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Canada in the Looking-Glass: Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), by Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee

Images réfractées du Canada dans Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977) de Clark Blaise et Bharati Mukherjee
Christine Lorre

Résumé

Days and Nights in Calcutta est l’un des nombreux mémoires que l’Inde a inspiré à ses visiteurs. Clark Blaise et Bharati Mukherjee, dans deux récits indépendants, juxtaposés, rapportent chacun l’année qu’ils ont passée en 1973 à Calcutta (ponctuée de séjours plus brefs à Bombay), loin de Montréal où ils s’étaient installés plusieurs années auparavant. Si l’on peut comparer Calcutta à un miroir dans lequel Blaise et Mukherjee contemplent le reflet de leur propre vie, chacune des deux parties du livre joue aussi comme un miroir tendu à l’autre par chaque écrivain, tandis que le récit dans son ensemble offre à ses lecteurs canadiens une représentation indirecte de ce qu’ils sont, ou plutôt, une image de ce qu’ils représentaient dans les années 1970. Cet article propose donc une lecture de Days and Nights comme représentation oblique du Canada ; il examine d’abord la position de chaque écrivain, puis analyse comment ce double récit personnel reflète leur propre perception du Canada et des Canadiens à l’époque.

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  • 1 “Hinduism”, Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 20, 1995, 520. The entry reads on: “Nearly 2,00 (...)

1Days and Nights in Calcutta is one of the many memoirs that India has inspired its visitors to write. In two independent, juxtaposed narratives, its co-authors, Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee, relate separately their one-year stay in Calcutta—with occasional, shorter stays in Bombay—in 1973, away from Montreal where they had been established for several years. The book’s title, which is coined after the title of a film by Satyajit Ray, Aranyer Din Ratri / Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), as well as being a homage to the Bengali filmmaker, suggests from the start that their year in India was a time for Blaise and Mukherjee, husband and wife, to take stock of their lives. The title of Ray’s movie refers to one of the four stages in the life of a Hindu, one of the four ashramas as defined in the dharma texts, which “held that a member of the three higher classes should retire [at some point of his adult life …], with or without his wife, to the forest to devote himself to spiritual contemplation.“1 In Blaise’s and Mukherjee’s narratives, the forest is replaced by Calcutta, making it the modern version of a special place where one devotes oneself to reflection. If the city may be likened to a mirror in which Blaise and Mukherjee see their own lives reflected, the two parts of the book also act as mirrors that each writer holds to the other, while the story as a whole offers its Canadian readers an oblique representation of who they are, or rather, images of what they stood for at the time. The following analysis thus engages in a reading of Days and Nights as an indirect representation of Canada by characterizing each writer’s position and examining what their personal narratives tell us about being Canadian in the 1970s.

Strategic location”: Two Different Viewpoints on India—and on Canada

  • 2 Edward SAID, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979, 20

2In his pioneering work Orientalism, Edward Said talks of the viewpoint of any traveller to and writer of the Orient as “strategic location,” which he defines as “a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about.”2 It is particularly essential, in the case of Blaise and Mukherjee, to start by defining their contrasted viewpoints on Calcutta, and more largely India. Blaise was born in the United States in 1940 of Canadian parents. In the early 1960s he attended the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he met Mukherjee. They were married in 1963 and moved to Montreal in 1966. To Blaise, a young aspiring writer of Canadian ancestry, Montreal, with its vibrant cultural life, was the place to be; there, he hoped, he would connect with his material and find his voice, tapping into his father’s French-Canadian background and his mother’s English-Canadian heritage. Montreal was also where his parents had met, a powerful symbol of the double (or dual) cultural nature of Canada that Blaise was keen to explore from his slanted viewpoint as an American of Canadian origin, raised in the United States but personally familiar with Canada. His commitment to Canada resulted in his giving up his American citizenship to become Canadian in 1973.

