Space in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day

97 Pages·2002·0.4 MB·English

by  國立中山大學 外國語文學系研究所 林雅晨

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國立中山大學外國語文研究所
碩士論文

阿妮妲．德賽《白日悠光》中的空間論述
Space in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

研究生：林雅晨 撰
指導教授：張錦忠 教授

中華民國 九十八年七月
For the most wonderful people I met during school days
Space in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

Abstract

This thesis examines the spatial representations of India as respectively a
nation-state, a colony, and a member of the third-world countries in modern history in
Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day. According to Henri Lefebvre, space is
simultaneously a part in the production and a product. An abstract space has a goal in
homogeneity; however, the realization of spatial plan is usually interfered by different
ideologies. The flow of the entangling ideologies embedded in the novel is embodied
in the family house, the modern city, and the imagination of India as a tourist
attraction. Chapter One applies Cathy Caruth’s traumatic theory to demonstrate the
family house as a symbol of the dominating Hindu nationalist discourse. The
separation of the Das family is taken as an allegorical representation of the Partition.
Recollecting the traumatic past, the Das encounters repetitively the crisis of identity
caused by the separation and the diversity of discourses. The Hindu nationalist
discourse has occupied the family house as the position of articulation. The
authoritative discourse promotes the establishment of India as a nation-state through
excluding the elements of difference. In addition, the colonial design of establishing
New Delhi as a modernist capital reflects the British government’s plan to assimilate
Indian colony. Chapter Two applies Michel Foucault’s theories of power and space to
analyze first British governmentality in making the new capital a homogeneous space
and, secondly, the potential resistance generated from the variety of local cultures.
Eventually, New Delhi exhibits itself a synthesis of the modern and the tradition, of
the western and the local. Chapter Three explores Indian intellectuals’ dilemma of
cultural identity in diaspora. As Rey Chow indicates, the third-world intellectuals
articulate for the marginalized; however, the minor of the minor has still been left in
the dark. While the diplomat Bakul decides to tell the foreigners only the glory of
India exclusive of the socio-political calamities, the local reality is estimated as
dispensable for the first-world imagination. Furthermore, the Eurocentric grand
narrative embedded in the third-world studies locates the diasporic’s recognition of
India oscillating between homeland and tourist attraction.

Key words: Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day, space, trauma, memory, homogeneity,
diaspora
論文名稱：
頁數：97頁
系所組別：國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所
畢業年度及提要別：九十七學年度第二學期碩士學位論文提要
研究生：林雅晨
指導教授：張錦忠教授
論文提要：
阿妮妲．德賽《白日悠光》將近代印度呈現為民族國家、殖民地、和第三世界國
家。本文探討其中空間再現的議題。列婓柏荷(Henri Lefebvre)主張空間具有生產
之過程與成品兩個層面。抽象空間有同質化的傾向；空間計劃的執行卻往往受到
其他意識形態的干擾。小說中意識形態的流動具現化為宅院、現代城市、以及旅
遊敘事中的印度。第一章援引克如斯(Cathy Caruth)的創傷理論說明宅院如何成為
印度民族主義主流論述之象徵。達斯一家的分崩離析被視為國家分裂的寓言。達
斯一家每每在憶及傷痛的過去時，因各人處境、想法的歧異而面臨認同危機。印
度民族主義論述因長駐宅院而握有發言權。藉由排除歧異，權威論述推動建設印
度為民族國家。其次，英屬殖民政府塑造新德里為現代化首都。此舉反應其同化
殖民地的計劃。第二章採用傅柯(Michel Foucault)的權力與空間理論分析英屬政
府將新都建設為同質空間的統治策略；與之抗衡的則是由地方文化的多樣性衍生
出的勢力。最終，新德里成其為兼備西方現代性與地方傳統的都市。第三章討論
離散的印度知識份子面臨文化認同的困境。周蕾指出第三世界知識分子為弱勢族
群發聲，卻無法為弱勢族群中的弱勢階級發聲的窘境。小說中的外交官巴谷為了
滿足第一世界的異國想像，對外宣傳印度的傲人成就卻拒談社會政治方面的難
題。此時，印度的真實面已從外交言論中抹除。進而言之，第三世界研究底下潛
藏的歐陸中心論述使得對印度的認知不斷擺盪：在離散情境下，印度究竟是家鄉
抑或一處旅遊勝地。
關鍵字：阿妮妲．德賽、《白日悠光》、空間、創傷、記憶、同質、離散
Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter One The Family House: Monument of Traumatic Past ………………19

Chapter Two Dual Cities: Colonial Design and Local Reality …………………41

Chapter Three “Eternal India” in Diaspora: The Dislocation of Culture ………61

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………84

Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………88
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Introduction

General Background
The first half of the twentieth century is the most tumultuous period for India.
The two World Wars and the shrinking of empires liberated British colonies in South
America, Africa, and South Asia. The history of modern India1 is a record of endless
conspiracies, riots between communities, and wars between racial groups. In the
process of spreading its business all over India, East Indian Company (EIC)
confronted the revolt from local Indians in the second half of the nineteenth century.2
A Concise History of Modern India shows that the imperialist exploitation of material
and labor gradually became the British’s main financial support. To ensure stable
profit from the Indian colony, English government recruited a military force to
suppress the mutiny, and later on sent off a group of governors and officers. In 1858,
the British government in Calcutta served as the dominating power in India. Twenty
years later, Queen Victoria became the coronate Empress of the United Kingdom,
whereas India was claimed to be the most precious jewel in the crown. In 1911, the
government, being aware of the rising protests, decided to build a new capital named
New Delhi in the neighborhood of the ancient capital Old Delhi. Starting from
commercial exploitation, through militant suppression, to political governmentality,
the colonization of the British Empire has revealed its ambitious determination to
develop India as British territory overseas.
As for the Indians, the colonizer put its violent invasion into practice in various
layers. The revolt against the British colonialism never ceased. During the two world

