Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World by Chelva Kanaganayakam (review)

HUMANlTIES 279 Compounding these contextual problems is the book's relative slightness. With just over 120 pages of its total length devoted to the authors' own account of the history and significance of the PFS, it 'is little wonder that both the mass communications and film historical aspects of the project receive s~ort shrift. As a film historian, I appreciate the primary source material this volume incorporates (including an unpublished volume from the origmal PFS), but not at the expense of a more fully elaborated account of the importance of the PFS to this period in film history. I suspect mass communications scholars will find the book somewhat deficient for their purposes as well. As scrupulous and helpful a research document as Children and the Movies is, ultimately it does not provide a useful model of how to meld the fields of film and communication studies. (CHARLIE KEIL) Chelva Kanaganayakam. Configurations ofExile: South Asian Writers and Their World TSAR Publications 1995· 159· $16·95 Configurations ofExile is a collection of interviews with twelve writers from arotmd the globe: nine men and three women, five people who continue to live in the countries where they grew up and seven who do not. They write poetry, novels, fables, memoirs, autobiography, travel narrative, and history. They have all travelled - most have gone abroad to study, either to Britain, Canada, Australia, or the United States; many, if not all, have travelled to India - but their journeys have had different points of origin and different points of arrival. The one thing the writers have in common is that they write in English. And yet they can be distinguished from other writers in English because all twelve must come to terms with South Asia, even the five who have never lived there and who write about Fiji, Singapore, Africa, or the Caribbean. Chelva Kanaganayakam can ask all these writers about India because, wherever they now live and however far they have travelled, they have grown up among words and names and ways of doing that point to South Asia. Kirpal Singh, a Singaporean Sikh, can say, 'I have never been to Jalandhar where I come from.' This paradox, that the self is more than what it has experienced, that it is shapedby others who carne before,is what interestsKanaganayakam. Indeed, the interviews are arranged neither chronologically by date of birth or date of interview nor geographically by place of birth or of residence, but in alphabetical order by surname, as if to emphasize the centrality of something more mysterious , arbitrary, and ineluctable than time or space in the constitution of identity: whatever it is that one receives with the name of one's father or husband. It is' the outsider's eye that sees Parsis and Sikhs, Tamils and Burghers, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans as having more in common than they have 280 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 things that separate them. In Australia, Canada, and Britain, dark skins encounter white racism. In East Africa and Fiji, Indianness is deffued against other identities seen as indigenous. In Guyana, the Indian majority defines itself against an Africarmess that is the majority culture of the Caribbean. The category of 'South Asian' which Kanaganayakam interrogates is therefore as much a function of distance from Asia as it is of 'COImection to Asia, something the titleConfigurations ofExile itselfindicates. These writers all feel they must answer Kanaganayakam's questions about Indianness, even if no two answer in quite the same way. Kanaganayakam wonders if a common ancestry affords these authors 'similar cultural assumptions, ones that are evident in their use of language, form or myth.' This would be difficult to prove. Kanaganayakam does prove, however, that ancestry is no less legitimate and useful a category for the understanding of literature than are national or universal groupings. A book of interviews such as this one will inevitably be divided in its interests. Students of any of these authors will turn to Configurations ofExile as a scholarly resource. The decorum required by interviews means that Kanaganayakam can offer no negative aesthetic judgments of his own. He does not, however, shy away from difficult questions. Kanaganayakam's larger project, an interrogation of the meaning...