South/South, South/North Conversations: South Africa, India, the West

??? COMPAKATLST SOUTH/SOUTH, SOUTH/NORTH CONVERSATIONS: SOUTH AFRICA, INDIA, THE WEST Michael Chapman The new century might have suggested new possibilities for comparative study. The end ofthe Cold War, the symbolic end ofracism in the demise of apartheid, the potential ofinformation-age communication, taken together , could have been conducive to comparison as a mode ofconstructing , enlarging, and enriching the cultural life. Instead of flexible interchanges , however, millennial reactions often remind us of Charles Bernheimer 's observation that comparison is "anxiogenic," or too frequently productive of anxiety (1, 2). Certainly it was the competitive model ofthe comparative enterprise that prevailed in the heated exchange that followed Salman Rushdie's remarks in a special fiction issue of The New Yorker that appeared in 1997. The issue, "India Focus," marked the fiftieth anniversary ofIndian independence and provoked the comment by Rushdie that Indian literature in English represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. In his response in the IndiaStar Review of Books C. J. S. Wallia points angrily to the condescending title of Rushdie's article ("Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!") and concludes that not only does Rushdie disdain India's thirteen highly developed languages, but that Midnight's Children is not the utterly original work it is often cited as being in the West. Wallia's comments hark back to the early assessments of Rushdie's novel by the Indian critics Feroza Jussawalla and Urna Parameswaran, both of whom drew attention to Rushdie's imitation of G. V. Desani, a writer who showed how English could be bent and kneaded until it spoke in an authentic Indian voice. Wallia is pleased, at least, that in the article under attack Rushdie, albeit grudgingly, concedes that he learned a trick or two from Desani (5). Unfortunately, such reactions involving "them" and "us" have come to characterize comparative study of the center and the edge, or the métropole and the periphery, or the rich North and the poor South, to use the terms of postcolonialism, whether the South be India, South America, Africa, or even—I suspect—the former Eastern Europe. We are reminded that comparison does indeed continue to produce anxiety. Instead of transcending the divide of the colonial, or colonized experience, argument continually re-inscribes the dichotomy. Instead of centers and edges finding open conversation between different understandings, different vocabularies, and different cultural paradigms, antagonists remain locked in reactive response. The voice of the métropole, often the self-exile of diasporic inclination, empties experience at the edge of its Vol. 26 (2002): 5 SOUTH AFRICA, INDIA, THE WEST politics and history by placing it in the textual inflections of Western academic and literary pronouncement. Or, so the critic at the edge might charge. Thus Aijaz Ahmad—like Wallia—sees postcolonial studies as essentially a fashion ofthe center while ArifDirlik typecasts postcolonial figures—the Rushdies, Spivaks, and Homi Babbhas—as a set of elite transnational intellectuals who, from the comfort of the metropolis, enunciate further discourses that marginalize the problems and struggles of those who remain the victims of Euro-American power. As far as critics like Ahmad and Dirlik are concerned, the impact ?? Midnights Children has not so much to do with its contribution to Indian literature in English; rather it is that behind terms such as hybridism and creolization —terms associated with the colonized native of the South— Rushdie employed a less radical, more familiar method: that of modernist or postmodernist style, a style usually associated with the self-referring art worlds, even the art religions of the West. As Wallia reminds Rushdie, the "style" oí Midnight's Children does not accord with the styles ofvery many major Indian writers, including Ghosh, Desai, Seth, and Narayan. In these writers the life experience of people is rooted in the realism of tradition, or folk wisdom, before it is rudely wrenched into yet another adaptation of the self-exile: that of magical realism. To which Arnab Chakladar adds that the Indian literature favored by the First-World academy is that which most closely approximates Western postmodernism's image ofitself: an observation that could be applied no doubt to writing from South...