INDIAN ELEMENTS IN THE WORKS OF M.G. VASSANJI
The present chapter aims
at an evaluation of the varieties of indianity in the works of M.G. Vassanji. Diasporic writings are invariably concerned
with exile, memory, diasporic consciousness, longing for return, alienation and
search for identity. All these characteristics find unique articulation in the
novels of M.G. Vassanji. Vassanji has produced five novels tracing the migration
of people from South Asia in the late 19th century to East Africa, and then
from Africa to North America in the 1960s and
1970s. The Gunny Sack is one of them.
It deals with the story of four generations of Asians in Tanzania . Here the author has examined
the theme of identity, displacement and race-relations. He also has endeavoured
to retain and re-create oral histories and mythologies that have long been
silenced.
The Gunny Sack celebrates the spirit of Asian pioneers who
moved to East Africa in the late 1800s and
early 1900s. The novelist provides an insightful look also into the culture of
one particular group of Indians who were born and grew up in East
Africa during the mid 20th century. Living under German colonial
rule, the family of Dhanji Govindji becomes permanent residents of Africa while witnessing historical events that result in
the birth of African nationalism. In this fantastic piece of work the writer
focuses on the problematic union of East Africa and South
Asia . The tension arising from the contact between the two lands
is captured mostly in the characters that migrated from India to East Africa .
Here most of the Asian African characters such as Dhanji Govindji and his
descendent Salim Juma take part in the quest for new homes and identity. It is
interesting that the same quest for new homelands that were more promising in
terms of prosperity was to be Govindji’s downfall.
The main story of
this novel is narrated by Salim Juma. It is he who is bequeathed a gunnysack by
his mystical grandaunt named Ji Bai. This sack is an ancient sack that is full
of mementos. It appears as a metaphor for the collective memory. It becomes a
device to recall the author’s family history in India ,
Africa, England and finally North America . Nicknamed ‘Shehru’, the gunny unravels a
gallery of characters whose unwritten stories reflect the Asian experience in East Africa over four generations. It seems that the
novel is both the story of one extended family’s arrival and existence in East Africa as well as a repository for the collective
memory and oral history of many other Asian Africans.
The first section
of The Gunny Sack is very
interesting. In this section we see that Dhanji Govindji arrives to Zanzibar as a trader from Junapur in Gujarat in the late
19th century and then settles at Matamu in Tanzania . He has a son, Husein,
with a discarded African slave, Bibi Taratibu. Later growing in prosperity,
Dhanji Govindji marries Fatima . She is of
Indian extraction. She is the Squint-eyed daughter of a Zanzibari widow with
unknown antecedents. But when Dhanji Govindji’s half African son Hussein
disappears into the east hinterland, he pays out his fortune in attempt to find
him again. In search of Husein he devotes more and more time. In this search
mission he spends not just his own money but embezzles that of others to
support his search mission of his lost son. One morning Dhanji Govindji is
mysteriously murdered. The cause of Dhanji’s death is narrated as a shabby
affair that might be tied to his serving of ties with his relatives in India
so as to establish himself and his descendents in the new world:
A few
years before, the Shamsi community in India had been torn apart by
strife. Various parties had sprung up, with diverging fundamentalist positions,
each taking up some thread of the complex and sometimes contradictory set of
traditional beliefs, hitherto untainted by theologian hands, to some extreme
conclusion and claming to represent the entire community. The bone of
contention among Shia, Sunni, and Sufi and Vedanti factions became the funds
collected in the small centres and mosques. Faced with this situation, Dhanji
simply stopped sending the money on to any of the big centres and kept it in
trust for the Matamu community. The strife had resulted in the murders in Bombay and Zanzibar .
And now it seemed, in Matamu…. Mukhi Dhanji Govindji, Sharrifu to the Swahilis,
was buried with full honours by the village
of Matamu , carried in a
procession of males headed by Shamsi, Bhatia and Swahili elders to the grave,
grieved for by women ululating along the way.1
We can read the
implications of the strife outside Matamu in far away India as being intimately connected
with Matamu itself. Moreover, we can also read the implications of Govindji’s
mental turmoil on his community. As he has stopped sending funds to the mother
community of the Shamsis back in India , Govindji declared the
autonomy of the Shamis of East Africa and sought independence. There are
insinuations in the novel that Dhanji Govindji had used money drawn from public
coffers for personal needs without consulting other faithful. This independence
of the mind was the one that had enabled him to make a journey in a dhow across
the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar .
In the novel, this act of dislocation from the originary homeland in Junapur
and locating oneself in the East African coast is very significant. This act
was to be the initial step in the troublesome quest to belong that future
generation of Govindji’s family such as Salim Juma were to face.
The novel ends with
dejected Salim alone in a basement of a flat somewhere in Canada , the last memories coming
out of a gunny sack he inherits, hoping that he will be the last migrant of his
family-line. The last paragraph of the last chapter of The Gunny Sack captures
Juma’s wish:
The
running must stop now, Amina. The cycle of escape and rebirth, uprooting and
regeneration, must cease in me. Let this be last runway, returned with one
last, quixotic dream. Yes, perhaps here lies redemption, a faith in the future,
even if it means for now to embrace the banal present, to pick up the pieces of
our wounded selves, our wounded dreams, Little, One, we dreamt the world, which
was large and beautiful and exciting and it came to us this world, even though
it was more than we bargained for, it came in large soaking waves and wrecked
us but we are thankful, for to have dream was enough. And so, dream, Little
Flowered.2
Salim
Juma, the narrator who now lives as an exile in Canada , utters this above-mentioned
passage. He is just one of the droves of Asian Africans who left East Africa
after independence for Britain ,
Canada and the United States .
After the migration of his forebear, Dhanji Govindji, from Junapur in India to
Zanjibar; after the migration of his family from Tanzania to Kenya, then back
to Tanzania and finally after his migration to Canada, Salim is tired and
exhausted by the perpetual feelings of unhomliness and impossibility of
belonging.
A sense of identity, a feeling of discrimination and
demarcation, has always been in the writings of the literary members of Indian
diaspora. Writing from a ‘hyphenated’3 space probably instigates
authors like M.G. Vassanji to manifest their expressions of identity. In The
Gunny Sack, M.G. Vassanji talks about volatile union of Africa
and expatriate Indians. The being formed from this union is charged with the
relentless quest of trying to find its own true meaning. The identity that the
Indians are searching for is produced through this union. Salim Juma recounts
the consequences of the family movement from Porbandar ,
India to Zanzibar ,
Africa . The narration carries an air of
vividness and a sense of reality, as Salim recounts the fortune of his family
under German, then British colonialism, and finally under Julius Nyrere’s
socialism in independent Tanzania .
