Demystifying The Imperial Travel Gaze And Synchronizing the Borders: A Study of Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake
Pronami Bhattacharyya
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Bhattacharyya, Pronami. “Demystifying The Imperial Travel Gaze And Synchronizing the Borders: A Study of Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.2 (2014): 117-28.
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| P U B. M A Y ‘1 4 | 3 (2) |
We share the same biology regardless of ideology
What must save us me and you is that the Russians love their children too (Sting, qtd. in Hollander, 54)
In the changed milieu of border conditions, due to which modern concepts of cultural boundaries and political territoriality are being destroyed by the process of globalization, the usual view at migration as involving border crossing between two non-physical (state) entities is no longer hypothetically satisfactory. Borders have become “moving objects.” It is easy to be a liberal multinational in Paris or New York. But Vikram Seth is at home in remote cultures, too. As in his California, London, Vienna or Venice settings, China and its people, though situated far away, are never unfamiliar to him or his readers. It is a general assumption that travel writing is a kind of coverage from the margins or a culture of them to a culture which belongs to us. Them consists of the culture of the others. But Seth, the adaptable and innovative traveler that he is, is at home wherever he goes, and China was like another home to him, so much so that he could not make out whether he had crossed the border and stepped into Nepal, when he had actually done so walking past a midge-infested stream. Seth’s travel narrative brings together two adjacent but politically separated spaces in an artistic or literary form and combines them in a unique yet fundamentally relational point of view. The hard border consisting of a tightly-closed no man’s land, between the two giants of Asia, is turned into a porous, easy-to-cross, and an appealing space by Seth.
When meeting new cultures, there are chances of mutual growth. But at the same time, due to the imbalance of power in the world, spaces for newer forms of violence often crop up. It depends entirely on the course of the traveler’s discovery and exploration whether s/he wishes to dominate, or listen to, the other. For Seth, violence seemed to be an unknown term. He grows with the other’s culture just as the other enjoys his company while hitchhiking throughout the country in a truck, stopping occasionally at places and making friends for a lifetime.
The issues of bridging gaps or cultures in travel literature have the idea of border innate in them. The numerous borders on the atlas divide the planet into continents, countries, states, and so on. These boundary lines, which divide everything physical (even non-physical such as air), are themselves non-physical. In the colonial era, the gap between two countries, their cultures, even if they were neighboring ones, was relatively large. And the opportunities of knowing them were clouded with the colonial travel writers and their imperial gaze. Thus, the gap was not only physical, but there were borders of culture, and tradition. Globalization, the phenomenon of integration of economy, society and cultures around the world, has squeezed the globe and turned it into a global village. Travel writing in such an era, when all the boundaries of colonialism or imperialism has collapsed, has undergone a drastic change, and the borders between countries (not necessarily political or geographical), have visibly shrunken to a great extent.
Seth writes the most refined poetry as effortlessly as he writes an aria or a travelogue or a novel. Seth is not bothered about the diasporic dislocations, or the search for roots. Possibly, he does not feel dislocated or uprooted. He does not seem to address any issue that shakes the western world, or pander to critical theory. He just writes narratives about people and places visited while making those people and places come alive out of the pages for the readers to undergo a firsthand experience.
In an interview with Meenakshi Mukherji, he said that he was just a writer: not an Indian or of the commonwealth. He is one of those human beings privileged and fortunate enough to be able to travel and make the world their own. Nandini Chandra looks at the world travel writing and tries to see if Seth fits the “postcolonial hat.” Seth does not seem to, or he may even not want to. Though as a postcolonial traveler to an “Oriental” communist country Seth carries some baggage on his travel, but his gaze is not at all like those of his colonial counterparts. He does not look at China as a post colonized traveler through the “high meditation of western viewing glasses.” From Heaven Lake does not group into the category of the “rescue and recovery mission” that the colonial travel narratives come under. Seth’s journal is more akin to the classic western trope of travel for the sake of travel; as Rilke says a poet must travel in order to write. The very first paragraph of the book describes a place akin to an Indian town in the scorching summers:
The flies have entered the bus, and their buzzing adds to the overwhelming sense of heat…Donkey-carts pulled by tired-looking donkeys, pestered by flies…It is not long past dawn, and already the heat has struck (1).
