Abstract
In October of 1951, G. V. Desani returned to India from Britain, where he had been living and working for more than a decade. Drawing on previously unexamined archival material, this article considers Desani’s return journey and experience of India through the written record he left in his unpublished travelogue, The Indian Journal (1951–1958). Reading the manuscript of the Journal as an example of “autoethnographic expression”, this study pays close attention to Desani’s engagement with the modalities of representation made familiar through the textual apparatus of earlier narratives of European exploration and travel to India, yet suggests that he enacts complex, and at times fraught negotiations with these discursive and symbolic modes of colonial space-making. Through reference to the sections of the journal recounting the formative months of his travels, where he restages psychically disruptive and spatially disorienting moments of encounter, this article explores the ways in which Desani charts the Indian environment through an alternative topography, one contrasting sharply with that conventionally narrativized in Eurocentric accounts of travel to India.
First published in 1948, Indian author G. V. Desani’s lone novel, All About H. Hatterr, holds a unique position in histories of post-war metropolitan publishing: few surveys of the field fail to mention the work, and critics often include it in cultural accounts of the period as an inaugurating moment in the developing literatures of postcoloniality (see, e.g., Weiss, 2009: 166–7; Nasta, 2005: 570; Salgado, 2000: 31). Credited elsewhere with “introducing an aesthetic and linguistic modernism to Indian letters” (Joshi, 2002: 235), and often compared to James Joyce, Desani is, however, cited most frequently in relation to Salman Rushdie’s acknowledged debt to All About H. Hatterr as a literary model for his own writing. Rushdie’s numerous endorsements of Hatterr (see, e.g., 1982a, 1982b: 19–20, 1997: xviii) did much to precipitate the canonization of the work. Yet, as Amardeep Singh has pointed out, even as he is extolled as a literary innovator and is “often mentioned by postcolonial literary critics”, Desani nonetheless remains “rarely read” (2010: 89).
Representing a recuperative exploration of a complex biography and literary reputation that have more usually been characterized in terms of conspicuous gaps and elisions, this article offers a reading of a previously unexamined text authored by Desani, his unpublished The Indian Journal (1951–1958). The series of manuscript notebooks comprising the Journal (held with Desani’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas, Austin) form the foundation of a further work that was planned by him, ostensibly a travel memoir chronicling the period following his return to India in the early 1950s. While commentators have often noted his sudden and largely unexplained departure from mid-twentieth-century Britain, given the lack of any new publications by him beyond the revised editions of Hatterr and his subsequent offering of Hali: A Play — the genre defying work he went on to publish with Saturn Press in 1950 — the interlude of the decade and a half or so he spent firstly in India, and latterly, travelling to Southeast Asia and Australia, has more often than not been described as an extended period of silence. Relying, for example, on the rare snippets of anecdotal biographical information gleaned from his later journalism and essays, Singh suggests that Desani’s departure from Britain was solely for the purpose of furthering his study of Hindu and Buddhist religious philosophy and devotional practices, and that upon arriving in India he “went into total religious seclusion for about ten years, during which time he wrote nothing at all” (2010: 92). Likewise, emphasizing the presumed “voicelessness” of these later years, Amitav Ghosh speculates that the hiatus in Desani’s creative output was most likely a conscious decision, one evolving organically from his acute awareness of the inadequacies of language and “the incommensurability of what he wanted to say with the language he was saying it in” (2000: n.p.). While this is no doubt a concern shared by many Indian authors who choose to write in English, “Desani was unique”, Ghosh insists, “in that he alone had the courage to follow his perceptions to their natural conclusion — into the unreachable otherness of silence” (2000: n.p.).
