In the Shadow of Three Empires
In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood reflects on the literary scene in Canada (or lack thereof). She seemingly mourns the overwhelming presence of imperial influence in every aspect of her culture. It gave me a haunting sense of deja vu. In my more obnoxious moments of navel-gazing, when I act as my own literary critic, I've long thought that to grow up reading and writing in my skin and culture is to be governed by three empires at once.
I am Indian-American. Emphasis on American. Note where I live. So the most immediately obvious influence is the modern American Empire. We don't think of it as an empire, but it is. Yes, it is the world's only military superpower. But it is a cultural hegemon as well: look at how Hollywood and American music seep into global monoculture. My brown, vegetarian, Hindu family may as well have been aliens in the old, untouched towns of New England, but America taught me well. What I could imagine could be made reality, with the sweat of my own brow and fierce defense of my hearth. As the child of parents who escaped the license raj, nothing could be more romantic. Within my writing spirit lives the outlaw, anarchist instincts of both the Wild West and Walden Pond.
And yet India lingers, at the root of it all. Telugu, a language of the south, was my first language, not English (though first only by a few months). My bedtime stories were episodes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Emerson wrote of the Bhagavad Gita:
It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.
That's why India emerges in my writing repeatedly. Through it, I was connecting to a sense of the sublime far beyond the memory of man. A shared cultural genome. But one that carries a very un-American ethos: one of hierarchies, duties, obligations, etiquette, and communalism. We call it maryada. There's no great English translation for the concept. That should tell you something.
Okay, easy enough to see how those two empires can cause inner turmoil. But wasn't there a third?
Yes. Like Atwood, I keenly felt the effect of the British. Americans, like the fish David Foster Wallace observed in This Is Water, cannot see what's all around us. Our inherited common law, language, and customs all hailed from those sceptered isles, if we did but know it. But the effect that spit of land had on India was and is profoundly apparent to its common man. All popular literature in India was British or trying to be. P.G. Wodehouse was the height of wit. The Hindu emulated The Times of London. Tagore won his Nobel Prize by translating and adapting his work for continental Europe. Indeed, Indians rediscovered India much as the world did, by reading Englishmen like Kipling and Forster. My sense of humor and my love of the language come from books my father received from books his father received from monarchists and missionaries, conquering with sword and pen.
Stoicism and understated irony and general ease with a world you tamed is a dapper and nostalgic look on an Englishman. But it comes across as unpardonably arrogant on Americans, who still have actual power. And it is delusional and irresponsible and unrecognizable on Indians, who cannot afford to let their guard down after spending centuries being pillaged, and who now are slaves to sectarianism and casteism, fighting over the meager remains.
Anarchism. Communalism. And stoicism. The inheritances of three empires. This is all heady stuff, and in a therapy session, or after a few drinks, I can probably outline the practical effect this had on my childhood. But one thing is sure—fiction allowed me to mediate the conflict between these inheritances. To embrace them all despite their differences. In fiction, I could have characters and cultures both individualistic and communal, both stoic and red-blooded.
In writing, America and India and Britain became just Pranav.
A son of three empires.
