[ilds] An Indian View of an Indian View: Durrell’s India

[Bruce Redwine]

All,

I’ve just returned from New York City.  My thanks to Sumantra for Gulshan Taneja’s article on Durrell and India.  It raises many issues that need to be discussed (and already has as the numerous responses indicate).  Here’s my take.

Taneja has apparently read all of Durrell’s major works and has extracted about every possible reference to India, no matter how brief, obscure, or tangential.  This is a useful compendium.  In defense of Durrell, however, I think Taneja’s conclusions are completely wrongheaded and egregiously indebted to Edward W. Said’s notion of “Orientalism.”  (Said is uncited in the essay but whose methodology is obvious.)  I simply don’t know what Taneja means that Durrell “does not have a view of India.”  Durrell has his childhood memories, and I see nothing wrong with hugging them like a teddybear, as Taneja mocks (“Durrell turned to India as a child turns to a stuffed toy to hug to go to sleep”).  Aren’t those memories often idyllic?  Hasn’t Wordsworth taught us that the “child is father to the man.”  Granted, Durrell’s memory is faulty and given to exaggeration.  Ian MacNiven often corrects Durrell’s “claims,” and  James Gifford has codified some of these errors in his edition of “From the Elephant’s Back.”  I do not find that this weakness invalidates Durrell’s India.

More to the point, Durrell’s view of India is spiritual, anti-materialistic.  Not for nothing was he a life-long practitioner of yoga, the Indian form of meditation.  But Taneja faults Durrell for not relating any real experiences of India.  So, he echoes Said’s assertion that “Orientalism” represents imperialist fantasies about the East and is not based on the “actual,” the “real” India.  He finds Paul Theroux, a realist of the first order, a better describer of the Indian experience.  Theroux, however, has little good to say about India and often focuses on the country’s dirt and poverty.  In his first big success, The Great Railway Bazaar:  By Train through Asia (1975), he has a typical story about traveling by rail in the south of India:   

Because it was still early, and because Indian villagers seem to think of railway tracks as the margin of their world, there were people crouched all along the line, shitting.  At first I thought they were simply squatting comfortably to watch the train go by, then I noticed the bright yellow hanks under them.  I saw one man; he portended a hundred more, all facing the train go by for the diversion it offered, unhurriedly fouling the track.     (p. 137)

Theroux lets a “man in Delhi” put the finishing touches on this description, when the latter calls such scenes exemplifying “The Turd Word.”

As the vignette illustrates, I would call Theroux’s approach immersed in merd-culture.  That culture is what Durrell opposes.  Why didn’t he ever go back to India?  I think the cliché applies, you can’t go home again.

Bruce





> On Nov 16, 2015, at 9:14 PM, Sumantra Nag <sumantranag at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> http://ebc.revues.org/2477 <http://ebc.revues.org/2477>
> Gulshan Taneja's paper appears to be a significant, wide ranging inquiry into Lawrence Durrell's connection with India and the continuing if latent influence of India on his spiritual perspective of the world. People familiar with the work of Ian MacNiven and others mentioned in the paper, might of course be familiar with the material in this paper, which might also be included in existing collections of the literature on Durrell.
> 
> There are some enlightening revelations, such as Durrell's wish to get Justine translated into Bengali by a prominent Bengali writer. I have often felt that in the AQ at least, Durrell writes with the colour and intensity I would associate with a Bengali writer!
> 
> Regards
> 
> Sumantra Nag
> 
> Sent from my Asus Zenfone
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20151118/2a554e68/attachment.html>