The archival record, on the other hand, indicates that Desani remained invested in his writing throughout this period. Correspondences and journal entries from the earliest days of his trip suggest that the primary motivation for his voyage was, in fact, his creative life. While not wholly rooted (as Ghosh implies) in the question of the choice of which language to write in, by late 1951 Desani had arrived at a personal and professional impasse. Plagued by ill health, he was at the same time struggling with a pervasive sense of creative dereliction, at one stage describing this as an all-encompassing and “insistent futility” (HRC R16252, IJ, Notebook 1: 4) which left him feeling utterly defeated. 1 He attributed these feelings in some measure to the disappointingly lukewarm critical reception and limited commercial success of Hali (1950). At the time of its publication this work had met with a generally bemused critical response: it presented a problem to reviewers, who were troubled by its seemingly wilful formal indeterminacy, with many suggesting that it could not by rights be categorized as a play. They were equally perplexed by the attendant estranging effect of Hali’s obscurity of reference which, even as he endorsed the book in its foreword, E. M. Forster had cautioned was dependent “upon a private mythology — a dangerous device” (Desani, 1950: 11). Judging himself creatively misunderstood, Desani thus left Britain with the hope that a period of travel might help to counter the personal and artistic disorientation he was experiencing, that his health would be restored, and that his creative impulse would be reawakened once more. Envisioned at the outset as only a temporary respite, his return to India was therefore not entirely dissimilar to the leisured “travel as rest-cure” (Clark, 1999: 14) journeys chronicled in earlier centuries.
The Indian Journal is itself a prolific document. Spanning seven consecutive years, and comprising 14 successive notebooks, the collective volumes of the manuscript amount to almost 3000 pages of handwritten text. The individual entries, each ranging in length from a few sentences to a number of pages, are relatively consistent in their chronology; while Desani did not write in the journal every day there are few substantial gaps in the continuity of entries for the period of time that they cover. 2 Commencing in October 1951, the text briefly charts his outward journey across continental Europe via slow cargo ship, and provides a record of his experience in India up until 1958. It is written principally in English, though with his characteristic linguistic flexibility, Desani makes use of Hindi words and phrases throughout. In signalling a retreat, however, from the modulated tone and highly stylized language of his experimental fiction, the Journal involves a far more direct inscription of the self. Although Desani (notably, in contrast to most diarists) does not offer anything like an opening statement of intent, it does seem as if he had initially anticipated it to resemble a standard travelogue, one in which his everyday experiences and impressions of India would be recorded. And yet, entirely consistent with the fluid boundaries of the diary form, it eventually evolved into a type of trans-generic repository, used alternately as a space for taking down drafts and sketches, capturing sensations and images relating directly to his travel experience, but also as a vehicle for gathering testimony about his life, both past and present — indeed, the text is brimming with self-revelatory details of an often confessional tenor.
During his solitary and often difficult travels around India, the extended notebooks of the Journal provided Desani with a refuge, and he understood that they captured an immediacy of experience. While remaining essentially a private document, as early as 1952 he had intimated to his New York publisher, Stanley Young of Farrar, Straus and Young, that he was occupied with a new writing project, pitching the Journal to him as “a ‘normal’ book for a change” (HRC SYC, 26 June 1952). Writing to Young again two years later, he maintained that his work in progress was something that the publisher would certainly be interested in: “The Indian Journal. It is a slow enterprise, but most fascinating experience has been coming my way recently […] and I think you would find it fascinating too” (HRC SYC, 27 April 1954). Select passages from the text were eventually reworked as instances of travel journalism or comment pieces published mainly in The Times Illustrated Weekly of India throughout the 1960s, with some of the material finding its way into the regular, anonymized column (“Very High and Very Low”) that he contributed to the magazine between May 1966 and November 1967. A shorter piece drawing directly on material from the journals also appeared under the title “India, for the plain hell of it” in a 1997 special edition of The New Yorker magazine on Indian fiction, edited by Salman Rushdie (Desani, 1997). Additionally, there is clear indication within the manuscript that Desani revisited parts of the text at a later date and began the initial stages of editing it for potential publication. In various interviews given across the latter decades of his life he made repeated references to a non-fiction book about India which he intended to revise and to publish as a whole — given his conviction that the publication of such a work had been foretold in the Nadi Shastra palm leaf texts he had dedicated years to studying, one might accurately say that he was haunted by this task. In spite of this, he remained unable to prioritize the considerable undertaking, a fact that in his later life was compounded by his failing eyesight and incapacitation after suffering a series of strokes. It was thus with a deep sense of mourning for work left undone that towards the end of his life Desani referred to The Indian Journal as part of his unfinished atmakatha, or autobiography. 3