It is a spirited saga of alliances, rivalries, success and failures. It
illustrates the ability of the Shamsi community to survive oppression,
fragmentation and displacement. For these children of Africa and India ,
the question of identity becomes an important issue. The maintenance of
traditions and culture turns out to be significant.
M.G. Vassanji seems to suggest that when several cultures
exist together, it is essential for each culture to have its own distinguishing
identity. But when this identity is imposed on a particular culture on the
basis of race, colour and religion, the cruel brutalities become rife with
reality. Vassanji focuses on this part of reality in his works. In The Gunny
Sack the colour of human creed becomes important. The characters of this
novel seem to draw their identities on this basis.
The
sense of being that Vassanji portrays for all the characters comes from the
theory of discrimination. Perhaps through this observation, Vassanji draws our
attention not only to the circumstances under which Asian Africans developed
their interstitiality but also to the fact that they have lost their sense of a
secure identity, theirs is now an identity of the in-between space, an identity
that does not make sense in a world interpreted in terms of Black or White.
The diasporic subjectivities that Vassanji and his
characters illustrate are transfigured many times over in multiple sites
through self-chosen migrancy or enforced wanderings as well as exile. Since
diasporic identities get constantly ruptured together with their language,
class, race and gender denominations, and get mutated as well as reconstituted
in the trans-local spaces, the originary notions of home which are imagined
over and over again in different ways across borders and boundaries become
ambiguous in Vassanji’s case as well as in case of other diasporic writers.
Having been removed from a place of supposed origin and without emotional,
political and cultural affiliations, to territorially bound, static localities
diasporic people move on, as indeed their homes do, like tortoises and their
shells. Peter G. Mandeville, therefore, comments that ‘identity and place’4
of diasporic communities ‘travel together’5 and these communities
practice ‘the complex politics of simultaneous here and there’. 6
For Vassanji, home is
multi-locational in urban sites. Land based ties and strong social bonds that
would generally hold together people rooted in native, rural places do not
apply to this Kenyan-born-Tanzanian expatriate writer of Ismaili-Indian
descent, domiciled in Canada .
Owing to his over-hyphenated identity, the question of exilic condition in the
urban landscape for him becomes entwined with the notion of home away from home
in one sense and no home in particular in another sense. Home in his case is
freighted with enormous investments of the imaginary. At least this is
impression he casts on us when we read his interviews. In an interview with
Sayantan, Vassanji says:
I am more comfortable defining myself in terms
of my locale and city. That way Dar es
Salaam would be probably the first place that figures
as home. Every writer, I think belongs to his city, to the streets and his
urban landscape, assuming he is part of an urban ethos. Another place I could
call home in that sense would be Toronto
in Canada.7
In
another interview with Gene Carey, Vassanji says:
Once I came to the United
States I had a fear of losing my link with Tanzania .
Then I feared going back because if I went back I feared losing the new world
one had discovered.8
Vassanji’s
statements make it clear that he is caught between the homes ‘there’ and
‘here’. On the basis of the idea of multi-locational home he conciliates
between the nostalgic desire for home and community through his characters.
These characters are people living on the fringes of host society and dreaming
of a home, replete with intimate memories and feelings of emotional
affiliations. The narrator’s remark in The Gunny Sack sums up the lives
of the Indian traders:
Among the trading immigrant peoples, loyalty to
a land or a government, always loudly professed, is a trait one can normally
look for in vain. Governments may come and go, but the immigrant’s only concern
is the security of their families, their trade and their savings.9
Their
lives that unfold a saga of self-survival through countless dispersion, losses,
separations, ruptures are never mapped onto the history of the nation they have
either left behind or the one they have come to as immigrants. Their family lore
across generations builds up an intimate domestic context that is far removed
from nationalist politics and recorded public memory.
The
writings of all the Indian diasporic writers usually focus on the
discrimination, differentiation, injustice and inequity that have been a part
of life of almost every East Indian immigrant. Such treatment of life has
compelled them to become nostalgic. Perhaps that is the reason why these
writers tend to draw upon the reservoir of memories from their homelands. In The
Gunny Sack Salim Juma’s remarkable remembering includes finding the
significance of ancestral genesis and genealogy. Vassanji, double diasporic
Indian writer, talks more about East Africa
than anything else. His novels The Gunny Sack and The Book of
Secrets and his collection of short stories, Uhuru
Street – are all focused on the lines of Indians in East Africa . Vassanji says:
I write about my own people because we are a
people without any sense of history and place. A person without history is like
an orphan. We know the name of the place we stay, we know our immediate
surroundings, but we tend to look towards a future – tomorrow and day after
tomorrow – of a better future may be. But where is our past? Where are our
roots? 10
In
an interview M.G. Vassanji says to Kanaganayakam:
Once I went to the United States , suddenly the Indian
connection became very important: the sense of origins, trying to understand
the roots that we had in us.11
In
Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack the historical past concerning origins engages
his characters in a tortuous way, mediated through memories of countless
displacements and ruptures:
…. wisps of memory. Cotton balls gliding from
the gunny sack, each a window to the world….Asynchronous images projected on
multiple cinema screens….Time here is not the continuous co-ordinate ….but a
collection of blots like Uncle Jim drew in the Sunday Herald for the children,
except that Uncle Jim numbered the blots for you so you traced the picture of a
dog or a horse when you followed them with a pencil….here you number your own
blots and there is no end to them, and each lies in wait for you like a black
hole from which you could never return. 12
Since
a black hole is a condition in the outer space from which no matter and ray can
escape, Vassanji uses this figurative as a dark, endless one way passage from
which the diasporic self can’t return, nor indeed can he progress towards any
closure or resolution unless it is forced and deliberate. In this fictional
scheme, migrancy turns out to be basically an interminable narrative journey
without any beginning or end.
In
The Gunny Sack, memory negotiates the colonial and postcolonial history
of East Africa . Throughout the narrative the
history of the struggle of imperial powers of Europe like Germany and England
over colonies in Africa, the world wars, their impact on the demographic
profile of Indian diaspora in the African east coast, and finally the
decolonisation of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zanzibar and other nations
constitute the troublesome destiny of the people. They are forced to migrate
and re-migrate to places both imaginary and real. Throughout the novel Salim
Juma negotiates communal and individual identities, the life of the continent
of Africa and the lives of individuals. He
explores the past, constructs genealogies and traces the complex formations of
the sites of subjectivity through ruptures, dispersal and mutations.
