THE IN- BETWEEN WORLD OF VIKRAM LALL: A STUDY
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, a compelling record in the voice of a character described as “a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning”1, took three years to write. After research in Kenya and Britain, M.G. Vassanji devoted himself to the novel in a dark office at University of Toronto. It was a hard process of creation and discovery. It was like working on a sculpture. When this novel appeared in 2003, it met with immense international success.
It is indeed vital to recognize
contextual influences that inform Vassanji’s literary practice. When Vassanji
utilizes the history and experiences of his community to create his textual
worlds, he inters into what has been called the pact between a writer and his
community, sealing his status as a committed artist. This pact between the
writer and his community is often acknowledge by Vassanji himself and others.
For instance, upon the publications of his first novel The Gunny Sack,
Vassanji did a homecoming tour of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1991. In a
subsequent interview with Wahom Muthai he said:
I
have tried to differ a certain kind of East African Asian, to create a
mythology, which applies not to a nation as in Ngugi Wa Thiong’s case, but to a
minority which does not know where it belongs.2
This pact between M.G. Vassanji as a
writer and the Asian African community becomes evident in the sentiments of the
renowned Kenyan Asian African ethnographer Sultan Somjee after reading The
In-Between World of Vikram Lall. He says:
Reading
the book, I felt I know all this; I have lived it; I feel it in my veins….I
feel I have met and worked with the variety of characters among both Asian
families and African friends, and breathed the fragrance of the landscapes but
Vassanji has put in touching words what a lesser writer can’t do with such
mastry.3
Narrated by Vikram Lall, a
disreputable middle-aged businessman, from his new home on the shores of
Canada’s Lake Ontario, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is an epic
tale of modern Kenyan history, mapped out amid the major transplantations of
the Lall family. In the course of about five decades, three generations of
Lalls have migrated across three continents in the westward movement followed
by a growing number of African born Asians. As a young man, Vikram’s
grandfather, Anand Lall – along with tens of thousands of other indentured
labourers – is shipped from British India to an alien, beautiful and wild
country across the seas to work on the grand Mombassa-Kampala railway,
Britain’s gateway to the African jewel.
In this adopted land Vikram’s father,
Ashok Lall, runs a grocery store in the central Kenyan town of Nakuru before
moving to the capital, Nairobi. And it is from this country – now independent
and governed by a clique of nepotistic politicians – that an adult Vikram is forced
to flee by Kenya’s anticorruption hounds, Lall is fugitive, not from justice,
and there is none where he comes from. Now he is alone and lost in the snowy
Ontario, suspended between multiple worlds, neither Asian, nor African, nor
Canadian, neither innocent nor guilty, a captive observer:
My
name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of
Africa’s most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous reptilian cunning. To me has
been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country’s treasury
in recent years. I head my country’s List of Shame. These and other
descriptions actually flatter my intelligence, if not my moral sensibility. But
I do not intend here to defend myself or even seek redemption through
confession; I simply crave to tell my story. In this clement retreat to which I
have withdrawn myself, away from the torrid current temper of my country, I
find myself with all the time and seclusion I may ever need for my purpose.
I
have even come upon a small revelation – and as I proceed daily to recall and
reflect, and lay out on the page, it is with an increasing conviction of its
truth, that if more of us told our stories to each other, where I come from, we
would be a far happier and less nervous people.4
And
so begins M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. This
total self-indictment introduces us to the narrator, Vikram Lall. Lall, “one of
the Africa’s most corrupt men”5 who headed his country’s “List of
Shame”6, narrates this novel, a personal and political story of
Kenya during the years before, during and after its independence from Britain.
The narrator, a Kenyan born Indian, now living in Canada, in hiding from those
that would hound him in Kenya, recounts the story of his life when he is in his
sixties.
Divided
in four parts – The Years of Our Loves and Friendships, The Years of Her
Passion, The Years of Betrayal, and Homecoming – The In-Between World of
Vikram Lall is a bold attempt at telling the epic tale of Asian people in
Africa.
The
story opens in colonial Kenya in the 1950s, around the time of coronation of
Queen Elizabeth II. Vikram Lall, the protagonist remembers his early life:
Njoroge
who was also called William loved my sister Deepa; I was infatuated with
another whose name I can’t utter yet, whose brother was another William; we
called him Bill. We had all become playmates recently. It was 1953, the
coronation year of our new monarch who looked upon us from afar, a cold England
of pastel, watery sheds, and I was eight years old.7
Lall’s story begins with his happy
childhood in Kenya with his parents, sister Deepa, his uncle and other extended
family members and close family friends. Nakuru in the Great Rift Valley is the
setting. This is a backwater town on the railway line built by Vikram’s
grandfather and other Indian coolies brought in by the British. Here Vikram’s
father runs a grocery.
