedagogy creates a different world view, a different understanding of literary genres, a different, dare one say instrumental, reading of one’s own culture. It also locates the idea of homeland both in ancestral and metropolitan colonial centres so that in the realm of literary composition an ironic correction of one’s colonial worlds was a crucial motif. Food dislocates connections further, creates an ambiguity in the flow of retrospective memory, and proclaims a difference, a superiority even where one did not exist. But India comes back in another form, and I want to complete this presentation with my third spectral item which is cinema, and principally what has come to be known as Bollywood cinema.

23The usual verbal stoush between Mr Biswas and his wife done, Shama retreats to the back room of the shop in The Chase and sings a sullen popular Hindi song:

Slowly, slowly,
Brothers and sisters,
Bear his corpse to the water’s edge (160)

24A funereal dirge, it looks like a combination of songs from the films Acchut Kanya (1935) and Kismet (1943)—kis gaye ho khevanhār, naiyā dūbatī (‘O where are you my boatman, my boat is capsizing’) and bhagvān kinare se lagā de merī naiyā (‘Lord gently, gently take me to the water’s edge’) both of which are built around the metaphor of a boat on a river. In his earlier novel The Suffrage of Elvira, a film is actually mentioned. Foam, tailor Baksh’s eldest son and Harbans the politician’s campaign manager, hears Mrs Chittaranjan (wife of the Hindu powerbroker) sing the ‘theme song from the Indian film Jhoola’ [1941] (Naipaul 1958: 103). The song is hummed again by Mrs Chittaranjan’s neighbour Ramlogan, the rum-shop owner, who, however, stops humming when he realises its origin in Mrs Chittanjan’s singing (120). There are two signature songs in Jhoola: mai to dillī se dulhan lāyā re (‘I have brought a bride from Delhi’) and calī re calī re merī nāv calī re (‘Slowly, slowly moves my boat’). I suspect it is the latter, sung by Ashok Kumar, given that this song too is about movement and flow, and about a boat. The grand recollection is, however, of a film song Naipaul hears on his first visit to India. In An Area of Darkness, he immediately transcribes the song upon hearing it, which is followed by a translation in a footnote:

Tumhin ne mujhko prem sikhaya
Soté hué hirdaya ko jagaya
Tumhin ho roop singar balam

‘You gave love meaning.
You awoke my sleeping heart.
My beauty is you, my lover,
my jewels are you.’ (272)

25The song is from the film Manmohan (1936) and sung by Surendra and Bibbo. Naipaul reflects on the song—it is from the late thirties, it creates a mood rather than relates a meaning—and later as he walks in the bazaar he sees harmoniums which remind him of a similar broken musical instrument and Indian brass plates in his grandmother’s Lion House (Mrs Tulsi’s Hanuman House). He gets the words right even if he gets soté wrong (it is soyé in the original). As pure mood (and not as semantic content) it is precisely the feeling of the old men in the arcade of Hanuman House for whom too India was a mood, rather than an historical memory to be recalled through exact words. When Indian (Bombay/Bollywood) cinema comes to the plantation colonies again the connection is not through real re-constructions nor in their detail or in the spectators’ abilities to understand the films’ language; it is instead in films as evocative of something quite elusive, imagined but not easily translatable for if they were then in terms of what they related, ‘ours would be greater’. So films were always misread, and had to be misread for they were constitutive of mood not meaning, which explains their circulation not so much as film texts but as film songs, a point we have noted in the citations of film songs in Naipaul.

26The difficulty that a diaspora film critic like Atticus Narain has in explaining this dilemma—Bollywood films as functional items irreducible to their semantic content—is symptomatic of the old diaspora’s ambiguous relationship to this form. Narain, as an Indo-Guyanese, speaks of ‘these films’ as ‘primary sources of confirmation’ (Narain 2008: 164) but discovers during his research in the filmgoing practices of the Indo-Guyanese that the confirmation is now presented as something that only happened with the old films, by which the Indo-Guyanese mean pre-1980 films. The old films are recalled as championing ‘traditional values’, (166), ‘hard-working Hindu ethic, well-defined gender roles, codes for moral and religious self-conduct’ (169) but precisely because they are no longer shown (except occasionally on Guyanese television) they become part of a memory where the films recede in time and are disconnected from their narrative content. In other words, in terms of what Atticus calls the ‘cane field coolie’ paradigm’ (177) the new Bollywood films cease to have the static function of the old which, in terms of spectatorial investment, offered a version of a larger ‘geopolitical’ Mother India which went beyond its shores and embraced the plantation diaspora too. New films do not have that kind of centre as what they construct is a much more fluid, ungraspable India which has an ‘unaccented’ relationship with the diaspora. Narain speaks of the diaspora itself as being ‘Bollywoodized’ which effectively means that it too is multiply accented, its own field of relationships now no longer linked to a fixed narrative of Mother India. As with the technological and simulacral dimension of Bollywood, the old plantation diaspora too shifts the idea of the ‘imaginary’ (which is based on mapping out a one-way traffic between India and the diaspora) to a complex system of networking based on re-migration to other metropolitan centres: London, New York, Toronto. Atticus Narain’s difficulty in articulating the presence of Indian films as mood rather than content, indeed points to the peculiar ways in which the plantation diaspora consumed Indian cinema and that consumption, as I have said, is understood best, as Naipaul himself did all those years ago, as periodic confirmations of a ‘mood’ about India and not as a representation of a nation as such: its history, its social forms, its engagement with modernity and so on. That mood, as in the case of Fiji, led to the internalization of the Rāmāyana-based mythologicals (which Rushdie has called ‘theologicals’) as narratives of banishment, rejection and return albeit a return where Rama has to reject Sita, Mother India herself. That mood also functioned at the level of a fetish transmitted through the ‘Raja Harishchandra’ films which indicated the power of the renouncer in an ideal Indian polity against a generally materialist West, anticipating as well as reinforcing the idea of the renouncer-Mahatma for whom a nation-state is found on the principle of renunciation (passivity, denial of culinary and sexual pleasures and so on). But because these were moods without critique or moods without critical reading of the films themselves, films in the old diaspora circulated as songs even when, as is the case in most plantation diasporas with the exception of Fiji and Surinam, their meaning was not available. In Guyana, in Mauritius and in Trinidad imitative renditions of Indian film songs especially of singers such as Mukesh and Mohammed Rafi are not uncommon but here again the songs exist as recreations of moods without semantic content.

27The departure point of this paper has been a classic passage from a classic text. As a lengthy footnote to it the paper, arising as it does from a self-evident desire to connect or represent to consciousness the homeland, has suggested that the colonial discourses to which we were bound made unmediated representation impossible. To rework a phrase we have used elsewhere, India becomes the sublime object that forever eludes representation. What emerges instead are ghosts, spectres and claims of difference even as we continue to play out, that is, re-enact the agony of the old men on their jute sacks in Hanuman House. In all these—presented here as spectres of discourse, food and cinema—the homeland becomes memory without texts. Old men squatting on sacks in the arcade of Hanuman House, reminiscing about home, creating a mood without texts, their eyes dimmed by glaucoma and cataract, themselves becoming nothing more than spectres in an unwelcome environment—the images are telling and prescient. We began with Othello; we must now give way to Prospero—‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep’. Ours is forever the condition of the ‘familiar temporariness’3.