3As an Indian, Mukherjee had different ties from Blaise to Canada, which like India was a former colony of the old empire and now part of the Commonwealth. She was born in Calcutta in 1940 into a Brahmin Bengali family, but at the age of eight spent two and a half years abroad with her parents and two sisters, in London and Basel, where her father worked. Back in Calcutta, in 1951, she received an education from the Irish nuns at Loreto House. Altogether, she was shaped by a traditional Bengali education, but influenced in various fundamental ways by Western culture. At the age of twenty-one, she went to the United States to attend the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City, where she met and subsequently married Blaise. After moving to Montreal in 1966, she gave up her Indian citizenship to adopt Canadian nationality in 1972, although she had always been drawn to the United States more than to Canada. Both writers have a double viewpoint on India and on Canada, being simultaneously outsiders and insiders. Days and Nights was published in the United States by Doubleday in 1977, giving yet more of a slanted edge to their narratives. Mukherjee’s one-year stay in Calcutta took place twelve years after she had permanently left India; it was a time to take stock of her life in North America and her ties to India. For Blaise, the stay was an opportunity to develop his relationship to a culture foreign to him until his marriage, while taking a look at his own life from a different perspective. Their radically different viewpoints have an impact on their modes of narration: they resort to genres, forms and narrative strategies prompted by their cultural backgrounds, as well as by the points they want to make. Blaise’s narrative, which he explicitly describes as a quest, is akin to travel writing, whereas Mukherjee’s is closer to autobiography and matches the archetype of a story of exile. These forms are part of two different literary traditions, as the critic Arun Mukherjee (no relation to Bharati) shows in Oppositional Aesthetics, when she contrasts systems of thought and narration and sheds light on the differences between them:

  • 3 Arun MUKHERJEE, “The Vocabulary of the ‘Universal’: The Cultural Imperialism of the Universalist Cr (...)

Contrary to the assertions of the liberal humanist critics, literary appreciation as well as literary production are culture based and no universal criteria can be worked out that will apply regardless of cultural differences. It is not possible to accept that the quest, the Jungian journey to the underworld, the individual’s growth from ignorance to knowledge, etc., are ‘universal’ archetypes. These are the forms created by a civilization whose physical frontiers have continually expanded during the last four centuries. For example, instead of the quest, the main motif of Indian epics is exile. The characters of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata go to the forest against their will, in obedience to the command of the parents in the first one and as a punishment for having lost at gambling in the second.3

  • 4 Clark BLAISE and Bharati MUKHERJEE, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977, (...)

4Mukherjee’s narrative appears as a sort of reverse, doubled-up experience of exile, as if she had been punished for losing her gamble (only temporarily so, as the future would show) to make it in the United States. She feels exiled in her hometown, where she says she couldn’t live again—in fact, she was never keen on spending a year in India, stating early on: “Going to India was Clark’s idea.”4 But she feels exiled also in Montreal, which she dislikes—she could equally have written, “Going to Canada was Clark’s idea.”

  • 5 The phrase is from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (v. i. 17) and is used by Roshan (...)

5Her feeling of exile has a lot to do with what Said calls “strategic formation,” which he defines as “a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power themselves and thereafter in the culture at large” (Orientalism, 20). One of the aspects of the concept of strategic formation is the relationship between a writer and his or her readership, in institutional and referential terms, a relationship Mukherjee was keenly aware of at the time: she was still in the process of defining her voice and was confronted with division as a writer of Indian origin in the United States and Canada. Canada where she lived did not inspire her writing; her first two books (The Tiger’s Daughter, 1971; Wife, 1975), published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin, were set in India and the United States and dealt with the themes of exile and cultural clash. In Days and Nights, she thus uses the traditional narrative of exile to voice her frustrations as a Bengali woman and writer in North America in search of “a local habitation and a name.”5 Blaise, in contrast, had deliberately chosen to move to Montreal so that his material—his double Canadian background—would be at his fingertips, and his writing would thrive. And now he is curious about India, seemingly increasingly at home in the world. With the traditional quest motif of travel writing, Blaise’s first-person narrator, a persona also called Clark Blaise, in accordance with the conventions of the genre, is in a position to grow from ignorance to knowledge, to use A. Mukherjee’s terms. But an indirect dialogue starts between the two parts of the book which respond to each other, B. Mukherjee’s anger echoing Blaise’s satisfaction, and from this exchange emerges a criticism of various forms of Western imperialism. On Blaise’s part, this unusual conversation is triggered by what he identifies as a threefold quest, which may be summed up as follows: he wants to understand his marriage, to understand the philosophical tenets and fundamental principles that underlie Indian thought, and to get a sense of what future lies in store for India. To these questions, he hears unexpected responses.

A Canadian in India: the “good Canadian abroad”

6The persona called Clark Blaise variously identifies himself as Canadian, American, European, of the Commonwealth, and eventually Indian, depending on the situation he is in, how he wants to be perceived by others, and how others perceive him. The Canadian component—Blaise’s favourite—of his multiple identity plays a particular part.