In the majestic Rift Valley, Members
of the dominant Kikuyu tribe, impoverished and festering under the massive
European land-grab are taking secret oaths to drive out the white colonizers.
Faced with furtive, loosely organised rebellions they have taken to calling
Mau-Mau uprising in an attempt to demonise the restive tribes, the British
administrators is waging their very own war on terror.
Attack and counter
attack are going on. Brutal killings of white settlers by Mau-Mau rebels are
followed by vicious British crackdowns involving prolonged detentions, which in
turn fuel further local support for the Mau-Mau.
But the bloodshed engulfing this troubled
land has yet to touch the 8-year-old Vikram, growing up in Nakuru. Every
Saturday morning, in an unpaved “parking lot”8 near his father’s
grocery store, Vikram plays with his little sister, Deepa, and their friends,
Bill and Annie – a pair of well scrubbed English siblings – and Njoroge, the
matt black, woolly-haired grandson of the Lall’s faithful Kikuyu gardener. From
his hideout in Ontario, Canada, Vikram recounts his idyllic childhood days:
I
call forth for you here my beginning, the world of my childhood, in that
fateful year of our friendships. It was a world of innocence and play, under a
guileless constant sun; as well, of barbarous cruelty and terror lurking in
darkest night; a colonial world of repressive, undignified subject-hood, as also
of seductive order and security….so that long afterwards we would be tempted to
wonder if we did not hurry forth too fast straight into the morass that is now
our malformed freedom.9
In a move that sets the tone of much
of the work, Deepa and Njoroge soon develop a strong affection for each other,
one that will haunt the narrative at the end. It is here too that Vic, the
anglicised name of Vikram used throughout the novel, falls in love with Annie
who used to play Sita to Ram in a Diwali inspired game.
The idyllic life around Vikram soon
begins to collapse as the Mau-Mau insurrection enters his life. Eventually Vic
does take a secret blood oath with Njoroge to support Jomo Kenyatta, the leader
of the Mau-Mau movement. He discovers his Mahesh uncle’s secret activities in
support of the Mau-Mau. The Mau-Mau rebels increase the frequency of their
raids against the whites. In a gruesome attack they kill the entire Bruce
family including Vic’s beloved Annie. Vikram never recovers from this horrific
and tragic event.
The horrible killings and increasing
unrest create a sudden displacement for everybody. Vikram’s family moves to
Nairobi hoping to have safer home, away from the Mau-Mau killings. Still Vic
cannot manage to shake away his image of the brutal killings. After moving to
Nairobi, Vic’s father, Ashok, gives up business as a shopkeeper and begins to
work as an estate agent. He starts selling the houses of many white Kenyans who
choose to flee the newly independent nation they once called home.
The novel resumes in 1965, after Kenya
has achieved independence. Jomo Kenyatta has advanced from political prisoner
to president. Vikram, now a Kenyan citizen finishes his education at Dar es
Salaam to seek his opportunities in the world. The family’s personal lives
begin to deteriorate as they must adapt to the changed circumstances of life in
the city, rather than their previous lives in the less urban area of Nakuru,
where everyone knew and respected each other.
Njoroge, Vic’s childhood friend, is in
Nairobi, too, studying Economics at Makerere. One day he shows up, handsome,
personable, well educated, and idealistic. The Lalls have not seen him since
his grandfather died in custody. Once again he becomes an intimate friend of
the family. Here Njoroge and Deepa try to rekindle their love.
They grow up a
passionate love affair but neither community approves of their relationship.
Deepa’s love is fiercely opposed by her mother. Eventually Deepa is married
with Dilip, a young and wealthy Indian. After marriage Deepa and Dilip soon
leave for London, but Deepa’s love for Njoroge remains a central theme in the
novel.
Njoroge now marries a black woman. Vic
himself marries with an Indian woman. Everything around Vic simmers and burns
slowly and his own life becomes predictable and mundane – marriages to a virgin
Indian girl, a pack of children and straight family life. Rice and daal and
Chappati forever. Curiously passive, at least on his own account, Vic is set
for life as an Indian businessman, part of a new Africa, but when Njoroge
appears, things begin to change. Eventually, by the support of Njoroge, he gets
a job in the Ministry of Transport.