This description is of Turfan, a desert town of China, which Seth finds similar to the summers of Delhi. The geographical distance/dissimilarity between the two countries are attempted to be blurred. Often the real essence of a place and the lived experiences of a traveler amidst the “natives” of a place she/he is visiting are erased by the formation of a prototypical ‘traveler’s gaze’ based on the nationalistic affiliations, color of the skin, race, gender, class, education or any other formative factors. Moreover, the knowledge about a place or people that one gathers before coming to a particular place, which Mary Louise Pratt terms antecedent literarios, or prior/earlier literary productions, also leads to the formation of one or the other kind of a gaze/s in a traveler. Vikarm Seth too had some kind an image of China in mind. Being born and brought up India, a country which shares a very long borderline with China and the border wrought with an extensive turmoil, he has a prior and a very strong image of China in his mind. But unlike the colonial travel writers, he does not hold the “all knowing” subject position gazing at the passive “to be studied” objects. The colonial travelers had a sense of cultural authority implicit in their writings. In Seth’s case, the subject-object binary gets blurred. Vikram Seth can be termed a cosmopolitan person/leader, one who embraces multicultural demographics.
The most deeply entrenched border, evermore difficult to change, is the mental structure. Despite the similarly of people all over the world, nations and their residents are often categorized on the basis of certain national traits. It is believed that there is a Chinese way of thinking, of liaising, negotiating, interacting and communicating just as there is an Indian way. For instance, a tilted way of saying things is apparently Chinese. At Heaven Lake, the hotel owner wanted to warn the author not to swim in the lake, he does not tell him directly. Instead, the cook and he give examples of people who have drowned earlier, especially citing the case of the Beijing athlete:
‘Swimming?’ Mr. Cao says. ‘You aren’t thinking of swimming, are you?’”
“‘I thought I might,’ I confess. ‘What’s the water like?’”
“He doesn’t answer me immediately, turning instead to examine some receipts with exaggerated….Mr. Cao, with great offendedness, addresses the air. ‘People are often drowned here,’ he says. After a pause, he continues. ‘When was the last one?’… ‘Was it the Beijing athlete?’ (Seth, 23).
Friendship alone can transcend these barriers. Sui, the Liberation truck driver, who is taking Seth to Lhasa, as he is on a hitch-hiking trip, goes about his travel in a way which is suggestive of a Chinese temperament. He follows his own whim and pace. His long trips depend on the stock of his comic books and the number of stopovers he has to make at the homes of friends and acquaintances to spread goods and gifts en route to his destination. Once, he suddenly stopped at the middle of nowhere because he wanted to catch fish for his wife from a river, although it was raining heavily and the river, swollen. Seth was getting irritated of Sui’s phlegmatic nature because he was running short of time, and his exit visa was to expire in a few days. They fought as if they were close friends, and their fight is amicably resolved. Sui’s heavy smoking and the resultant glob of blue-green phlegm of cough makes Seth too much concerned for him. Their accidental last meeting in a Lhasa street is extremely poignant.
Seth, like Amitav Ghosh, is separated from a majority of contemporary travel writers due to his avant-garde gaze at a “historically subjugated culture.” Seth tries to settle a history of “mutual ignorance and conflict” (Holland and Huggan, 56). Seth understands that time and patience is required to solve the long drawn-out border problem between the two nations. Thus, he says:
To learn (on a personal level) about another great culture is to enrich one’s life, to understand one’s own country better, to feel more at home in the world, and indirectly to add to that reservoir of individual goodwill, that may, generations from now, temper the cynical use of national power (178).
