By Jade Furness
This is a research essay presented in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Postgraduate Diploma in Arts in English, at Massey
University, Palmerston North, New Zealand, 2006.
The Trotter-nama by Allan Sealy
is a novel written in magical realist style that covers the lives of seven
generations of Trotters, an Anglo-Indian family whose lineage in India began
with Justin Trottoire, a French mercenary, in the
1750’s.
This research essay examines how the concept of hybridity in The
Trotter-nama serves to break down the
hierarchical binary logic of
pure/impure, original/copy, authentic/inauthentic, whole/half,
real/unreal, true/false notions within the context of the colonial encounter in
British India. It examines the forms and functions of hybridity
in the novel, interrogating its application within post-colonial theory and
selecting textual enactments of racial and cultural hybridity
that support the unravelling of such binary
oppositions.
Sealy’s purpose in destabilising the binary logic of colonialism that still pervades much of Western thought is to create a narrative and mythological space for the racially mixed Anglo-Indians who were written out of any official history of British India. Through the narrative mode of ‘magical realism’, Sealy situates Anglo-Indians at the centre of the colonial encounter, erasing determinate borders between the literal and metaphorical, thereby creating a new discourse that is as legitimate as any existing, authoritative ones. Sealy is not however, suggesting that this is the definitive account of the Anglo-Indian community in India, for there is no such true or original record. There are only multiple stories of multiple identities that shift and change over time.
The Trotter-nama is a narrative and discursive chronicle of the
lives of seven generations of Trotters, an Anglo-Indian family whose lineage in
India began with Justin Aloysius Trottoire. Justin Trottoire came to India in the 1750s as a French mercenary,
was later employed by the British East India Company, and with ambitious
ruthlessness and talent, made his fortune through gunpowder, saltpetre
and indigo, establishing what would become the ancestral home of the Trotters,
Sans Souci, near the city of Nakhlau. His change of
surname to the
anglicised Trotter was politically expedient as the British
gained more control over Indian territory and Justin, responding to the
shifting power base, realised that future
opportunities lay in their hands.
The chronicle or nama
covers the lives and fortunes of the Trotters over the span of two hundred
years of British colonisation of India, from the
1790s through to independence in 1947 and its aftermath. Told by the narrator
Eugene Trotter, the “chosen” Trotter who continues the family trait of one blue
eye, one brown, The Trotter-nama begins with him reflecting on his world travels,
ostensibly undertaken to reconnect the narrative fragments of the diasporic Trotters into a unified, coherent and complete
family story. As Eugene says, “and the result for the
chronicler, a paper-chase. Because we came from all over, not just
England, and went all over, not just to England” (7). As the nama unfolds, we realise that a coherent story is impossible to attain. The
Trotter chronicle (not history, as Eugene is careful to point out [7]) begins
with Justin Trotter’s death as he falls out of a hot-air balloon while floating
above Sans Souci. The nama
ends with Eugene misplacing the chronicle and resuming his life in the city of
his birth, Nakhlau, his own Trotter origins in
question and the Trotter chronicle lost forever. The Sans Souci estate is sold
off and dismantled, but the Trotter remnants continue to live on the outskirts
of their former ancestral home. As a means to survive their displacement in the
political machinations of the colonial disengagement, the Trotters become
globetrotters. Globally dispersed, the Trotter genealogy becomes as
increasingly fragmented as their memories.
One of the emergent concerns of The Trotter-nama is with the concept of “hybridity”. We are
attuned to this concept right at the beginning of the prologue with the words
“Take up the Grey Man’s Burden” (1). “Grey” is the colour
that Sealy uses to refer to Anglo-Indians throughout the novel. Eugene
introduces himself with the words, “I’m half Anglo you know” (3), and in an
almost flippant, dismissive tone hints at the interior terrain of living life
as a person of “mixed race”, a “hybrid” person when he says, “I’m white here
[in India], but I’m brown back there [England, Europe]. It starts at the
airport, so I usually wait in the toilet till the change is complete” (6).
Identities of racial and cultural hybridity are
predicated upon the existence of pure, authentic, original races and cultures. The
central thesis of this research essay is that Sealy uses hybridity
discursively, linguistically and formally to shift western logic from its
entrapment in oppositional binaries and dialectical discourses within the
colonial context.
Sealy
situates the lives of Anglo-Indians, who represent the literal embodiment of hybridity, within the broader cultural hybridity
of British India, showing that India, invaded many times by different groups of
people, was already a mixed and diverse culture. Alexander the Great, the Mughals, Portuguese, French and British all left their mark
and were marked in turn by their ventures into India. However, the mixed-race
Anglo-Indians were written out of British Indian history, their literal
existence denied a location and temporality. A number of factors may have
contributed to this erasure, one of them being that their very hybridity questioned notions of pure and original races and
cultures, prominent in nineteenth-century European epistemology but also
available to twentieth-century manipulation in the resurgence of nationalist
movements. Paradoxically, it is through their hybridity
that Sealy is able to insert Anglo-Indians into a narrative historical
representation, positioning them at the centre of the colonial scene. By
situating Anglo-Indian racial hybridity within the
“Indian” context of cultural and linguistic hybridities,
as ineluctable products of the colonial encounter, Sealy is able to recontextualise Anglo-Indian identity from invisibility to
legitimacy. Through the nama
of the Trotters, Sealy shows, however, that hybridity
cannot be fixed into a unitary, universal meaning. It is a process that takes a
variety of forms and trajectories rather than being a privileged indicator of
post-colonial progress. In order to relocate and reinstate Anglo-Indians, Sealy
has to give them an identity and a name. However, what this identity entails is
as varied and heterogeneous as the colours he uses to describe their skin
tones, their divided and complex loyalties to either the British or Indian,
their sense of home, belonging and where their future lies.