7As part of his enterprise to understand India in philosophical terms, Blaise first sets out to define what is “real India,” his object of observation, “for a fiction writer” (DNC, 18), before elaborating a framework of analysis which will enable him to draw conclusions. The old market in Bombay is a revelation: “This is where I began to love it. […] India alerted me again to the basic social value, buying and selling—knowing goods and providing goods—the original reason that people came together” (DNC, 17). By calling “original” the commercial activity at the market, Blaise confers on it a value of authenticity, implying that he is drawing close to the essence of what he wants to discover and understand. He perceives the market as a metaphor of social bonds, which delights him as a writer. However, he appreciates being away from the crowds: the Ramakrishna mission, where he and Mukherjee are staying, welcomes foreign researchers and visiting Indians, acting as a veritable fortress, protecting its guests from the mob that has come from the countryside. And beyond Bombay, a city influenced by the West, India does not have much meaning to Blaise: “One is always aware in India that they, that indefinable, unknowable, and unpredictable mass is out there, violent, suffering, simple, and passive, but no one in the cities really knows what can be done for them. They are from a different era. So nothing is done” (DNC, 19).

  • 6 Robert STERN, Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 19 (...)
  • 7 Timothy BRENNAN, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, MA and London, Eng: Harvard (...)

8The rural world and the related problem of poverty are relegated to another sphere, another era. But this exclusion is a consequence of Blaise’s own way of looking at society from a particular position, not a matter of fact: the masses of poor are not part of “another India,” but certainly make up “real India.” They are also at the core of Indian public discourse, as Robert Stern points out in Changing India: “In India’s constitution, its eight successive five-year plans, hundreds of its party manifestoes, thousands of its laws and myriad speeches of its politicians there is a rhetorical commitment to a process of change whose chief beneficiaries are the poor.”6 Blaise’s attitude is part of a tendency that literary travellers from rich to poor countries have, and which Timothy Brennan analyzes in his study on cosmopolitanism: “The world of the poor is disturbing to the literary sensibility in ways that are not yet fully understood, and is at least as important a candidate for the distortions of ‘third-world’ reception as are racial, historical, or linguistic differences.”7 Poverty and literature do not go well together here, and Blaise’s India—picturesque, cosmopolitan, sophisticated—reflects his response to what he sees. It is the India that contemporary Western writers would be drawn to, which one still needs the help of a familiar intellectual framework to grasp.

9Once he has defined and restricted his field of observation, Blaise proceeds to establish a system of analysis, raising a question in binary terms: how to interpret India—through the thought of Marx, or that of Hegel (DNC, 12)? In other words, is the physical India, the society in its daily reality, the expression of an idea, an ideal, or should the material world be reduced to economic rules of offer and demand (DNC, 52)? The phrasing of the question in these terms is revealing of Western ethnocentrism: the dichotomic paradigms Blaise chooses are Western, to the exclusion of other perspectives on his subject of observation; typically, Western rationality prevails over Eastern spirituality. Blaise’s view of India may thus be generally identified as that of a Westerner—a white man, a Sahib of the 1970s. More specifically, it may be characterized as Canadian.

  • 8 Brian MCKILLOP, “The Idealist Legacy,” Contours of Canadian Thought, Toronto, Buffalo, London: U of (...)

10Blaise’s attempt at understanding India in terms of Hegel or Marx is part of the building of the persona he has created. Indeed, Hegelianism is a fundamental element of the Canadian idealist tradition which Brian Killop has analyzed, arguing that “much of Canada’s intellectual past consists of the attempts of people who were moralists of different hues to come to grips with modernity as they understood it.8 Blaise’s reference to Marxism, the counterpart of Hegelianism, is also constitutive of his persona as the zgood Canadian abroad” (DNC, 98): by being willing to consider India in the light of Marxist theory, he implies that he is not the anti-Communist, pro-Vietnam war American type. He hints repeatedly at his condemnation of the United States’ aggressive style of foreign policy (DNC, 20, 50, 111, 116, 134). Moreover, it was certainly wise not to show intolerance of Marxism when in India at the time of the Naxalite revolutionary movement. Altogether, for Blaise then and there, being Canadian was definitely a more enviable identity than being American. Furthermore, from a Canadian viewpoint, the third world which India was part of had a particular meaning at the time. The period was one of strong nationalist feeling: Expo 67 and the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Canadian Confederation had had a cohesive effect on the nation, and the initiatives of the Trudeau government in the 1970s pointed to a bright future. Daniel Coleman and Donald Goellnicht, in their introduction to a special 2002 issue of Essays on Canadian Writing on “Race”, retrace the situation and spirit of the time:

  • 9 Daniel COLEMAN and Donald GOELLNICHT, “Introduction: ‘Race’ into the Twenty-First Century,” Essays (...)