In this article I propose that The Indian Journal might be productively considered as an instance of what Mary Louise Pratt has termed “autoethnographic expression”. According to Pratt, this is a category of travel narrative whereby colonized (and we might readily add here formerly colonized) “subjects seek to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms”; a process necessarily involving, she suggests, “partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the conqueror” (1997: 2; emphasis in original). Elsewhere, in her examination of examples of colonial-era travel texts authored by indigenous Indian subjects, Jayati Gupta has considered this co-optation of representational strategies in terms of the licence afforded by a socially determined shared perceptual standpoint. For, as Gupta notes, “‘colonial vision’ was not necessarily [only] the colonizer’s vision but that shared by the colonized elite, who assumed a cultural and moral superiority in terms of values, sensibilities and attitudes” (2008: 65). Within the Journal, the residual aesthetic and ideological traces of certain dominant modalities of representation demonstrably influence Desani’s own attempts to grant textual form to his experience of India. Yet, though he engages with inherited ways of seeing and knowing commonplace to narratives of European exploration and travel to the wider “Orient”, at the same time, he enacts fraught negotiations with these symbolic and discursive modes of colonial space-making. During the formative months of his travels the formal dictates of the travel genre were more often than not experienced by him in terms of their failure to account for the realities of India. Questioning his stylistic choice of a travelogue, and repeatedly contemplating the limits of his own discursive authority, Desani grappled with the legitimacy and function of his project to document India; a struggle, as we shall see, that was to become a conflict of his own subject position in as much as a conflict of genre. Through reference to sections of the journal recounting the early phase of his journey, in which he restages psychically disruptive and spatially disorienting moments of encounter, the following analysis foregrounds such points of incongruence. Focusing in particular on Desani’s apprehensions about the ethical implications of the relationship between him as privileged travelling/observing self and the narrated “others” encountered during his pedestrian wanderings, I suggest that it is in his acute sensitivity to the material plight of the poor and stricken met on his travels that, within the Journal, he is able — albeit perhaps inadvertently — to chart the Indian environment through an alternative topography, one which contrasts sharply, I shall argue, with that conventionally narrativized in earlier, Eurocentric accounts of travel to India.
The “Indian Scene” and the “European eye”
Kate Teltscher has suggested that in many twentieth-century narratives of travel to India, “particularly those published after independence”, the nation “offers a site for the interrogation of the writer’s own identity” (2002: 194). Very early in The Indian Journal, Desani, whose biography had from his earliest years been characterized by multiple relocations and a degree of recursive itinerancy, paused to reflect on the relationship between place and identity. In February of 1952, writing in the journal on board the Norwegian freighter ship Trianon as he set sail from the port of Genoa in Italy on the final leg of his voyage to India, he expressed mixed feelings about his projected destination. Questions of his own exilic belonging were uppermost in his mind. “So many of my fears are gone, or are less”, he wrote, because I realize that I have never had a home — and that every place is my home. I have lived largely independent of environment — and have made one of my own: books, radio, objects, and toys. And it is after years (never did I capture this in 12 years that I have been away) that I feel a sense of joy — however slight, and passing. […] Parting from anything and any creature is a sorrow; a genuine sorrow. But once parted, I do not feel any hurt. (IJ, Notebook 1: 6)
The preliminary deliberations here on his decentred subject position signal an illuminating departure from the discursive regularities of the travel genre. In her account of a generalized “poetics” of travel writing, Debbie Lisle observes that “it is spatial movement that links the journey itself (its ontological status) and the resulting narratives about those journeys (their epistemological status)” (2006: 41). Yet, whereas in a conventional travel narrative the traveller sets out from a fixed point of orientation and moves towards an unfamiliar elsewhere — as Lisle elaborates, “[h]ome is what he [the traveller] knows and understands, and away is what he is making sense of in relation to home” (2006: 42) — in Desani’s formulation this particular characteristic of the travelling subject is dispersed: the polarities of the spatially coded constellations of “home” and “away” are bridged and essentially replaced by a form of unsettled habitation and a provisional, distinctly mobile sense of self and belonging.