By
destabilising the colonial binary logic through the repositioning of racial hybridity, Sealy invents a narrative space and a mythology
for Anglo-Indians, which may compensate for their invisibility in official
histories. Through the interrogation of grand imperial narratives and monolithic
thinking, he reveals the complexities of the coloniser/colonised binary within
the British Indian colonial context. Although differential power structures did
exist and exerted their influence on the lives of people, Sealy undermines
their consolidation into stable linguistic and discursive binaries. Western language and thinking, however, still
revolves around hierarchical binary oppositions such as original/copy,
authentic/inauthentic, real/unreal, whole/half. Since the discourses we occupy
and subscribe to have constructed such polarities, we believe they are real,
solid and true. Racial and cultural hybridity
challenges such hegemonic thinking and rehabilitates the many, the plural, onto
the ontological stage.
In
his ironic fashion, Sealy underscores the plight of the “kirani”
or “cranny”. The word denotes a traditional Anglo-Indian occupation, that of
scribe or clerk, as one who copies recorded discourse, language and history,
rather than one who initiates or speaks the official word. (“Cranny” also
became another name for Anglo-Indian). Instead of relegating them to a
secondary role, Sealy, however, constructs a new representation of
Anglo-Indians, a different discourse, a different place to live in and through
recorded time. This discourse, however, is not the definitive, authentic
history of Anglo-Indians because there is no original form; there is no
“official” spoken or written record. Nishan Chand, the Sans Souci librarian and caretaker of knowledge,
highlights the Anglo-Indian dilemma when he describes the Portuguese
hairdresser Fonseca as a kirani. “Well copy he does.
Never a man quicker to learn: his dress, his manners, his whole person modelled
on his master [Justin Trotter] – before the master himself became a native!
Whom will you copy now, kirani?” (55).
Throughout this research essay, I will explore how the
notion of hybridity dismantles hegemonic linguistic
and discursive structures of whole/half, original/copy, authentic/inauthentic
and hierarchical oppositions between true and false historical discourses. I
will also show how Sealy’s use of hybridity enables
the reconstruction of new colonial histories, in particular that of the
Anglo-Indians, and multiple identities unencumbered by privileged binary
terms. In the ensuing discussion I will
examine the concept of hybridity that underpins
post-colonial theory and how it is enacted in The Trotter-nama. I will also explore how
hybridity is expressed in the novel through the
narrative mode of ‘magical realism’, thus showing how hybridity
and magical realism, the tenor and the vehicle, merge through the interrogation
of notions of fixed concepts and hierarchical structures and the creation of an
Anglo-Indian mythology. For as Linda
Conrad states, “The Trotter-nama’s magic realism, with all its ebullience and
complexity, gives a marginalized community an etiological myth and a fictional
voice” (386).
In his
discussion of hybridity, Young points out that the
term generated prominent debates in the nineteenth century in relation to the
construction of theories of race and human evolution (6-7). Much of the
nineteenth-century discussion focused on the mixing of different races and how
this could lead to the degeneration of racially pure, superior races, such as
white Europeans. This debate occurred as part of the historical backdrop to
European colonial expansion in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, whereby the
dominant European races and cultures came into physical and cultural contact
with people who were very different from what was known and familiar to the
colonising powers. In contrast, in the context of late twentieth-century
globalisation, theorists such as Homi Bhabha have valorised hybridity
as a means of exploring and understanding the dismantling of ethnic and
cultural borders at the global level.
Thus,
the term ‘hybridity’ has resurfaced in
twentieth-century cultural studies and, particularly in post-colonial theory as
a contested issue. In one sense hybridity has come to
mean a fusion or mixture of two different things into something new that is the
same and different and which can be “set against the old form of which it is
partly made up” (Young 25). In this sense, the new hybrid form is made up of
parts of its parent cultures, the coming together of which transforms both into
a third term that is different but which also changes as conditions and
contexts reconfigure. In the colonial context, this blending of cultures and races
of both coloniser and colonised produces hybridised peoples and cultures that
are new and different from the pre-colonial encounter, so that neither can
return to a supposedly pure, original form.
Homi Bhabha,
however, introduced ‘hybridity’ into post-colonial
theory as a process that disrupts the dominant voice of authority, in this case
the coloniser’s voice, and enables other knowledge, and the voices of the
colonised, to challenge and resist hegemonic colonial power. In the
post-colonial context, hybridity is “the name for the
strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the
production of discriminatory identities that secure the pure and original
identity of authority)” (Bhabha 112). Hybridity overturns the coloniser’s disavowal of the
process of discrimination, thereby shifting the coloniser’s authority from that
of a totalitarian force to a contested power relation.
In
his later writings, Bhabha introduces what he terms
the third space of enunciation, a contradictory space in which “all cultural
statements and systems are constructed” (37) and “which constitutes the
discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols
of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be
appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read
anew” (37). Sealy takes Bhabha’s position that hybridity
is not a third, stable term that resolves the tensions between races and
cultures, or that inverts the power relations between dominant and subservient,
colonising and colonised (113). It is instead a third term that disrupts and
dispels the notion of fixed identities, cultures, races, and power
relations. In The Trotter-nama, Sealy enacts the concept of hybridity
and its changing usage in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century theories of race and colonisation. The Trotter-nama is set within the historical timeframe of both
centuries and surveys the fate and fortunes of the Anglo-Indians—the
hyphenated, mixed raced offspring from British/European and Indian sexual
unions who represent and reflect the shifting theoretical premise of hybridity itself.
