1In his book provocatively entitled Provincializing Europe, postcolonial critic Dipesh Chakrabarty presents a project that aims not only at dismantling the idea that modernity is a solely European creation, but also at refashioning the discursive practices through which the political and cultural authority of Europe has so far manifested itself. This project is described by its author as an anti-imperialist effort to expose the strategies of domination—based on imaginary cultural constructs—inscribed within the practice of colonialism which still pervade postcolonial self-liberating strategies:

The Europe I seek to provincialize or decenter is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address questions of political modernity in South Asia. (4)

2Chakrabarty goes on to explain that he does not mean to destabilise the foundations of Western culture, nor is he interested in going back to nativist models of culture. His is a discursive strategy aimed at providing means of liberation:

I ask for a history that deliberately makes visibile, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices […]. To attempt to provincialize this ‘Europe’ is to see the modern as inevitably contested, to write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connection that draw sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’ creates. (45-46)

3Such a narrative of human connection that draws on ‘dreamed-up pasts and futures’ is the story of the novel form within the context of Indian literature. As a form of narrative that is often found in competition with history, the novel, more than history, is invested with an increased capacity to ponder on the meanings of events. Initially a British import, like the English language itself, the novel has made an impressive career in India. Contemporary Indian writers writing in English—of which a lot are non-resident Indians—are among the most marketable and widely read by global English-reading audiences. One of the reasons behind this success might be the fact that this particular narrative genre overlapped an already well-established tradition of storytelling that goes back to the mainly oral transmission of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The epics provided a wealth of techniques that helped refresh a genre, which, according to some critics, had reached exhaustion in the West.

4I would like to extend Chakrabarty’s model of ‘provincialising’ the authority of the Western cultural and political discourse to one representative of non-resident Indian fiction, Vikram Chandra, and his novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The novel is a framed collection of stories told by Sanjay, the white monkey who regains human consciousness from a previous nineteenth-century life, and Abhay, a former student in the United States like the author himself who, as he returns from America upon completion of his studies, fails to readjust to Indian realities. After his near-fatal accidental shooting by Abhay, Sanjay is given one last chance to prolong his life by Yama, the Hindu god of death: like Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights, he must entertain his executioner (in this case Yama himself) by telling him stories. Encouraged by Hanuman, the monkey-god, and Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who took down the Mahabharata from the bard Vyasa, both protectors of storytellers and characters in Chandra’s novel, Sanjay signs a contract with Yama. As he is too weak from the wound to fulfil the contract himself, the obligation is carried out with the help of Abhay, who in the end inherits the storytelling mission from Sanjay and continues it after his death, assisted by Abhay’s parents, Ashok and Mrinalini. The contract binds the storyteller to please not just Yama, but a whole audience of children (the best judges of stories), who even contribute to the storytelling with prompts and encouragement, like the audiences of traditional Indian oral storytellers. This opens the text up to a whole series of metafictional comments on how to tell a good story and even shifts the emphasis from the storyteller, whose survival is the initial target of the storytelling process, to the storytelling itself, which continues even after Sanjay’s death and, presumably, after the end of the novel.

5Red Earth and Pouring Rain functions on the basis of this shift of emphasis from plot development (with its aim of a dénouement) to the process of storytelling and the digressions in it. The meanings of events (like digressions in the traditional Indian epics) prevail over their dynamics, yet everything is ultimately subordinated to the process of telling. This move from what we could call ‘the English (or European) way’, i.e. the plot-oriented way of telling a story, to an ‘Indian way’ (more interested in digressive comments and side stories that further pursue certain lines of thought) is a formal gesture and a political one at the same time. A narrative that otherwise would have been about the usual postcolonial plot (the Empire writing back to the centre) becomes one that escapes containment within dichotomous categories of thinking and ultimately states that the most important thing of all is not what happens in the story, but that the story should be kept going.

