Sheje Amar Janmabhoomi

A Srinivas Rao

I was surprised when someone I know was wishing others the national day of his adopted country, a state which is also unfairly sometimes called a ‘nanny state’. It was not the incongruity but the intriguing idea of solidarity and loyalties (however divided) to the lands of our adoption. The lands in question are not merely those of geography but mental worlds. “We Are All Palestinians” was the emblazoned lettering on the Tee shirt that one day flashed across the street, provoking me to wonder whether that was true. Palestine to the author of this shirt sleeve slogan was more than a nation without a state. Palestine is a ‘state’ of exile. Maybe we are all Diaspora, exiled in varied ways from what we imagine as ‘home’. In other words, is ‘home’ an imagining of a golden childhood, inaccessible except through longing, a nostalgic hankering for the “holy grail”? Just like the saccharine refrain of Dwijendralal Roy’s song “Amar Janmobhoomi” a mere fictitious idyll. Are our loyalties really divided between our native lands and the places of our adoption (and our freshly minted citizenships markers to a yearned difference in our self identities and descriptions and demonstrated by declamations of loyalties)?

Is exile inevitable, circumstantial or otherwise; what we metaphorically suffer regardless of living in the place of our birth? I am reminded of my first visit to England, especially London more than a decade ago. I had imagined an England much in advance of even visiting it by adopting the colonial master’s tongue as a child and had shaped the world around me in its own English image. The world they say is linguistically constituted; nay language is the world. More provocatively, is language our real homeland? My imagination was fired by the fact that Baker street, Bond street, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Trafalgar Square, Bard of Avon, Charring Cross, Henry VIII, Piccadilly, Bunbury, Winston Churchill, Westminster, Rosetta, Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, Thomas Moore, Queen of Scots, Stone of Scone; all proper nouns, carefully capitalised in my mind were all real. Images of places people and things, however inchoate that had populated my mind since childhood, over English breakfasts (however notoriously insipid) and teas and buttered scones, and a lush countryside, were real imaginings, sometime somewhere as much as pixies and elves, gnomes, goblins and golliwogs. I shed real tears at the graves of poets of yore at Westminster Abbey remembering their song and longing. It was an imagination shaped not so much by Kalidasa, Bana or Panini or Bhartrihari or Abhinavagupta but by Enid Blyton, Conan Doyle and Agatha Christies, or perhaps Dickens, Bronte and Hardy or Shelly, Keats and Wordsworth. Yet I felt an alien in that familiar land where each person looked at me with an indifferent or perhaps an odd if not a derisive eye. I possibly feared the place despite its familiarity as it unsettled me, as I did not belong there though I belonged to it. I knew I was not one among them sharing the fruits of a debatable civilization that Macualay so laboriously and notoriously conferred upon me a colonial subject long after independence from a foreign yoke.

Yet when I returned to my motherland within a fortnight, I wondered whether my own land took me unquestioningly in her copious lap without making me wonder whether I was always English in my mind notwithstanding my feverish efforts to really know and belong to the imagination of an indigenous but absent mother tongue. It is not that I lack a mother tongue, but it is not the language that shapes my imagination as I have known no tongue with any intimacy as English. It is a strange feeling of not belonging to the native idiom and not belonging to that foreign land as shaped by its tongue. It was being a perpetual traveller in ones own native land examining it always as an outsider would, noticing the exotic and the marginal like a Dalrymple in his “Nine Lives” of religious oddities even within my own faith. Gibbon had famously stated in his history that the Koran wasn’t written in Arabia as there was no mention of the word ‘camel’, so ubiquitous to an Arabian landscape in its text. Was that really proof that the Koran was not written there? Perhaps that was proof that it was indeed written there, as it is only to an unfamiliar traveller that the camel stood out as exotic and strange, divorced from its landscape and context. Why does Dalrymple appeal so much to the English mind (that many of us are) than MT Vasudevan Nair in English translation?

Does that condemn me to being in a state of perpetual exile; un-belonging to either shore, yet seeking harbour for a tried brow? A child of a mixed parentage of different cultures; uneasily unsettled in the interstices. A Diaspora of the mind; though not in geography. Neither do I envy those with a great grounding in a vernacular tongue such as Bengali, Tamil; apart from English as neither have they negotiated the chasm with any comfort, preferring to keep the ‘Two Cultures’ sanitarily separate and purposively expedient. Probably as another Tee shirt claimed “My Roots Lie in the Soil of Palestine” which is really shorthand for being in exile! Who knows what harbour it is to unburden ourselves through belonging. Some of us though will remain exiled by language.