While the coming together of different races and
cultures does shift linguistic and discursive dualities, Bhabha’s
valorisation of hybridity
has been challenged for not taking into account the specific historical and
material lived experiences of hybridity. As Sealy
demonstrates in The Trotter-nama,
the hybridised state can be a disruptive, confusing
place to inhabit, because of the diametrically discrepant constructions it can
elicit simultaneously. This is especially so when the challenging signifiers of
hybridity are openly exhibited. In the prelude to the
Mutiny of 1857, Philippa, married to Thomas Henry
Trotter, relates how, on a recent visit to the village, some boys had thrown
stones at her and called her a firangi (330):
Philippa was accustomed to
unwelcomed attention: when she went to the city, to the new market called Hazratganj, the Europeans sneered at her while the Indians
did not hide their puzzlement at the sight of a dark-skinned woman in a foreign
dress. Lately there were no Europeans to be seen and the Indians’ perplexity
had turned to scorn. (330)
Sealy dedicates his novel to all the Anglo-Indians, which indicates recognition of a group of people who identify as such and have been represented as such in historical and political terms. Yet Anglo-Indian is a relatively more recent twentieth-century term, representing ambiguous categories of people who could not be defined as either pure Indian or pure British. The reality for Anglo-Indians meant that, because they were of mixed racial parentage (father British/European, mother Indian), they were treated sometimes as British, sometimes as Indian depending on the colonial politics of the day. Their very existence as a community of people was not recognised under civil law, yet by virtue of their birth they were discriminated against in employment by both the British and the Indians (Younger 11-15, 22-23). They were seen as half-castes by both British and Indians and regarded as impure, as well as physically and mentally inferior to both races (Younger 16).
Robert Young in Colonial
Desire identifies a problematic use of the concept of hybridity
today because past nineteenth-century usage leaves its trace on present
meaning, “show[ing] the connections between racial
categories of the past and contemporary cultural discourse” (27). Stuart Hall
refutes the charge that post-colonial critics are complicit with Victorian
racial theorists in using the same term, hybridity,
and regards such a conclusion as being overly simplistic (“When was the Post-colonial?”
431). Young also argues that using the term “hybridity”
locks us into a nineteenth-century oppositional economy or ideology (27). Simon
During, however, considers that while Young is underscoring that ‘hybridity’ does
not move past identity politics where one group is often in opposition to
another, nevertheless Young’s “critique is rather removed from everyday life
where so much is ordered by identities. It seems to be making
a theoretical and utopian rather than a practical point” (151). The
point is that we cannot live in society without some sort of identity so that hybridity will always be engaged to an extent with identity
formation, but this does not necessarily discredit its usefulness in
undermining notions of single, essential identities.
In The Trotter-nama, Sealy reinforces ones of the concrete ramifications of living a hybridised identity, when he re-enacts fictionally the historical Anglo-Indian petition presented in 1853 to the House of Lords Select Committee on Indian Affairs. In Sealy’s text the presenter is Jacob Kahn-Trotter. The exchange between one of the members and Jacob goes as follows: “In Calcutta you are entitled to British law, but in Nakhlau you are a Native? Yes, answered Jacob. We are sometimes Europeans and sometimes Natives, as it suits the purposes of the Government” (307-308). Sealy is indicating that hybridity entails a fluidity of identity that involves a naming, such as ‘Anglo-Indian’, but which cannot be held to a particular form or type. The hybrid identity can be remodelled by whoever controls the discourse.
Sealy employs “hybridity” in
the text very much as a process of identity formation that fluctuates and
mutates according to the political and cultural context of his characters’
lives. He demonstrates how this lived
experience of hybridity destabilises
notions of pure, authentic, races and cultures as his characters mix and mingle with each other’s already hybridised
cultures in the context of colonised India.
Justin Trottoire, a “French”
soldier, who comes to India in the 1750s, builds his home Sans Souci in the
style of a French chateau. He eats French cuisine, dresses in European style
and imports French furniture. He tries to recreate a piece of France in India.
However, the chateau is never properly finished, and Justin becomes
increasingly absorbed into the culture of his adopted home. He marries
Sultana—from the line of the Prophet—and keeps three mistresses or bibis in different towers at the chateau. He is very much
lord and master of his domain, but gradually lets go
of external power as he undergoes a spiritual crisis. He laments,
but what is this
India? Is it not a thousand shifting surfaces which enamour the newcomer and
then swallow him up? It allows him the many titles of victory while obliging
him to accept a single function, that of conqueror. The very divisiveness that
allowed him in enmeshes him. How is he to grasp what
cannot be held—what in fact holds him fast? (134)
Justin is alluding to the dialectic where both
conqueror and conquered are fashioned by the nature of conquest, caught in the
power struggle, in the same making of history. As a Frenchman in India, Justin
belongs to the coloniser or conqueror class and is
influenced by its dominant discourse. However, living in India, with all its
cultural diversity, disturbs what he believes is true, how he thinks a
conqueror should be. He begins wearing Muslim clothes and eating only spicy
Indian food, in a sense trying to be Indian, but then realises
that “no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t turn Indian (any more than he
could revert to a European) and that it was best if he were reconciled to the
fact and became a third thing…” (195). Through Justin’s identity remodelling, Sealy is questioning the fixity of naming—of
being named French or Indian, for these identities are produced by converging
forces which are always subject to change. Justin’s ‘third thing’ is an
identity in process, a fluidity that enables him to make sense of his internal
and external world. Rather than holding onto rigid ideas of what it means to be
either Indian or French and imposing these on himself and others, he is
involved in the creation of new blends, new formations, new
categories of people. He continues
building his chateau “and saw that
instead of a spiritless Provencal chateau replicated on Indian soil, or a
humdrum Nakhlau mansion after the traditional manner,
there had grown up in San Souci something altogether new” (233).
