The Emigrant and the Native

THE EMIGRANT AND THE NATIVE:
the Indias of Akhil Sharma and Rupa Bajwa
By Ashima Sood

"Because nothing can be performed in isolation. All perform a good action, when one is performed, and when an evil action is performed, all perform it" - Professor Godbole, A Passage to India

The nature of corruption is the theme that runs through two recent novels set in contemporary India - Akhil Sharma's An Obedient Father (2000) and Rupa Bajwa's The Sari Shop (2003). Both novels feature lower middle class protagonists with limited education, in North Indian settings where the struggle for upward mobility is the defining quest. Despite significant overlaps in the cultural territory they explore and the conclusions they reach, however Sharma and Bajwa offer interesting and instructive contrasts in perspective. While Bajwa is the native born and bred, Sharma's parents emigrated from Delhi to the USA when he was still a child. Can the differences in tone and viewpoint stem from the difference in the authors' relation to the setting?

Numerous reviewers have described Sharma's fictional universe in An Obedient Father (hereafter AOF) as 'unrelentingly grim'. The place is old Delhi, the time the early 1990s when within the course of a year, petty bureaucrat Ram Karan's life is turned upside down. His wife dies and so does his son-in-law; at home, his daughter Anita returns with her own daughter Asha to live with him and at work Ram Karan is appointed moneyman and fall guy by his boss, Mr. Gupta. As wheeler and dealer and extractor of bribes from school principals however Ram Karan has only limited flair. As he admits: 'My general incompetence and laziness at work had been apparent for...long...this is common for a certain type of civil servant who knows that he is viewed with disdain by his superiors and that he cannot lose his job.' In Ram Karan's world, the rules of public life are meant to be circumvented - his cowardice and his talent for finding moral loopholes are assets that aid his success. He becomes Mr. Gupta's right-hand man when the latter commences an ill-fated run for Parliament.

Over the course of the novel it also becomes apparent that the rationalizations and excuses Ram Karan is so adept at seep into his personal life as well - the moral miasma he operates in includes rape and incest. As Ram Karan admits at a moment of typical self-abnegation, 'My mind was attracted to what is loathsome and humiliating.' His molestation of his own daughter Anita has remained a bitter family secret, but once he reaches for his granddaughter Asha, Anita becomes the avenging goddess, determined to expose and punish him. The shape of that retribution gives the novel its title.

If Ram Karan is the consummate insider working at the heart of India's political machine, Rupa Bajwa's protagonist in The Sari Shop Ramchand is the eternal man on the margin. Orphaned at a young age and rendered asunder from the fabric of family that supports Indian society, his work restricts him to the feminized, seemingly innocuous arena of the small town sari shop where he is a salesman. The Sevak Sari House is the narrow oblique lens through which he, with the reader, views contemporary North India. There are the customers, ladies of leisure from Amritsar's elite families and then there is the lower middle class existence of Ramchand and his colleagues.

Like AOF, the precise and inescapable gradations of class (and implicitly caste) and power configure the arena of possibilities in The Sari Shop; like the former novel, the struggle for upward mobility provides the motive force. Unlike Akhil Sharma's Ram Karan, however Bajwa's Ramchand is naīve and perhaps more pertinently, young. His path of self-improvement takes him through English essay books. But for all of Ramchand's comic efforts, there is horror also at the end of the The Sari Shop - in the rape of Kamla, the wretched wife of one of his colleagues, Ramchand sees the consequences of challenging the social order. The surfaces of this world may seem smooth but the edges are jagged.

The Kamla episode has been described by many reviewers as 'melodramatic' and implausible but in fact it is no more than the stuff of numerous newspaper headlines brought home. Read together with Sharma's more polished novel, The Sari Shop thus yields an interesting counterpoint. In AOF the political becomes personal; in The Sari Shop the personal becomes political. In both the iniquities of the public sphere cannot be escaped.

Neither Sharma nor Bajwa can offer the possibility of salvation for their characters - if Ram Karan succumbs to his daughter's brutal revenge, Ramchand survives by an equally terrible anaesthetization of sensibility. Yet despite the similarly bleak outlook the two novels have a remarkably dissimilar flavor. In Sharma's Delhi, the quality of the light is almost never untainted; in Ramchand's (and Bajwa's) Amritsar occasionally the sun shines down 'gently on him, with pleasant warmth'. As The Sari Shop progresses, these moments prove to be deceptive; yet while there is no more hope here than in AOF, the possibility of recognition serves almost as a proxy for redemption.