All discriminatory laws against Asian immigrants were repealed by midcentury, and the 1967 Immigration Act ‘liberalized’ immigration from Third World countries, thus leading to a rapid increase in racialized minority populations, especially in Canada’s large urban centres, during the next decade. In the 1970s, Trudeau’s Liberal government increased aid to Third World countries, opposed escalation of the Vietnam war (widely perceived as a racist/imperialist war), recognized the People’s Republic of China, led the Commonwealth in calling for economic sanctions against South Africa, admitted a significant number of Asian refugees from East Africa and from Vietnam to Canada, and called on the industrialized world to address the huge economic imbalance between North and South. Following Pearson’s international peacekeeping engagements, Trudeau sought to carve out for Canada an international role distinguished from those of the old European colonizers and from that of modern U.S. imperialism: Canada as champion of the Third World.9

  • 10 See William H. NEW, “Remembering India,” Essays on Canadian Writing: Eli Mandel Issue, n°45-46, Win (...)

11Canada’s friendly relations with India included the development of cultural ties between the two countries, which Blaise and Mukherjee both participated in.10 Altogether, Blaise’s fondness of India and Canada was part of his commitment to values Canada stood for, while making his life more of a metaphor of Canadian identity.

12Although the Canadian values Blaise identifies with are defined in contrast with various forms of imperialism, championing of the third world is not entirely devoid of Western imperialist tendencies, as his vision of India shows. His inquiry into the future of Indian society may be seen as a sequel to his endeavour to understand India. Following numerous observations, transcribed as a series of vignettes relating anecdotes or conversations he had, his conclusion emerges after a discussion on Bengalis: “I think there is probably no short cut. India must undergo the same long process that we did in the West, the gradual proletarianization of lumpen refugees off the land. Then the creation of proletarian personality that will be less class-conscious, less religious, less family-dependent, and thoroughly self-centered” (DNC, 120). At the end of his narrative, on the train that is going through the state of Bihar on his way back to Bombay, he muses and reiterates his conviction that ordered development is the path to India’s future. With this statement, he is not simply speculating on the future of India; he is also defining and defending the values of modern—that is to say Western—identity, focused on the ideal of personal freedom, whose self-declared international champion was, and still is, in ways often contested, the United States.

13The shortcomings of ideological imperialism are revealed some twenty years later, when Blaise is given the opportunity to take stock in his prologue to a reissue of Days and Nights. His thought and vision on the slow social climbing of the masses turn out to be wrong, for it is through the development of a local bourgeoisie that India increased its national wealth:

  • 11 Clark BLAISE, Prologue, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Saint Paul, MN: Hungry Mind P, 1995, xii.

More than ever, India seemed poised for rupture, yet the nightmare future that was so easy to predict twenty-one years ago never materialized, at least not in the dramatic form I’d expected. India is poor and fragile, but it is also rich and robust; the problems have always been the unequal distribution of wealth and the disparities between urban and village economies. It must be understood that India has the largest middle class in the world.11

  • 12 Mary Louise PRATT, Imperial Eyes, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, 217.

14Blaise’s prediction proven wrong is a sign of the times—he thought he could see into India’s future, but was mostly projecting his own fears, hopes and beliefs. Whether his tone is analytical or dreamy, whether his viewpoint may be considered as American or Canadian, it is characteristic of contemporary travellers from comparable backgrounds whose position Mary-Louise Pratt characterizes as “speaking from the 1970s, deep in the post-colonial era of ‘underdevelopment’ and decolonization.”12 Blaise’s quest is part of what she calls, in 1990s post-colonial manner, “the ideological project of third worldism and white supremacy” (Imperial Eyes, 220). By asserting his Canadian identity, he aims at showing his benevolence, but remains caught in his predicament as a white man. But his Canadian stance is double-edged, for he also makes use of it to criticize certain aspects of Canada.

An American and an Indian in Canada: the “Commonwealth type"”

  • 13 In a piece entitled “Writers of the Commonwealth” written some ten years later, Mukherjee does put (...)

15Understanding his marriage better, to Blaise, means understanding his wife, where she comes from, and why she chose to settle in North America rather than go back to India, what she has lost and gained in the process. At first, he assumes that she wanted the freedom to have a writing career.13 But while in India, he realizes how mistaken he is about intellectual life in Calcutta and the perception Calcuttan intellectuals in general have of Western culture. In a gesture of cultural imperialism, he wrongly lends them a feeling of envy of Western cultural capitals, presuming that they must feel disadvantaged not to live in London, New York or Paris. He thus misinterprets completely what a Calcuttan newspaper editor tells him during a conversation:

Because Chattopadhaya affected British ways, I assumed his life in Calcutta was unoriginal and imitative (that he was, in short, one of Naipaul’s ex-colonial ‘mimic men’); I also assumed he must be alienated from Calcutta, still nostalgic for the West. […] I was not yet ready to tolerate his satisfaction with Calcutta, his ironies with the West. But here I was, as Bharati would later remind me, a foreigner in Calcutta asking a native-born Calcuttan who had come back to his home in order to rise to the top of his profession, about his disappointment and dissatisfaction. And for me to have snickered, during the ten years of our marriage, when visiting Bengalis would ask the same of Bharati in Montreal. ‘What have you given up? Is it worth it?’ (DNC, 103-4).

