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An Other Destiny: Mimesis, Parody, and Assimilation

ANUSHIYA SIVANARAYANAN

There is a deeply painful moment in Ekow Eshuns travel nar-

rative Black Gold of the Sun when the London-born, young black protagonist goes to Ghana. It is important to note that this journey to his parents home country is taken in a profoundly unromantic fashion (Who can forget Du Boiss rhapsodies on Africa?). Despite the hardship of his journey, Eshun hopes that he might be able to come to some kind of understanding of his black self when placed in the midst of other African bodies: that he would no longer feel like an exotic; that his feelings of being an outsider in the West and his search for a denable identity would come to an end when he could see similarities between himself and the people of Ghana. Instead, like Richard Wright in Black Power who despairs over the alienation he felt while traveling amongst the people of the Gold Coast in the 1950s, Eshuns feelings of disconnectedness and exile only become more pronounced the longer he stays in Ghana. The worst incident, however, occurs when he nds out that one of his ancestors had been a Dutch slave trader and that for two generations his family had participated in the slave trade on the West African coast. The shock is physical. You feel winded (141). He recognizes that his family had also had a hand in sowing the seeds of racism that now refuse him a place in the West. Even worse, he wonders if his own critical judgments of the behavior of modern Ghanaians is predicated on a Western upbringing that has rubbed off its racist prejudices on him. Richard Wright, too, had wondered about the proclivities of an African personality that were deeply repulsive to his American self. 391

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Does living in a white country make you, in some way, white? asks Eshun (197). He refers to the unrelenting racism minorities experience that makes people like himselfassimilated, upwardly mobile, and articulate in the language of the master racesunderstand the position of the dominant class in certain pathologically sensitive ways. Such an adoption of mainstream cultural values, whether critical or not, comes at a price. For the assimilationist is convinced of his own lack. Like Eshun, and Wright decades before him, the outsider believes in the humanist values expressed in the rational argument as to why people like him are despised by the larger culture. He hears the Go Home cries as those of the ignorant and hasty in the community. He is hopeful that once he has proven himself to be hardworking, likeable, and willing to become one of them, he would be accepted. The danger of such thinking involves the process of assimilation itself. For in signing up for the change, one also begins to believe in the essentialized notions of race. Eshuns question undergirds the work of many of the modern Tamil Dalit writers I translate. (The Dalits are the so-called untouchable castes in India and the diaspora.) The Tamil Dalit poet N.T. Rajkumar, yoking together history, desire, and the black body in a culture (both Indian and Western) that sees the dark-skinned body as representative only of violence and rarely of aesthetic beauty, writes,
To tell the history I havent nished counting the Violent kisses you gave me O My Dark one.

However playful, Rajkumar accepts the qualities attributed to the dark body. Eshun is not alone in wondering about the ways one assumes the value system of the majority culture.1 For in
Richard M. Swiderski, in Lives Between Cultures: A Study of Human Nature, Identity and Culture, calls the journey into anothers culture crossing, and, according to him, it is this crossing that denes in many ways what a culture is:
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order to belong, to be assimilated in such a way that one could benet from being an insider, the Black/Dalit adopts discourses and practices that are always already there as Foucault calls it. This process of change is relentlessly one wayas testied to by writers as different as Richard Wright and the postcolonial writer Salman Rushdie. 2 There is no going back. In a personal interview, the Tamil Dalit writer Bama admits that when her autobiographical novel Karukku (The Dried Palmyra Leaf) came out, there was such anger amongst her village community (most of whom were illiterate and unable to read her book and yet saw her act of writing for a reading public that was mostly non-Dalit as a deep betrayal) that her father warned her to stay away. The sub-title of Eshuns novel, Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond, a search that culminates at the edge of the cliff in Grenada where the Caribs had all jumped into the sea rather than be made slaves to the French, is poignant in its acknowledgement of a point of no return. Eshun, like the Caribs before him, recognizes the racial construction of the body put forth in colonial discourses as inescapable destiny. The constructions of racial difference as integral to crossings of color lines is made clear in the spate of scholarship available in both black and whiteness studies. Frequently, racial certainties are revealed as constructions of race based upon the notion of the black body as inassimilable. Wrights disgust in Ghana is due to this recognition. For race discourses purport to dene what
It is language, dress, social customs especially those regarding marriage, expressions, food preferences, and a myriad of other ways if the list is to be extendedbut mostly it is language and dress. In crossing publicly from one life to another a person rst and foremost ostensibly shows a change in appearance and behavior. Conversely, a person wishing to suggest a crossing dresses and acts, especially speaks, differently. A crossing is managed in this way: the commentator responds rst to these differences; the captive or the voluntary crosser [. . .] has them engineered. (4)
2 He should have known that it was a mistake to go home, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing was bound to be a disaster (Rushdie 34).