As an illustration consider the contrasting moments of revelation of injustice in either novel. In AOF, Anita's attempts to expose Ram Karan's incestuous tendencies to her relatives are met with no more than a mild curiosity; in The Sari Shop Ramchand's attempt to draw a seemingly sympathetic and enlightened college professor into condemning the incarceration and rape of Kamla are met with frank hostility. Yet Ramchand's own breakdown and horror at Kamla's fate undermines the conspiracy of silence that surrounds it. In Sharma's world, on the other hand, culpability is so pervasive that it is no longer even recognized - the conspiracy, if it can be called that, is one of indifference.

It is possible indeed to read AOF entirely as an allegory - in the obscenely obese character of Ram Karan we find an embodiment of the vitiated, dog eat dog way of life that characterizes the public sphere in post-colonial India; in his bloodless black ankles upon his death we see the lethal rot in that system. Numerous episodes throughout the novel document the comfortless, conscienceless cosmos that is Sharma's India. When a rich classmate in Asha's school throws away a used imported tissue, the other girls make a grab for it. When a monkey enters a women's restroom, two of the women inside manage to escape by locking the third one in to be mauled by the monkey. While these episodes early in the novel play for laughs (the humorist David Sedaris mentioned the monkey-in-the-bathroom tale in numerous interviews in praise of AOF's comic triumphs), the message is clear - Sharma's is a Darwinian world where self-preservation comes at the expense of others, even sometimes at the expense of self-respect. Similarly, in the sublime second chapter (which was earlier anthologized as 'If you sing like that for me' in Best American Short Stories 1996) Anita tries to love her husband by arranged marriage and finds that to him she is no more and no less than a lifestyle accessory, equivalent to a car or bungalow. Not surprisingly, social relations in this world are mediated entirely through the paradigm of use.

In the cultural landscape of Bajwa's novel the things that money can buy command a similar ascendancy in social relations - it is significant that its central arena is a shop. In the friendship of the Mrs. Sandhu, the government servant's wife and Mrs. Gupta, the businessman's, Bajwa hints at the oily nexus of corruption. The Sari Shop may be far removed from the hurly burly of public life but there is no doubt that its innocence is contaminated; and in time and unlike AOF, Ramchand comes to be the witness of that taint. Ramchand's perspective can most accurately be described as the 'critical insider', a term first used by distinguished Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy. In allowing Ramchand the outsider's viewpoint and leaving some spaces uninfected by the malaise of apathy, Bajwa also opens up space for survival.

It is interesting then that the only opening possible in Sharma's world is escape. The final chapter is told in the narrative voice of Kusum, Ram Karan's youngest daughter who emigrated to the USA and married an American and who now returns to adopt the teenage Asha. The generosity of her relationship with her husband and daughter serves as a contrast to the murky, mean-spirited bonds her sister Anita has lived with. In a revealing dialogue at the end, as the plane lifts off from London's Heathrow airport, Kusum corrects Asha when the latter points to the geography they have just left behind - on the land below, says Kusum, are not paths but highways. The implicit metaphor is powerful - the highway connotes freedom and destination, features of a life in the West compared to the aimless dust paths of Delhi and/or India. Read in the light of its author's relation to the setting, AOF then is clearly the emigrant's passage to India. Like Forster's celebrated novel, Sharma's is an outsider's view. Like the other insider-outsider Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, his vision has the merciless perspective of distance. AOF in effect offers a radical re-interpretation of Professor Godbole's mysterious comment quoted at the beginning of this essay. Culpability is indeed pervasive but in a more literal sense. The vision of AOF's characters is rendered opaque and limited by a self-serving culture that continues implicitly to excuse everything. Till the point of no return.

In comparison, The Sari Shop can be read as the insider's passage from ignorance to bitter knowledge. There is no forgiveness here either but there is the terrible grace of insight. Bajwa's characters may be no more able to change the direction of the world or even of their lives than Sharma's. But continuity is made possible precisely by the brief periods when they see through the systemic violence.