16Blaise gradually acknowledges his cultural ethnocentrism and imperialism, and comes to see more clearly that Montreal, where he feels at ease, does not suit his wife as a writer: their local bookstore refuses to sell her US-published books, she is not invited to join the recently created Canadian Writer’s Union; in contrast, she is welcome as a celebrity in Calcutta. To Blaise, Mukherjee’s treatment as a writer in Canada becomes emblematic of the country’s racist attitude towards Asians in particular at that time:

From Canada came rumbles of anti-Indian demonstrations on the West Coast, the curtailing of liberal immigration, especially as it affected aspirants from the Third World. From friends and relatives in Calcutta came stories of harsh treatment, lost documents, insults by the Canadian High Commission staff in Delhi that could only by part of a deliberate policy of discouragement. […] It seemed as though Canada were determined to show that it could be as callous as the United States, only less efficient and courteous. Naturally, I couldn’t face all this at the time. The myth of one’s essential decency dies hard among us Commonwealth types (DNC, 138-139).

17By calling himself a “Commonwealth type,” Blaise embraces Canadian identity, warts and all, including its history of colonialism and imperialism—only to be in a better position to denounce Canadian racism.

18But the national metaphor Blaise likes to see in his marriage and family history becomes overstretched at this point, overlooking as it does the complexity of his wife’s tangled frustrations.

19Mukherjee does not feel at home in Canada, her adopted country, where she sees constant signs of racism against Asians and feels excluded from literary life:

[I]f as a citizen I am painfully visible, I cannot make myself visible at all as a Canadian writer. The literary world in Canada is nascent, aggressively nationalistic, and self-engrossed. Reviewers claim that my material deals with Indians usually in India, and because my publisher is American, my work is of no interest to Canadian writers and readers. […] In order to be recognized as an India-born Canadian writer, I would have to convert myself into a token figure, write abusively about local racism and make Brown power fashionable. But I find I cannot write about Montreal. It does not engage my passions. It is caught up in passion all its own, it renders the Asian immigrant whose mother tongue is neither French nor English more or less irrelevant. Montreal merely fatigues and disappoints. And so I am a late-blooming colonial who writes in a borrowed language (English), lives permanently in an alien country (Canada), and publishes in and is read, when read at all, in another alien country, the United States (DNC, 169, 170).

20If Canada does not see and does not want her as an Asian immigrant, it may be said that she does not want Canada either. A reciprocal lack of interest prevails between herself and a historically, passionately bicultural, English and French Montreal. The city had little interest in Asians then; neither did the rest of Canada. In the United States, that interest was in the process of developing, and writers of Asian origin were looking for ways to connect with their American audience: Mukherjee explains how the main challenge for her as a writer at the time was to make her (American) readers understand the difficulty of cultural adjustment for Indian women immigrants to (North) America. While in India in 1973, she was writing her second novel, Wife, the story of a young Bengali wife who has emigrated to New York City but who feels trapped but is not resourceful enough to find ways to assert herself in her new environment. She explains about the novel:

The anger that young wives around me [in Calcutta] were trying so hard to hide had become my anger. And that anger washed over all the manuscript [of Wife]. I wrote what I hoped would be a wounding novel. There was only one problem, my problem: how could I explain this anger to critics in New York or Montreal who did not know that a young Bengali woman could rebel by simply reading a book or refusing to fast? (DNC, 268).

  • 14 Clark BLAISE, “The Commonwealth Writer and his Material,” Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwea (...)

21Her problem as a writer may be analyzed in two ways. It may be seen as the main problem of “the Commonwealth writer,” which Blaise writes about, in a contemporary essay, as “a problem faced by all writers in the Commonwealth who lack a sufficient ‘home audience;’ how to be true to your material and still make it accessible. How to make it accessible without turning unnecessarily mystical, didactic, or condescending.”14 Or it may be considered as the problem of an ethnic writer in Canada and the United States, at a time when the audiences in both countries were not yet receptive to writers of Asian descent. Change was under way in the United States though, where Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, which would be considered as a landmark in the development of Asian-American literature, had been published in 1976.

  • 15 Pramila VENKATESWARAN, “Mukherjee as Autobiographer,” in Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, (...)
  • 16 Bharati MUKHERJEE, Epilogue, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Saint Paul, MN: Hungry Mind P, 1995, 301.