Sealy also addresses the Indian hybrid experience
throughout the novel, particularly in terms of colonial power relations. Once
again, Sealy is pointing to the complexities of identity formation as ongoing
social and cultural constructions, the outcome of a confluence of many forces.
He uses the munshi Nishan Chand to illustrate this. Nishan Chand, philosopher, scribe, librarian and Trotter
biographer, is a Hindu but he dresses as a Muslim—he has done this for so long
he has to reassure himself he is still Hindu (his foreskin and strand of hair
being the only signifiers to indicate that he is not what he appears). It has
been politically expedient for him to dress in this way. His title, munshi, is Persian for translator of languages, and for Nishan Chand this represents his
powerless position in a country ruled by foreigners—the Mughals.
He is waiting for the time he can be called a pandit—that
is, a brahmin scholar or learned man—the time when
Hindus can claim their rightful place as the centre of power in India, and he
can be reinstated in his rightful role. He rails against the Mughals, calling them
“the savages who rule us now, converting wretches from the meanest castes,
preferring rice-Muslims to deserving Hindus, meat-eaters to devout men,
pressing foreign labels on sons of the soil—oh what self-respecting historian
should call himself ghulam, or what writer of esteem munshi?” (53). Nishan Chand intends to reinstate Hindu authority and control by
studying the ways of the rulers and then using these tactics to overturn them.
One of the underpinning discourses of eighteenth-century European enlightenment
was to bring Western knowledge and reason to the superstitious natives of the
East. Likewise Nishan Chand
too is entrapped in his own version of this binary logic. For him, however, the
Mughals from Persia represent the unenlightened, forcing their religion,
language and culture onto Hindu Indians. He does not seem to appreciate fully
that his allegiance to Justin Trotter and his adoption of both Muslim and
European cultural aspects have changed him, just as the Hindu India he seeks to
restore is a myth, already a fictionalised ideal,
unattainable in its pure, essential form.
The hybridised nature of
Indian society is further illustrated when Sealy describes the Nawab of Nakhlau, the local Mughal ruler, seen through the eyes of the Muslim Yakub Khan, the ambitious chief steward of Sans Souci:
What stands out in this description is that even
though the Nawab adopts European dress, for Yakub Khan, he is still a black man in white man’s dress
and as such out of context, like a word “misspelt or
turned around” (72). The Nawab has begun to absorb
the cultural influences of India’s French inhabitants and its future British
rulers. Hybridity does not discriminate between coloniser and colonised; nor does
it operate only over a fixed period of time.
As Simon During points out, “What history over and over again reminds us
is that people are interconnected.…This means that
interrelatedness (imitations, distinctions, transformations, mixings) is the
norm of cultural formation” (166). During argues that while this makes hybridity a more banal concept than some cultural theorists
would like it to be, “it [does] undermine the case for monoculturalism
and ethno-racist purism” (166). The notion of hybridity
exposes the spuriousness of such essentialist identities that compel us to
adhere to “truths” of racial and cultural purity and perpetuate the quest for
original, authentic cultural experiences in the formation of self.
These
characters in the novel, Justin, Nishan Chand, the Nawab, represent an
amalgam of ideas, beliefs and cultures in the Indian context, belying notions
of singular, original, authentic subjects and cultures. They are expressions of
hybridity as a process of cultural formation.
However, it is common practice for us to use labels with which to separate
ourselves from others while signalling that we also belong to particular groups
or communities. As During points out, “It is impossible to exist in society
without a proper name, without being located within the set of
identity-granting institutions into which one is born: family or kin-group,
nation, ethnic community, gender” (152). This use of specific labels or names
often serves to fix us into essentialised identities
that deny the reality of multiple ways of being. The language we use influences
how we see different categories of people and so we come to believe that there
is an authentic way of being a woman, a man, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Frenchman and
so on.
The
notion of hybridity dispels such faceted identities.
According to During, “hybridity theory thinks of
identity not as a marker, a stable trait shared across groups, but as a
practice whose meaning and effect is constantly mutating as its context
changes” (151). Though we may need to hold onto specific names and labels to
give us a sense of who we are, or because of the political climate we live in,
we can acknowledge that we are made up of many different categories
that change over time. In The Trotter-nama
Sealy contests notions of original, pure monolithic entities of race,
ethnicity, nationhood, family and even self.
Every character is given a label, often signifying their occupation or
function e.g Sunya is the
“aged egg-brahmin”,
Yakub Khan at one stage is “future
baker-and-Chief Steward”, Fonseca becomes “barber–and–Ice-Manager”. This serves
to remind us who they are, but as Sealy changes their
labels throughout the novel, he shows that this is what they are, merely
labels. Justin Trottoire, the Great Trotter, is
distinguished racially as being French; we assume therefore that he is from
France. However, his mother was Coptic (an Egyptian Christian), his father
Swiss French and he was born at sea, in between France and Egypt. Eugene Trotter, writer of the Trotter
chronicle, even contests Justin’s birthdate given by
the Trotter historian, Mr. Montagu (Proxy Trotter ),
as 1729. Eugene instead fixes the date at twenty-first of June, 1719 (113). Jarman Begum, Justin’s first mistress, is initially called
“the German”. She is described as white, like ice. However, we later find out
that she is not what she appears to be—her mother a local Muslim courtesan, her
father a burgher from Ceylon (mixed race descendant of a Dutch or Portuguese
colonist) who has never been to Germany. Jarman Begum
thinks of Germany as her homeland just as the Trotters look to England as
theirs, both mythical countries of origin. The munshi
Nishan Chand’s outward
appearance is that of a
Muslim, but he was born a Hindu and he is Hindu at heart. He
reflects, ” Go disguised among that lot [the Mughals], but keep the heart pure” (54). Fonseca, the
Portuguese hairdresser cum kirani, is described as
blacker than Indians and there are hints he may have come to India as a slave
from Africa. Finally, the origins of the chosen Trotter, Eugene, are brought
into disrepute. His father was not a Trotter, but an Indian, his mother, a
Burmese of mixed race, the whole Trotter line a mixture of truth and myth.