Agree with this take? Have a different point of view? Discuss these novels and Ashima's reading of them here

Ashima Sood was born in Ludhiana, grew up for the most part in Delhi and now live in Ithaca, New York where she is a graduate student in Economics. Ashima says, "my interest in matters literary unfortunately is strictly extra-curricular".


home about contact policies submissions feature archives audio visual writing reviews forums art film & television food literature music society & culture elsewhere desilit parabaas sasialit sawnet upper stall	THE EMIGRANT AND THE NATIVE: the Indias of Akhil Sharma and Rupa Bajwa By Ashima Sood "Because nothing can be performed in isolation. All perform a good action, when one is performed, and when an evil action is performed, all perform it" - Professor Godbole, A Passage to India The nature of corruption is the theme that runs through two recent novels set in contemporary India - Akhil Sharma's An Obedient Father (2000) and Rupa Bajwa's The Sari Shop (2003). Both novels feature lower middle class protagonists with limited education, in North Indian settings where the struggle for upward mobility is the defining quest. Despite significant overlaps in the cultural territory they explore and the conclusions they reach, however Sharma and Bajwa offer interesting and instructive contrasts in perspective. While Bajwa is the native born and bred, Sharma's parents emigrated from Delhi to the USA when he was still a child. Can the differences in tone and viewpoint stem from the difference in the authors' relation to the setting? Numerous reviewers have described Sharma's fictional universe in An Obedient Father (hereafter AOF) as 'unrelentingly grim'. The place is old Delhi, the time the early 1990s when within the course of a year, petty bureaucrat Ram Karan's life is turned upside down. His wife dies and so does his son-in-law; at home, his daughter Anita returns with her own daughter Asha to live with him and at work Ram Karan is appointed moneyman and fall guy by his boss, Mr. Gupta. As wheeler and dealer and extractor of bribes from school principals however Ram Karan has only limited flair. As he admits: 'My general incompetence and laziness at work had been apparent for...long...this is common for a certain type of civil servant who knows that he is viewed with disdain by his superiors and that he cannot lose his job.' In Ram Karan's world, the rules of public life are meant to be circumvented - his cowardice and his talent for finding moral loopholes are assets that aid his success. He becomes Mr. Gupta's right-hand man when the latter commences an ill-fated run for Parliament. Over the course of the novel it also becomes apparent that the rationalizations and excuses Ram Karan is so adept at seep into his personal life as well - the moral miasma he operates in includes rape and incest. As Ram Karan admits at a moment of typical self-abnegation, 'My mind was attracted to what is loathsome and humiliating.' His molestation of his own daughter Anita has remained a bitter family secret, but once he reaches for his granddaughter Asha, Anita becomes the avenging goddess, determined to expose and punish him. The shape of that retribution gives the novel its title. If Ram Karan is the consummate insider working at the heart of India's political machine, Rupa Bajwa's protagonist in The Sari Shop Ramchand is the eternal man on the margin. Orphaned at a young age and rendered asunder from the fabric of family that supports Indian society, his work restricts him to the feminized, seemingly innocuous arena of the small town sari shop where he is a salesman. The Sevak Sari House is the narrow oblique lens through which he, with the reader, views contemporary North India. There are the customers, ladies of leisure from Amritsar's elite families and then there is the lower middle class existence of Ramchand and his colleagues. Like AOF, the precise and inescapable gradations of class (and implicitly caste) and power configure the arena of possibilities in The Sari Shop; like the former novel, the struggle for upward mobility provides the motive force. Unlike Akhil Sharma's Ram Karan, however Bajwa's Ramchand is naīve and perhaps more pertinently, young. His path of self-improvement takes him through English essay books. But for all of Ramchand's comic efforts, there is horror also at the end of the The Sari Shop - in the rape of Kamla, the wretched wife of one of his colleagues, Ramchand sees the consequences of challenging the social order. The surfaces of this world may seem smooth but the edges are jagged. The Kamla episode has been described by many reviewers as 'melodramatic' and implausible but in fact it is no more than the stuff of numerous newspaper headlines brought home. Read together with Sharma's more polished novel, The Sari Shop thus yields an interesting counterpoint. In AOF the political becomes personal; in The Sari Shop the personal becomes political. In both the iniquities of the public sphere cannot be escaped. Neither Sharma nor Bajwa can offer the possibility of salvation for their characters - if Ram Karan succumbs to his daughter's brutal revenge, Ramchand survives by an equally terrible anaesthetization of sensibility. Yet despite the similarly bleak outlook the two novels have a remarkably dissimilar flavor. In Sharma's Delhi, the quality of the light is almost never untainted; in Ramchand's (and Bajwa's) Amritsar