6This formal artifice is a powerful subversive strategy that not only challenges the novel form, but also liberates the postcolonial discourse from its own neocolonial shadows. The only indication of it on the level of content is the chapter ‘In London, a Battle Between Immortals’ which occurs towards the end of the novel. There is one scene, set in the urban space of nineteenth-century London, which provides, through a reading of London’s criminal underground (inspired from stories such as Jack the Ripper’s) a totally different perspective on the whole book. This scene—of a murder, seen not through the eyes of the Empire’s detectives (who prove useless), but through the eyes of an Indian who reads in it the workings of the Empire’s troubled subconscious—becomes an inverted narrative of the Empire. Britain, recently victorious in India (through the smothering of the 1857 sepoy mutiny and the crowning of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in 1876) is here exposed as drawing on India’s blood. The murder of Mary Kelly, a pregnant prostitute, by Sarthey, a former British medical doctor in India—who therefore was carrying on the mission of the Empire through his job—becomes allegorical of India’s being abused by the imperial metropolis: ‘See. See. See, India, this is your womb. This is your heart. This is your bone’ (570). The mysterious Sarthey—a kind of mixed embodiment of the promises held by colonialism in India through its alleged civilising mission and of its hidden murderous impulses—appears for the first time many pages before the actual London scene features him as a key character. We encounter a Sarthi who wants to study the Vedas (221) and who represents the British colonial power that wants to ‘take’ possession of the sacred Hindu scriptures, the heart of Indian culture, in order to control India. This episode resonates with the one later in the novel when Sarthey, an alternative version of Jack-the-Ripper, literally murders ‘India’. Later on Sanjay reads his own description in one of Sarthey’s books in the British Library Reading room. During his years in India, Sarthey researched a book entitled The Manners, Customs, and Rituals of the Natives of Hindustan; being chiefly an account of the journeys of a Christian through the lands of the Hindoo, and his appeal to…, for the benefit of which he wanted to study the sacred books of the Vedas, to which only the twice-born Brahmins normally have access. Here we see life and history mingling, a reflection of how Chandra himself was inspired to write this novel by discovering the story of nineteenth-century British colonel James ‘Sikander’ Skinner in the Library of Columbia University, and then upon receiving letters from his real-life descendants:

Sanjay, a native I thought of some promise, chiefly in consequence of his smattering of education, which he had acquired willy-nilly; however I was to be predictably disappointed, since the man, in a characteristic turn of emotion, for no particular reason, conceived a hatred of me and attempted to steal my books and notes, in which project he was thwarted. (562)

7As he reads this account, Sanjay realises that there can be no cooperation, but only conflict between Sarthey and himself, situated as they are at the opposite poles of the colonial encounter. As life and narrative borrow from each other, Sanjay decides to replicate Sarthey’s colonial mission by trying in his turn to conquer London. He pursues his search for the ultimate meaning of his life (placed in a kind of allegorical tuning with the symbolic meanings of India’s history, marked by the compromise with the English) first by learning to be like the English through performing Englishness:

That night Sanjay left his hotel and walked the streets of London as an Englishman; he found that if he strode confidently he was stared at but left alone, and he had confidence because he wore the clothes of a gentleman… (553)

8This roleplay allows Sanjay, the colonised subject who has nothing left to lose—as this scene takes place at a time when he is actually dead, yet ‘still not delivered from memory and from experience’ (544)—to study the appropriate strategy for his joint venture against Yama—the Hindu god of death—and, at the same time, against the English colonisation of India, embodied in Sanjay’s life story by Sarthey, whose ultimate meaning, as spelt out by the London murder scene, is also death. Sanjay’s version of inverted colonisation of the metropolis consists of his conquest of Englishness, in revenge against his Indian self being murdered by the Empire. His refusal to die —both as an individual who has ‘unfinished business’ and as an Indian (who has not closed his accounts with the British) is both a sign of individual revolt and a commitment to his nation. This is also a reminder that, like a living body, the story we are witnessing and have thus become part of should not be allowed to die. Sanjay can’t die because he has to ‘go to London’ (546). He sets out for London naked and with no speech, it takes him years to reach the end of his journey and finally he arrives to meet the same Sarthi (whose name is now spelt ‘Sarthey’).

9Sanjay emphasises his right to Englishness and, by extension, to the English language, in which Chandra’s novel is also written. This appropriation of English in order to construct a variety of Englishness, the Indian variety, is related to the metamorphosis of the novel form, an English import too. As regards the storytelling process at this stage, though, it is significant that the exploration of the meanings of English implicit in the novel, through Sanjay’s encounter with his own Englishness, goes hand in hand with metafictional comments on the technical requirements of a story (or, rather, of a real ‘ocean’ of stories) about hybrid identities. Sanjay swallows the English letters and sacrifices his tongue to Yama (Chandra 1995: 504) in order to be able to speak English. English has become, through adoption, but at the price of centuries of colonialism, one of the Indian languages. However, his Englishness is bound to remain hyphenated—a matter of performance—, as he tells Abberline, a London policeman who does not understand him entirely:

My name is Parasher.
You are not English.
I am. But I am Indian.
How can you be English, if you are an Indian?
It is precisely because I am an Indian that I am English. (576)

10Englishness is defined as a lack rather than a gain. Chotta describes it to his brother Sanjay (who consequently takes the mission of conquering Englishness upon himself) in terms that show it as inevitably conditioned by the sacrifice of India: ‘I was to be a prince, a Rajput, a soldier. I was sure of myself. Today I am nothing. Do you know how I am nothing? It is because I am an Anglo-Indian, which is that thing nobody owns’ (523). This lack is reflected in the London scene, charged with a negative meaning that only appears to be of a different sort. In fact, London is not an actual city in Chandra’s novel, but rather an ‘imaginary figure’, like Chakrabarty’s Europe, which is there to represent something other than it seems. We do however read a description of the city, depicted as a body with a life of its own (in the distressing guise of a dirty corrupted industrialised place, devastated by poverty and crime, as we are later to find out):

London swam up on the port bow under a deep red sky, and as Sanjay watched from the rail he had to cover his nose, because a close odour rose from the river; the water was black and viscous, and the smell surprised him because he could hardly remember being affected by his body, he had learned to ignore the flesh, but now the reek made him gag and his eyes steam. It was a smell he had never encountered before, and he knew it was not human, it was the city, huge and electrified and gassed and geared—it was the apparatus itself that emptied itself out into the watercourse; the rooftops were endless and black to the horizon, and as the ship moved slowly to the dock, the water surged against the stones like oil, and Sanjay felt as if he were being drawn into a mouth. (548)

11This description resonates with accounts of Victorian London such as those in Dickens’s novels. We are exposed to brief but poignant scenes of what it means to be walking the Victorian streets (to borrow the title of Deborah Nord’s book on the representation of women and prostitution in Victorian London) and, by extension, to be exploited by the metropolis. The terrible scene of Mary Kelly’s murder (the details of which are too gory to be repeated) ends with an association that suggests the rape of India by the British Empire:

… he picks up her hand and places it slowly and surely in her stomach, in the red cavity where her stomach used to be, the room is red, he places her hand in herself, he is speaking, his voice is steady and calm and low, Sanjay can hear each word clearly, Sarthey says: ‘See. See. See, India, this is your womb. This is your heart. This is your bone.’ (570)

12The fact that Sanjay—who has postponed his death through striking an understanding with Yama, the Hindu god of death, in order to go to London as his karma requires—is the only one who can solve the mystery of the London murders is not without significance. As he knows Sarthey from India, where the latter used to be a medical doctor (even though back in England he turns into a serial murderer), Sanjay has access to information about him that nobody else has. He can thus tell that the murderer’s mind is set upon a higher goal than common street murder and that it has to do with the tragedy of India’s being colonised by people who fail to understand the country completely. The whole novel aims at reaching a similar wider message, meant to subvert the violence of the imperial centre by looking at it from the perspective of the colonised, of which this scene is the key.

13Sanjay’s mission of ‘saving’ India, which costs him his life and reincarnation as an animal, is however not just about his detective mission of finding Sarthey in London. He fulfils it more thoroughly through his Scheherazade-like narrative (an instance of the postcolonial urge to rewrite history as storytelling for survival) upon other people whose lives he does save (even though he cannot save his own). While the chief audience-figure, the little girl Saira, is literally saved from imminent death by storytelling, the one who is actually empowered throughout the process of becoming a storyteller is Abhay, the American-returned Indian student (a reflection of the author-figure) who would have lost himself in the process of wavering between two cultures if it hadn’t been for the stories in which he reinvents himself. In this we read Chandra’s own self-initiating endeavour directed at opening up and appropriating the novel form (a British import to India) to accommodate Indian content. The level that is most affected by this endeavour is that of the textuality of the text, whose ‘Indianness’ is to be seen both in its language and in its subversive political meaning. We can detect in Chandra’s text a set of ‘provincialising’ techniques that not only make it possible to express this kind of subversion, but also adopt an innovative type of textuality, which I will call nomadic.

