“Ambiguity is the driving force or the nuclear reaction behind my creativity”: An E-conversation with M. G. Vassanji

Note: This email correspondence with M. G. Vassanji took place between November 10 and December 30, 2010. It was intended as a broad-ranging conversation on topics that arise from Vassanji’s work. At the end of the exchange, the transcript was edited for clarity, but the general tenor and development of the conversation were retained.

Desai:

Mr. Vassanji, thank you for taking the time out of your busy writing schedule to engage in this email exchange, which I hope will allow us to discuss both specific issues that are raised in your books as well as more general questions about the nature of interpersonal and intercultural relations that all of your work addresses. In deference to Miss Penny [The Gunny Sack], let us begin at the beginning—India—which in your specific case ironically means beginning with your latest work, A Place Within: Rediscovering India. As I read through this marvelous travelogue and memoir, I kept asking myself to be on the lookout for the specifically African traces in the book. After all, there have been many who have written on India, but few, I think have reached it, coming originally from East Africa and routed through the US and Canada. There are, of course, experiences you describe that resonate with your earlier work, such as Juma’s peeping at Bombay through the porthole of a ship (based, we now know, on a similar story told about your own father), but there are also other points of connection. In what ways, might you say, your African heritage influenced what you saw or didn’t see in India?

Vassanji:

My African heritage was of course an African-Indian heritage. I was brought up on the streets of Dar es Salaam, so to speak, as a member of an Indian community. In the US and Canada I had already studied the history of East Africa in the colonial period, which pertains to my history. When I went to India, I couldn’t help but try to understand or find myself vis à vis India. Before I went there, I saw India as ancestral and alien, but also as being familiar. When I arrived there it seemed so much less alien than I had thought. It looked familiar! But there were little things which I noticed in India as an East African that delighted me—“East African Motors” in Gujarat, the name of a car dealership; a taxi driver who was on his way to work in Dar es Salaam; a “hundred”-year-old woman who had been married away to a man from Dar. Jamnagar reminded me in many ways of the Dar in which I had grown up, but that area was of course the Indian area, its architecture Gujarati. I recall the thrill of seeing African Indians—the Sidis—and feeling some affinity with them, noticing the irony or coincidence that my ancestors hailed not far away from the area where these African Indians lived; I had the near temptation to speak to them in Swahili! In Gujarat, particularly, people knew of Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam, etc. So I would say that these visits I made were basically to understand and reconnect to my Indian-ness, but any reminder I saw of East Africa interested me, sometimes thrilled me. I could not help but notice, from the beach at Calicut, the direction in which Africa lay.

Desai:

I’m glad you mentioned the Sidis, because in many ways they are a community that most other observers to India would probably not have noticed, had they not come from Africa or perhaps the African diaspora. What you note about your encounters with them, though, is telling—in many ways they have been so Indianized over the generations that the genealogical connection with Africa seems to remain in many cases a trace. Such Indianization has not necessarily resulted in any form of upward mobility or access to mainstream society. As a contrast, I was struck by your candid discussion of the divisions among Hindus and Muslims that...