Sealy is highlighting that our identities are a composite of many
factors, our genealogies a mixture of truth and myth, but that our language and
social structures encourage us to think in terms of either/or—we are either
male or female, French or Indian, Muslim or Hindu. The names or labels
themselves become reified, fixed as truths and perpetuated through family
stories and official histories. Justin Trotter’s first wife, Sultana, spends
her life at Sans Souci collecting and naming things in order to make sense of a
world that she has no control over. Naming things is her way of asserting some
personal power, making the unreal tangible, but it is not enough to keep her
alive and she gradually fades away to her death. As a mother, Sultana is not
able to name her son because once she has done this he will become separate
from her, just another object, one of many in the world. It is interesting to
note that Justin also does not initiate any naming of his son, which may
indicate an ambivalence about the legitimacy of his
lineage through the birth of his Anglo-Indian son. Their son grows up nameless
until he is given one by the Tibetan lama. As they are nearing Calcutta, the
lama says, “You must have a name in this city little one…..I will call you
after a foreign friend of mine in the high country: Mikhail” (171). Sultana’s
son prefers Mik (a palindrome on Kipling’s Kim), and
so he is named and given an identity. Mik also
represents the first generation of Anglo-Indians, or Eurasians as they were then
called, and his lack of a name mirrors the lack of Anglo-Indian identity in
colonial Indian history. It is only through their naming that Anglo-Indians
become visible in the world of official names and discourses. The Trotter-nama is Sealy’s naming of Anglo-Indians, hence giving
them an existence in time and space, but as always with Sealy there is a
caveat. As Justin Trotter falls to his death from the hot-air balloon, he
reflects, “I will suffer nothing, simply a change of identity—and what of that?
Did I not ask for my stone to read: Justin Aloysius Trotter who lived and died”
(35). The name, the
identity, including that of Anglo-Indians, is not immutable or solid; it is
always changing.
Identities of race and ethnicity are also fixed in
part by their naming according to the colour of one’s
skin. Sealy uses a variety of colours
and tones to describe racial and cultural categories in India, thereby
exploring the binaries pure/impure, whole/half, white/black and their material
representation through the colour spectrum. In
so doing, he destabilises a normative and
hierarchical classification of people according to skin colours
based on the white/black duality. Fonseca the “barber-and-raconteur” is
described thus: “His face so black it shone blue at its points and in the pits
marked there by smallpox” (48). Fonseca cross-dresses as Elise (Jarman Begum), the woman he loves, and makes love to her
reflection in the mirror. He puts on a wig of white-gold hair, and dabs cold
cream called alpine snow onto his face: “A solemn grey face stared back at him”
(48-49). Fonseca, supposedly Portuguese/Indian, who is “darker than any man at
Sans Souci” (91), literally portrays notions of race, ethnicity and sexual
identity as social constructions or discourses based on traditional, Western
paradigms of naming and labelling. He is both black
and white, male and female, a third term. The Nawab
of Tirnab is described as “black verging on purple”
(72), and Mik, who was born with blue genitalia,
starts to turn completely blue through revelling with
the “half-Macedonian nymphets” in the indigo baths (153). His father, Justin
Trotter, bemoans, “If he grows any darker he will be invisible” (154). Justin
equates being dark with not being seen. Mik, however,
is already invisible; he has no name, he is of mixed race, living in the shadow
of his European father. It may be that Mik’s blueness
represents his darkness, but I would suggest that at this point Sealy is
eliciting the tenuous relationship between skin colour, racial bloodlines and
cultural identity. We tend to categorise ourselves and others according to what is
visible—skin colour, facial features—and accordingly
a particular ethnicity, Indian or European and so on, disregarding or devaluing
all the other parts that also shape us.
Throughout the novel Sealy refers to Anglo-Indians as
the grey people, neither white nor black; the mixing of these two colours producing grey. While “grey” does not have the same
political impact as groups of people identifying themselves as “black”, it does
provide a more accurate description of Anglo-Indian representation in history
and as a racial group that is neither one thing nor the other but a fusion or
blend of both black and white, Indian and British/European. The use of “grey” places Anglo-Indian
representation in the context of “grey literature”, which is unpublished, hard
to find, obscure and often lost but also crucial to unlocking hidden
discourses. The irony is that, in
writing The Trotter-nama,
Sealy is in effect legitimising the grey people, and
transferring them from obscurity to a place in the historical narratives of the
West. This does not mean that Anglo-Indians are no longer grey. Instead it
places “grey” on the political colour agenda of black
and white, and highlights the complexities of racial and cultural hybridity. As grey (not black, brown, yellow or white),
they share a common experience of having been rendered invisible, yet their
textual visibility inserts them within a diverse colour
spectrum of which they are part. Until they are acknowledged as a specific
named racial and cultural group they will be represented as “almost
the same [as the white colonisers] but not white” (Bhabha
89). They will still be enmeshed in the white/black
binary, unable to discover their differences of experience and the fluid spaces
they occupy within the diaspora.