14Attempts have been made by poststructuralist criticism to describe such changes in narrative textuality that liberate it from the tyranny of a centre of meaning, a gesture with high subversive potential with respect to discourses of power. The free play of textuality and reading is recognised as the main source of meaning, which dethrones the importance of authorial intention (as suggested by Roland Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’). The author’s function in the process of meaning-production becomes secondary to the interplay between the text, the context and the reader. In Of Grammatology, Derrida famously signals the absence of any extra-textual ‘reality’ on which the text might be based: ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’.2 This implies that the founding assumption of the realist novel—that there is a reality which this kind of narrative aims to mirror—is not justified, since both the ‘reality’ and its mirrored representation are texts. Thus reading becomes the performance of an intertextual act in which on the one hand the text of reading is not the same as the text of writing and on the other hand le hors-texte—the ‘reality’ outside the text which represents the reader’s baggage, the perspective from which he/she will approach the text—is also a text, on an equal footing with the text of the reading. The text, in which everything, even outside reality, is to be found, turns from a given product into a fluid process in the making or, to use Roland Barthes’ terminology, it turns from ‘work’ to ‘text’. Barthes draws a distinction between an older understanding of the ‘work’ as a static given and the more fluid, dynamic ‘text’ in the following terms:

The difference is as follows: the work is a fragment of substance, it occupies a portion of the spaces of books (for example, in a library). The Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (though not reproduce term for term) a distinction proposed by Lacan: ‘reality’ is shown [se montre], the ‘real’ is proved [se démontre]; in the same way, the work is seen (in bookstores, in card catalogues, on examination syllabuses), the text is demonstrated, is spoken according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language: it exists only when caught up in a discourse (or rather it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself to be so); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work which is the Text’s imaginary tail. Or again: the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production. (Barthes 1986: 57-58)

15If the work is given in a supposedly final version once and for all, the text is always a dynamic process in the making, in production, in which writing is supplemented by orality, a ‘methodological space’ of movement that relies on the potential of language for meaning-production. ‘The text is plural’, Barthes shows, it ‘depends not on interpretation, however liberal, but on an explosion, on dissemination’. Through its plurality, the text manifests a potential for dissent from established codes or laws, which the work represents, and for permanent negotiation of meaning with the reader. It has a plural or demonic texture opposed to the monologism of the law which, through its very plurality, it continuously challenges (Barthes 1986: 59-61), as in Kafka’s story ‘Before the Law’ on which Derrida bases his essay with the same title (Derrida 1992: 181-220).

16In contemporary Indian fiction in English, such dynamic textualities ‘in production’ are achieved through the incorporation of traditional Indian storytelling in the writing of the novelistic text. Given the English origin of the novel in India, this gesture acquires a significant political meaning. In Red Earth and Pouring Rain, the interchange between storyteller and audience is reinstated every time by the magic word ‘Listen’, which has the power of a mantra, a magic invocation meant to lure the audience into the world of the story. Thus the dividing line between the text of storytelling and the extra-textual ‘reality’ to which the audience belongs is blurred, so that everything becomes a continuous Barthesian text:

I looked around. Mrinalini was seated just outside the door, ready to read out the typed sheets to my little allies in the courtyard. Ashok and Abhay sat next to each other, behind the desk. Saira sat next to me, on the bed, holding sheets of paper and spare rolls of ribbon. I could hear the birds outside, in their thousands, and see the leaves on the hedge beyond the window, turned gold by the setting sun.
‘All right. Listen…’ (24)

17Writing (or typing), in its interplay with oral storytelling, causes a deferral of meaning (as opposed to the immediacy of speech) and thus justifies the story’s constant return to previous points for clarification. Thus meaning becomes dynamic and has to be redefined in motion every time, as it reflects the characters’ movements in time (Sanjay) and space (Abhay) and their perpetual search for identity.

18Deleuze and Guattari propose a concept of the nomad which is different from the migrant in that the nomad perceives movement along trajectories as more important than the fixed points on them (380-1). Rosi Braidotti takes Deleuze and Guattari’s theory further and repositions nomadology in the context of the emphasis on process, a useful strategy for feminism to depart from its essentialist deadlocks and to construct a concept of the female nomadic intellectual as a model of a contemporary agent of meaning formation. In theorising a discursive/textual nomadism that can better express the ‘molecularisation of the self’ which she sees as a distinctive feature of the new millennium, Braidotti states that what she calls ‘my desire for nomadism’ is in fact a commitment to a refashioning of discursive practices that would ‘suspend all attachment to established discourses’ (18). Braidotti signals the emergence of a nomadic type of discourse which, I would like to suggest, makes a successful career in contemporary Indian fiction in English.

