Vijay Mishra

Fashions changed, but Raja Rao remained a transcendentalist throughout his long life. It may be noted that at the high point of French surrealism, Raja Rao saw in it not so much a reaction to classical forms but a philosophical extension of debates about the real and the unreal, the world of phenomena and the world of dreams, the idea of a self other than that understood by the senses. Raja Rao wrote not to claim a special space for himself but to show how culturally sensitive he in fact was when it came to aesthetic matters. Indeed Raja Rao, like no other writer and thinker, would have said what more could one write when faced with Drona’s words to Yudhisthira when the latter, at the end of the Krishna–Arjuna dialogue in the Gita, goes to his teacher, Drona, to seek not only his permission to fight but also to ask how he could be killed.

The genre of fairy tales in Bollywood is to write about the work of Homi Wadia. Homi Wadia initially joined Wadia Movietone, the studio and company his brother Jamshed B. H. Wadia established when Homi was barely 22. The canonical version of Aladdin which was readily available to Homi Wadia and his script writers was Sir Richard Burton’s translation. With Aladdin began what could be called a rebirth of the Arabian Nights fairy tale for the Indian in modern times. The success of Aladdin and Alibaba persuaded Wadia to offer a tale that was part of many Arabic–Persian legends but did not have an established or definitive source text. This tale is “Hatim Tai,” a story about a legendary knight of sixth century pre-Islamic Arabia, regarded as the exemplary figure of boundless generosity. The Hatim Tai story is not part of the Arabian Nights canon Homi Wadia’s film transforms it into a seemingly Arabian Nights narrative in the Indian fairy-tale imaginary.

Taking a leaf out of Beverley’s (2004) valuable study, a testimonio may be defined as a pétit recit, a small subaltern voice marginalized by history and sincere to its emotional rather than historical content. A testimonio is thus both an ‘authentic subaltern voice’ as well as a ‘staged performance’ where the speaker (often with the aid of a transcriber) speaks for the other and lays the foundation for any future subaltern struggle for equality (Beverley, 2004, xvi). The Indian plantation diaspora has few surviving written testimonios that give contemporary accounts of the subaltern life-worlds of indentured labourers. In the case of Fiji, our case reference for the Indian plantation diaspora, there are two testimonios by Totaram Sanadhya, an indentured labourer who just happened to be literate and who returned to India after some twenty-one years in Fiji. These testimonios are a remarkable source of Fiji Indian plantation history and culture as they show the effects of crossing the black waters, the role of recruiters and the creation of a collective memory of the homeland. The testimonios by Sanadhya tell us one side of plantation history because they are written, retrospective and edited accounts of felt experience and in a sense this is a limitation. To provide us with narratives of lived experience of quotidian indenture life, the kind of experience that required immediate cultural expression, one has to go to oral narratives and songs that present more immediate memories of the lives of people of indenture in terms of a real here-and-now even as they created a collective memory of the homeland. A key mode of recall in the songs took the form of longing and departure. Through these songs – often cast as songs of the rainy season – the people of the Fiji Indian plantation diaspora, like the men and women on the Ibis in Amitav Ghosh’s memorable Sea of Poppies, lamented their lost homeland. This chapter examines the emotional power of these songs by re-working them back into the real, material conditions of indenture so graphically outlined in Sanadhya’s testimonios. In doing so the writer also uses memory as an affective source with which to qualify the uneven nature of plantation indenture history.

This chapter maps the received tradition of the Gothic on to the Bollywood Gothic noir. The tradition, it is argued, as it comes to India, is mediated by both the literary Gothic and the pervasive power of the Hollywood film and Gothic noirs. The form that the Bollywood Gothic noir takes is a function of a compromise as the received Western literary and filmic Gothic is deployed to articulate a specifically Hindu narrative of reincarnation. Whereas the idea of an afterdeath in the Western Gothic carried as its basic affect the concept of the uncanny and was alarmingly anti-redemptive, reincarnation narrative postulated that the uncanny was a pre-given capable of recall. However, the presence of the filmic and the literary Gothic as part of a world-literary system now disturbs the seamless and affirmative narrative of Hindu reincarnation by introducing the darker side of karmic retribution.

Although Rushdie makes reference to Sanskrit and Old Hindi texts in his fiction, his archival modernism draws primarily on medieval Islamic and European archives. I use the term ‘archival modernism’ to mean the manner in which earlier modernities, earlier and including pre-European Enlightenment modernities, inform the works of a late modernist writer. Instead of looking at modernity as a purely post-Kantian and, more generally, a European legacy with literary modernism as its direct outcome, in this chapter I make creative use of what Susan Stanford Friedman has called ‘planetary modernisms’. Setting aside Friedman's category error in conflating modernism and modernity, what is of value is her claim that modernist writers have self-consciously turned to the past, indeed to the entire cross-cultural global enterprise of modernism, to energise their works. In novels earlier than the ones discussed in this chapter, Salman Rushdie had used Farid Ud-din Attar's Persian-Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds (c. 1187) in Grimus (1975); subversive medieval commentaries on the Qur'an in The Satanic Verses (1988); The Arabian Nights and early Indian tales (notably the Katha¯saritasa¯gara, composed in the second half of the eleventh century) in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990); and the history of Moorish Spain in The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). Embedded in more recent novels, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001), are classical myths, those of Orpheus and the Furies respectively. In Shalimar the Clown (2005) medieval pastoral serenity is destroyed by jihadist as well as state terror, while in The Enchantress of Florence (2008) Rushdie turns to Mughal India as a Renaissance site equal to Florence, and in Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) to the traditions of Oriental storytelling. His latest work, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), projects a crisis in modernity (Western secularism versus Islamic fundamentalism) on to the battle between two medieval Islamic thinkers, known in the West as Avicenna and Averroës. In this admittedly schematic account of archival modernism in Rushdie's later novels, I begin with The Ground Beneath Her Feet, where Rushdie's turn to archival modernism is informed by a reading of the Orpheus myth as one composite text in a number of versions.