Edward Said’s Orientalism throws light on the idea of a traveler’s gaze. For the imperial travel writers, “the Orient, as it emerged as a body of knowledge about other (eastern) regions and cultures, involved techniques of representation that were designed to assert or reconfirm the intellectual authority of the west” (Holland and Huggan, 70). Orientalism goes hand in hand with imaginative geography, a concept framed by Said: it redistributes knowledge in space to serve the needs of a dominant culture. Seth, in From Heaven Lake, recognizes that modern day travelers must know how best to negotiate borders that are often the result of indiscernible lines of geopolitical forces. In his Chinese journey, Seth is precisely drawn into such marginal or contested areas. He reaches Xinjiang, a north-western province also known ambiguously as the “New Borderland,” and the partly autonomous, closely guarded and supervised country of Tibet. Seth finds himself engrossed in battles with authorities, arguing endlessly over entry visas, exit permits and traveler’s rights. “Travel, for Seth, seems to be less a celebration of human freedom than a confrontation of political obstacles that are placed in freedom’s path” (ibid, 71). The disputed India-China border is one such insurmountable border—the reminder of a fraught history of international relations that has kept these two cultures irreconcilably apart. Seth’s journey home is crossing all these borders of culture, tradition and politics is only a small victory in the face of continuing cultural ignorance and political distrust.
The anthropologist-ethnologist, Arnold von Gennep, suggests that frontier crossing often has a “magico-religious” aspect whereby one moves from the known of the community and its mores to the territory of the unknown, marked as evil (15-20). The distinction between us and them is thus created and sustained. A classic text of western journey to China is Paul Theroux’s Down the Yangtze published in the same year as Seth’s book, in 1983. Pronouncing his verdict on the Chinese as a racial category, Theroux says, “the Chinese were practical, unspiritual, materialistic, baffled and hungry, and these qualities had brought a crudity and terrible fatigue to their country. In order to stay alive, they had to kill the imagination; the result was a vegetable economy and a monochrome culture” (50). All this is of course observed from his seat in a luxury cruise as it sails down the Yangtze. The border between Theroux and the oriental Chinese thus, looms very large and very threateningly in the narrative. For him, descriptions of unpleasant experiences in China occupy a substantial part of the narrative. Even in his travel narrative, Dark Star Safari, he says: “distant places were unknown; the unknown was dangerous” (125). Seth’s reflections are not based on any overt judgments and he is by no means a seasoned or courageous traveler. But, his reflections are more nuanced and warranted, given that he was student at Nanjing University for a year and he was hitch-hiking through the innards of the country. The journey to Tibet is a sort of homecoming by a cheaper and more interesting route. Seth is lazy, slipshod and not very motivated by any overt ethnographic operation. He was in fact not visiting, but passing through Tibet. Throughout his journey, either in a vehicle or on foot, he never seemed to be engaged in separating one piece of land from another. He felt at home everywhere awaiting humans made him see the difference created by man-made borders. In the chapter ‘Into Nepal’, Seth is seen traversing on foot towards Nepal with his luggage carrier, Tenzing.
We traverse a smooth, meadow-green yet almost vertical slope, hundreds of metres above the river….A woman wearing a sari is washing clothes in a small stream. She looks up at us as we cross. The forest continues beyond…( 169).
Suddenly a man steps out from behind a tree. He warns them to stop and show the luggage. He is a Nepali customs officer. It is only then that Seth comes to know that he has crossed the border and stepped into Nepal.
‘But I didn’t know we had crossed the border,’ I say.
‘That stream there, that’s the border. You’ve just crossed it.
‘That…?’ I look back at the stream. The woman is wringing out clothes over the water. Her soap lies on one rock, her washing on another… (170).