The
past is retrieved in The Gunny Sack and reconstituted only through the
backward gaze upon the gunny sack that still carries the dust of Kariakoo, a
street in Dar es Salaam
where young Kala Juma, the narrator, fortuitously meets Grandmother, Ji Bai,
who conjures from the past people, times and places for him. He admits:
Thus past gets buried, but for my drab, my sagging
ugly shehrbanoo, from which the dust of Kariakoo has not been shaken yet.13
The
dust -- metaphorically, the remains of the dead -- magically bodies forth the
past and the entire line of forebears. Ji Bai speaks to him almost like a
prophet. She says to him that she will give him his father Juma and his father
Husein and his father -- And thereupon begins Juma’s journey back into the
realms of past. He says:
Ji Bai opened a small window into the dark past
for me ……and a whole world flew in, a world of my great grandfather who left
India and my great grandmother who was an African, the world of Matamu where
India and Africa met and the mixture exploded in the person of my half-cast
grand father Husein who disappeared into the forest one day and never returned,
the world of a changing Africa where Africa and Europe met and the result was
even more explosive, not only in the lives of men but in the life of the
continent.14
The
knowledge of one’s origins and past, howsoever shameful and sordid, is
necessary. The search for the origins and past is also a moral responsibility
towards the posterity and future to be assumed, in addition to the necessity
for self-knowledge and survival on the part of the diasporic self.
No New Land is Vassanji’s second novel. It is a poignant
story of the immigrant experience. It creates a rich portrait of a transplanted
community. Here Vassanji appears as a keen observer of lives caught between one
world and another.
This saga of global uprootedness and unstable migration is
dramatised in Vassanji’s No New Land. Here the novelist illustrates the
fate of the Asian Africans in Canada .
Like a keen observer Vassanji portrays how the immigrants are victimised. He
wants to draw the attention of the readers on the themes of exile, alienation,
memory, nostalgia, identity, race, culture, tradition and community.
The novel, No New Land, opens in Canada, with the
Lalani family shown in the grips of a big tension and panic because Nurdin
Lalani, the head of the family, has not come back home from work. Nurdin and
his family had come from Africa and settled down at Toronto . The family of the protagonist Nurdin
Lalani is a double immigrant family -- Asia to Africa to Canada . The novel moves in
flashback of incidents and events.
No New Land deals with the story of Shamsi community. As we know that diasporic writings are
invariably concerned with writers’ attachment to their homelands, it is quite
evident in Vassanji’s No New Land. Here we get an elaborate description
of East Africa in the second chapter. In this
context Vassanji can be compared with Rohinton Mistry who also describes his
homeland India
in his novels like Such A Long Journey and A Fine Balance.
The quest for identity is one of the important issues in
the writings of diasporic writers. Vassanji’s No New Land is not an
exception. In this novel Vassanji attempts to explore the quest for identity
through the character of Nurdin Lalani. Lalani endeavours to establish an
identity of his own. The family, the community and the society obstruct his
endeavours. The displacement, racial discrimination and the generation
differences put hindrances in the way to formulate an independent individual
identity.
Throughout the novel, Nurdin tries to formulate an identity
for himself. In No New Land the discrimination based on colour is
projected powerfully in the following observation:
The black kicked us out,
now the whites will do the same…
Where do we go from here?
15
Roots play a
significant role in the lives of immigrants. Their behaviour, attitude, and
modes of life, seem to be formulated by their roots. Nurdin has his roots in India .
His father went to Africa many years ago with
certain innate Indian characteristics. Nurdin inherited these characteristics
and came to Canada
with them. The Indian characteristics can be seen through its customs,
tradition, typicalities and cuisines that Vassanji portrays in No New Land.
It can be observed in the very beginning of the novel. When Fatima
receives envelop from some University, which may decide her career, she becomes
excitedly anxious. Becoming nervous may be a human trait, but whispering
prayers superstitiously due to nervousness, anxiety and excitement is a typical
Indian characteristic:
It did not occur to her
that the decision she awaited had already been made a few days before, and she
whispered a prayer in much the same her mother sometimes did…16
Nurdin’s wife Zera also shows the
typical Indian traits in her. When the Lalanis immigrated to Canada , Zera had got with her lots of souvenirs
and memories from Africa . But when they
settled down in Sixty-nine
Rosecliff Park ,
most of the things went to the dustbin, except the photograph of Hazi Lalani.
It was the first objecte to go up on the walls. One may draw a conclusion that
this sort of respect for father-in-law may be a traditional human trait but
lighting incense sticks and holding them in front of the photograph is an
Indian trait of respect and devotion for the father-in-law. Hanif, Nurdin’s
son, has also some innate Indian characteristics. Hanif calls Nanji ‘Eeyore.’
17 Eeyore is an accented form of the Indian word for friends. This is a
typical way of summoning friends in India . Friends are sometimes called
as ‘yaar’. Yasmin Ladha, one of the Indo Canadian authors, also uses this word
‘yaar’ in her collection of short stories, Lion’s Granddaughter and
Other Stories. She addresses her readers as ‘yaar-readerji.18
Not only the Lalanis but other people of Indian roots in the Sixty-nine Rosecliff
Park also have such
inborn Indian Characteristics. Jamal uses the term ‘chacha’19 to
summon an aged person. ‘Chacha’ is an Indian word to show respect for the
elderly people. It is an Indian word for uncle.
Through the various characters of No
New Land, Vassanji beautifully portrays some Indian traditions and customs.
Touching the feet of the elderly guests always concludes the welcoming ceremony
in Indian tradition. When the Missionary, the religious man, comes to Nurdin’s
apartment, there was a traditional welcoming ceremony. As he entered the room
the females of the congregation, dressed in white, attempted an elaborate
welcoming ceremony, ‘with touching of feet and cracking of Knuckles and
garlanding….’20 When one visit someone’s house for the first time,
it is an Indian tradition to take sweets or fruits along. Nurdin does not
forget his tradition. When he and Romesh visit Sushila’s house at Kensington
Market, they take some fruits with them.
While portraying Indian traditions,
customs and typical characteristics, Vassanji talks about the Indian cuisines.
As we all know, the food one takes, affirms the traits of a particular place.
The food that the Indian dwelling in Sixty-nine
Rosecliff Park
eats shows that they belong to India .
For instance, chappatis is the staple food of people of Northern part of India .