Grey is not a colour commonly used
to denote racial hybridity; neither is indigo. Indigo
is defined as “a colour between blue and violet in the spectrum” (COD). In The Trotter-nama, as Justin Trotter falls through the sky (out of
the hot air balloon), he remembers:
the
first trial of his indigo. After an hour’s simmering in the vat [of indigo] his
bolt of cloth had come out white – if anything, more dazzlingly white than when
it had first gone in……He was on the point of flinging it back in when before
his very eyes the cloth began, very faintly to darken. He took it out into the
sunlight and watched it go from pale blue through an infinite number of stages
to a dark and fast indigo. The secret, it seemed, was neither in the dye nor in
the cloth but in a third place. It was in the air. (33)
Transformation
and change are shown as being positive aspects of the process of hybridity, resulting in the formation of indigo, through
the opening up to new ideas, different realities. As Justin is falling to his death he longs to
find the absolute, the truth:
The
sky’s colours changed subtly, but where the blue ran into the indigo or where
the indigo received the blue, he could not say. Nor could he point to where the
colour was purest….At the zenith, where the colour seemed true, seamless, and
virginal, where purity was most insistent, there it was that Justin longed with
a fierce longing to install the absolute. But he could not. For was there not a
purer spot just beside it? (32)
Justin’s
search for an authoritative place of purity reflects the coloniser’s desire to
impose their will, their law, their discourses and language onto the colonised,
as the true and rightful way. However, even when dying, Justin is not able to
find true purity, for it does not exist. For everything is
contingent, not more or less, better or worse, pure or impure, just different.
Throughout the colonial encounter, the dominant discourse is always contested,
never able to rest in a stable position with fixed hierarchic parameters.
Over
the centuries India has experienced a number of racial and cultural
invasions—Greek, Persian, Portuguese, French, British. During the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company was enforcing
increasing economic and strategic control over India, and it is during this
historical period that the mixed race Eurasian or Anglo-Indian population grew
large enough to form a specific racial and cultural group. When Justin Trotter
dies, his will cannot be found, his succession is in dispute. Without the will,
his son Mik, born of Muslim and French lineage,
cannot inherit. “An entire class of person like Mik, sprung equally from Europeans and Indians, was
altogether destitute of law” (253). In a sense Mik
heralds the naming of Anglo-Indians as a group or class because he falls
outside both British and Indian law. Mik has to prove
he is Justin’s son by showing material evidence through the body (blue
genitalia) and through the production of written evidence in the form of the
will. Mik has to make visible what is hidden, to
establish his bloodlines, and to legitimise this through the coloniser’s law.
His word has no authority. When the will is found it is written on the back of
Fonseca’s resignation to Justin. This signals that the old ways of
intermingling and fusion have been replaced by a different form of hybridity. As the British gain more dominance in India, the
Mughal, Portuguese and French influence wanes, and
the mixed race progeny become increasingly Anglicised. English becomes their
mother tongue, England, their mythical home.
Fonseca’s resignation represents a decline in recognition of European
lineage in favour of that of the British. The will legitimises the emergence of
an Anglo-Indian community that becomes increasingly endogamous as their status
and structural power in the colonial context diminishes. As D’Cruz
states in Midnight’s Orphans,
the most common explanation for the emergence of the
Anglo-Indians as a discrete class of people is that the East India Company’s
discriminatory policies forced Eurasians to develop their own social and
political institutions, such as the East Indian Club, in order to gain
political representation, and improve the community’s educational and
employment opportunities. (139)
Once
Mik is master of Sans Souci, the nilchis
or blue/black tribals, who cultivate and process the
indigo, revolt against his rule because of lack of pay and poor conditions. The nilchis are the tribal people, the indigenous people, who
are expelled from the land and further marginalised by the new hybridised
order. They eventually disperse from Sans Souci after having killed the next
Trotter heir, Charles. They also reflect that part of the Anglo-Indian lineage
that becomes displaced as the British aspect assumes precedence. Sealy shows that disavowal of their racial
and cultural hybridity becomes the norm for
Anglo-Indians as well as the British and Indians who deny the heterogeneous
cultural context of British India. It is at this point in the narrative that
the Trotters start to become a more cohesive but closed community, intent on
perpetuating the hyphenated Trotter line.
The
lack of documented sources may be one of the reasons Sealy has chosen not to
write a realistic historical novel about Anglo-Indians. It may also be that
writing a solely realist story about this community of people would be an act
of collusion with the hegemonic representations of history that excluded such
marginalised groups. A novel may reach larger numbers of readers and a realist
novel about Anglo-Indians may have a gained a greater following than The Trotter-nama
has had. However, in order to recuperate Anglo-Indians into a history that has
either been unrepresented or misrepresented, Sealy has chosen the narrative
form of magical realism. For it is only through the imagination and its
interaction with what is known to be real that he can restore to Anglo-Indians
their sense of belonging and being a part of an Indian history that impacted
not only at the global, political level but on individual lives as well. Set
within the colonial and post-colonial discourses of India, The Trotter-nama is a magical-realist
polemic, that blends fact and fiction, the literal and the figurative to
produce an Anglo-Indian mythology that is accessible to us all. It is ironic
that Sealy’s magical realist tale provides a more representative account of
Anglo-Indian history than has hitherto been inscribed and published.
Magical realism, like hybridity, is a contested concept in current literary and cultural studies because it is unable to be definitively contained. The term was coined by a German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 and was taken up by Alejo Carpentier who wrote the essay “De lo real maravilloso”, or marvellous real, in 1948 (Hart 306). Since then magical realism as a narrative form has been used by a number of South American writers as a way to represent their communities and cultures that have traditionally been marginalised in Western discourses, and until recently this form was regarded as belonging almost exclusively to them. Salman Rushdie and other post-colonial writers, however, have since used the mode as a means to convey the complexities of colonial and post-colonial lives and stories. As a discursive form, magical realism provides marginalised and/or post-colonial people a vehicle for creative expression of their own narratives in a way that does not privilege the magical over the real or the real over the magical. It enables them to become the centre of their own stories, acting as a counterpoint to the dominant authority of the coloniser’s voice.
