(B)ordering Naipaul: Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics

Diaspora 5:2 1996 (B)ordering Naipaul: Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics Vijay Mishra Murdoch University Despite the solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. V.S. Naipaul, House 390 All diasporas are unhappy but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way. There are two types of (unhappy) Indian diasporas: the old diaspora of exclusivism, the new of the border.1 V.S. Naipaul belongs to the former, Salman Rushdie to the latter (Mishra, "Diasporic" 421-47). For most people the Indian diaspora of the border is theoretically the more exciting: it feeds easily into late modern questions about ethnicity, postcolonialism, and the idea of the nation-state. It is the natural place to go to for researchers working on questions of migration, the role of electronic bulletin boards, web sites, fusion music, and the cultural logic of what Gayatri Spivak has called "transnationality" (Spivak, "Diasporas" 245). The old, created "before the world was thoroughly consolidated as transnational," (Spivak, "Diasporas" 245) seems to have faded, lost in the mistaken security ofits "familiar temporariness," lost too in its own nineteenth-century fossil-world (V.S. Naipaul, House 194). It is a remarkably closed world, made up of people whose "journey had been final" and who had become resilient to the point of annoyance (V.S. Naipaul, Area 29). It cannot understand India, "an area [only] of the imagination" but without its memory, it cannot function (V.S. Naipaul, Area 42). Large numbers do not speak any Indian language—"its language not even half understood ," Naipaul had written {Enigma 111)—yet eat Indian food; do not understand the rituals of Indian religions (whether Hinduism, Islam, or Sikhism) but practice them nevertheless. As India "became more and more golden in their memory" they inscribed the Motherland into the new geographical spaces they occupied by reenacting village rituals, songs and epic fragments (V.S. Naipaul, Enigma 130). Against this relatively closed, "quaint" world 189 Diaspora 5:2 1996 (reconstituted into meaning and a totality through material or imaginary residues of the homeland), the diaspora of the border is the site of hybridity, change, "newness," mobility, and almost everything else that goes by the name of postcolonial theory. The real significance ofthis way of characterizing diasporas ofborder is that the first diaspora of exclusivism will in time collapse into that of the border. Altogether against the grain of postcolonial theory and against the inevitable collapse of the distinction I have advanced, in this essay I want to return to the old Indian diaspora of exclusivism. What is its background? How can we rethink its importance in the general history of diasporas? I want to address these questions by connecting the works of V.S. Naipaul to the history of Indian indenture, with specific reference to the West Indies. In doing so, I want to return to historical specificities, to the singular, the arbitrary, and the contingent within the larger project of a late modern reading (after Foucault) ofthe Enlightenment project as an attitude that would lead to a permanent critique of our historical era. In line with this understanding ofthe [Enlightenment] project, the manner in which the material will be examined is going to be archaeological and genealogical and not transcendental. The structures that I would seek to identify are not universal ones (be it knowledge or moral action) but historical ones that emphasize what we do as historical persons inextricably linked to concepts of race, class, and power. I begin by stressing historical confinements, limited and delimiting historical experiences, and then rework them back into the domain of the literary as a mode of aesthetic freedom or release. Within such an analytic, there are two further points that need to be mentioned. The first relates to indenture background, the second to Naipaul's own modernity. I read Indian indenture through a critical postcolonial frame of reference and bias. As I understand this procedure, the analytic, if rigorously pursued, would take us to an exploration of the specific conditions of plantation life and to the establishment of...