Indians prefer to take it with pickles. They even tend to put ghee or clarified
butter over the chappatis. Sheru Mama and her husband, Ramju, tend to serve
chappatis that way:
Sheru Mama makes hundreds
of chappatis everyday and baby-sits to toddlers at the same time, while husband
Ramju helps with the dishes and puts the required dollop of margarine over
every chappati. Her customers tend to be single men who will eat a chappati
with a pickle, or butter and jam, or curry canned in the United States . 21
‘Samosas’ 22 are one of the
favourite snacks of the people of Northern part of India . They like to take them with
tea, especially; ‘Tea would fetched and samosas.’23Vassanji mentions
about having Samosas with tea even in one of the short stories in Uhuru
Street. In ‘In the Quiet of a Sunday Afternoon’, Zarina sells samosas to
the Indian people living in Uhuru Street . We
can get a sentence like this, ‘I have tea and wait for the woman to bring
samosas.’24 Indians are well known throughout the world for a
variety of fried and spicy food. Even in breakfast, they prefer to have fried
food. When Mohan and Lakshmi, the Indians from Guyana stayed back for a night in
Nurdin’s apartment, Zera made some ‘puris.’25 Uma Parmeswaran, in
her Rootless But Green are the Boulevard Trees, mentions several Indian
cuisines. One of her characters says:
How about puris? I
haven’t had a good Indian meal in ages. Here, I’ll get the dough ready. Arun,
it is time you wash your eyes. Slice some onions for raita. 26
The literary members of Indian
diaspora use the names of Indian cuisines deliberately. Through this act they
want to affirm their existence and identity. In fact, the cultural identity
that comes up through food is very powerful because it exhibits the everyday
modes of life. This is the reason why Vassanji mentions the names of food in
all his works. It is not only descriptions of about food, but also enumerating
the traditions, customs and typical Indian characteristics that prove the fact
that maintenance of culture is an innate trait of immigrants.
M.G. Vassanji’s third
novel, The Book of Secrets, was
published in 1994. It’s a fine piece of work that foregrounds the themes and
ideas that recur throughout M. G. Vassanji’s fiction. It is an engrossing
account of Asians in East Africa . Rich in
detail and description, this award winning fiction magnificently deals with
immigrants and exiles. It appears as a story of displacement, physical and
emotional, and one’s search for identity and a promised land. It explores the state
of living in exile from one’s home and from oneself.
The world of The Book of Secrets is part fiction -
part memory, a history of the people who left Indian shores in search of a
dream for Eastern Africa . Here the author
focuses on the interaction between the Shamsi [Indian] community and native
Africans, as well as the colonial administration. Even though none of the
characters ever return to India ,
the presence of the country looms throughout the novel. Here M.G. Vassanji’s
engagement with the history is very significant. With it he has attempted to
explore his own past and the past of Indian community in East
Africa . He has brilliantly and skillfully woven the past with the
present. He discusses “how history affects the present and how personal and public
history can overlap.”27
The Book of Secrets is an eloquent story of the diary of Albert
Corbin, a junior British colonial administrator, who has served many years in
various East African colonies. Corbin is posted to Kikono, a tiny fictitious
Kenyan town near the border of Tanganyika .
Immigrants from India , who
had come to East Africa in the second half of
the 19th century, had founded this town. They became traders and over the
generations, some of them prospered. They lived through two world wars, married
within their community and lived within their faith. When independence came in
1960s, they were destroyed by the native powers. Thus M.G. Vassanji gives us
the history of Indian settlements practically from their beginning to their
almost destruction. Pius Fernandes, the narrator of this fascinating novel,
uses this description to refer to an old diary on which the novel is based.
Struggle for identity is one of the important features of
diaspora. M.G. Vassanji always attempts to establish the quest for identity
through his works. His novel The Book of Secrets is a beautiful example
of his fictional efforts to resolve the enigma of identity. The identity that M.G. Vassanji portrays for
all his characters comes from the theory of discrimination. This theory is
based on colour. But in The Book of Secrets the discrimination is tinged
with staunch orthodoxy. The following passage in The Book of Secrets
focuses the real feeling of the White for the people like Nurmohamed Pipa:
“The Indians are half
savages”, Mrs. Bailey observed, beginning an explanation she had obviously
thought out conclusively and in detail.
“And, therefore, worse”,
said her companion.
“You can do nothing with
them.”
“Gone too far the other
way”, she means.
“At least the African you
can mould. But the Indians and that Mussulman are incorrigible in their worst
habits and superstitions. They will always remain so.”28
Nurmohamed Pipa is a typical case of racially migrant born
in East Africa -- though native; his alien origins make him simply impossible
to belong to Africa . Pipa like his community
in real life forever finds himself at the nexus between political discourse and
identity formation. In other words, he can’t define himself out with the
racialised political and socio-historical backgrounds that nurse him. His
estranged sense of being starts from the very early moments of his life. It is
visible in the following excerpt from The Book of Secrets:
His name was Nurmohamed
Pipa….Pipa was the nickname given to the family by the neighbourhood, and had
stuck. It made him feel a lack of respectability, of a place that was truly
home. He was simply an Indian, a mhindi, from Moshi, a town in the vicinity of
Kilimanjaro whose masters were Germans.29
Nurmohamed Pipa, a metonym of Asian
African community, is not only a restless character but also a homeless one. It
is a deep sense of unhomliness that makes the forefathers of Asian Africans
such as Dhanji Govindjhi in The Gunny Sack to migrate from the
borderlands of Cutch, Kathiawar and Punjab . It
is the same deep sense of unhomliness that drives Nurmohamed Pipa away from his
borderland birthplace of Moshi in search of comfort, home and security. It is
still the same deep sense of unhomliness that drives scores of post-Pipa
generations of Asian Africans from the borderland that is postcolonial East Africa . East Africa is a borderland, a world
in-between India and the new
Asian African homelands in North America and Western
Europe .
In The Book of Secrets
Nurmohamed Pipa can be seen struggling for home. He feels compelled to run away
from spaces that stand in the way of his desire for homely life. This is why
Pius Fernandes expresses his view:
Pipa was home now, yet
lived in fear. He was a marked man, known both to the agents of Maynard and the
allies of Germans; any of them could call on him as they had done in Kikono.30
This illustrated feeling of
unhomliness that Nurmohamed Pipa feels after his interstitial experience of the
First World War later becomes the hallmark of his state of being as well. No
matter where he goes or what he does, he never gets comfort or feels at home.
Here we are brought to share in the pains and searching for homes and the pains
of losing these homes.
Memory is also an important
characteristic of diaspora. This characteristic has a significant place in The
Book of secrets. The world of memories has always been the germ of
Vassanji’s fiction. The author’s engagement with the past and heritage through
memory is very significant. In The Book of Secrets memory negotiates the
colonial and postcolonial history of East Africa
to underscore its contradictions and contingencies. Throughout the novel the
history of the struggle of imperial powers of Europe like Germany and England
over colonies in Africa, the World Wars, their impact on the Indian diaspora in
the African East Coast, and finally the decolonisation of Kenya, Tanzania,
Uganda, Zanzibar and other nations constitute the troublesome destiny of the
people. They are forced to migrate and re-migrate to the place both imaginary
and real.