In
terms of language, magical realism is an oxymoron, bringing together the
contradictory ideas of magic and real to form a new and fluid hybridity of representation that contains possibilities of
the unreal, or magical, being present in the real and the real or factual being
available to magic. As a literary form it is a way of connecting fact and
fiction, myth and history, the real and imaginary, the literal and metaphorical
(Linguanti 5), and recovering invisible or forgotten
stories that are unavailable to or excluded from more realist modes of writing.
For most people, the Anglo-Indian story remains
hidden, elusive and unreported. Anglo-Indians are a racially and culturally
diverse group of no one fixed abode, having dispersed globally since the
partition of India in 1947. The nama
of seven generations of Trotters is a metaphor for the lives of a group of real
people and a community, produced in colonial India and abandoned by the colonising power when the British left India to “home
rule”. Sealy’s history, different from the traditional realist histories found
in our texts, places the Anglo-Indian at the centre of discourse, eroding the
truthfulness of colonial discourses.
One of the major historical events in British India
was the Mutiny of 1857. This was a watershed event that catapulted India into
being proclaimed part of the British Empire. Prior to the Mutiny, the British
East India Company controlled the economic and strategic environment through
its armies of clerks and soldiers. Many of us in the West learned about this
event at school, written from a British point of view—horrific stories of rape
and slaughter committed by the Indians against their British sahibs and memsahibs, who, though not without blame, redeemed themselves through their assumed
natural right and ability to rule. With a fanciful stroke of the pen, Sealy
rewrites the siege of Lucknow 1857 as the relief of Nakhlau from an Anglo-Indian point of view. He describes
how the Trotters residing at Sans Souci escape in disguise as the Indian sepoys are advancing. Philippa
and Thomas Henry Trotter seek help from their Indian workers:
The family decided to wait till it was dark and then
go the house of Durga Das to ask refuge. The old
dhobi-and-dyer stood in the doorway chewing pan with fastidious incisors…He
addressed Thomas Henry, who was standing in the shadows still in European dress
and content as in the past to leave all such transactions to his dark-skinned
wife. (333)
Durga Das does not
help them, nor the potter, but the tailor Wazir Ali
gives them shelter and is killed for doing so, while the dhobi’s son Dukhi warns them of impending danger. He helps them escape
to the residency where they live under siege for some months with Europeans,
Indians and Anglo-Indians. It is Dukhi who is initially
charged with the task of getting a message through to General Sir Crawley Campelot. However, Thomas Henry, the middle Trotter, begs
to go with him and, dressed as an Indian, face darkened, he is placed at the
centre of the story as the hero of the hour who gets a message through to the
British reinforcements, advising them not to go through the town but to take an
alternative route. Thomas Henry receives the Victoria Cross for his exhausting
two-hour journey with Dukhi whose bravery goes
unrewarded. Sealy names this section of the story “how history is made” (343),
and compresses their journey into a “breathless”, sped-up precis of the last
moments before reaching the Commander-in-Chief (347).
In re-presenting the Mutiny through this fictional event, Sealy is refiguring history with the aid of fiction. He uses hyperbole, irony and humour to draw the reader’s attention to this other version, bringing in a sense of disbelief or doubt that applies to both this account and the coloniser’s official historical one. Anglo-Indians did help the British during the Mutiny but any account of their bravery is difficult to find. In the novel, Thomas Henry’s uncle Cedric is given a cursory mention as having telegraphed a message through to the British forces in the Punjab, forewarning them of the Mutiny. The forewarning by Cedric is based on the known recorded account of the Anglo-Indian telegraph operator George Brendish who performed this deed as the Mutiny took hold, but Sealy does not accord it the same centrality and recognition as his made-up version of Thomas Henry’s adventure. He displaces an important historical heroic act by an Anglo-Indian with his own fictionalised Anglo-Indian hero, thereby interrogating the truths of history by showing that they are determined by whoever controls the discourse.
Eugene Trotter, the miniaturist and seventh Trotter,
describes Mr T. Jones Barker’s painting The Relief of Nakhlau:
Everybody who was anybody in the siege is recognizably
there—everybody except the Guide of Nakhlau. Where is
Nakhlau Trotter? Could he be the blur? Is that grey
smudge the Middle Trotter, his makeup imperfectly removed, traces of burnt cork
lingering on the forehead, his middle sized nose foreshortened to nothing, his
mid-grey eyes fixed on the viewer, on posterity, on History? (350)
Eugene
continues, “It might be History’s revenge on Thomas Henry, Middle Trotter, to
have placed him so far to the middle as to be virtually invisible” (350). Sealy
is reinforcing the point that the unsung Anglo-Indian heroes of the Mutiny have
yet to be redeemed to visibility, and that this can only be done through
reinvention and reworking of written historical accounts.
The
rise and fall of the Trotters is a metaphor for the birth, development and
literal decline of the Anglo-Indian community in colonial and post-colonial
India. However, Sealy also literalises the metaphor. The Trotter family becomes
a real family; the nama
describes the lives, births, marriages, and deaths of ordinary Trotters. Justin
Trotter builds an extravagant but unfinished home called Sans Souci (“without
care”) and begins his lineage. The daily minutiae of life are
unravelled in Trotter conversations, observations, dreams, hopes and
fears—the staples of real lives. The real/unreal merge and blur and in so doing
create a narrative space for Anglo-Indians that is grounded in fact and
fiction. This undermining of the binaries of real/unreal, true/false,
literal/metaphor situates
Anglo-Indians in a different history that is as legitimate as the
realist, “definitive” accounts. The representation of racial and cultural hybridity as well as magical realism interrogate the
hegemonic discourses of the colonial encounter by disrupting the linguistic and
discursive binary logic and giving the dispossessed a place at the centre and a
voice in time.