It is worth noting, however, that as a travel narrative connected to a particular historical conjuncture — the transition from colonialism to national independence — The Indian Journal is marked by a very specific form of cultural and geographical dislocation. Dislocation may well be the basic condition of the text. Desani’s articulated consciousness of the outsider position he inhabited, the provisionality of his own existence and his ambivalence to place, were no doubt heightened by his double displacement. For although figuring himself as a cosmopolitan, very much at home in the world and able to live, as he puts it, “independent of environment”, he was not just the returning émigré. His travels were not untouched by the recent tumultuous history of the region, which had witnessed the controversial reterritorialization occasioned by the politically driven partitioning of the subcontinent just a few years prior. Uprooted from their ancestral home in Shikarpur, Sindh — now a part of Pakistan — members of Desani’s extended family had in his absence relocated to and were rebuilding their lives in Mumbai, his first port of call upon arriving in India. In spite of his avowed exilic sensibilities, then, his voyage was in a sense the occasion of an unhomely arrival; a return journey paradoxically marked by an interdiction against return, and a severing from a natal “home”. Even while he was keen to know and to understand what he spoke of as the “new India”, as a national landscape, it was to remain for him a highly problematic social and political territory. Alienated from the nation-space, he was equally unconvinced of the promise of progress offered in the name of elite nationalism, expressing in no uncertain terms his antipathy towards the aphoristic “truths” and homogenizing imperatives of a nascent civic rhetoric, which, as he saw it, was a symptom of the postcolonial state’s detachment from everyday life and the concerns of ordinary citizens.
Following his arrival in Mumbai in late February 1952, however, Desani’s itinerary saw him spending a number of months visiting different regions and cities across the Hindi Heartland. Moving on to Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh by October of the same year, he eventually came to settle in Sarnath, where he became absorbed in his religious studies. In due course his original plan to return to Britain within a year was abandoned. Instructing friends to sell the contents of his south London lodgings at auction, he went on to commit himself to a number of years of monastic training under the auspices of the Mahabodhi Society of India — a decision that is reflected in the nature of his journaling as time passes, with the later notebooks taking on the profile of an account of a spiritual journey. Yet crucially, these formative months represented something of a period of adjustment for him. In his letter to Stanley Young, for example, he had disclosed that the otherness of India was proving not just an affront to his senses, but that the exposure to conditions of extreme poverty had had a reciprocal dehumanizing effect on him: “the sights of Bombay”, he wrote, “the display of suffering, and everything — made me quite unhappy, and I have taken three months to be ‘human’” (HRC SYC, 26 June 1952). A good deal of Desani’s recorded observations in the earliest notebooks of the Journal reveal, in this way, a deep consciousness of the unequivocal disparities in the economic undercurrents shaping life in the postcolony; he frequently felt provoked and overwhelmed by the unmitigated realities of an environment marked by what Mukherjee refers to as a “radical unevenness” (2010: 13), which for Desani manifested itself most visibly in the type of normalized everyday privation and level of human suffering that, after an absence of almost 12 years spent living and working in Britain, he had grown quite unaccustomed to witnessing. Even by early October, more than some seven months after his initial arrival in India, this was still a pressing issue for him: writing to his friend, the Dutch ceramic artist Judith Revesz, he again declaimed that India was “a terrible country for upsetting a man and violating his emotions by just displaying suffering and imperfections” (HRC R16252, Desani to Revesz, 3 October 1952).