M.G.
Vassanji’s fourth novel is Amriika.
Once again it deals with the themes and ideas that recur throughout his novel.
It is an excellent tale of immigrant experience. It explores the state of living in exile. In
‘More Personal Notes on the Book’ the author himself has expressed his views
about this book. He says:
How far can political
commitment and radical dissent go? How far west can you go? In Canada this novel, beginning in Boston-Cambridge
in the Vietnam War era, was seen as documenting the travails of an immigrant;
in India
it was seen pre-cursing 9/11.The reader can draw his or her conclusion. “Amriika”
is how Indians pronounce America.31
The novel Amriika deals with
Ramji, the protagonist of the novel. His name has Indian essence. This earnest
and intelligent novel, the fourth from the Indian born author of The Book of
Secrets, sedulously charts an Asian African immigrant’s experience of three
decades of recent American history. Here is a writer from the Indian diaspora
who wishes to write back not just to the empire, but also to his homeland.
Praised for its combination of history
and fiction, The Gunny Sack was a movingly told story of a small
community of Asian Africans, whom M.G. Vassanji called the Shamsis. “This
community corresponds to the Ismailis, who regarded Aga Khan as the 10th
avatar of Vishnu.”32 In Uhuru Street ,
M.G. Vassanji went back to the lives of Cutchi settlers in Dar es Salaam . In Amriika M.G.
Vassanji uses the same material, but with a new twist.
M.G. Vassanji, a gifted writer, is a
shy, reticent man who hardly looks or behaves like a famous writer. Like The
Gunny Sack, No New Land and The Book of Secrets his Amriika
is a fantastic piece of work. It is a well told, even observing story that adds
to Vassanji’s already versatile and considerable oeuvre. It is an outstanding
novel of personal and political awakening that spans three highly charged
decades of America
and explores the eternal quest for home. Dealing with the theme of rootless
ness, it suitably and beautifully articulates nearly all the features of
diaspora. Talking of this book and the protagonist Gene Carey is of the view:
Vassanji has inevitably
woven his newest tale around the issues of exile, longing, displacement and,
ultimately, acceptance. The world of the 1960s from the backdrop – a world of
changing values and sexual freedom, of peace marches, religious cults, and
protest bombings -- that is the world that Ramji inherits and shapes to make
his own.33
In this beautiful and richly textured
mosaic of lives and events, M.G. Vassanji deals with the personal experience of
an immigrant named Ramji from the Cutchi Ismaili Muslim community. As M.G.
Vassanji did in The In-Between world of Vikram Lall, he guides his
narrator to a safe location to reminisce. In The In-Between World of Vikram
Lall it is Southern Ontario in Canada
but in the present novel it is California .
Ramji, an immigrant from Dar es Salaam , narrates
many parts of this novel by Vassanji. These parts tell a compelling story of
displacement and it’s after effects. From the Gujarat he never knew, to the Dar es Salaam he grew up in, to the America he adopted as his own, M.G.
Vassanji traces the diasporic journey of an immigrant in Amriika. The
name of this immigrant is Ramji who is the protagonist of this novel. He seems
to be modelled so closely on M.G. Vassanji himself. Here the author records his
initiation into student life in Boston .
The plot of this novel is very
straightforward. Indian origin boy, a second generation African, Ramji is a
native Gujarati Muslim. He belongs to a small community of Cutchi Ismaili
Muslims who have settled in Dar es
Salaam . His parents are dead and his deeply religious
grandmother raises him. Like M.G. Vassanji himself, he leaves his home, and his
grandmother in Dar es Salaam , to pursue a
bachelor degree on scholarship at the Boston
‘Tech’, a prestigious American school. As a student he arrives in the United States in 1968 from Dar
es Salaam , East Africa . ‘It was
time of protest and counter culture.’34 Studying at ‘Tech’ which is
obviously modelled on MIT, he is drawn into campus radicalism. He very soon
finds himself engulfed in radical politics, especially the anti-war movement.
As an immigrant Ramji comes in America
in hope of achieving the great American dream. The myriad facets he is exposed
to overwhelm him. But he finds an America far different from the one
he dreams about, one caught up in anti-Vietnam war demonstrations,
revolutionary life styles, racial discrimination and spiritual quests. The
reality he faces is very harsh and awful, and finally he realizes that America
cannot appear as a dreamland. He becomes helpless like Nurdin Lalani of No
New Land. He has no option except to keep on living there.
The story of Ramji obviously reflects
that the journey undertaken by a migrant or a migrant community in search of
identity, belonging and security is normally shattered by doubts, challenges
and never-ending feelings of despair.
M.G. Vassanji takes the dream of the
60s and tells a beautiful tale of a man’s search for his roots. It explores the
eternal quest for home. Like other novels of Vassanji, Amriika once
again illustrates the complex nature of diasporic narrative. It must speak both
to the adopted home and to the homeland, and in Vassanji case the medium or the
bridge between the two is older diasporic home, East
Africa . In the present novel the protagonist has been shown
struggling for home. He hankers after his desire for homely life. In search of
this he leaves his first wife and goes to California with Rumina. But when after a
subtle rift Rumina leaves home, Ramji is left once more homeless.
M.G. Vassanji is caught between the
home ‘there’ and ‘here’. It becomes clear when we study his novels and
interviews. Asked about his sense of national identity, Vassanji observed:
In my heart I am still
very much an African, but I have lived in Canada for a ling time and it feels
like home. At some point in your life you realise there are several homes.35
In an interview with Sayantan
Dasgupta, Vassanji expresses his views:
I am more comfortable
defining myself in terms of my locale and city. That way Dar es Salaam would be probably the first
place that figures as home. Every writer I think belongs to his city, to the
streets and his urban landscape, assuming he is part of an urban ethos. Another
place I could call home in that sense would be Toronto in Canada.36
In another interview with Gene Carey,
M.G. Vassanji says:
Once I came to the United States I had a fear of losing my link
with Tanzania .
Then I feared going back because if I went back I feared losing the new world
one had discovered.37
He further says:
I went back to Tanzania
in 1989 after 19 years. It is a part of my soul. The other part is India ,
which I visited for first time in 1993. My father has never been to India ,
the land of my forefathers.38
Talking of his career and roots, M.G.