22The anger conveyed by Mukherjee’s narrative also reflects her frustrations as a woman. Although she had left India and the subaltern condition of women in a predominantly patriarchal society, she remained sensitive to the condition of her peers in Calcutta, who acted like a mirror held up to her, in which she could observe what she would have become had she stayed in Calcutta. “I was witnessing a non-American definition of women’s liberation. These few women were successful and ambitious, but like the Sita of the Hindu legends, their virtue was demonstrated in the service of their husbands” (DNC, 213). She watches for all the small gestures which point to a certain liberation of women, and reports these anecdotes in the form of “vignettes of ethnography,” her narrative as a whole being a combination of autobiography and ethnography15—“a communal autobiography” in her own terms.16 The narrative finds its meaning in this very exchange between Mukherjee’s individual experience and the collective experience of the Calcutta women whose stories she hears; a relationship rich in potential conflicts over values. Although a veritable dialogue is established, it also makes the writer feel torn into two: “I was learning to look at concepts like ‘democracy’ and ‘democratization’ in non-American ways. I felt that finally I was shaking off intellectual imperialism by indulging in purely Indian clichés that ‘conceptual democracy’ had to be interpreted differently in chaotic, developing nations” (DNC, 203). But Mukherjee is eventually convinced that democratization and women’s liberation must be total and uncompromising, which makes her resist the temptation to sympathize with her friends, give in to their arguments and adopt their position. The crisis linked to her being tempted to compromise begins to resolve itself when she decides to envision her stay as a time of female solidarity with Indian women: “For me it was a time to share that anger and that confusion; it was not a time to judge” (DNC, 238). Her double viewpoint enables her to empathise with Indian women and to respect their ways of responding, while developing a strategy of her own to address her personal situation.

  • 17 See in particular Roseanne KLASS, review of Wife, Ms., Oct. 1975, 83.

23But a major obstacle remained, which separated the author of Wife from contemporary American feminists. Days and Nights was published two years after Wife, and when she writes about the difficulties of a Bengali writer in the United States (“New York or Montreal”), Mukherjee is in fact responding to violent attacks against her novel by certain feminist critics.17 Dimple, the protagonist of Wife, an unhappy woman who may draw the reader’s empathy, makes a poor female role model to contemporary American feminist activists. Mukherjee defends the character of Dimple (and the whole novel) in the name of her rejection of a form of imperialism in these women. Fifteen years later, during an interview, she examines again her position of 1975:

  • 18 Bharati MUKHERJEE, “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” Iowa Review, vol. 20, n° 3, Fall 1990, 22 (...)

Yes, I think a resistance does run through my work. For some non-white, Asian women, our ways of negotiating power are different. There is no reason why we should have to appropriate—wholesale and intact—the white, upper-middle-class women’s tools and rhetoric. Especially rhetoric. I think that 1975 was a very dogmatic, prescriptive year in American feminism and they could not stand any deviation or any rebellions. […] But I do disapprove of the imperialism of the feminists. American, and perhaps European feminists, but especially American feminists of the mid-’70s who felt they could go to Iran and tell the Iranian women what to do.18

  • 19 The dedication reads: “For Bart and Bernard [Mukherjee and Blaise’s sons]. And for Leonard Gordon [ (...)

24What Mukherjee claims for herself is a brand of feminism specific to American women of Asian origin. Her position is not that of a third-world writer: although Wife was inspired by her observation of her Calcutta female friends, it is intended for an American audience, as the dedication suggests.19 Her protagonists, from the eponymous heroine Jasmine (1989), to Devi, in Leave It to Me (1997), are increasingly bold conquerors. The form Mukherjee invents is one in which heroines are quick at liberating themselves from the weight of tradition and proceed to launch themselves on an American odyssey. Mukherjee’s novels still reflect a double perspective, Indian and American, but most of all they praise the American ideal of freedom, including women’s freedom—although not in its 1970s version. At the time, Mukherjee’s gaze, like that of Calcuttan women, was still largely turned inwards; like them, she yet had to conquer her own outside world.

  • 20 See Daniel COLEMAN and Donald GOELLNICHT, op.cit.

25But what of Canada amid this fierce 1970s debate between feminists of various hues? Although Mukherjee considers her stay in Calcutta as a period of transition in her life, from exile to immigrant—“The year in India had forced me to view myself more as an immigrant than an exile” (DNC, 284)—the main crisis she was about to confront was between Canada and the United States. She realized this with the benefit of hindsight, writing in the 1995 epilogue previously quoted: “The urgent drama that I began to play out centered on making a choice between two distinct New World myths of nationhood” (“Epilogue,” 302). In the larger background of Mukherjee’s choice looms the official policy of multiculturalism launched in Canada in 1971 by the Trudeau government, within the existing bilingual framework, which reinforced the projection of Canada as a mosaic of ethnic groups that could retain their particular identities, in contrast with the American melting-pot ideology. The Canadian ideology of multiculturalism has been strongly criticized for presenting a semblance of equality while in fact maintaining racial inequality. In the arts community, it was only in the 1980s and 1990s, a time of vigorous public protest, that a debate on race in cultural institutions started, denouncing Canada’s “mythology of racelessness.”20 But back in the 1970s, Canada’s non-confrontational approach to race issues, and its decision to promote a certain anthropological version of ethnicity did not suit Mukherjee, and she would soon clearly reject the “Commonwealth type.”