In some ways his admissions here articulate a common reaction from European (or as in Desani’s case, Europeanized) travellers to India. Yet, while poverty and its various unpalatable significations remain a presiding stereotypical image that travellers anticipate from India, the picture that emerges in the Journal is at the same time more complex and ambivalent. Like most travellers, Desani set forth with an awareness of the various ways in which the travel memoir form had been used in the past. Critics have argued that this is a phenomenon inherent to the mediated nature of travel. Ali Behdad, for instance, suggests that all outward journeys are shaped by a cumulative ideology that influences the travel experience, for “there is always already an inter-text (that is, another travel narrative) that informs every traveller’s desire” (2009: 82–3). The formative sections of the Journal are perhaps most interesting for the insight that in his perceptions of India, Desani was influenced in particular by what Bernard Cohn describes as the “observational/travel modality” made familiar through the textual apparatus of earlier narratives of colonial exploration and travel to India (1996: 6). Part of a broader category of “investigative modalities” constituting the continuous process of collating empirical information, through which the British were able to “classify, categorize, and bound the vast social world that was India so that it could be controlled”, as Cohn outlines, the fixed typifications of the traveller modality — “the itineraries and the particular sites, social types, practices and encounters with India and Indians” — enabled European travellers to India to find “themselves in a place that could be made to seem familiar by following predetermined itineraries and seeing the sights in predictable ways” (1996: 6–7).
Within the Journal there are many examples of the thoroughly acculturated Desani’s impulse to bring the locales of India — sites both urban and rural — into a systematic vision through the deployment of a specific repertoire of descriptive practices commonplace to the narrative forms of colonial travel writing. The language of the text often bears out Paul Smethurst’s (2012) characterization of the broader category of imperial travel writing as a composite form, consisting of two distinct yet interrelated sub-categories which share a great deal in terms of their strategies of representation. Desani gestures, for example, towards the “scientific form” and the objectivism of the traveller-scientist in his frequent slippages into the classificatory language of ethnography. Likewise, in his attempts at the mastery of the now unfamiliar landscape through European visual codes and aestheticizing techniques such as the convention of the “picturesque”, he also signals to the “aesthetic form”, which while sharing the emphasis of scientific travel writing on visual scrutiny and observation is, on the other hand, delimited by “fashion and optics, and prescribing order and structure in the spaces of landscape” (Smethurst, 2012: 14–15). Tellingly, early on he even refers to the Journal as his “survey” of India, and describes his regular excursions to local sites of interest as “expeditions”. Such linguistic registers reveal a clear encoding in his staging of a travelling identity, one involving a self-stylization in the mould of earlier colonial surveyors and explorers, in particular those administrative authorities behind the many “great surveys” of India, the various historical projects that sought to “map” the territory (its ecologies and its peoples) in order to bring it discursively and institutionally under the control of the colonial state (Goswami, 2004: 32).
Despite his most earnest efforts during the early stages of his return, Desani inevitably emerges as unable to maintain the objectifying language characteristic of the directives and narratives of colonial administrative officialdom, nor is he able to make grand teleological claims based on the proofs of his “survey”. It is, rather, what might be called the smaller reckonings of the travelling gaze that insistently command his attention. The overriding sensitivity to spatiality that animates the Journal emerges in the depiction of the lived unevenness of the postcolony. Abounding with details of the discrete and the quotidian, it is in relating the seemingly unremarkable and the everyday that Desani recreates the immediacy of an often contradictory, and at times traumatic, topography of social encounter and exclusion. Of particular interest is his continual reflection on the very processes of mediation. Many of the journal entries fluctuate between recounting specific events, and more self-reflexive commentary in which he ends up scrutinizing the essential documentary act — the transposing, that is, of the fluid, fragmentary life “event”, into conclusive narrative occasion. At one point, for example, he presents a vivified account of the challenges entailed in attempting to textually render one of the more enduring motifs associated with travel texts about India, the teeming street scene. Whilst in Kanpur, after a day spent exploring the Naya Ganj commercial district, he writes: I found [sic] it impossible — unless I have a thousand words — to describe the Indian Scene. I must use instead a formula. The first characteristic thing about this mob action is that everybody is exclusively & solely interested in what he or she is doing or saying […] If a man is bargaining — he continues to do so, and if a bullock cart or rickshaw runs into him — but a word or two of abuse — he continues bargaining. Next, it is [a] most extraordinary display of goods. The most unlikely objects are displayed side by side. The scene is “fantastic”. I[t] has “colors”. It has a curious “exaggeration”. Everything has the maximum of it. (IJ, Notebook 1: 64–5)
Here, as elsewhere, Desani recognizes the incongruities and excesses of the sites/sights he faces as contributing to his sense of just how beyond description he finds the Indian environment. Even with his resolve to discover a “formula”, the urban Indian landscape is stratified and cumulative; always in motion, mutable and volatile with details, it surpasses fixed conceptions and definitions.