Vassanji expresses his helplessness about returning. He clearly states:
Once you come here, cross
the oceans, there is no going back. There is a psychological belonging to East Africa , Particularly Tanzania. You need something to
hold on.39
Sometimes it
seems that Ramji is Vassanji himself. Vassanji wanted to return to his homeland
to teach after completing his Ph.D. but it was not possible for him. Like him
Ramji also longs to go back to Tanzania
to join in the political struggle but he is trapped in the ideals. Moreover,
the American abundance in every possible way enthrals and mocks the atrophies
back home. The siren call, in other words, so powerful that nothing can wean
him off it – neither a beloved grandmother’s death, nor the political
upheavals. Discussing Ramji’s situation Vassanji says:
He has guilt feelings
about not returning back to Channel hi knowledge into politics but the idea
remains the back of his mind. If learning about radicalism is the first irony
in the book, the second one is realization that in America he is still considered a
coloured person.40
Memory
plays a very significant role in the novels of M.G. Vassanji. Either in The
Gunny Sack or in The Book of Secrets, it is memory that has got a
significant place. In The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and No New
Land it has played vital role. In Amriika the story springs from the
same memory. Vassanji’s engagement with the past is praiseworthy. Unlike the
archives, where the past is already digested as the raw material for history
writing, the past here is a past of memory. For him it is an aesthetic
necessity, and it has great sacral value.
Decades
later in a changed America ,
having recently left a marriage and sub-urban existence, an older Ramji,
passionately in love, finds himself drawn into a set of circumstances which
hold terrifying reminders of the past and its unanswered questions. In this
context Makarand Paranjape observes:
Vassanji’s obsession with
the past, with the history of his small community, is well reflected in the
tanga painting that he gives to the host family; it bears a simple but telling
legend: “Wayfarer look back.” In a sense, this is what Vassanji has been doing
all along.41
Told in a spiral fashion, the story of
Ramji moves forth through remembrance, which he re-lives time and again, and
his affairs of all sorts. With the help of the history Vassanji has tried to
explore his own past and at the same time the past of Asian African community
in East Africa and America .
He has beautifully woven the past with the present. He tries to discuss “how
history affects the present and how personal and public history overlap.”42
In Postcolonial times, the Indian
community in East Africa got a strange
position. Its condition became pitiable. It was marginalized by the
postcolonial regime. The members of this community were forced into the
international diaspora. The second phase of migration started in the sixties.
Some members of the above-mentioned community later undergo a second migration
from East Africa towards Europe, Canada
and North America . Vassanji is then concerned
how these migrations affect the lives and identities of his characters, an
issue that is personal to him as well:
[The Indian diaspora] is
very important…Once I went to the U.S. ,
suddenly the Indian connections became very important: the sense of origins,
trying to understand the roots of India that we had inside us.43
Vassanji has observed about his characters:
I tell stories about
marginalized people. All writers do, whether the people in question be a family
of Jews in New York or a farming community in Saskatchewan…I’ve had people
who’ve moved from Nova Scotia to Toronto tell me that they can appreciate my
stories because it speaks to them of their experience. Again it is one of
marginalisation.44
In short, Amriika beautifully
tackles ‘the predicament of in-between socities.’45 It is a
fantastic diasporic reminiscence with a great, great deal of authentic detail.
It also reads like autobiography, slipping from third to first person at
various places in the text. Vassanji, of course, makes a point of insisting
that everything in the novel is fictitious, but I cannot agree. The incident
may be fictional, but the note of personal experience is unmistakable. Here the
typical Third World characters, and their
cries, inhabit the hyphenated identities and spaces that Vassanji, a literary
member of Indian diaspora, explores.
A fascinating mix of contents flows in
M.G. Vassanji, the first writer to win the prestigious Giller Prize twice. He
is looming high on the arc of Indian diaspora writers. His fifth novel The In-Between world of Vikram Lall is
an interesting and relevant account of the Indian diaspora. It deals with a
compelling story of Vikram Lall, a third generation Kenyan Asian. Through this
story, set in East Africa , we learn the
ambiguous situation and the strange position of Indians of Kenya who are
neither indigenous Africans nor European colonizers. Many of them can’t find a
familiar refuge on the Indian subcontinent nor in the colonial home country.
They are alienated from their African homelands regardless of their emotional
attachment and legal status.
In
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall we get Vassanji’s articulation of a
most complex diaspora. This novel brilliantly captures nearly all the
characteristics of diaspora. It is profound and careful examination of an
immigrant’s search for his place in the world. It also takes up themes that
have run through Vassanji’s work, such as the nature of community in a volatile
society, the relations between colony and colonizer, and the inescapable
presence of the past. The major thing that stands out in the book is people who
are in-between. The feeling of belonging and not belonging is very central to
the book. In his various interviews M.G. Vassanji articulates time and again
that when he lived in Tanzania
he belonged and did not belong because he had come from Kenya . In
short, this novel deals with exile, memory, alienation, longing for home,
in-between status of immigrants and search for identity. Here Vassanji
demonstrates how the individual is caught in the conflicting demands of race
and nation.
Narrated by Vikram Lall, a
disreputable middle-aged businessman, from his new home on the shores of Canada ’s Lake Ontario ,
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is an epic tale of modern Kenyan
history, mapped out amid the major transplantations of the Lall family. In the
course of about five decades, three generations of Lalls have migrated across
three continents in the westward movement followed by a growing number of
African born Asians. As a young man, Vikram’s grandfather, Anand Lall – along
with tens of thousands of other indentured labourers – is shipped from British
India to an alien, beautiful and wild country across the seas to work on the
grand Mombassa-Kampala railway, Britain ’s
gateway to the African jewel. In this adopted land Vikram’s father, Ashok Lall,
runs a grocery store in the central Kenyan town of Nakuru
before moving to the capital, Nairobi .
And it is from this country – now independent and governed by a clique of
nepotistic politicians – that an adult Vikram is forced to flee by Kenya ’s
anticorruption hounds, Lall is fugitive, not from justice, and there is none
where he comes from. Now he is alone and lost in the snowy Ontario , suspended between multiple worlds,
neither Asian, nor African, nor Canadian, neither innocent nor guilty, a
captive observer:
My name is Vikram Lall. I
have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa ’s
most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous reptilian cunning. To me has been
attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country’s treasury in
recent years. I head my country’s List of Shame. These and other descriptions
actually flatter my intelligence, if not my moral sensibility. But I do not
intend here to defend myself or even seek redemption through confession; I
simply crave to tell my story. In this clement retreat to which I have
withdrawn myself, away from the torrid current temper of my country, I find
myself with all the time and seclusion I may ever need for my purpose. I have
even come upon a small revelation – and as I proceed daily to recall and
reflect, and lay out on the page, it is with an increasing conviction of its
truth, that if more of us told our stories to each other, where I come from, we
would be a far happier and less nervous people.46
Divided in four parts – The Years of
Our Loves and Friendships, The Years of Her Passion, The Years of Betrayal, and
Homecoming – The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a bold attempt at
telling the epic tale of Asian people in Africa .
