Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality.

Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality. Edited by Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. 372 pages. $19.95 paper.

The visibility and currency of postcolonial studies in the academy today has necessitated a book like Between the Lines, in which Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva have put together an interesting collection of previously unpublished interviews, commentaries, and critical essays. Problematizing the terms "postcolonial," "diaspora," "South Asian," and "Asian American," the contributors attempt to discard false notions of essentialization and homogeneity implied by these terms.

In their Introduction, the editors discuss the rationale for their focus on South Asians, believing that the "historical and cultural specificity of South Asian experiences is often obscured or omitted within the discourse of `Asian' studies in Anglo-America," but at the same time caution against seeing this collection as a representative profile of South Asians which they say, is a "genetic category" that can obscure important differences of "class, religion, history, sexuality, or politics."

The interviews with Meena Alexander, Gauri Viswanathan, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provide fresh insights, even as they emphasize the necessity of making postcolonial discourse useful and meaningful outside the academy. Alexander talks about her experiences in New York City, her writing, her role as a teacher, saying that postcolonial studies is "a field of multiplicities" and that the different narratives of the newspaper vendor and the academic must be stitched together "with the seams revealed so that the labor shows." The Viswanathan interview, very different in tone from Alexander's conversational style, grapples with the multiple meanings of the term "postcolonial" and discusses the danger of "co-option of postcolonial literature in the academy in the absence of what the term means." She believes South Asian intellectuals must "enter the broadcasting media," so as to counterbalance the Orientalizing of South Asia by some communities of South Asians in North America. Spivak questions some of the editors' underlying assumptions about postcolonialism as she takes charge of the interview, saying South Asian intellectuals in the "First World" have thrown in their "lot with a northern economy--an exploitive economy" but still choose to see themselves as victims, not "agents of domination" or even "of exploitation." She relates the recent surge of postcolonial and multicultural literature and theory in the academy to the "financialization of the globe" which has made it "necessary for people in the United States to `know other cultures.'"

In the next section entitled "Commentaries," Amritjit Singh discusses the tensions of inter-ethnic conflict between Asians and African Americans, underscoring the need for South Asians to "form supportive coalitions with each ethnic or racial group caught in the same whirlwind of change and resistance," an idea that Mira Nair explores in her film Mississippi Masala, as Binita Mehta points out in her analysis of Nair's film. M.G. Vassanji examines the status of South Asians in Canada and the role of the media in constructing and promoting their marginality, while Sohail Inayatullah reflects on the complications in Pakistan arising out of the conflicting forces of fundamentalism and economic and social globalization. In her essay, "Coming to Terms with the `Postcolonial,'" Deepika Bahri poses and thoroughly examines some of the most important questions in the field: What is "postcoloniality?" What is the role of global capitalism in its popularity today? How is it different from multiculturalism? What is its relationship with postmodernism? Why is this `the' postcolonial moment?

Part three of the book explores the portrayal of South Asian postcolonial identity in the media. In her analysis of Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears's film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Ranita Chatterjee shows how the film deconstructs any form of classification, where "being nonwhite or nonmale or heterosexual does not exempt one from replicating yet another hierarchy of privilege," an idea that Spivak also brings up in her interview. In the next two articles, Sanjoy Majumder and Mahasveta Barua examine the popularity of the television adaptation of the Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, the role of the media in promoting a Hindu identity as representative of a national identity, and the perpetuation of the marginalization of women through the portrayal of Sita, the sacrificial heroine of Ramayana.

Essays on literary criticism comprise part four of the book, with a majority of them analyzing the literary representation of a postcolonial female self. Sukeshi Kamra in her essay on Salman Rushdie argues persuasively that for all his conscious parodying of Orientalist texts, Rushdie's own fiction is "problematically riddled with familiar patriarchal modes of containment." Samir Dayal begins his article with an examination of Sara Suleri's provocative statement, "There are no women in the third world," and believes Meatless Days "explores alternatives to both contemporary western feminist and postcolonialist conceptualizations of the feminine subject." While commending Meatless Days for its "stylistic difference" and anti-essentialism, Dayal points out that the important question of class is "conspicuous in its underemphisis or erasure" by an author privileged in both Pakistan and the United States. Anita Desai, on the other hand, though no less privileged than Suleri, shows in Clear Light of Day, how the issues of class and caste problematize the representation of postcolonial Indian women. "Privilege and agency for educated, upper middle-class women," says Pushpa Naidu Parekh in her article on Desai, "is [often] mounted on the silence and erasure of poorer and often socially ostracized women. "Indrani Mitra in her essay analyzes the term "postcolonial" and questions Bharati Mukherjee's status as a postcolonial writer, who is willing to "reclaim only a limited aspect" of her Indian past and insists on her recognition as an American writer. What is deeply problematic in Mukherjee's fiction, argues Mitra, is her decontextualization of Indian history, reducing the resistive force of sociopolitical struggles, as the Naxalbari uprising in the 1970s, to mere acts of violence and insanity. Believing in the need to recount the history of the partition of India and Pakistan, for it may provide "a window into the complexities of imperial political agendas as well as other sources of internal animosities" between the two countries, Huma Ibrahim in her analysis of Bapsi Sidhwa, Khushwant Singh, and others, shows that in these fifty years writers have been unable to tell the tale of partition without being either sentimental or detached.

The last section of the book, "Experimental Critiques" combines literary/theoretical discourse with personal narrative. The first half of Amitava Kumar's piece is a critical examination of Upamanyu Chatteijee's English, August and Mahasveta Devi's journalistic writing depicting two radically different ways of resistance to oppression; in the second half Kumar presents his short story "The Monkey's Suicide," which explores the strength of women in rural eastern India as they become figures of resistance in a postcolonial patriarchal society that continues to marginalize them. Shantanu DuttaAhmed in his essay tries to bring together his personal experience as a gay South Asian academic in the United States with the theoretical discourse of postcoloniality and identity politics, though his personal voice is drowned in the profusion of quotations from famous theorists. Uma Parameswaran's piece, on the other hand, with its mix of critical theory, personal narrative including journal entries, and metawriting is refreshing in its discussion of cultural (mis)appropriation, (mis)representation, identity, and hybridity.

Between the Lines is an important and valuable study as it engages in a discourse which pushes beyond simplistic meanings and complacent acceptance of complex terms like "postcolonial" and "South Asian." However, the editors' selection of critical essays on metropolitan writers, who they refer to as "major authors of South Asian origin," reveals the tendency of critics to continue to focus on a Mukherjee or a Rushdie while ignoring radical political writers, such as a Premchand or Ismat Chugtai. Mahasveta Devi is a welcome inclusion, though the recent spurt of critical essays on her work has perhaps more to do with climbing on the Spivak bandwagon than a genuine interest in her writing.

Irma Maini is Assistant Professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she teaches American literature, World literature, and writing. She has published articles on Anita Desai and Graham Greene.