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it is to be Black/Dalit in nal terms. Such descriptions work in a paradoxical fashion: on the one hand, they are the basis for violence against the Black/Dalit body; on the other, they function as arguments for assimilation. In James Weldon Johnsons novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the narrator decides to pass as a white man only after witnessing a lynching in the South. He feels deep shame and humiliation as a fellow black at the indignities suffered by the murdered black body (136). Interestingly, this feeling of shame at recognizing ones blacknessrealizing that there is somehow an essence, an irreducible and frozen center in oneselfis always read (by the protagonist as well as the reader) as somehow natural and plausible. For instance, in Nella Larsons novel Passing, narrator Irene Redeld sees her childhood acquaintance Clare in a hotel dining room and is unable to recognize her. When Irene catches Clare staring at her, the rst thought that crosses Irenes mind is the fear that she had been found out to be black. But Clare comes over and calls upon Irene by name, claiming a shared black past. Suddenly, Irenes perspective changesshe looks at the physical characteristics of the light-haired, dark-eyed Clare differently. Irene now judges Clares smile at the white waiter as denitely coquettish, and her eyes were Negro eyes! mysterious and concealing [. . .] set in that ivory face under the bright hair, there was about them something exotic (200). What had initially been judged as an unoffending white body now, when known to be black, assumes a persona that ts in with the racist discourses of the time. Clare draws attention to the ways such discourses are disseminated by mentioning her two white aunts who made the orphaned young Clare do all the housework while quoting the Biblical Hams curse. The ambivalence Irene feels about Clare comes into being only when she recognizes Clare as black. And here, recognizing Clare as black also means linking her with all the negative descriptions about the hypersexualized nature of the black female body. Ironically, Irene is

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also passing for white even as she applies troubling race-based assessments of Clare.3 These are signicant moments, especially because of the easy ways mainstream White/non-Dalit writers and artists have been able to adopt black face to walk on the dark side or claim, however momentarily, the forbidden. Michael Norths The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature describes such white adoptions of black culture as language-driven movements that ultimately changed the face of modern culture itself (34). In reading Hemingways The Garden of Eden, Toni Morrison points to the reasons given by the white woman Catherine Bourne to her husband as to why she wants both of them to tan in the sunso that she will look like a lion with her dark body and dyed blonde hair, and he will be made darker than an Indian(86). According to Morrison,
Catherine well understands the association of blackness with strangeness, with taboounderstands also that blackness is something one can have or appropriate; its the one thing they lack, she tells him. Whiteness here is a deciency. She comprehends how this acquisition of blackness others them and creates an ineffable bond between themunifying them within the estrangement.(87)

For those designated historically as the marginalized, there is no easy way to move back and forth.

3 Sander L. Gilman, in his essay Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature (Race, Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 223-61), argues that artistic representations of the black body in various media, in paintings, medical texts, cartoons, or the opera, served the dubious function of racial and sexual stereotyping. The body represented takes on all the qualities, usually negative, of the class or race the body is purported to belong to, and by the various conventions in place, read in typical ways. For instance, the celebrated 1862 painting of Manets Olympia shows a reclining nude white woman with a fully-clothed black servant in the background. Gilman argues that the black woman in the picture is there only to add sexual spice to the conventional portrait of a white prostitute. The two classesthe prostitutes and the blackscome together in Manets painting to reinforce prevailing notions of illicit sexuality.

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WESTERN UNDERSTANDING OF COLOR In his essay Race, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that the set of assumptions which amounted to a new theory of race that came about in the nineteenth century was signicantly different from the understanding of race that had been prevalent in Western discourses since Hellenic and Biblical times (274). Appiah explains that the new nineteenth-century-based understanding claimed for race an essential quality: that along with the physical features of racial identity came characteristics that were commonly inherited by all. Even if such beliefs have been increasingly proven to be false, the racial discourses of the nineteenth century hold tremendous sway upon the public imagination. For it is impossible not to encounter the question of blackness (not whiteness) as a way of being in the world, whether it is in the writings of historically signicant black authors like Wright, postcolonials like Eshun, or in modern Tamil Dalit poetry. I have come to realize through my study of Tamil Dalit writings that the Western understanding of colorthe persistent belief in the racially identiable body and its inherited qualitiesin the Indian context has a much longer history. The caste divisions of Indian society rest upon the reasoning that certain groups of people are uniquely endowed with characteristics that will allow them to succeed in the carrying out of certain duties. Thus, the reasoning goes, the Brahmin with his light skin and innate intelligence shall be in charge of the written word while the Dalit with his darker skin will take care of the cleaning tasks of the world. The Tamil Dalit poet Cheran writes of this age-old marginalization of the powerless and points to the ways such inequalities become justied as normal and natural:
Ask: The snake how he fornicates The morning how it dawns The trees about their patience The sleepwalkers whether their dreams have colors The refugees about the transformation of their tears

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into prison. Ask What is fear, from the dark skinned men and women who walk the nights in this city. (1-11)