In The In-Between World of Vikram
Lall the major thing that stands out is people who are in-between. The story
revolves around Vikram Lall whose grandfather, Anand Lall, was brought from India as an indentured worker to Kenya
to help build the East African railway. Though his grandfather played a
significant role in the development of Kenya , the status of his family
remains enigmatic unsettlers. Indians in Africa
are viewed as the Other by both whites and blacks. While reading the book we
can easily conclude that Vassanji’s world is really in-between because as an
Indian in Africa , he is positioned between two
groups, the Europeans and the Africans, neither group of which he could be an
intrinsic part of and looked down upon with deep suspicion, by both.
In
fact, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall tells the story of an
immigrant named Vikram Lall who represents the Indians in Kenya . Indeed, the Indians hold
that tenuous in-between position, not as lowly or poor as the Africans, but
definitely lacking in power and subject to the colonial overlords. Like his
father who continued to work as a middleman, no longer in a shop but in the
field of real estate, Vikram also took work as someone else’s agent.
In
his very early life Vikram experiences the racism that was apparent everywhere.
The British, or whites, were at the top of social ladder, while the Africans
were on the bottom. Stuck in the middle were the Indians. The ugly and horrible
face of the racism can be seen in the following excerpt:
By comparison our end was
sedate, orderly: a few vehicles parked, a few rickety tables outside Arnauti’s
occupied by Europeans on a good day…….and my sisters and I could go to
Arnauti’s, where we were allowed a corner table outside, though not our black
friend Njoroge, who with quite straight face, head in the air and hands in the
pocket, would proudly wander off.47
In such a racially divided society,
interracial love is not only frowned upon, it can have explosive and
far-reaching consequences. Deepa and Njoroge’s love story is drawn particularly
gorgeously chiselling out the politics of race, class and identity. Vikram’s
sister, Deepa learns this the hard way when she re-establishes contact with her
childhood sweetheart, Njoroge. They try to ignore the cultural and colour
barriers of that era. They want to marry. But neither community approves of the
relationship between them. Njoroge who deeply loves Deepa, finds her family as
obstinately against their relationship as Vikram finds his girl friend’s family
to be against him – her family is Muslim from Gujarat, while his is Hindu from Punjab .
In The In-Between World
of Vikram Lall, Vassanji returns to the theme that preoccupied him in
earlier works. It deals with the strange position of Asian Africans in East Africa . In the figure of Vikram Lall, Vassanji has
created a character whose life reflects the myriad experiences of thousands of
Asian Africans in latter half of 20th century, but also, more
generally, a figure through whom he explores broader issues of the Indian
diaspora.
M.G. Vassanji is quite a wordsmith.
His descriptions of Indian food, family life and community are both rich and
delicious. Vikram remembers:
On Saturday mornings,
with the schools closed, my sister and I went down to the shop with our
parents. Sun-drenched Saturdays is how I think of those days, what memories
trapped for me days of play. Though it could get cold at times, and in the
morning the ground might be covered in frost. At the other end of the mall from
us, Lakshmi Sweets was always bustling at midmorning, Indian families having
stopped over in their cars for bhajias, samosas, dhokras, bhel-puri and tea,
which they consumed noisily and with gusto.48
Like many other writers of Indian
diaspora, Vassanji uses the names of Indian cuisines deliberately. With the
help of this use the author wants to affirm the existence and identity of the
Indian immigrants in Kenya .
As we know that the cultural identity that comes up through food is very
energetic because it highlights the everyday modes of life. This is reason why
Vassanji mentions the names of Indian foods in his novels. In No New Land Sheru
Mama and her husband tend to serve chappati that way:
Sheru Mama makes hundreds
of chappatis everyday and baby-sits to toddlers at the same time, while husband
Ramju helps with the dishes and puts the required dollop of margarine over
every chappati. Her customers tend to be single men who will eat a chappati
with a pickle, or butter and jam, or curry canned in the U.S.49
‘Samosas’ are the favourite snacks of
people of northern part India .
They like to take them with tea. Even in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
we find great fascination of Indians for samosa and tea. Remembering his
idyllic childhood Vikram says:
…Indians families having
stopped over in their cars for bhajias, samosas, dhokras, bhel-puri and tea….my
father and mother always ordered tea and snacks from Lakshmi…50
It is not only description of about
food, but also of enumerating the traditions, customs and typical Indian
characteristics that prove the fact that maintenance of culture is an innate
trait of immigrants. Vikram and his family, and all the other inhabitants of
Nakuru try to maintain their culture.
Esman
regards that a diaspora is a minority ethnic group of migrant origin, which
maintains sentimental or material links with its land of origin. It is true to
this novel. We see that Vikram’s father Ashok, an Indian diaspora, finds
references to Indian politicians, such as the pro-axis figure Subhash Chandra
Bose and even Gandhi himself, to be ‘quite alien.’51
In the first section of the novel
Vassanji creates a world of immigrants that is a classic, with all the tensions
between the generations and the desire to become part of new land without
losing the old culture. Vic’s world has an added complication: The Indians,
brought in as cheap, reliable, if despised, labour by the British, and are regarded
as the outsiders by the Africans. Among the Indians themselves age-old
animosities from home continue, exacerbated by the savagely murderous partition
of India .
The Lalls, Hindus from Peshawar
in what is now Muslim Pakistan, no longer have ‘a home’, even if they wanted to
return.
The novel unfolds ‘as a remembrance
told by Lall as he looks back on his years in East Africa from the safe
distance of Southern Ontario . He has earned
this exile from his beloved Kenya.’52 Throughout the novel, the
author brings us back to Vikram’s present location, Canada, from where he is
recalling his past life and decline – which mirrors that of his beloved
country. In short, as an immigrant Vikram ‘retains a collective memory, vision,
or myth about his original homeland – its physical location, history and
achievement.’53
Exile,
dislocation and displacement have been inevitable motives in Vassanji’s
writing. They try to encompass Indians living in East
Africa . Some members of this immigrant community have to leave East Africa under pressure. They have to migrate to
Europe, Canada , or the United States .