  • 21 Clark BLAISE, Resident Alien, Markham, ON: Penguin, 1986, 29.
  • 22 On the aesthetics of failure in Blaise’s writing, see Christine LORRE, L’Autobiographie chez Clark (...)

26After moving back and settling in the United States in the 1980s, Blaise considers his Montreal experience of twenty years earlier in Resident Alien (1986): “My imperialism, totally. [Bharati] was happy in America, anywhere except the South would have done. But she was also a wife and a mother: Indian wife, and mother—she submitted to my dream, or to my pitch.”21 In his 1995 prologue to Days and Nights, he looks back at the year spent in India“ (xii). When talking about his imperialism, he may be speaking as an American who believed that Canadian identity was something he could decide to appropriate, that India could be explained out by an outsider. Or as a Canadian, who thought he had a special bond with India because he meant well. Or as a Westerner who was convinced that a Western model of development was best. Or as a man who took his spouse to Montreal in the mid-1960s and to India in 1973. Or all these at once, admitting failure on all fronts.22 Meanwhile, Mukherjee continued to reject various forms of imperialism, conquering her own place in American letters as a woman of Indian origin, celebrating the transformations worked by immigration to America. Days and Nights in Calcutta thus stands as a passionate joint testimony to a time when Canada was coming to terms with its colonial history and defining itself on the world stage in terms of opposition to the United States, offering a different dream of New World, and being both an agent and a witness to the redefinition of centre-periphery relations in a fast-changing world.

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Bibliographie

ALAM Fakrul, Bharati Mukherjee, New York: Twayne, 1996.

Aranyer Din Ratri / Days and Nights in the Forest, dir. Satyajit Ray, 1969.

BLAISE Clark, A North American Education. A Book of Short Fiction, Toronto and New York: Doubleday, 1973.

BLAISE Clark, “The Commonwealth Writer and his Material,” Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah, New Dehli: Sterling Publishers, 1978.

BLAISE Clark, Resident Alien, Markham, ON: Penguin, 1986.

BLAISE Clark and Bharati MUKHERJEE, Days and Nights in Calcutta, New York: Doubleday, 1977; Saint Paul, MN: Hungry Mind P, 1995.

BRENNAN Timothy, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, MA and London, Eng: Harvard UP, 1994.

COLEMAN Daniel and Donald GOELLNICHT, “Introduction: ‘Race’ into the Twenty-First-Century,” Essays on Canadian Writing, n° 75, Winter 2002, 1-29.

Hinduism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 20, 1995.

HONG KINGSTON Maxine, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, New York: Random House, 1989 [1976].

KLASS Roseanne, review of Wife, Ms., Oct. 1975.

LORRE Christine, L’Autobiographie chez Clark Blaise: invention d’un écrivain canadien, Doctoral thesis, University Paris 3—Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999.

McKILLOP Brian, Contours of Canadian Thought, Toronto, Buffalo and London: U of Toronto P, 1987.

MUKHERJEE Arun, Oppositional Aesthetic: Readings from a Hyphenated Space, Toronto: TSAR, 1994.

MUKHERJEE Bharati, The Tiger’s Daughter, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

MUKHERJEE Bharati, Wife, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

MUKHERJEE Bharati, “Writers of the Commonwealth,“ Literary Review, vol. 29, n° 4, Summer 1986.

MUKHERJEE Bharati, Jasmine, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989.

MUKHERJEE Bharati, “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” Iowa Review, vol. 20, n° 3, Fall 1990.

MUKHERJEE Bharati, Leave It to Me, New York: Knopf, 1997.

NEW William H, “Remembering India,“ Essays on Canadian Writing: Eli Mandel Issue, n° 45-46, Winter-Spring 1991, 89-93.

PRATT Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

SAID Edward, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979.

SHAHANI Roshan, “In Quest of a Habitation and a Name: Immigrant Voices from India,” International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue Internationale d’Études Canadiennes, n° 6, Fall / Automne 1992, 87-98.

STERN Robert, Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

VENKATESWARAN Pramila, Mukherjee as Autobiographer, in Emmanuel S. NELSON (Ed.), Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, NewYork: Garland, 1993.