An aspect, however, of a somewhat more disquieting relationship to the visual — again, both in the sense of what can be seen but also the corresponding anxiety of how this might then be textually reconstructed — is dramatized in far starker terms in an earlier passage. From the moment he arrives in India, Desani’s journal entries convey a deep self-consciousness about his own privileged externality, a consciousness that inevitably frustrates his efforts to recoup and textually render his impressions. Not long after his initial arrival in Mumbai, for instance, in the entry of 12 March he recounts accompanying on foot a hand-drawn rickshaw he has retained to carry a shipment of his belongings collected from the Victoria Docks. His description of a slum sprawl along Frere Road, passed on the walk from the Mumbai port en route to his family residence in the Santa Cruz neighbourhood, grants an immediate sense of his alienation from the Indian environment: Not more than some ten minutes’ walk from the sea […] there are hundreds of huts buil[t]. I had seen people sleep on the footpaths — but never these “huts”. It is difficult to describe these dwellings in any physical terms: the size of them, or the appearance of them, I am afraid to do this. If I describe these things in these terms, it is possible one might lose sight of the human aspect of it all. I am not sure what I mean by human aspect. I think I mean by these words the attack on human dignity […] I have never seen any dwelling for any domestic animal, or an animal in captivity, which will compare with these dwellings. Men live in these huts, sleep in them […] nor did I ever imagine anything of this kind before I reached Bombay. […] The impression left on me was a feeling of wonder — and I can still wonder — that any human beings should be so insensitive to environment. (IJ, Notebook 1: 24; emphasis in original)
He continues at some length, turning his observations from the dwellings to the collective “types” — the abstracted “they/he” produced as subjects — who invariably live under such conditions. This is certainly language bearing all the hallmarks of the ethnographic portraits familiar from examples of imperial travel writing which, as Pratt notes, “work to normalize another society, to codify its difference from one’s own, to fix its members in a timeless present where […] ‘[h]e’ is a sui generis configuration, often only a list of features” (1997: 64). But interestingly enough, Desani ends up prevaricating around the naturalized distinctions of this “manners-and-customs” (Pratt, 1997: 64) mode of representation. This is partly because he cannot find any cultural equivalencies, he suggests, that would help him better to elucidate: for “it is difficult”, he writes, “to compare these classes with anything known in Europe” (IJ, Notebook 1: 24). Yet, also keenly at issue for him is the temptation to succumb to descriptive practices that, while imposing order, would at the same time efface what he terms “the human aspect” — an aspect which although tentatively defined here, can be understood as the moral dimensions of the scene before him. A key moment in the text, this passage anatomizes Desani’s burgeoning struggle with the challenge that the ethics of encounter posed to his efforts to depict “the Indian Scene”.