1 The perception of India is mostly of geographical significance—a combination of late 20th century
Pakistan and Hindustan—rather than political construction. The politically united organization is not
set up until the government of British Raj. In addition, the inhabitants in India are mostly consisted
of Hindus and Muslims.
2 The revolts activated by local Indian against Britain’s commercial exploitation are called Indian
mutiny.
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wars, the trend of nationalism influenced Indian revolutions. Britain’s
governmentality, on the contrary, declined due to the exhaustion in the Continental
wars. To postpone the inevitable independence of India, the British government and
the Muslim’s became alliance in coping with the independent revolution wedged by
Hindu nationalists. In the 1940s, the military force of the British shrank and was
unable to hold back its colonies’ request for independence. The establishment of the
Republic of India and the partition of Pakistan happened almost at the same time.3
Most Muslims emigrated to Pakistan; those lived in the eastern part of India
aggregated in the western half of Bengal and made it a battlefield of racial conflict. In
1972, when the riot reached its peak, the Muslim inhabitants separated themselves
from India Republic and built a nation: Bangladesh.
Anita Desai was born in Mussoorie, Delhi in 1937, ten years before Indian
Independence. As a daughter of Toni Nime of German origin, and D. N. Mazumdar, a
Bengali businessman, Desai speaks German, Bengali, and acquires Urdu, Hindi, and
English from her multiethnic community. At the age of seven, Desai began to write in
English, and published her first story two years later. She was educated in Delhi at
Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School and Miranda House, Delhi University, where
she received a bachelor degree in English literature in 1957. In the next year she
married Ashvin Desai, a businessman. They had four children, two sons and two
daughters. Their daughter, Kiran Desai, inheriting her interest and talent in literature,
won the 2006 Booker Prize for her second novel: The Inheritance of Loss. Desai has
lived in New Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and other Indian cities since the 1950s. She
has taught at Girton College and Smith College in England and at Mount Holyoke
College in the United States. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at

3 The Independence was issued in the midnight of August 15, 1947, and the Partition was announced
earlier in the evening of the previous day.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Desai’s best-known novels include Fire on the
Mountain (1977), which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and Clear Light of
Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999), each of which was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was made into a film by Merchant Ivory
productions. Her children's book, The Village by the Sea (1982) is awarded the
Guardian Children's Fiction Award. She has been a member of the Advisory Board for
English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi.
Desai is noted for her sensitive portrayal of the inner life of female characters.
Most of the Indian women are victims of conventions. Disciplines of caste system,
gender discrimination, and religions command women’s sacrifice while there are
conflicts between self-interest and familial, sometimes social, profits. Without
constructing complex and fantastic plot, Desai probes into the consciousness and the
inner monologue of characters. Neeru Chakravertty points out that Desai, as a second
generation Indian writers of English, “has been intimately associated with the realm
of the introspective, psychological novel and a metaphysical inquiry into the
existential dilemma of human beings” (2). N. R. Gopal observes that the difference
between the pre- and post-Independence Indian writers lies in that the former has their
main concern on “socio-economic and political realities of Indian life” while the latter
focuses on the exploration of “the psychological and sociological strains in the social
and individual life” (1). Asha Kanwar regards Desai’s concerns on existential
dilemmas similar to that of Virginia Woolf’s.
Inner struggles, senses of discontent, and desperate cravings for comfort are the
central themes in Desai’s early novels. The female protagonists in Cry, the Peacock
(1963), Where Shall We Go this Summer? (1975), and Fire on the Mountain are
entrapped in family rules taking the form as marriage. Realizing their being misfit and
excluded, the protagonists no longer fight for their family’s approval, but either
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self-exiled to a remote places, or retreat to inner space, or both. Self-alienation and
self-exile indicate the characters’ inability to follow the social, or familial conventions.
In other words, they suffer from the unharmonious relationship between the outer and
the inner world, the “existential dilemmas of life” (Chakravertty 2).
In the mid-1980s Desai started to look more closely at the life of the unprivileged.
In Custody is Desai's ironic story about literary traditions and academic illusions. In
her later novels Desai dealt with German anti-Semitism, the demise of traditions, and
Western stereotypical views of India. Desai put her own German half of the parental
heritage in the background of Baumgartner's Bombay (1987). In the story a retired
Jewish businessman has escaped the Nazis to India in his youth and stays there in
poverty. In the end, he only finds out his being a stranger in post-independence India.
The novel is a powerful literary embodiment of Desai’s claim that East and West are
parallel, not contrasting, worlds. In Journey to Ithaca (1995) Desai examined the
nature of pilgrimage to India. In Fasting, Feasting, the confrontation of American and
Indian culture ends up with disaster consequences. Whether Desai’s characters live on
the banks of the Ganges or amidst the excesses of Massachusetts, they cannot find
meaningful personal relationships other than their own solitude. In The Zigzag Way
(2004), her most recent novel, Desai departed from her familiar territories and set the
story of identity and self-discovery in the twentieth century Mexico. In Fasting,
Feasting and The Zigzag Way, Desai gives her answer to critics who have concluded
that her characters are usually westernized middle-class professionals and therefore
their problems are more close to those of Western readers than to the majority of
Indian people.
Desai’s protagonists are outsiders of their family and society, and cannot help
adopting escapist ways while facing boredom and challenges from reality.
Geographically, they stay away from cities; temporally, they prefer returning to the