Part three, entitled ‘The Years of
Betrayal’, and is the largest and most dramatic part of the novel. This part
seeks to encompass the varied and multiple ways in which human beings betray
each other, themselves and their nations. In the period covered here Lall’s
father is unfaithful to his wife; Deepa to Dilip; Vic to his wife Shobha;
politicians such as Jomo Kenyatta, Okello Okello and Paul Nderi will betray
their people; friends and family both cheat and suffer the ignominy of
deception and lies. This section provides also a map of Kenya’s long and
painful period of transition between political independence and national
maturity. Although a detailed portrait of the experiences of Kenya’s small
Indian community, the novel tells a boarder tale of the new nation’s struggle
for harmony between different ethnic groups and their political
representatives. Here, again, Vassanji tells the grand narrative of Kenya’s
political, national struggle through a focus on the acts, dreams, fears and
desires of anonymous people such as Vikram Lall and the Asian Africans.
This third section of the novel is
very impressive. It traces Vikram’s career. It chronicles Vic’s gradual
progression from working as an employer of the Ministry of Transport to
becoming a crucial cog in embezzlement scheme in high places, almost without
realising it. After completing his studies at the University of Dar es Salaam,
Vikram finds a prestigious post in the new government, first as comptroller in
the Ministry of Transport and then as a personal assistant to Paul Nderi, a
corrupt minister.
On the basis of his talent and diligence he swiftly raises
through the ranks, to the point where he has the trust of all powerful Father
of the Nation, Jomo Kenyatta. As a fixer of rare talent, Vikram is gradually
drawn into a web of official and political larceny.
Nderi uses Vikram to conduct a massive
money-laundering scheme involving American aid money and members of Vikram’s
extended family who become the chief financiers of corrupt deals and dubious
transactions on behalf of powerful politicians. He is sucked from a successful
civil service career into the corruption of a postcolonial Kenya, where he
becomes involved, with others, in scams that skim millions of dollars of aid
money from public coffers, earning him the notoriety of one of the most hated
men of his time and place.
In the end he is framed by his party, led down by
the very people that employed him. He is the perfect scapegoat. After his
dismissal he is a marked man in Kenya. He escaped to Canada, from where he
tells his life story.
In the last section entitled
Homecoming, Vassanji develops a present day counter plot, which sees the adult
Vikram living in a snowy town in rural Ontario. The local librarian herself of
Indian extraction, begins to find out about Vikram’s tainted past. Meanwhile
Njoroge’s angry young son, Joseph, visits Vikram. Now settled in Canada, Deepa
has asked Lall to look after Joseph who is shortly to begin college in Toronto.
Between the two men there is a little affection.
In spite of that Joseph agrees
to come and stay, and Vic to take him in out of respect for Deepa’s wishes.
Vikram reveals that Joseph had become involved in student activism back home in
Kenya, a tempting and hazardous occupation. He resents his radical politics –
Vic’s tense relationship with Joseph, who despises Vikram for plundering his
country, sets Vic reflecting on the past.
Throughout the novel Vic agonises over
whether to go back to Kenya and deal with the consequences of his past actions.
Joseph’s unexpected decision to go back to Kenya, as the political situation
once again flares up, finally persuades Vic to undertake the trip he ponders
throughout the novel. Although he intends to secure Joseph’s release, he
decides to return to Kenya from his safe haven in Canada and also to pay his
debt to Kenya, and to settle anew in the place he calls home.
Yet again, he is
placed in an in-between position, expected to take the blame for the actions of
senior ministers whose skin colour exempts them from guilt and responsibility.
The head has changed but the body of the politics is the same. Vikram concludes
that to the Africans he would always be the Asian, the Shylock; he would never
escape that suspicion, that stigma.
As it has been discussed in the
previous chapters that a sense of identity, a feeling of discrimination and
demarcation, have always been important issues in the writings of the literary
members of Indian diaspora. Writing from “a hyphenated”10 space
probably instigates authors like Vassanji to manifest their expressions of
identity.
The feeling of belonging and not belonging is very central to the
book. In this context this is deeply a personal book. Vassanji articulates time
and again that when he lived in Tanzania he belonged and did not belong because
he had come from Kenya. It is true to the protagonist of The In-Between
World of Vikram Lall.
This novel is a profound and careful
examination of Vikram Lall’s search for his place in the world and at the same
time it deals with rootlessness of those who have no fixed national identity.
In independent Kenya he wants to secure his identity as a civil servant but the
officers and politicians cut him out. On the basis of his talent and diligence
he becomes a successful fixer to ensure his place and his family’s in Kenya.