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Notes

1 “Hinduism”, Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 20, 1995, 520. The entry reads on: “Nearly 2,000 years ago, [the] dharma texts elaborated the social doctrine of the four ashramas (stages of life). This concept is an attempt at harmonizing the conflicting tendencies of Hinduism into one system. It held that a member of the three higher classes should first become a chaste student (brahmachari); then become a married householder (grihastha), discharging his debts to his ancestors by begetting sons and to the gods by sacrificing; then retire (as a vanaprastha), with or without his wife, to the forest to devote himself to spiritual contemplation; and finally, but not mandatorily, become a homeless wandering ascetic (sannyasin). The situation of the forest dweller was always a delicate compromise that remained problematic on the mythological level and was often omitted or rejected in practical life.”

2 Edward SAID, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979, 20

3 Arun MUKHERJEE, “The Vocabulary of the ‘Universal’: The Cultural Imperialism of the Universalist Criteria of Western Literary Criticism,” Oppositional Aesthetic: Readings from a Hyphenated Space, Toronto: TSAR, 1994, 26.

4 Clark BLAISE and Bharati MUKHERJEE, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977, 168. The book title is subsequently abbreviated to DNC in page references.

5 The phrase is from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (v. i. 17) and is used by Roshan SHAHANI in “In Quest of a Habitation and a Name: Immigrant Voices from India,” International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue Internationale d’Études Canadiennes, n° 6, Fall/Automne 1992.

6 Robert STERN, Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993, 7.

7 Timothy BRENNAN, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, MA and London, Eng: Harvard UP, 1994, 28.

8 Brian MCKILLOP, “The Idealist Legacy,” Contours of Canadian Thought, Toronto, Buffalo, London: U of Toronto P, 1987, 96-110. Canadian idealism, as defined by a distinctive tradition, is found through Blaise’s autobiographical fiction in the mother figure. She stands for values of education and social progress, no matter how mistaken she may be in her grasp of the world around her. See for example “The Salesman’s Son Grows Older,” A North American Education, Toronto, ON, and Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973, and “The Porter / Carrier Stories”, Resident Alien, Markham, ON: Penguin, 1986.

9 Daniel COLEMAN and Donald GOELLNICHT, “Introduction: ‘Race’ into the Twenty-First Century,” Essays on Canadian Writing, n° 75, Winter 2002, 7.

10 See William H. NEW, “Remembering India,” Essays on Canadian Writing: Eli Mandel Issue, n°45-46, Winter-Spring 1991, 89-93.

11 Clark BLAISE, Prologue, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Saint Paul, MN: Hungry Mind P, 1995, xii.

12 Mary Louise PRATT, Imperial Eyes, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, 217.

13 In a piece entitled “Writers of the Commonwealth” written some ten years later, Mukherjee does put her writing and personal freedom at the core of her decision to emigrate: “I left India for the freedom to write and make my own life.” Bharati MUKHERJEE, “Writers of the

Commonwealth,” Literary Review, vol. 29, n° 4, Summer 1986, 400.

14 Clark BLAISE, “The Commonwealth Writer and his Material,” Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah, New Dehli: Sterling Publishers, 1978, 122. See also A. MUKHERJEE: “[Several Indian and African writers] assert that life in the Third World is different from life in London, Paris and New York. And they claim that the writer who writes about these differences has to create new forms for articulating these differences.” Oppositional Aesthetics, op. cit., 20.

15 Pramila VENKATESWARAN, “Mukherjee as Autobiographer,” in Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, New York: Garland, 1993, 24-25.

16 Bharati MUKHERJEE, Epilogue, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Saint Paul, MN: Hungry Mind P, 1995, 301.

17 See in particular Roseanne KLASS, review of Wife, Ms., Oct. 1975, 83.

18 Bharati MUKHERJEE, “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” Iowa Review, vol. 20, n° 3, Fall 1990, 22-23.

19 The dedication reads: “For Bart and Bernard [Mukherjee and Blaise’s sons]. And for Leonard Gordon [the Columbia University professor Mukherjee and Blaise met at the Ramakrishna mission], who wondered about Bengali wives.”

20 See Daniel COLEMAN and Donald GOELLNICHT, op.cit.

21 Clark BLAISE, Resident Alien, Markham, ON: Penguin, 1986, 29.

22 On the aesthetics of failure in Blaise’s writing, see Christine LORRE, L’Autobiographie chez Clark Blaise: invention d’un écrivain canadien, Doctoral thesis, University Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999.

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Christine Lorre, « Canada in the Looking-Glass: Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), by Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Vol. III - n°2 | 2005, mis en ligne le 28 octobre 2009, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/8815 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.8815

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