occasionally the sun shines down 'gently on him, with pleasant warmth'. As The Sari Shop progresses, these moments prove to be deceptive; yet while there is no more hope here than in AOF, the possibility of recognition serves almost as a proxy for redemption. As an illustration consider the contrasting moments of revelation of injustice in either novel. In AOF, Anita's attempts to expose Ram Karan's incestuous tendencies to her relatives are met with no more than a mild curiosity; in The Sari Shop Ramchand's attempt to draw a seemingly sympathetic and enlightened college professor into condemning the incarceration and rape of Kamla are met with frank hostility. Yet Ramchand's own breakdown and horror at Kamla's fate undermines the conspiracy of silence that surrounds it. In Sharma's world, on the other hand, culpability is so pervasive that it is no longer even recognized - the conspiracy, if it can be called that, is one of indifference. It is possible indeed to read AOF entirely as an allegory - in the obscenely obese character of Ram Karan we find an embodiment of the vitiated, dog eat dog way of life that characterizes the public sphere in post-colonial India; in his bloodless black ankles upon his death we see the lethal rot in that system. Numerous episodes throughout the novel document the comfortless, conscienceless cosmos that is Sharma's India. When a rich classmate in Asha's school throws away a used imported tissue, the other girls make a grab for it. When a monkey enters a women's restroom, two of the women inside manage to escape by locking the third one in to be mauled by the monkey. While these episodes early in the novel play for laughs (the humorist David Sedaris mentioned the monkey-in-the-bathroom tale in numerous interviews in praise of AOF's comic triumphs), the message is clear - Sharma's is a Darwinian world where self-preservation comes at the expense of others, even sometimes at the expense of self-respect. Similarly, in the sublime second chapter (which was earlier anthologized as 'If you sing like that for me' in Best American Short Stories 1996) Anita tries to love her husband by arranged marriage and finds that to him she is no more and no less than a lifestyle accessory, equivalent to a car or bungalow. Not surprisingly, social relations in this world are mediated entirely through the paradigm of use. In the cultural landscape of Bajwa's novel the things that money can buy command a similar ascendancy in social relations - it is significant that its central arena is a shop. In the friendship of the Mrs. Sandhu, the government servant's wife and Mrs. Gupta, the businessman's, Bajwa hints at the oily nexus of corruption. The Sari Shop may be far removed from the hurly burly of public life but there is no doubt that its innocence is contaminated; and in time and unlike AOF, Ramchand comes to be the witness of that taint. Ramchand's perspective can most accurately be described as the 'critical insider', a term first used by distinguished Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy. In allowing Ramchand the outsider's viewpoint and leaving some spaces uninfected by the malaise of apathy, Bajwa also opens up space for survival. It is interesting then that the only opening possible in Sharma's world is escape. The final chapter is told in the narrative voice of Kusum, Ram Karan's youngest daughter who emigrated to the USA and married an American and who now returns to adopt the teenage Asha. The generosity of her relationship with her husband and daughter serves as a contrast to the murky, mean-spirited bonds her sister Anita has lived with. In a revealing dialogue at the end, as the plane lifts off from London's Heathrow airport, Kusum corrects Asha when the latter points to the geography they have just left behind - on the land below, says Kusum, are not paths but highways. The implicit metaphor is powerful - the highway connotes freedom and destination, features of a life in the West compared to the aimless dust paths of Delhi and/or India. Read in the light of its author's relation to the setting, AOF then is clearly the emigrant's passage to India. Like Forster's celebrated novel, Sharma's is an outsider's view. Like the other insider-outsider Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, his vision has the merciless perspective of distance. AOF in effect offers a radical re-interpretation of Professor Godbole's mysterious comment quoted at the beginning of this essay. Culpability is indeed pervasive but in a more literal sense. The vision of AOF's characters is rendered opaque and limited by a self-serving culture that continues implicitly to excuse everything. Till the point of no return. In comparison, The Sari Shop can be read as the insider's passage from ignorance to bitter knowledge. There is no forgiveness here either but there is the terrible grace of insight. Bajwa's characters may be no more able to change the direction of the world or even of their lives than Sharma's. But continuity is made possible precisely by the brief periods when they see through the systemic violence. Agree with this take? Have a different point of view? Discuss these novels and Ashima's reading of them here Ashima Sood was born in Ludhiana, grew up for the most part in Delhi and now live in Ithaca, New York where she is a graduate student in Economics. Ashima says, "my interest in matters literary unfortunately is strictly extra-curricular".