But he is embroiled in a corruption scandal and thus his identity suffers from
danger. He is declared as “one of Africa’s most corrupt men.” 11 He
has been labelled with “a cheat of monstrous reptilian cunning.” 12
The protagonist of this epic tale is
depicted less as a man who is out to get whatever he can than as a man who has
found himself in a position in which he can’t refuse to do what he has been
told to do, even though he knows that it is wrong. His life is dependent less
on his own will than it is on the political whims of the day. Indeed Vassanji’s
view of Kenya’s Asians appears as ambivalent as his in-between protagonist’s
identity crisis. For Vikram, the ambiguity of his identity will morally and
emotionally cripple him in later years as he turns – impassively and without
too much reflection – into a money-changing middleman. In the newly independent
Kenya, where power has shifted to a group of black elites headed by Jomo
Kenyatta, the first president of the country, Vikram’s community has suddenly
slunk from protected colonial collaborators to potential victims.
Disproportionately
wealthy, avowedly apolitical and intent on keeping themselves culturally and
economically apart from black Africans; the Indians now face two stark choices:
Pack up and flee – hopefully to Britain – or shell out considerable sums to
sundry officials and thugs with political connections to survive. In this
climate of rampant corruption, Vikram is the ideal invisible go-between, the
middle man who can be trusted to transfer slush funds, hold awkward secrets and
pay the requisite personal respects – along with suitcases of cash – to an
increasingly duplicitous Kenyatta ensconced in Nairobi’s lavish State House.
Year’s later, white snow bound in his
Canadian home in exile with only the odd visits from the local librarian for
company, Vikram is dispassionate about the moral choices he’s made. According
to him politics confused him; large abstract ideas bewildered him; and – what
was definitely incorrect in newly independent Africa -- he had no clear sense
of the antagonists, of the right side and the wrong side.
In his urge to tell
his story without moral judgements or frills, Vikram is always the objective
chronicler. “In this clement retreat to which I have withdrawn myself, away
from the torrid current temper of my country”13, he writes at the
start of the book, “I find myself with all the time and seclusion I may ever
need for my purpose.”14 While Vikram has sought refuge in “clement”15
Canada, his new country seems to barely impinge on his consciousness, intent as
he is on recording his past in a distant, dangerous land.
Deepa and Vikram can’t realise their
dreams of getting married to their beloveds. Though, finally they make
marriages, but these relationships provide little emotional sustenance, or
finally protection. We learn that Vikram’s sister had never been emotionally
satisfied after her forced break-up with Njoroge. The portrait of Vikram’s
father is one of great pathos. He will neither be Indian enough for his wife’s
relatives, nor African enough for the African descended Kenyans, even after he
takes up, after his wife’s death, with an African woman. After moving to
Nairobi Vikram’s father gives up his business as a shopkeeper and begins to
work as an estate agent. The condition of the family begins to deteriorate, as
they must adapt to the changed circumstances of life in the city, rather than
previous lives in the less urban area of Nakuru, where everyone knew and
respected each other. Here in Nairobi the members of this family have lost
their identity. Nobody knows them. They do not get proper response there. Vic,
the metonymy of Indian Kenyans, wants to survive but rootlessness, racism,
displacement and in-betweenness appear as barriers before him.
In The In-Between World of Vikram
Lall the major thing that stands out is people who are in-between. The
story revolves around Vikram Lall whose grandfather, Anand Lall, was brought
from India as an indentured worker to Kenya to help build the East African
railway. Though his grandfather played a significant role in the development of
Kenya, the status of his family remains enigmatic unsettlers. Indians in Africa
are viewed as the Other by both whites and blacks.
While reading the book we
can easily conclude that Vassanji’s world is really in-between because as an
Indian in Africa, he is positioned between two groups, the Europeans and the
Africans, neither group of which he could be an intrinsic part of and looked
down upon with deep suspicion, by both.
As an Indian child growing up in 1950s
Kenya, Vikram Lall is at the centre of two warring worlds – one of childhood
“innocence”16, the other a “colonial world of repressive,
undignified subjecthood.”17 In a quiet retreat near the shores of
Lake Ontario sits Vikram Lall, who has been forced into exile; he is in his own
words, “numbered one of Africa’s most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and
reptilian cunning.”18 Now he wants, not to speak in his defence, but
to simply explain his life.
He begins with 1953, when he was eight years old,
and living in British ruled Kenya. Lall inhibits a place in-between the young
playmates in his town. He feels that he is neither a native of the land like
his friend Njoroge nor is he anything like Bill and Annie, the children of
British colonials; in a sense Vikram Lall is an in-between from very early in
his life.
The novel deals with Vikram’s liminal
position. He is a migrant in Canada, a perpetually offshore Indian and a native
of Africa. His in-between world is that of the Asian African in colonial and
postcolonial Africa. He belongs to Indian community of Kenya, which is socially
and politically sandwiched between the White and the Black. Before Kenyan
independence the British used the Kenyan Indians to suppress the Africans.
Anyway, things were not rosy in Kenya after independence.