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If, as Appiah claims, the division of whole populations into naturally born racial categories is a recent phenomenon, that the ideas about innate qualities of whiteness and blackness are historically recent phenomena, then the ancient Indian varna system (varna literally means color in Sanskrit) that hierarchically divided human beings into four large groups of people based upon their professions is particularly interesting. For the Indian caste system employs the language of racialism made familiar to those in the West to explain the division of caste. The Dalit cannot enter the temple, as his body by virtue of the hereditary work he is assigned to docleaningis inherently polluting. Conversely, the male Brahmin is allowed to touch the ritually sanctied statue of the god in the temple as his body by birth is one of high purity. The prohibition against not only the mingling of castes but also the mutual exchange of professions is vehemently punished in lived reality. Even today, the mingling of castes in many parts of rural India is punished by ostracism and sometimes death. The edicts of the Indian King Manu in the fth century B.C.E codied caste as a way of being in society. Like the slave legislations and later segregationist laws in the United States, Manus code of caste behavior was designed to create and maintain an unequal society. Most importantly, the various discourses about race, labor, gender, and class notions remained in the hands of the dominant groups who habitually described the black body as the outsider. W.E.B. Du Bois described the state of being the other in a pre-dominantly white society as a painful existence of constantly being aware of ones black body, of seeing the white world gaze back at someone who is black. Ellison made such a condition into a metaphor of the invisible manthe condition of never being seen as a subject and only as a black body.

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Hey, sister, you cant enter the house / Through the front door: / Our living is a backdoor affair (1-3), writes Rajkumar, describing the ways the Dalit is made to signify such a marginal living. The Dalit entering the back door of the masters house announces to the world, and more importantly to herself, her blackness. The stark reminder of being the other (to go to the back of the bus), of always trying to not embody the characteristics of the so-called black (to be on time, as Ellison puts it), also gives those who live in oppressed circumstances a special understanding of what it means to possess that elusive qualitywhiteness. The question of ones own whiteness is a deeply troubling one for those of us who struggle with issues of identity that involve race, gender, and place.4 To recognize the whiteness in oneself or, conversely, the blackness is to grapple with attitudes about the body and its place in history. In Theme for English B, Langston Hughes writes to his white teacher about his race, desires, and place of origin. Hughes traces a geographical trajectory from the South to the North, all the way to his college on the hill and his own more humble abode at the Harlem YMCA. Then he makes the startling claim that he is not fully black the same way his teacher is not fully white. Given the Jim Crow politics of the time period, it is a bold claim and, as Hughes notes wryly, one that might be unpalatable to the white teacher. Whiteness, as commentators have often pointed out, involves an assumption of superiority that gets rarely challenged. It is simply thereeternal and unchanging as words written on
But one need not go too far to see the ways this notion of whiteness as a way of seeing and judging works itself out in reality. It is a question that arose at the time of the oods of Katrina in 2005 when the black people of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans were shown on national television looking overwhelmingly alien to mainstream Americaobese, lacking teeth, and without transportation. It is a question that underlies the subsequent chocolate city comment of New Orleanss black mayor Nagin who wanted to reassure his black populace that he was not going to give in to the city planners who wanted to re-build the city leaving the poor, black regions out.
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a pillar of rock. Signicantly, it is only within black communities that the various permutations of the word nd form: Acting White in the North American context could be compared to the acting like a white man one hears in formerly colonized countries. In my own Sri Lankan context, the Sinhala word sudha, meaning white man, when applied to a Sri Lankan expresses a range of feelingssometimes contempt for an overweening personality but mostly undisguised approval for a well-organized individual. In both cases, the word has within it the connotation of being superior. The Tamil word used for the colonial Englishman is Durai which means Sir or Lord. The word appears in Tamil colonial discourses as the singular term used to describe the white colonizer. Interestingly, the term Durai itself has survived more than fty years since the last English Durai ostensibly left the shores of Sri Lanka in the regions most closely associated with the colonial plantation culture. It is not by chance that Durai is a popular sufx (and sometimes prex) for male names in the coastal region of Tamil Nadu, India; it is read as a regional identication, signaling the bearer to be from the coastal areas of Tutucurin and Thirunelveli, the places that provided most of the Tamil-speaking migrant labor to the British plantations across the sea in Sri Lanka and Malaysia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, my Sri Lankan-born father is named Selvadurai (meaning lord of wealth), his cousin who was born in Thirunelveli, India, is Rajadurai (King of the lords), and the ever-popular Iyadurai (lord of the Sirs) is the title of a recent Tamil blockbuster, set in the Thirunelveli district. The men and women in colonial times who named their sons as Durais of one kind or another were recognizing the raw, god-given power wielded by the whites in their midst. Even in many African American communities, where white is used as a method to put down one perceived as being upwardly mobile, to act white means to take on behavior that will earn one entry into the mainstream culture. Whiteness then comes to mean an