Though the dwellings of Indians and scenes of privation did appear in imperial travel narratives, as Teltscher (2002) has observed, they most often featured as sites where the anxieties of colonial rule surfaced. Descriptions of indigenous habitation were usually underwritten, she suggests, by “the fear of contamination and corruption through contact with Indians […] for the dwellings of Indians were regarded as the source of dirt and disease” (2002: 199). Unvaryingly, though, scant commentary would be offered in such texts about how this “poverty manifested all too clearly the inequalities of colonial rule” (Teltscher, 2002: 199). Desani’s statements are admittedly frequently coloured by a comparable form of mysophobic angst; at another point in the passage cited above, for example, he rails at the sight of a woman preparing food at an open charcoal fire over raised bricks, when “barely six inches away from her is the traffic — and the dirt and the flying dust”. His journal entries do not, however, dwell on scenes of abject poverty in quite the same manner as the nineteenth-century “slumming narrative”, with its moralistic voyeurism and stock scenes of dirt, disease, degeneracy and danger (Teltscher, 2002: 200). Nor does Desani write in the vein of those questionable cultural practices associated with the leisured touristic gaze in the more recent phenomenon of “slum tourism” — arguably a present-day incarnation of the “slumming” genre, which like its historical forerunner shares in the negative dramatization and “territorial ascription of the ‘Other’” (Frenzel et al., 2012: 3). Desani, by contrast, does not seek out such encounters; they are invariably brief happenstances, rooted exclusively in his visual observations, with little or no interaction with those being observed. They bear, in this, a close resemblance to the manner of travel encounter categorized by Catherine Mee as “challenging”. As Mee suggests, challenging encounters are those “unplanned moments that interrupt the flow of a journey, arresting travellers, perturbing them and raising ethical dilemmas” (2014: 14). Evoking in the traveller feelings of “discomfort or even shame”, such moments will generate “doubts about how to act”, and importantly, “how to represent them in writing” (Mee, 2014: 107).
Examples of challenging encounters are not lacking in the Journal. From its opening pages we are in fact alerted to Desani’s progressive difficulty in appropriating and deploying a more self-effacing attitude and mode of representation that he would have liked — and certainly, at the beginning of his journey had intended — to adopt. At one point, he describes his frustrations with his project of granting discursive shape to the Indian environment explicitly in terms of his own guilty feelings: “A major fact of existence hereabouts”, he writes while in Mumbai, “is the feeling of guilt. Everything indicts” (IJ, Notebook 1: 23; emphasis in original). Later, it is in observing an urban street child, a young boy whose legs have been purposely cut, and whose scarred, damaged limbs are displayed for the sake of soliciting alms, that Desani finds himself implicated in complex ways: “My problem”, he relates, “was to describe this and say nothing about my outraged feelings” (IJ, Notebook 1: 25). In a comparable moment of insecurity, once again, reflecting on his consistent inability to maintain a neutrality and critical distance in his observations (a distance which is clearly a precondition for the aestheticization of the environment through the scopic regimes favoured by the European “inter-text”), he recognizes his own cultural positioning as the reason why such self-effacing gestures remain impossible for him. Observing a group of Mumbai street traders interacting with an English traveller, he ruminates on his intense discomfiture at witnessing them aggressively bartering with the Englishman over a commercial transaction: I thought I am distressed because “I care” — If the Italians were uncouth, I did not care — why should I care now — because these people are “like me”, are “mine”. I must overcome these feelings. I must be “objective”. (IJ, Notebook 1: 20)
It is in moments like this — of which, incidentally, there is a plenitude in the Journal — that Desani experiences his own split subjectivity most keenly. For it is around such figures (indigent labourers, the stricken and destitute, and above all, street children) that we see the tensions of his outsider status and ambivalent sense of belonging emerge most clearly; they provide the occasion for a meditation on his uncanny awareness of being both in place, yet out of place at the same time. In common with most travel texts, the Journal stages an interrogation of the relations between self and other. Yet the conventional transposition of an identity/difference logic onto the traveller/travellee dyad is disrupted; Desani’s status as a returning émigré seemingly opens up another dimension to (and quite often forecloses) his traveller’s instinct to locate “concrete example[s] of otherness” (Lisle, 2006: 83; emphasis in original).