The social hierarchy
gets flipped after this independence leaving the Indians in the middle again.
The Africans, drunk on this new state of African power, turned not only upon
their ex-rulers, the British, but also upon Kenyan Indians, trying to seize
their properties and business through sheer intimidation.
In
fact, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall tells the story of an
immigrant named Vikram Lall who represents the Indians in Kenya. Indeed, the
Indians hold that tenuous in-between position, not as lowly or poor as the
Africans, but definitely lacking in power and subject to the colonial
overlords. Like his father who continued to work as a middleman, no longer in a
shop but in the field of real estate, Vikram also took work as someone else’s
agent.
The
In-Between World of Vikram Lall is not only a
history lesson. Beneath it is the much more intimate story of the fate and
fortunes of Vikram Lall and his extended family. Here Vassanji explores the
subtle distinctions that exist between different racial, ethnic and tribal
groups during that period of rapid change.
The whole spectrum is represented in
one way or another, from the old-fashioned allegiance of Vikram’s father to
Queen and country to the nationalistic fervour of Africanization. Discussing
the three tier racial society of East Africa Taban Lo Liyong says, “This
society comprises of indigenous Africa (Blacks), Caucasoid (Whites) and Asiatic
(Browns).”19 Vikram, who is not white enough to be British, like his
friends Annie and Bill, or quite black enough to be like his African friend
Njoroge, realizes early on that he and his sister Deepa inhabit a murky middle
ground which makes them suspect to both the white and the black communities.
Vikram feels that they lived in a compartmentalized society; every evening from
the melting pot of city life each person went his long way home to his family,
his church, and his fold.
Vikram
is a native of Africa whose racialist ideologies do not admit that he is in
fact of native of it. Vassanji superbly limns the pathos of this condition. Though
Vic is a third generation Asian African, he understands that Njoroge is somehow
more Kenyan than he or his family ever is. Vikram’s childhood, for a while,
seems almost idyllic – spent in the company of his British friends, Bill and
Annie Bruce, the gardener’s child, a Kikuyu, Njoroge and his own sister Deepa.
It is unlikely multiracial mix of kids whooping it up in a “parking lot”20,
a calm before Kenya’s political storms will rip them along the very racial
lines they appear to have transcendent in more innocent times. But even in
childhood, racial intersections are self-conscious affairs. Vikram, for
instance, is acutely aware of his nebulous status between the oppressors and
oppressed an existential state of in-betweenness that will dog him for the rest
of his life. He could not help feeling that both Bill and Njoroge were genuine,
in their very different ways; only he, who stood in the middle, Vikram Lall,
cherished son of an Indian grocer, sounded false to himself, rang hollow like a
bad penny.
In
his very early life Vikram experiences the racism that was apparent everywhere.
The British, or whites, were at the top of social ladder, while the Africans
were on the bottom. Stuck in the middle were the Indians. The ugly and horrible
face of the racism can be seen in the following excerpt:
By
comparison our end was sedate, orderly: a few vehicles parked, a few rickety
tables outside Arnauti’s occupied by Europeans on a good day…….and my sisters
and I could go to Arnauti’s, where we were allowed a corner table outside,
though not our black friend Njoroge, who with quite straight face, head in the
air and hands in the po0cket, would proudly wander off.21
In such a racially divided society,
interracial love is not only frowned upon, it can have explosive and
far-reaching consequences. Deepa and Njoroge’s love story is drawn particularly
gorgeously chiselling out the politics of race, class and identity. Vikram’s
sister, Deepa learns this the hard way when she re-establishes contact with her
childhood sweetheart, Njoroge. They try to ignore the cultural and colour
barriers of that era. They want to marry. But neither community approves of the
relationship between them. Njoroge who deeply loves Deepa, finds her family as
obstinately against their relationship as Vikram finds his girl friend’s family
to be against him – her family is Muslim from Gujarat, while his is Hindu from
Punjab.
Beautifully written this episode
reveals the fears and prejudices that always existed in the Kenyan society.
Vikram, ever the keen observer, supports his sister’s forbidden romance,
although he himself, damaged by the loss of his first love, finds he can’t
follow through with his own courtship of Yasmin, a Muslim girl he meets at
University in Dar es Salaam. His friendship is threatened by racially inspired
attacks from her people. One night Vikram and Deepa are attacked by a mob of
Tanzanian Muslims who have identified Vikram as Nairobi Punjabi Hindu courting
a Muslim, whose sister is dating an African. Their breaching of tribal
boundaries is an abhorrent to their contemporaries as it is to their mother.