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adoption of distinct behaviorsprecise diction, middle-class values, certain aesthetic preferences. On the other hand, such a reading of whiteness places blackness as inferior, damaged, or in the state of a historical loser. In Wrights Native Son, Bigger Thomas is told that he could avoid a petty criminals life by becoming a passive domestic in a rich white mans house. Later as a desperate fugitive, as he ees into the heart of darkness, so to speak, into the poorest areas of the city where the blacks live, Bigger sees the deeply segregated Chicago landscape as relentlessly white, where the abstract notions of whiteness and blackness get transferred to the very architecture and landscape of the city (208). The modern history of racism functions as a map of sorts, where the erstwhile people of color either occupy the regions of the world that were colonized by white Europeans up to and into the nineteenth and early twentieth century (even if those early colonizers like the Spanish were very different in coloring from the Nordic races who entered the fray later on) or were forcibly moved into the various geographic regions that belonged to the Europeans. My own family, in various stages, migrated from South India to the hills of central Sri Lanka during the nineteenth century as part of a vast network of tea and coffee plantations across British holdings in Asia. It is important to point out that they were not forced nor coerced to move as cheap slave labor, like the thousands of Indians and Africans who were shipped to everywhere from the Caribbean islands to South Africa. Instead, they were part of a larger class who recognized early on the prot to be made in voluntarily linking themselves to the British. Traditional readings of colonial histories place the colonizer and the colonized at two ends of a vast chasm with the twain neer meeting. And yet, as Eshuns history makes clear, there were many points of convergence, not the least through identifying with the colonizers project, be it building a railroad or transporting slaves. For many of these blacks, such collaborations were benecial in terms of class mobility. Assimilation was a way

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to survive and share in the power and glory of the master class, unless one was willing to take the tragic path of the Caribs. And yet, these gures of assimilation have been traditionally treated as inauthentic: as imitators and worse. The brown sahib was a gure of contempt in the novels of Trollope, and the kangani or supervisor in colonial Indian and Sri Lankan plantations who was the middleman between the Europeans and the native labor population was universally despised. The Tamil folk songs that are a part of a strong oral culture describe the kangani and his sartorial preferencesthe black-coated kanganias a symbol of his assimilation into the dominant culture. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS But long before white men began venturing into the Conradian heart of darkness outside their own national boundaries, the early so-called Aryan invasions of a lighter skinned warrior class that gradually began to conquer and settle parts of India established a racial discourse familiar in terms of its color-based essentialisms. Such a discoursea caste and race-based codication of the human bodyhas remained unchanged as the early Sanskrit texts were translated into other vernacular languages over the centuries. Let me explain this phenomenon using the example of the female character Surpanakha, from the ancient Indian epic of Ramayana. In the West, it was only in the post-Colombian era that one saw the rise of race discourses that listed the various ways to identify the non-white body through skin complexion and facial features; in the Indian context, reecting the ancient Sanskrit epics, both ancient and medieval Tamil texts have traditionally codied the caste-based body in various discourses by placing the dark body as the outsider. The Vedic-derived caste system hierarchically classied the population into four basic professional occupations, with those who were most physically unlike the dominant classes placed at the very end as service workers. Such a work-based genealogical division of lived reality is then

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represented in the ancient epics in systematic ways. In Valmikis Ramayana, an Indian epic composed in Sanskrit sometime in the post-Vedic age,5 the initial moment of encounter between the hero Rama and Surpanakha, the sister of the villain Ravana, is described in severely binary terms. Notably, Surpanakha is described as belonging to the race of the asuras/raksasas, aboriginal creatures who are barely human.6
His face was beautiful; hers was ugly. His waist was slender; hers was bloated. His eyes were wide; hers were deformed. His hair was beautifully black; hers was copper-colored. His voice was pleasant; hers was frightful. He was a tender youth; she was a dreadful old hag. He was well spoken; she was coarse of speech. His conduct was lawful; hers was evil. His countenance was pleasing; hers was repellent. (qtd. in Erndl 69)

Notice how the dichotomies presented by Valmiki function within the text. As the French theorist Jacques Derrida points out, whenever two paired opposites are presented, somehow, instead of two absolutes being shown in an equal fashion, we have a violent hierarchy where one term assumes a higher order of being than the other (qtd. in Culler 85).7 Thus Rama, who belongs to the same culture and race as Valmiki, is presented as the epitome of grace and beauty while Surpanakha the aborigine

5 Romila Thapar in The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 calculates that the Ramayana had been present in oral form for many centuries before being written down in the early rst millennium AD (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002, 98). 6 In the Puranas the aborigines are described under the names of Asuras and Rakshas; as being giants and cannibals, and of course very repulsive (Garrett 49). The Dalit artists have traditionally claimed the asura/raksasa mask, signifying their identication with the despised and demonized other. Note the racial overtones in the description given to the asura/raksasa. See also Winthrop Jordans White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro that traces the discursive construction of the African as the Black to be placed in opposition to the White European: White and Black connoted purity and lthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, benecence and evil, God and the devil (7). 7

In Positions, Derrida argues, In a traditional philosophical opposition we have not a peaceful co-existence of facing terms but a violent hierarchy. One of the terms