Vassanji attempts to show how these migrations affect the lives and identities
of his characters. This vital issue is personal to him. That’s why he says:
[The Indian diaspora] is
very important…..Once I went to the US ,
suddenly the Indian connection became very important: the sense of origin,
trying to understand the roots of India that we had inside us.54
Vikram is a man displaced
from history and politics. Caught between several worlds Vic and other Indians
are in effect homeless, many of them doubly so, owing to exile that the
division of India forced upon many Indians. Kenya
and Tanzania and Uganda ,
cruelly purged its Indian population by the early 1970s simply to assuage and
to fortify nationalist or tribal ideologies that at least threatened to become
as repressive as the imperialism they replaced. When the Kenyans eventually
gain their independence, the Indian community finds itself caught in the
middle, as Africans try to take over not just the properties of the British,
but also the properties of Kenyan Indians, even those who have lived, as Vic
has, all his life in Kenya.
Vic’s grandfather had arrived in Kenya
as an indenture. His exile had taken place due to poverty and repression of the
British. Vic’s father has to leave Nakuru due to insecurity and Vic has to
leave Nairobi due to racialist ideologies of Kenya .
Vassanji superbly limns the pathos of this condition of a perpetual exile.
One of the most impressive
thing about this fine novel is that it gives voice to a people, some of whose
forebears were in Africa before Portuguese, who have tended to keep their heads
down and their mouths shut – and were not infrequently booted out – Vikram Lall
says proudly that he is the third generation African; a boast from the time
when people said such things, and believed them. He is the son of a grocer, who
was himself the son of a Punjabi labourer, an indentured ‘coolie’, brought to
East Africa to build the railway line from Mombassa to Kampala ,
through 600 miles of the loveliest terrain in Africa .
REFERENCES:
01. M.G.
Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (London: Heinemann, 1989), pp. 42-3.
02. Ibid.,
pp. 268-9.
03. Arun
P. Mukherjee, “Introduction”, in Oppositional Aesthetics: Reading from a
Hyphenated Space (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1994), p. Vii.
04. Peter
G. Mandeville, “Territory and Translocating: Discrepant Idioms of Political
Locality”, Columbia International Affairs On Line July2000,
21October 2002 < http: // www.cionet.org/htm>.
05. Ibid.
06. Ibid.
07. Sayantan
Dasgupta, “Coming Home”, The Statesman Review 30 May 2000. ts. Jadavpur U. , Kolkata.
08. Gene
Carey, “Ramji’s Amrika”, Rediff on the Net 5 May 1999, 5 July 2002 <
http: //www.rediff.com/news/1999/dec/ 08us.htm >.
09. M.G.
Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (London: Heinemann, 1989), p. 52.
10. M.F.
Salat, “The Need to discover: M.G. Vassanji’s Writings”, in Jameela Begum, and
Maya Dutta, eds. South Asian Canadian (Madras: Anu Chitra
Publications, 1996), p.71.
11. Chelva
Kanaganayakam, “‘Broadening the Substrata’: An Interview with M.G. Vassanji”, World
Literature Written in English 31.2 (1991), p. 21.
12. M.G.
Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (London: Heinemann, 1989), p. 112.
13. Ibid.,
p. 10.
14. Ibid.,
p. 135.
15. M.G.
Vassanji, No New Land (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 103.
16. Ibid.,
p. 3.
17. Ibid.,
p. 6.
18. Yasmin
Ladha, “Beena”, in Lion’s Granddaughter and Other Stories
(Edmonton: New West Publishers Ltd., 1992), p. 1.
19. M.G.
Vassanji, No New Land (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 160.
20. Ibid.,
p. 185.
21. Ibid.,
p. 61.
22. Ibid.,
p. 78.
23. Ibid.,
p. 78.
24. M.G.
Vassanji, “In the Quiet of a Sunday Afternoon”, in Uhuru
Street (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992), p.
2.
25. M.G.
Vassanji, No New Land (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 121.
26. Uma
Parameswaran, Rootless But Green are the Boulevard Trees
(Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1987), p. 20
27. Amin
Malak, “Ambivalent Affiliations and the Post-Colonial Condition: The Fiction of
M.G. Vassanji”, World Literature Today 67.2. (Spring 1993), p. 279.
28. M.G.
Vassanji, The Book of Secrets (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994),
p. 39.
29. Ibid.,
p. 127.
30. Ibid.,
p. 200.
31. M.G.
Vassanji, “Amriika”. < http: // www.mgvassanji.com /personalNotes2.htm
>.
32. Makarand
Paranjape, “Looking Back”, Online Edition of the Hindu, Sunday, August
20, 2000. <http: // www.hindu.com / the hindu/ 2000/ 08 /20 / stories /
htm>.
33. Gene
Carey, “Ramji’s Amrika”. Rediff on the Net. 5 May 1999. 5 July 2002.
< http: // www.rediff.com / news/ 1999/ dec/ 08us.htm >.
34. Makarand
Paranjape, “Looking Back”, Online Edition of the Hindu, Sunday, August
20, 2000. <http: // www.hindu.com / the hindu/ 2000/ 08 /20 / stories /
htm>.
35. Clay
Dyre, Review of Amriika. <http:// www. Canadian encyclopedia.com/
index.cfm.
36. Sayantan
Dasgupta, “Coming Home”, The Statesman Review. 30May 2000. ts. Jadavpur U. , Kolkata.
37. Gene
Carey, “Ramji’s Amrika”. Rediff on the Net. 5 May 1999. 5 July 2002.
< http: // www.rediff.com / news/ 1999/ dec/ 08us.htm >.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Makarand
Paranjape, “Looking Back”, Online Edition of the Hindu, Sunday, August
20, 2000. <http: // www.hindu.com / the hindu/ 2000/ 08 /20 / stories /
htm>
42. Amin
Malak, “Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of
M.G. Vassanji”, World Literature Today 76.2 (Spring1993), p. 279.
43. Chelva
Kanaganayakam, “‘Broadening the Substrata': An Interview with M.G. Vassanji”, World
Literature Written in English 31.2 (1991), p. 21.
44. Ray
Deonandan, Eletronic Magazine,www.deonandan.com/ < accessed 12th
Feb. 2004. >
45. Smaro
Kamboureli, ed. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature
(Ontario: OU Press, 1996), p. 335.
46. M.G.
Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Toronto : Doubleday, 2003), p. ix.
47. Ibid.,
p. 3.
48. Ibid.,
pp. 2-3.
49. M.G.
Vassanji, No New Land (New Delhi:
Penguin, 1962), p. 61.
50. M.G.
Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Toronto : Doubleday, 2003), pp. 2-3.
51. Ibid.,
p. 51.
52. Craig
Taylor, Reviews, Canada ’s
Magazine of Book News and Reviews, <http:
// www.quillandquire.com /reviews /review /.cfm? review_id =36127.
53. Robin
Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction
(London : UCL
Press), p. 26.
54. Chelva
Kanaganayakam, “‘Broadening the Substrata’: An Interview with M.G. Vassanji”, World Literature Written in English
31.2 (1999), P. 34.
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