The inclusive dream of their childhood is revealed as just that, dream. It
seems as if the only alternative is to settle for a traditional Indian
marriage. Deepa resists her fate, but friendly coercion wins out again, and
brother and sister, shaken and changed, follow the stereotypical and supposedly
safe paths that are expected of them by their communities.
For Vic, it means
marriage to an Indian virgin girl, a pack of children, and the straight family
life. Rice and daal and chappati forever. Though examples of successful
interracial relationships exist – Juma and Sakina Molabux, Janice and Mungai –
they seem the exception rather than the rule. In post independence Kenya change
is in the air, but it seems that old prejudices persist – or have been replaced
by new ones.
In The In-Between World of Vikram
Lall, Vassanji returns to the theme that preoccupied him in earlier works.
It deals with the strange position of Asian Africans in East Africa. In the
figure of Vikram Lall, Vassanji has created a character whose life reflects the
myriad experiences of thousands of Asian Africans in latter half of 20th
century, but also, more generally, a figure through whom he explores broader
issues of the Indian diaspora.
M.G. Vassanji is quite a wordsmith.
His descriptions of Indian food, family life and community are both rich and
delicious. Vikram remembers:
On
Saturday mornings, with the schools closed, my sister and I went down to the
shop with our parents. Sun-drenched Saturdays is how I think of those days,
what memories trapped for me days of play.
Though it could get cold at times,
and in the morning the ground might be covered in frost. At the other end of
the mall from us, Lakshmi Sweets was always bustling at midmorning, Indian
families having stopped over in their cars for bhajias, samosas, dhokras,
bhel-puri and tea, which they consumed noisily and with gusto.22
Like many other writers of Indian
diaspora, Vassanji uses the names of Indian cuisines deliberately. With the
help of this use the author wants to affirm the existence and identity of the
Indian immigrants in Kenya. As we know that the cultural identity that comes up
through food is very energetic because it highlights the everyday modes of
life. This is reason why Vassanji mentions the names of Indian foods in his
novels. In No New Land Sheru Mama and her husband tend to serve chappati that
way:
Sheru
Mama makes hundreds of chappatis everyday and baby-sits to toddlers at the same
time, while husband Ramju helps with the dishes and puts the required dollop of
margarine over every chappati. Her customers tend to be single men who will eat
a chappati with a pickle, or butter and jam, or curry canned in the U.S.23
“Samosas” are the favourite snacks of
people of northern part India. They like to take them with tea. Even in The
In-Between World of Vikram Lall we find great fascination of Indians for
samosa and tea. Remembering his idyllic childhood Vikram says:
…Indians
families having stopped over in their cars for bhajias, samosas, dhokras,
bhel-puri and tea….my father and mother always ordered tea and snacks from
Lakshmi…25
It is not only description of about
food, but also of enumerating the traditions, customs and typical Indian
characteristics that prove the fact that maintenance of culture is an innate
trait of immigrants. Vikram and his family, and all the other inhabitants of
Nakuru try to maintain their culture.
Esman
regards that a diaspora is a minority ethnic group of migrant origin, which
maintains sentimental or material links with its land of origin. It is true to
this novel. We see that Vikram’s father Ashok, an Indian diaspora, finds
references to Indian politicians, such as the pro-axis figure Subhash Chandra
Bose and even Gandhi himself, to be “quite alien.”26
Books
set in Kenya, hardly mention the presence of Indians who played an important
role in the growth of Nairobi, the building of the railway, and the politics of
the country, their dilemma was that they were both Asian and African. After Amriika
when Vassanji’s publisher asked him what he was doing next, he replied her that
he was going home. This book is it. This is nothing but longing for home. Here
the author shows his clear inclination towards his back home.
When
Vassanji finished his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of
Pennsylvania, he wanted to return to Africa to teach, but independence had led
to an exodus of Indians. He found he could not go back. His books become the
doorways through which he tries to go home. The In-Between World of Vikram
Lall is such an attempt. Having been removed from a place of supposed
origin and without emotional, political and cultural affiliations, to
territorially bound, static localities diasporic people move on, as indeed
their homes do, like tortoises and their shells. Mandeville therefore, comments
that “identity and place”27 of diasporic communities “travel
together”28 and these communities practice “the complex politics of
here and there.”29 The notions of home becomes complex in Vassanji
case – owing to his over hyphenated identity, the question of exilic condition
in the urban landscape for him becomes entwined with the notion of home away
from home in one sense and no home in particular in another sense. In an
interview he says:
Once
I came to the United States I had a fear of losing my link with Tanzania. Then
I feared going back because if I went back I feared losing the new world one
had discovered.30
This statement makes it clear that he is
caught between the homes ‘there’ and ‘here’. On the basis of the idea of
multi-locational home he conciliates between the nostalgic desire for home and
community through his characters. It is visible in The In-Between World of
Vikram Lall.