As travel testimony, then, The Indian Journal reveals a reconfigured topography, one that brings to the fore native travellees, those largely invisible and certainly silent inhabitants of the interstitial spaces of colonial travel texts that, when not disporting themselves in ethnic spectacles and rituals of cultural authenticity staged for the benefit of the European spectator, remain largely consigned to a “separate textual homeland” (Pratt, 1997: 52). The issue of proximity no doubt plays a role here. For as “native” traveller, Desani traversed the Indian environment without the restrictions (and equally, the protections) of the racialized spatial ordering and “regulation of distance” that was a foundational principle governing the relationship between the British in India and indigenous populations (Kumar, 2002: 87). Rather, in the Journal, the barrier between Desani and India’s poor remains open and porous, and the street-level glimpses of the precarious lives lived on the margins of society often take centre stage.
Later in 1952, Desani moved on to Uttar Pradesh, visiting the city of Varanasi for a spell, before eventually taking up residence in Sarnath. European travellers conventionally portrayed Varanasi as the ultimate icon of the mystical East: as Cohn notes, although the visual spectacle afforded by the spiritual centre of Hindu devotional practice was appreciated, “the city of light” was nonetheless a measure against which Western order, progress, and rationality could be both celebrated and consolidated (1987: 6). Looking back on his arrival in Varanasi in a 1956 article published in the Hindi Review, Desani recognized an oscillation in his own vision of the city. His was a viewpoint, he suggested, that was split between a desire for the imagined geography of unimpeded, elevated perspectives and sweeping touristic vistas that were standardized and determined as significant by the “European eye” (Cohn, 1996: 6), and conversely, a creeping awareness of the failures of such visual economies and representational modes to account for the realities of the Indian environment: I arrived in Banaras late in November, when the mornings were chilly and, if you avoided the traffic of the city, and got out to the field, the air crisp. Before the month was out, I had seen the sunrise on the Ganges. The view of it from Rajghat, in spite of the railway bridge — which ought not be there — is one of the loveliest sights in the world. Then, by and by, I got involved in the life of the city, I saw it a shade too close, the problems and the conflicts which beset Banaras […] obliterated the delight I took in the sunrise of the Ganges. On Louis MacNeice’s recommendation, moreover, I went out one evening, and saw the floating lamps sailing down the river, towards Calcutta and Ganga Sagar. But that, too, was replaced by the urgency, and the insistence upon attention of such things as corpse after corpse passing my door, accompanied by mourners crying the usual cries. (Desani, 1956: 10)
This passage usefully captures the struggle staged in a more dilated and diffuse manner across many of Desani’s journal entries. While circling around the unfulfilled promises of the itineraries and particular sights elevated as significant by the “European eye” (quite literally, in the case of Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice’s recommendation to Desani), his impressions ultimately point to the impossibility of such views. The “rhetorical diversion” of the scenic picturesque which allowed colonial travel writers of earlier eras “to encapsulate a scene, to frame it, and then to abruptly divert the narrative at an appropriate moment, thereby avoiding additional observations that might spoil the effect” (Williams, 2008: 58), stalls and falters in Desani’s account. Scenic order and structure evades him; in seeing things “a shade too close”, he remains unable to escape the more utilitarian aspects of the Ganges. So even though he did not consciously set out to resist what Edwards and Graulund have referred to as European travel writing’s “gravitational pull of metropolitan centrality” (2011: 2), Desani was alert to the impossibility of domesticating and explaining his experience in India through established conventions.
As one might expect, the insights presented in this article offer only a brief glimpse into what is a complex and multi-layered text, one while perhaps inhabiting its own contradictions, certainly warrants, I believe, further examination. Desani’s Journal is a unique case study for considering the connections between mobility and cultural displacement, not least because of its geographical situatedness, but also for what I have been arguing are its distinctive reconfigurations of the overdetermined conventions of landscape and travel writing, including the topoi of “home” and “away”, the epistemology of the travelling gaze, and the dynamic of the self against the other. Although much more remains to be said about The Indian Journal, its documentary value is certainly evident: fascinating as a personal account of 1950s India, it is at the same time a vital postcolonial narrative, one that affords an opportunity, moreover, to at once reorient and expand the critical assessment of an author who has for too long remained woefully understudied.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Archival research for this article was undertaken with grant funding from The Open University’s Crowther Fund and a University of Sheffield Petrie Watson Exhibition.
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