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is the damaged version of the same: if he has black hair, she has reddish hair; if he has a young body, her body is old. I noticed the coarsening, so to speak, of Surpanakha only when I read the Tamil version of the Ramayana by the medieval Tamil poet Kambar. Kambars description of the bodily features of Surpanakha is directly lifted from Valmiki, especially the description of her hair. Within a predominantly dark-haired people, the color of dull red or copper is an ominous indicator of extreme malnutrition. The sight of red hair within a mostly black-haired population is a sign of terrible depredation, where famine, poverty, and lack get represented on the body. Valmikis description of the meeting between Rama and Surpanakha becomes more troublesome when one realizes the ways Valmiki presents Surpanakha as but a diseased version of the norm. Signicantly enough, this moment of encounter between two castes/classes of people in the medieval Tamil poet Kambars translation, Iramavataram, is presented in a very different fashion. As Kathleen M. Erndl points out in her essay, The Mutilation of Surpanakha, in the Sanskrit version the meeting between the exiled prince and the wandering Surpanakha is a single encounter that ends with Rama ordering his brother Lakshmana to [m]utilate this ugly, unvirtuous, extremely ruttish, great-bellied raksasi (71). In the twelfth-century version of Kambars Iramavataram, on the other hand, Surpanakha is a more developed character, a tragic sufferer of unrequited love. I need to mention that both versions of the Ramayana function within the Indian/Tamil tradition as master narratives. In Kambar, in the section titled Aaranya Kaandam (The Forest Verses), the rst meeting between Rama and Surpanakha
dominates the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), occupies the commanding position. To de-construct the opposition is above all, at a particular moment, to reverse the hierarchy (qtd. in Culler 85). See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks Preface to her translation of Derridas Of Grammatology where she collates Nietzsches rhetorical strategy of interrogating the more familiar of opposites taken from Western philosophy (xxviii).

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is told entirely from Surpanakhas point of view. Seeing the sheer physical beauty of Rama, Surpanakha is smitten, and the love she feels for him swells higher than rain-lled waters, and her female chastity shrinks like the fame of the rich man who refuses to part with his wealth even in the face of pitiable circumstances.8 By imputing a reason for Surpanakhas subsequent bold act of approaching Rama, that it was love that made her lose that essential notion of karpu or virtue possessed by all chaste Tamil women, Kambar performs a neat literary trick. Whereas Valmiki presents Surpanakha as a monstrous raksasi, and as such devoid of all identiable feminine qualities valued by the patriarchal culture of his time, Kambar, in his seemingly more sympathetic rendition, rst presents her as a subject, gives her space within the narrative to express her point of view, and then swiftly strips her of her ethnic gender identity. By claiming that in seeing Rama Surpanakha loses her karpuwhich is a conglomeration of the four qualities of fear, foolishness, shame, and pollution that form the core of the chaste Tamil woman in classical literatureKambar makes her lose all claims to any kind of mainstream ethnic gender identity. Once Kambar makes Surpanakha a woman without karpu, she becomes a creature of base nature. It is important to note that in dating Kambars work to the twelfth century rather than the ninth century AD, one of the literary clues critics use is the way Kambar places the story of Rama securely within the Tamil Bhakthi literary tradition. Kambar adopts the mode of address of the Bhakthi poet towards the god, in this case, the hero Rama. The Bhakthi narrative of the twelfth century, Periya Puranam, a collection of life-stories of the sixty-three Saiva saints, is formulaic: the saint sees the god, falls in divine love, and is then asked to prove the strength of this love through a series of Job-like travails that usually end in the body of the worshipper being sacriced or almost sacriced.
Soorpanagai Padalam. All quotations of Kambars Iramavataram are taken from the online version posted on <http://www.tamilnation.org/literature/kamban/kambaramayanam.htm>. All the Tamil translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.
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The Bhakthi movement coincided with a period of intense local ethnic pride in many regions of India, and in South India especially, the rise of Tamil as a distinct language was compounded by the imperialistic activities of Tamil kings all over South East Asia. Kambars text participates unabashedly in what Edward Said describes as the epistemology of imperialism9 in that it provides a linguistically identied social group with its own foundational discourse that refuses to be traced back to its Sanskrit original. Kambars Iramavataram is usually read as a powerful hegemonic text alongside the other two well-known earlier Tamil epics, Cilapathikaram and Manimekalai, in the ways all three present a similar ethnic-based female identity.10 The texts of the period all participated in the construction of a Tamil woman as one who possesses karpu, an essential gender-derived quality that was identiable only through the womans performance. If, according to Kambar, Surpanakhas actions in propositioning Rama, his initial irtation with her, Surpanakhas return the next day, and the violent reaction of Ramas brother Lakshmana who cuts off her nose, ears, and nipples, were all due to her loss of karpu at seeing Rama, does it mean that Kambar presents Surpanakha as a woman of virtue at the beginning? That is, before she sees Rama, is Surpanakha described as a woman with karpu and therefore valuable? When Kambar describes Surpanakha as she catches sight of Rama standing alone on the banks of the Godavari river is a notable moment in the story. The section opens with a long description of Surpanakha, and her identity is repeatedly given in terms of her birth. One needs to remember that within the severely caste-based discourses of both Valmiki and the later poet Kambar all subjects are identied in terms of a hierarchy of insider/outsider status. Surpanakha is a raksasi, wandering
9

Edward Said, Orientalism, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

10

Cilapathikaram and Manimekali are believed to belong to the Later Ancient Tamil period of Tamil literature (around fth century AD).