In the first section of the novel
Vassanji creates a world of immigrants that is a classic, with all the tensions
between the generations and the desire to become part of new land without
losing the old culture. Vic’s world has an added complication: The Indians, brought
in as cheap, reliable, if despised, labour by the British, and are regarded as
the outsiders by the Africans. Among the Indians themselves age-old animosities
from home continue, exacerbated by the savagely murderous partition of India.
The Lalls, Hindus from Peshawar in what is now Muslim Pakistan, no longer have
‘a home’, even if they wanted to return.
The idea of home for Vassanji is, in
fact, always something of a creative act. East Africa has continued to haunt
his novel; a complex place he circles again and again, seeking understanding,
seeking re-entry. Though most of Vassanji’s books have been located in Africa, The
In-Between World of Vikram Lall is the first book in which through his
protagonist Vikram Lall, Vassanji revisits Kenya and brutal Mau-Mau uprising
that led to its freedom. Throughout the novel Vic agonised over whether to go
back to Kenya and deal with consequences of his past action.
Although he
intends to search and secure Joseph, he decides also to pay his debt to Kenya
and to settle anew in the place he calls home. But when he returns to Kenya he
finds that to the Africans he would always be the Asian, the Shylock; he would
never escape that suspicion, that enigma. Caught between many worlds Vic along
with numerous Indians are in effect homeless.
As we know that Vassanji’s work deals
with labyrinthine worlds of memory, The In-Between world of Vikram Lall
is not an exception. Vassanji himself admits that this novel is first of his
books to deal with the memories of Kenya, where he spent his early life.
Structurally,
the novel is organised along the two-parellel narrative threads. One, set in
the past, in the Kenya of 1950s, through to the present, the other, set in
Canada, but anchored in the past by Lall’s frequent flashbacks to the Kenya of
his earlier life. As Vassanji did in his last novel, Amriika, he guides
his narrator to a safe location to reminisce. In Amriika it was
California. Here, with the frozen black eternity of Southern Ontario outside
his window, Lall’s mind can travel freely back to the Kenya he knew. Canada is
the in-between, a perfect blank, and for Lall a place to slowly work over these
memories, smoothing out his troubles and regrets.
One of the major concerns of Vassanji
is “how history affects the present and how personal and public history
overlap.”31 There is tendency, however, for Vassanji to dwell too
much on the past, and much of the first half of the book proceeds laboriously
through the colonial days in Nakuru. Lall’s childhood in Kenya, in the early
1950s, glows with memories; it is a sunshine world, where he falls in love with
little girl called Annie. And then quickly the author shifts to the post
independence era in the second half.
Vikram Lall is a grown man trying to make
a new life in Canada, a country as different from his homeland, Kenya, as it
could possibly get. Nevertheless the still winter nights in Canada stir
memories in Vic, of the pregnant Kenyan nights when the freedom fighters, the
Mau-Mau, roamed the streets, and created their own path of justice. It was the
nights that curdled the blood that made palpable the terror that permeated the
Lall’s world like mysterious ether. He reminisces the faint yet persistent
chir-chir-chir of crickets or the rhythmic croak-croak of frogs when it rained,
the whine of the solitary vehicle on the road, seemed only to deepen the hour,
enhance the meaning ominousness lurking in the dark outside. The Mau-Mau owned
his darkness.
The novel unfolds “as a remembrance
told by Lall as he looks back on his years in East Africa from the safe
distance of Southern Ontario. He has earned this exile from his beloved Kenya.”32
Throughout the novel, the author brings us back to Vikram’s present location,
Canada, from where he is recalling his past life and decline – which mirrors
that of his beloved country. In short, as an immigrant Vikram “retains a
collective memory, vision, or myth about his original homeland – its physical
location, history and achievement.”33
Exile,
dislocation and displacement have been inevitable motives in Vassanji’s
writing. They try to encompass Indians living in East Africa. Some members of
this immigrant community have to leave East Africa under pressure. They have to
migrate to Europe, Canada, or the United States. Vassanji attempts to show how
these migrations affect the lives and identities of his characters. This vital
issue is personal to him. That’s why he says:
[The
Indian diaspora] is very important…..Once I went to the US, suddenly the Indian
connection became very important: the sense of origin, trying to understand the
roots of India that we had inside us.34
The In-Between world of Vikram Lall
tells the tale of displacement of Indians who came to East Africa and from
there to Canada. Acute and bittersweet, the story of the novel is told in the
voice of the exiled Vic who eventually leaves Kenya and takes shelter in
Canada. The eponymous narrator is an old man in exile. It is not self-imposed
exile but he is forced to flee by anti corruption investigations and death threats.