The Trotter-nama
begins with Justin Trotter’s flight over Sans Souci in a hot-air balloon. It is
his second attempt at flight, the first having failed when the balloon
collapsed into the firebucket. The balloon is
attached to a wicker basket lined with blue and green cushions. It contains
a spyglass, an astrolobe,
an horologe, an horoscope, a barometer, a gypsonometer,
one hundred and forty meteorological instruments, four sheets of writing paper
of the Gtreat Trotter’s own manufacture and bearing
his watermark, an inkhorn, three pens, two curried doves, and a partridge in a
covered dish. There was also a skin of iced water. (20)
At
this point, Justin is an elderly man of eighty years contemplating his estate,
his domain, his loves, his life, his death and afterlife. In search of
spiritual answers, Justin has studied many religions, “But the wider his field,
the less able he found himself to choose among the conflicting versions of the
hereafter and the heretofore” (162). He therefore developed a new religion, an
amalgam of many spiritual practices, Din Havai or
Religion of the Winds, which “would embrace as many faiths as the number of its
believers, for certainly no two members of a single faith could interpret that
faith in the same way” (162). Sealy is drawing a parallel here with Din Ilahi, the religious practice developed by Akbar, a former Mughal ruler in India, which did not have any lasting
spiritual impact, with the comment, “What has been tried once and proven
ill-conceived and fruitless cannot without compounding folly be repeated”
(163). While not exactly disparaging the idea of Din Havai,
he is suggesting that its extravagant idealism, with its belief in abstract
individualism, parts company with the material realities of colonialism: “It
has been said that the Great Men of the present age would do better to emulate
the Great Mughal’s practice of paying his servants on
time, and leave abstraction to the specialists” (163). Consequently, the
Religion of the Winds has affinity with “hot air” or empty talk.
During
the hot-air balloon flight, Justin looks west in search of his native France.
However, as he leans forward to look at the city of Nakhlau,
the basket tilts sharply and tips him out. He falls to his death in the filthy Ganda Nala canal; his body is
never recovered. The elevation of Justin through “hot air” is possibly an
extravagant metaphor for Western enlightenment thinking that was the prominent
ideology of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperialism, providing an
underlying justification for Western colonial expansion over the East. In the
colonial context, Western enlightenment would bring reason and civilising
progress to the superstitious, heathen, sensual natives of the East. In this
regard, Western enlightenment could be considered “hot air” for its discourse
of progress is predicated upon the logic of colonial domination. It is yet
another hegemonic discourse that is unsustainable. “Hot air”, in the sense of
being empty or without substance, literally becomes hot air that enables Justin
to view his personal empire Sans Souci, but in the end it also causes his
demise, indicating the tenuous and displaceable nature of hegemonic discourses.
Through magical realism, the interplay between the literal and metaphoric, the
real and the imagination, Sealy is unpacking the layers of Western ideologies
and values and the destructiveness of their arrogant transportation to the
Eastern context. Magical realism thus creates a different space for the
dispossessed, the invisible, and the silenced to take the stage and direct the
play.
In
this direction, Sealy is careful not to enthrone or reify an alternative
discourse. Eugene Trotter, the last and chosen Trotter, loses the Trotter
chronicle he has written. He lets go of the story, the fabrication of origins,
the fabrications of history. The Trotter lineage is a farce. “Tell
you the truth I made up the whole line—I mean joining up all those Trotters
like that” (572). As Eugene returns to the city of his birth, Nakhlau, on the plane, he sits next to a journalist Peter
Jonquil, who has been interviewing the remnants of the Anglo-Indian community.
He has been to Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Bangalore… but not to Sans Souci. “A
strange sad monadic people,” Peter Jonquil went on. “They speak a kind of
English…..They fantasize about the past. They improvise grand pedigrees. It’s like a Raj novel gone wrong” (560). What we are left
with are stories. True stories, false stories, their validity depends on who is
telling them and how they are told. Sealy is not positioning hybridity on a post-colonial pedestal in The Trotter-nama; he is, instead, interrogating its complexities
through the recreation of lived experiences of real communities of people. The
racially and culturally hybridised Anglo-Indians form the central concern of The Trotter-nama. The Trotter family represents the Anglo-Indian
community in all its many parts, but in the end theirs is not the definitive
story for the journalist has not even heard of them. Eugene has the final say. He no longer has
access to the ancestral home at Sans Souci, which has become a hotel. He lives
with an Anglo-Indian family in Nakhlau, and works as
a freelance tourist guide in the city. He has travelled the world but appears
content, as he describes his daily routines with a resigned humility, to remain
in an India that many are leaving. Does he really have a choice? “Me? Where to go? I don’t know. Here, you
look into my eyes. See? Tell me now. Where to go?”
(574). With one blue eye, one brown, indicative of an indeterminate identity
that cannot be secured by language or history, Eugene remains in a marginalised
cultural milieu that at least can provide some sense of home.
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------------------------------------------------
Jade Furness
completed her Postgraduate Diploma in Arts (English) in 2007, which included a
research essay on Anglo-Indian writer Allan Sealy’s novel The Trotter-nama. She has recently
finished her Master of Arts in English at Massey University, New Zealand with
the thesis entitled: Where the
Postmodern Meets the Postcolonial: Allan Sealy‘s Fiction after The Trotter-nama. Jade’s
initial interest in The Trotter-nama, stemmed
in part from an exploration into her own great grandmother’s French-Indian
lineage which took her to Kamptee, India in 1998.
She is currently working as
a librarian at an academic institution in Wellington, New Zealand and can be
contacted at <jadefurnz@gmail.com>