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the land (the young Rama and his brother Lakshmana had been hunting raksasas before arriving at Seethas marriage contest to win the bride), and Kambar notes that Surpanakhas arrival will lead to the downfall of Rama. Her hair like poured copper, Kambar begins the second stanza of the section, and he continues using descriptions taken directly from Valmiki.11 In fact Kambar borrows from Valmiki not only the rhetorical trope of the raksasi as the epitome of ugliness but also the details of what constitutes such a perception. Kambar thus borrows a whole set of tropes as if they are artifacts from a cultural museum in order to construct the familiar insider/outsider model. The word Kambar uses for Surpanakhas body, araaham, means uncontrollable and lusty. What is worse, after signaling in various ways that Surpanakhas arrival was inauspicious for Rama (just before Surpanakhas entrance, we had an idyllic description of Rama and Seetha taking in the beauties of the Godavari river plain), Kambar has Surpanakha speak in a monologue that explains to the reader how she perceived the breath-taking beauty of Rama. Kambar then stops Surpanakhas monologue and cuts in with a description from the narrator of the intense desire Surpanakha felt for Rama. It is at this juncture that the narrator/Kambar makes the argument that Surpanakhas karpu lost its battle with her growing love for Rama. After the three verses describing the effects of Surpanakhas love, the poem shifts back to Surpanakhas voice, allowing her to tell the reader how she was going to seduce the handsome Rama. It is at this point, where we clearly have the voice of Surpanakha speak, that Kambars text performs the most egregious of acts. Kambar places in Surpanakhas mouth a damning description of her raksasi body. It is Surpanakha herself who describes her body as an Eyirudhai araki, which means a raksasi with jutting
11

For a breathtakingly beautiful English translation of this section from Kambars epic, see George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz, The Forest Book of the Ramayana of Kampan (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988).

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teeth, and continues the self-description as one whose bloated stomach looks like she has eaten everything in sight. Therefore, Surpanakha argues, her raksasi body would not be pleasing to Rama, a conclusion that Kambar allows Surpanakha herself to make. In a moment of supreme self-abnegation, the lovelorn Surpanakha thinks of the goddess Lakshmi, the epitome of female beauty within the Hindu pantheon, and by uttering the requisite mantra changes her body to mimic that of the golden goddess who is the opposite of the raksasi in every way. As Seetha, the wife of Rama, is presented within the narrative as possessing the human form of the same goddess, it is interesting to note the kind of assimilative behavior at play here. Tamil critics have long argued that Kambars Iramavataram is not a faithful translation of Valmikis Ramayana but a literary masterpiece that needs to be read on its own terms. One of the reasons used to bolster such an argument is Kambars treatment of Surpanakha.12 The fact that Kambar allows Surpanakha a voice and narrative space was by itself argued as proof that the Tamil poet treated her very differently than did Valmiki. I beg to differ. Kambar demonizes Surpanakha in a much more complex fashion. Whereas in Valmiki Surpanakha is drawn deftly as a caricature, in Kambar the differences between Surpanakha as a representative of a raksasa woman and the Tamil woman as a woman with karpu is given in detail. Kambar uses Surpanakha to show that once she laid eyes on the divine Rama, the embodiment of grace and beauty, there was no going back. As a narrative artist, Kambar solves the dilemma of a meeting between the god-like Rama and the raksasi Surpanakha by re-making her into a female of his own kind. The question of why Surpanakha, a raksasi who is described repeatedly as belonging to another race, is drawn to the physical beauty of Rama is never allowed to rise in any of the various
See C. Rajagopalacharis Kambans Soorpanaka (Ramayana. Bombay, Bharathiya Vidhya Bhavan, 1958).
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treatments of Ramayana. Why would Kambar believe that the non-raksasa beauty of Rama would attract Surpanakha? I am not saying that such an attraction could never happen; but Kambar presents the beauty of Rama in a transparently universal fashion, the same way he presents the ugliness of the raksasas. Later in the story, when Surpanakha goes to her brother and tells him about the beauty of Seetha, Ravana too falls in love merely by listening to a description of Seethas beauty. The celebrated scene of Seetha in the garden of Asoka surrounded by raksasi guards is often described in Indian literary texts as a study in contrasts. From Valmiki to Kambar, the poets of high culture take for granted that the raksasas were so unlike themselves in physical features that not only did the raksasas despise their own bodies, but their deepest desire lay in possessing the bodies of those belonging to the dominant culture. Surpanakhas voluntary act of transforming herself into a woman who could pass as one belonging to the race of Rama is clearly one of assimilation. When Rama sees Surpanakha for the rst time in Kambars version of the Ramayana, her beauty stuns him, and their initial conversation is permeated with references to marriage and miscegenation. Surpanakha does not lie about her racial origin, and Ramas surprise at her beauty is compounded by his realization that she is a raksasi. The notion of physiognomy13 as unreliable is a leitmotif in novels dealing with race from such different writers as William Wells Brown (whose light-skinned slave Clotel escapes dressed as a young white man), Mark Twain, Nella Larson, and the Tamil
There is an incident in Evelyn. C. Whites biography of Alice Walker that might help us understand how physiognomy works within cultures. Walker, a bright student from the south, had moved out of Spelman, the traditionally black college, into Sarah Lawrence, one of the most expensive private colleges in the country. Surrounded by wealthy white students, Walker longed for her roots. Finally, she solves her problem by buying three cheap prints: Modiglianis Alice, Gauguins Three Tahitian Women, and Rubenss Four Studies of the Head of a Negro. After I hung the pictures in my room, I felt less lonely (103).
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Dalit writer Bama. A successful Dalit lawyer I know describes his inability to claim his caste identity: I would be traveling by train, chatting with my fellow passengers, and quite casually someone would ask, So, what is your caste? I cannot at that moment admit that I belong to the Parayar caste.14 In such instances, the word Pariah that entered the Western lexicon through the British colonization of India and is used only metaphorically in Western discourses becomes one of literal meaning that refers to both the world and the speaking self. Even ordinary discursive moments are mineelds of socialization: for to admit to the truth means the Black/Dalit speaker is throwing out a challenge to the interlocutor demanding him to act. In such moments, the addresser moves away or assumes a liberal demeanor and continues the conversationeither way, the moment is fraught with tension. In James Weldon Johnsons anonymously published 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an ExColoured Man, the narrator describes a similar scene of traveling by train in the Jim Crow South and participating in conversation with white passengers on the question of race and never once indicating that he was black. Unless he is willing to ght, the passing Pariah keeps quiet about his identity (158). The very claiming of his identity is read by the majority culture as a sign of aggression to be answered in kind. Keeping quiet or passing, as Nella Larson shows in her novel of the same name, requires an immense degree of mastery of the culture of the oppressor. The Black/Dalit needs to acquire the modes of language and behavior of those he seeks to lull into acceptance. He is constantly reminded that he is living in the mouth of the lion (16), as Ellison puts it in The Invisible Man. Imagining oneself in the position of his oppressor, the Black/Dalit produces both materially and rhetorically the re-imagined self who is then able to gain access to hitherto closed social spaces. There are umpteen stories in the oral literatures of India that
14