Most of the imperial travel writers furnished details about the legends and myths of a place they visited, instead of bringing into life the people who inhabited those places. Mentally divorced as the Orientalist travelers were from the people and places they visited, it was not possible for them to be one amongst the natives and look through the latter’s eyes. And thus, the baggage of Orientalist discourse and knowledge that these travelers were carried got magnified and established in layers through their narratives. In doing so, the people (natives) got relegated behind, and what captured the traveler’s attention were the legends and myths, which, as the terms suggests, were in most cases, simply legends and myths. Seth does exactly opposite of what his colonial counterparts did. The details he furnishes are related to the people he encounters. It is not places and monuments which hold the greatest value for Seth. Rather, people are the “real hero” for him, as when he says, “(w)hen I think of China, I think first of my friends and only then of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb” (36). While doing so, Seth is able to present the underlying social context of the gestures or incident that is being described. And in doing so, Seth demystifies many myths which the colonial gaze had created about the other. For instance, when at Lhasa, Seth witnesses a ‘ghastly’ ceremony which the imperial gaze attributed to the inherent barbarism attributed to Tibetan rituals. The dead bodies were chopped and minced, the skull broken, and were fed to eagles. But it is amply clear that all this is not barbarism, but is the result of scarcity of firewood to burn, and the ground is hard for much of the year. Seth thus indulges in dual activity. He lifts the veil of ignorance around the myths or wrong notions that people held since ages and ends up celebrating raw human values.
In Theroux’s account, the Chinese seem to be a “slavish mass.” In contrast, the Americans who are cruising with him, and thereby all other Americans, are deemed better off in that they are at least seen to be thinking individuals. It happens perhaps because Theroux hardly gets a chance to speak to this slavish people. Moreover, Theroux constantly has a belittling tone. Seth is radically different in the compassion and the love with which he remembers his Chinese and Tibetan friends. They are to him a happy race, with an instinctive kindness and a universal sense of hospitality. Though, it must be remembered that Seth had the twin assets of a brown skin and the song from the film Awara to break the ice.
By and large, the world Seth travels through is a homosocial one. There is bonhomie, there is companionship, and there is kindness. Borders seem to be nowhere. When Seth describes an old woman sitting on the doorway reading a letter, or soldiers passing by cracking sunflower seeds between their teeth, it is not merely an exercise in jousting.
Similarly when he finds that the border between Nepal and China is defined by a couple of rocks, and wonders at the absurdity of a customs man emerging from behind a tree, and the fact that it makes no difference to the woman washing clothes that her soap is on the China side and her clothes on the Nepal side, he is in a way trying to assert the unity between the pragmatic hard-edged world of geo-politics and international relations on the one hand and the other realm inhabited by Sui, old women, and other such people of the workaday world (Chandra, 31).
Seth closes the book with an optimistic vision of a world of bonhomie between India and China, a world where borders matter least. The days in China as a Nanjing University student are cherished in his heart forever in spite of all the physical or political hardships that he had to undergo. It is in China where, perhaps, he made a few of his best friends for life. The invisible but non-erasable political borders between the two countries could not stop Seth from experiencing the same feelings of brotherly, friendly, familial or any kind of comradeship in China, just as he did back at home. But at the same time, Seth is aware of the flip side of the coin too when he remarks:
…unfortunately I think that this will continue to be the case: neither strong economic interest nor the natural affinities of a common culture tie India and China together…The fact that they are both part of the same landmass means next to zilch. There is no such thing as an Asian ethos or mode of thinking. (178).
From Heaven Lake ends with the traveler’s victorious negotiation of a final border: the customs barrier at the international airport of New Delhi. Thus, Seth’s narrative demystifies the trend of the colonial travel narrative and aptly belongs to the postcolonial era by blurring the man-made borders and amalgamating the two adjacent cultures historically distanced so far.
References
Chandra, Nandini. “A Different Gaze: Vikram Seth’s Journey through Mainland China,” in GJV Prasad ed. Vikram Seth: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2004.
Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Hollander, Paul. The Survival of the Adversary Culture: Social Criticism and Political Escapism in American Society. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.
Lisle, Debbie. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Seth, Vikram. From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet. New Delhi: Penguin, 1983.
Theroux, Paul. Down the Yangtze. London: Penguin Books, 1995.
——. Dark Star Safari. New York: Mariner Books, 2004.
Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Oxfordshire & New York: 2004.