19To represent a hybrid, travelling version of Indianness, placed at the same time between the Indian understanding of the self as part of a community and the Western perception of the individual as an entity in its own right, Chandra uses a nomadic approach to textuality. Sanjay’s story is a retelling of his life intertwined with the history of colonial India, while the interpretation of all these narratives seems to be always in the making. Chandra treats this in terms of an ironical symbolism, which challenges, through its materiality, the idea that national and ethnic identities are inborn categories. To a great extent, Sanjay’s and his brother’s stories, well anchored in history, are linking elements between other narratives, ensuring the continuity of the storytelling process, as well as the continuity between story and history. It is here that the novel’s complicated narrative web makes room for Chandra’s real life source of inspiration—the life of Colonel James ‘Sikander’ Skinner, the starting-point of Chandra’s narrative meditation on hybrid identities. The different realities of history—through Skinner—and myth—through Hindu gods Yama, Ganesha and Hanuman and also through the references to the Mahabharata—are brought together in the storytelling continuum.

20As Sanjay and Abhay share the narrator role, the stories they tell are organised in five parts which recall the five-part structure of the Panchatantra: The Book of War and Ancestors, The Book of Learning and Desolation, The Book of Blood and Journeys, The Book of Revenge and Madness, The Book of the Return. These narratives are the two characters’ life stories, crossed, on a deeper mise-en-abîme level, by the life stories of other people they meet. The several layers of narrative (‘before’, ‘now’ and ‘after’) correspond to various narrative voices. This results in a continuous change of perspective. The third layer, narrated by Abhay’s parents (who are teachers, therefore are entitled to a superior claim to knowledge) is that of What Really Happened—a translation of the Sanskrit word itihasa—and associated with the Mahabharata. As the embedded stories proceed, the history of British colonisation in India is rewritten from the individual perspectives of the characters involved in these stories.

21Great emphasis is placed on storytelling technique and skill. With a view to attaining his goal of saving Sanjay through luring Yama into the storytelling labyrinth, Hanuman explains how a good story works and thus delivers a lesson in nomadic textuality. An intricate pattern is always necessary: ‘Straightforwardness is the curse of your age, Sanjay. Be wily, be twisty, be elaborate. Forsake grim shortness and hustle’ (24). According to Ganesha, a good story is one that mixes various elements in the right proportions. He describes successful storytelling in terms of a well-balanced mixture of feelings, of European and Oriental narratives and characters (Benoit de Boigne, George Thomas, Ram Mohan, Janvi and many others), like ingredients in an elaborate meal:

Grief. Love. Love. Love for the lover, love for the mother. Love for the land. Comedy. Terror. One tremendous villain whom we must love also. All the elements properly balanced and mixed together, item after item, like a perfect meal with a dance of tastes. (124)

22These stories complement one another in a complex series of patterns of similarities and differences experienced in journeys of initiation. At the end of the novel, even though both characters fail, the web of stories remains, stretching across continents and centuries, in a never-ending ritual of storytelling. This ritual is stronger than people, since its dynamic nature spells out the meanings of life and death beyond the individualities of the characters involved in it. This free, generous storytelling set against the prescriptive nature of history as written from the centre is the main tool through which London—and the imperialist discourse attached to it—is provincialised alongside the novel genre itself in this novel. The emphasis is on the journey rather than the fixed points along it, of which London, the metropolis, used to be the main focus. The spiral storytelling pattern is the main tool through which conflicts and crises are overcome. At the end of the novel, Abhay—the implied author-in-the-text—claims storytelling as an organic, life-giving process which cannot be stopped, invested with a great power to establish points of communication between all people and events. As he walks out of the hospital where Saira, his ideal audience, lies ill, yet is feeling better, he walks straight into a world of stories that demand to be told:

I tell my elders that I will be back, and then I walk out, out of the room and out of the building, into the street. There are people walking about the gates, cars and scooters passing by. I take a deep breath. I am mad, perhaps I will be arrested. Will I wander barefoot in the streets of Delhi, will you exile me from this city I love? Will you listen to me? Will you stone me, will you imprison me? I cannot care, I must tell a story. Listen. I am about to tell a story. […] I will tell you a story that will grow like a lotus vine, that will twist in on itself and expand ceaselessly, till all of you are part of it, and the gods will come to listen, till we are all talking in a musical hubbub that contains the past, every moment of the present, and all the future. (616-7)