Personal interview, July 23, 2001, in Madurai, India.

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signify the possibility of the Other to re-imagine himself into forms that make him difcult to identify as the Other. The possibility of such a re-imagination is the ultimate fear of an unequal society. The apocryphal story from the ancient Indian epic, Mahabharata, of Ekaliva, the young hunter who built a statue of Drona, the Brahmin teacher to the princes, and learnt by himself the art of royal archery is a case in point. The tragic denouement of the storyDrona asks Ekaliva for his thumb in return as his teachers fee so that the art is kept within its caste parametersdoes not take away the larger signication of the story: the immense possibilities of mimesis. The Ekaliva story is repeated within the oral cultural forms of the Dalit as a representative of the fear of the master class of this re-imagination. The art forms of the Dalit re-iterate the fact that the Dalit is capable of becoming unlike himself through a process of mimesis. Parody is the commonest form of such mimetic behavior. The folk arts of South India are mostly performed by men and women belonging to Dalit castes, and parody reigns supreme within the dance dramas of rural Tamil Nadu. The koothu, the dance drama of rural South India, draws its inspiration from the stories of the Hindu epics and puranas. Not surprisingly, the scenes and incidents chosen again and again for dramatic treatment involve the asuras, raksasas, and such outr gures; after all, the asuras and raksasas are purported to be the inhabitants of the underground region of patala and are giants and demons who are the enemies of the mainstream culture. The Tamil folk form of koothu takes as its subject matter such moments in Indian epics that will allow for a re-interpretation, exaggeration, or re-telling from down below, so to speak.15 Not surprisingly, the most popular of Tamil koothu dramas are the scenes involving Ravana, the brother of Surpanakha who kidnaps Seetha at the instigation of his sister and is then involved
The formulations of the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin are useful in seeing how the koothu takes the element of high culture and makes it its own. The Tamil used within the koothu dramas are actually the form of Tamil known as classical Tamil. But
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in a battle with Rama who comes to vanquish him. The koothu has very little narrative space for Ramainstead the raksasa Ravana and his brothers swagger about the stage declaiming, sword ghting, and singing about their valor, much to the delight of their mostly rural audience. When the Ramayana is performed, Ravana, the asura king of Lanka, holds center stage. The crowd delights in the sheer power expressed by the ten-headed, larger-than-life gure who ghts the warrior king, Rama. Ravana might lose the war, but nevertheless, it is he who gets the most amount of stage time to make his case. Given the fact that the Sanskrit Ramayana sets up racial and ethnic differences that get played out both regionally and physically (Rama meets the Monkey people and gets their help as he moves down South to travel to Lanka), with the asuras and their ilk being shown to be in every way inferior to the culture represented by Rama, it is signicant that the Tamil Dalit art form of koothu celebrates the demonized Ravana.16 The famous painting by the nineteenth-century artist Ravi Verma depicting Ravana slicing the wing of the bird Jatayu that tried to stop him from carrying away Seetha is a marvel-