Vikram is a man displaced from history
and politics. Caught between several worlds Vic and other Indians are in effect
homeless, many of them doubly so, owing to exile that the division of India
forced upon many Indians. Kenya and Tanzania and Uganda, cruelly purged its
Indian population by the early 1970s simply to assuage and to fortify
nationalist or tribal ideologies that at least threatened to become as
repressive as the imperialism they replaced. When the Kenyans eventually gain
their independence, the Indian community finds itself caught in the middle, as
Africans try to take over not just the properties of the British, but also the
properties of Kenyan Indians, even those who have lived, as Vic has, all his
life in Kenya.
Vic’s grandfather had arrived in Kenya
as an indenture. His exile had taken place due to poverty and repression of the
British. Vic’s father has to leave Nakuru due to insecurity and Vic has to
leave Nairobi due to racialist ideologies of Kenya. Vassanji superbly limns the
pathos of this condition of a perpetual exile.
As with so much of Vassanji’s work, The
In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a novel concerned with the grand themes
of life, love and identity; a story about exile and belonging, it has its
central unifying thread in the depths of memory. Here Vassanji explores a
conflict of epic proportions from the perspective of immigrants trapped in the
perilous in-between. Immigrants nowadays are not what immigrants used to be in
19th century or early 20th century because there is so
much communication. The world is a much smaller place. This makes it easy for
Vikram to get out of Africa but not so easy for him to escape it.
One of the most impressive thing about
this fine novel is that it gives voice to a people, some of whose forebears
were in Africa before Portuguese, who have tended to keep their heads down and
their mouths shut – and were not infrequently booted out – Vikram Lall says
proudly that he is the third generation African; a boast from the time when
people said such things, and believed them. He is the son of a grocer, who was
himself the son of a Punjabi labourer, an indentured ‘coolie’, brought to East
Africa to build the railway line from Mombassa to Kampala, through 600 miles of
the loveliest terrain in Africa.
* *
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REFERENCES
:
1. M.G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
(Toronto: Doubleday, 2003), p. ix.
2. Wahom Muthai, “Memories of Yesterday’s Home”, in Life Style
Magazine, Sunday Nation [Nairobi] 27 Oct. 1991: p. 13.
3. Evan Mwangi, “How New Novels Explore Kenya’s Moving History”,
in Lifestyle Magazine, Sunday Nation [Nairobi] 22 Feb. 2004: p. 12.
4. M.G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
(Toronto: Doubleday, 2003), p. ix.
5. Ibid., p. ix.
6. Ibid., p. ix.
7. Ibid., p. 1.
8. Ibid., p. 3.
9. Ibid., P. 1.
10. Arun P. Mukherjee, “Introduction”, in Oppositional
Aesthetics: Reading from a Hyphenated Space (Toronto: TSAR, 1994), p. vii.
11. M.G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
(Toronto: Doubleday, 2003), p. ix.
12. Ibid., p. ix.
13. Ibid., p. ix.
14. Ibid., p. ix.
15. Ibid., p. ix.
16. Ibid., p. 1.
17. Ibid., p. 1.
18. Ibid., p. ix.
19. Taban Lo Liyong, Another Last Words (Nairobi: Kenya
Literature Bureau, 1990), p. 39.
20. M.G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
(Toronto: Doubleday, 2003), p. 1.
21. Ibid., p. 3.
22. Ibid., pp. 2-3.
23. M.G. Vassanji, No New Land
(New Delhi: Penguin, 1962), p. 61.
24. Ibid., p. 78.
25. M.G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
(Toronto: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 2-3.
26. Ibid., p. 51.
27. Peter G. Mandaville, “Territory and Translocating: Discrepant
Idioms of Political Locality”, Columbia
International Affairs Online, July 2000, 21 October 2002 <http: // www.cionet.org
/htm>.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Gene Carey, “Ramji’s Amrika”,
Rediff On The Net, 5 May 1999, 5 July 2002 <http: // www.rediff.com
/news /1999/dec/o8us.htm>.
31. Amin Malak, “Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial
Condition: The Fiction of M.G. Vassanji”, World
Literature Today 67.2 (Spring 1993) p. 279.
32. Craig Taylor, Reviews, Canada’s Magazine of Book News and
Reviews, <http: // www.quillandquire.com /reviews /review /.cfm?
review_id =36127.
33. Robin Cohen, Global
Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press), p. 26.
34. Chelva Kanaganayakam, “‘Broadening the Substrata’: An Interview
with M.G. Vassanji”, World Literature
Written in English 31.2 (1999), P. 34.
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