by refusing to stay within the epic time period and by making references to every day life and politics, the koothu transforms the high culture into a powerful folk form. Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone elses. It becomes ones own only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other peoples mouths, in other peoples contexts, serving other peoples intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it ones own. (Bakhtin 293-94) In recent years, it has become common for popular Tamil movie lyrics to use words such as asura and raksasa in describing the heros valor. The terms have gained popularity if only for their shock value.
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ous illustration of the inherent ambiguity of mimesis., In this particular painting, Ravi Verma, a South Indian famous for his artwork depicting light-skinned Indian women in various stages of luminosity, has Seetha cover her face with both hands. It is Ravana who lls the frame, his large, muscular, blue-toned body made darker by the light blue background, his sheer power evident in every way as he holds the wilting Seetha under one arm and swings his large blade through the sky with the other.17 The stress upon the blue-black skin color of Ravana is signicant as all the Vaishnavite Bhakthi poets of the sixth to the ninth centuries sang of the two gods, Rama and Krishna, as similarly dark-skinned. The Tamil word for the god Vishnu, Thirumal means the Dark One.18 It is worth noting that the particular details of Vermas scene are taken from the Kerala folk dance drama, Jatayuvadham Koodiyattam, a Sanskrit-based folk dance form that nevertheless re-writes the Sanskrit original of Valmikis Ramayana. In Jatayuvadham, part of a larger play by Sakthi Bhadra Kavi called Aascharyachoodamani, Ravana and his charioteer take on the forms of Rama and his brother Lakshmana and in this fashion fool Seetha into going away with them. The play opens at the very moment when Seetha sees Ravana in his true shape and is horror-stricken. Ravana had inadvertently touched the jewel, choodamani, worn by Seetha on her head and is thus made to revert to his original form. The text plays upon the notions of real and the imagined as Seetha bemoans the way she was taken in by the raksasa. Interestingly, the moment captured in paint by Verma shows Ravana in his raksasa body, reveling in
17

It is interesting that in carrying away Seetha, Kambar, in keeping with the edicts of a culture that was focused thoroughly on certain forms of performative chastity, has Ravana not even touch Seetha and instead has him pick her up with her hut and carry her away.

See Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar, translated Tamil poems by A.K. Ramanujan for a selection of Bhakthi poems that speak of The Dark One (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993, 33).
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his power. In every way, Ravana is made to signify the opposite of the androgynous facial structure of the gods of the Hindu pantheon. And yet, Ravana is given the same skin tone that is celebrated in medieval Bhakthi poetry as belonging to the divine body of Thirumal and his avatars, Rama and Krishna. When the poets sing of desiring the grace of the Dark god, is it possible for one to be reminded of Ravana, whose dark skin gleams with an underlying blue tone in the Ravi Verma painting? As the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Babha has argued, mimesis shows up the constructed quality of the performative nature of subjectivity and, as such, is a profoundly destabilizing rhetorical mode (122). Mimesis is morally ambiguous as it undermines all ontological certainties. Language and the body are both shown to be shifting signiers. In the early pages of Richard Wrights Native Son, there is a scene where the disenfranchised young black men standing on the street corner act out the subject positions reserved only for powerful white men. They pretend to be the President and his army commanders and rattle out orders to each other and crack up over the absurdity of it all. But as soon as the moment is over, the young men realize how easy it is to take on such a rolethe language and the manner is already within their purview. The disapprobation Wright feels in the early part of his travel narrative Black Power towards the Nigerian Justice Thomas, whom Wright recognizes as being completely assimilated into a British colonial way of being in spite of his avowed Leftist identity, is rather telling. During an argument over African self-rule, Wright tells Justice Thomas, Say, you know, if you were not black, Id say that you were an Englishman. In fact, you are more English than many English Ive met (17). And yet, by the time Wright reaches the land of the Ashanti, travels through Kumasu, meets the Queen Mother, and then goes to see the famous stool makers of the nation (a journey repeated almost exactly by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 1999), all he can ask is why the people spit all the time. After giving in detail how the spitting is done and how often,

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Wright claims, I tried, before my mirror in my hotel room with the door locked, to spit like that and I succeeded only in soiling the front of my shirt. . .(283). Wright cannot, like Eshun decades later, slip his black body back into Africa, that is, step back through the looking glass. Like many of us, he has been made white. WORKS CITED
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Race. Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Discourse in the Novel. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Texas UP, 1981. 259-422. Bama. Personal interview. 16 July 2006. Bhaba, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Cheran. "Ask." Dalit 4 (1998): 94. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982. Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Random House, 1982. Erndl, Kathleen M. The Mutilation of Surpanakha. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. Ed. Paula Richman. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997. 67-88. Eshun, Eskow. Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Garrett, John. A Classical Dictionary of India. 1871. New Delhi: Rupa, 2001. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. 1912. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969. Kambar. Iramavataram. <http://www.tamilnation.org/literature/kamban/ kambaramayanam.htm>. Larson, Nella. Quicksand Passing. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club. 2001 Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Rajkumar, N. T. Panirandhu Kavithaigal (Twelve Poems). Dalit 4 (1998): 76-81.

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Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking. 1989. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Preface. Of Grammatology. By Jacques Derrida. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. ix-xc. Swiderski, Richard M. Lives Between Cultures: A Study of Human Nature, Identity and Culture. Juneau, AK: Denali, 1991. Thapar, Romila. The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. New Delhi: Penguin, 2002. White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954. . Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.