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SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 44
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Cultural Liminality and the Construction of a Space-other in Salman Rushdie's “The
Courter”
____________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Andrea Puchmüller
Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina
Ejército de los Andes
____________________________________________________________________________
Abstract
The Courter, a story from the East,
West collection (1994) by Anglo-Indian
writer Salman Rushdie, problematizes the
paradox of both divided and fused migrant
identity. The story fictionalizes various
cultural misunderstandings, clashes among
individuals from different cultures, the
stereotyping of migrants (particularly
Indian)by the dominant culture, hybridity
and negotiations of meanings. The
objective of this work is to describe and
characterize such cultural dynamics in The
Courter through certain constructs proposed
by the Indian critic Homi Bhabha, such as
hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence and
cultural difference. From the analysis
carried out, we observe that hybridity,
cultural contamination, mixture and
difference appear in The Courter in a
symbolic key through the game that is
established with language. In addition, the
migrant characters imitate the English
culture and this translation is materialized
through cultural intertexts that provide them
with alternative frames of reference from
which their experiences find meaning.
English society is represented as being
ordered on the basis of a homogeneous,
dominant, host society that
"accommodates" other cultures while it is
the diasporic identities that destabilize the
achieved socio-cultural order. The story
then proposes a space-Other, a third,
liminal space in which identities are
recreated to give rise to something totally
new and hybrid.
Keywords: The Courter- cultural
difference-third space
Introduction
Since the last decades of the XX
century, a tendency towards hybridization
(probably innate to the human condition)
has been growing and it has transcended the
realm of rhetorical enunciation to the point
of permeating almost every stratum of
culture. In the field of literature, this
process of mixing has contributed to
generating a real boom of fictions about
migrations and displacements,
characterized not only by a transformation
in the attitudes of the social and ethnic
sectors from which it originates, but also by
SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 45
RESEARCH ARTICLE
significant changes in the same social,
cultural and linguistic structures. This type
of literature has become a rallying point for
thinking about culture as a construct in
constant transformation, and its
characteristic elements, as well as its
characters, challenge, through their
marginality, the hegemonic power of the
center, being, at the same time, symbolic
edges of that center.
Immigrants, exiles, displaced
individuals, for whatever reason, move in
time and space between points of departure
and arrival and modify in that displacement
not only the space they leave but also the
space they reach. New spaces of socio-
cultural encounter are then created, in
which negotiation and confrontation are
inevitable, and in which new social
relations -fundamentally, power relations-
between the social actors who move in
those spaces are shaped.
Many post-colonial writers have
been interested in the theme of the new
spaces of agency that arise from the
encounter between cultures; liminal spaces
characterized by hybridization and a high
degree of immeasurability (Bhabha,
2002).A clear example is the Anglo-Indian
writer Salman Rushdie, who in his fictions
explores the hybridization of cultural
discourses and the rupture of the traditional
representation of culture as a homogeneous
and rigid unit. In 1994 Rushdie writes East,
West, an anthology of short stories which is
divided into three main sections: "East",
"West", and "East, West". Each section
contains stories from their respective
geographical areas, while in the "East,
West" segment both worlds are influenced
by each other.It is to this last section that
The Courter belongs, a fictionalization of
the reality lived in England by immigrants -
mainly from the Indian diaspora- inserted
into a cultural world strongly determined by
a historical colonial trajectory of
relations.What kind of cultural space is
envisioned in such a story? In what way are
diasporic identities constructed in a cultural
space that is not the one of origin? Is the
dominant culture permeable, does it give
rise to the incorporation and emergence of
the new? These are some of the questions
that drive this analysis, whose main
objective is to describe and understand the
cultural dynamics and the new spaces of
agency and interaction between natives and
migrants fictionalized in the short story The
Courter (Rushdie, 1999).
To answer the questions raised, an
interpretative methodological logic is
proposed that is based on a hermeneutic and
socio-critical paradigm. This paradigm,
understood as a type of discourse that
privileges the social dimension of texts,
their historical weight, and their cultural
and ideological significance, allows us to
explore the dynamism between the texts
and the production of sense of the social
that crosses them. This implies working in
SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 46
RESEARCH ARTICLE
two different but complementary directions:
from society as a condition of production,
to the literary work, and from the latter, as a
second, parallel universe, to society, thus
generating a flexibility of analysis forward
and backward between the text and its
universe of production. In this sense, the
literary work is presented in itself as an
aesthetic, transdisciplinary and
sociodiscursive object that gives an account
of the dialogical condition underlying
discourse.
For the theorization of the analysis
of The Courter we propose some epistemic
categories outlined by post-colonial critic
Homi Bhabha, namely hybridity, mimicry,
ambivalence and cultural difference. In
addition, we frame the hermeneutics of The
Courter by taking as a starting point a brief
synthesis of the British Raj and the
migrations from India to Great Britain, as
well as of the emergence of a literature of
resistance or counter-colonial writing.
The British Raj: Indian Domination and
Migration to Britain
Westernist attempts to colonise
India began with the arrival of the
Portuguese in 1498. Although they
managed to occupy and colonize only Goa,
Daman and Diu, they imposed themselves
during the 16th century as staunch
monopolizers of the spice trade. The
Portuguese occupation was then followed
by attempts from the Netherlands and then
in the seventeenth century, both France and
the British Empire began to compete for the
colonization of the Southeast Asian country
(Preciado Solís, n/d). Finally, around 1757
England took over almost all of the Indian
territory which was controlled through the
so-called "British East India Company".
Later (in 1876) Queen Victoria was
proclaimed Empress of India and thus the
British Raj began, that is, the direct colonial
rule of the British crown over India
(O'Reilly, 2004).
Indian culture was subsumed under
a political, economic, social, cultural and
ethnic transformation imposed by the
British Empire, which transformed the
order, structure and intrinsic elements that
had sustained this millenary society. With
the aim of imposing a market economy, the
Indian peasant system organized in villages
was dismantled by the British Company
(Gutman, 2009). Activities that had been
fundamental to Indian economy such as
handicraft development, the textile
industry, and food crops were replaced by
plantation crops (cotton, jute) that English
industry demanded from the continent. The
British Raj also introduced western
medicine, displacing Indian epistemologies
and ancestral knowledge, such as the
Ayurveda medicine of more than 3000
years old (Gutman, 2009). The British
Macaulinist educational system was also
imposed, which aimed at the "civilization
of the natives" through the imposition of
the English language, the British literary
SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 47
RESEARCH ARTICLE
and cultural canon, European history and
the Western values of the Enlightenment.
The British Empire focused much of
its cultural and symbolic ruling efforts on
the Anglicanization of the Indian education
system. A large number of schools and
universities were established; institutions
that –following British standards and the
curricula set by Oxford and Cambridge-
trained a large percentage of Indian citizens
in the liberal arts and laws. In this way, the
empire ensured that the public
administration was occupied by natives
who met British criteria that are, culturally
mimicked in terms of Bhabha (2002). Lord
Macaulay sought nothing more than to
conform a class of people Indian by blood
and colour, but English by taste, opinion,
morals and intellect (Bhabha, 2002, p. 113).
According to Anderson (1991), the
deception of Macaulinism was due to the
opportunities of social ascent that this
system offered the natives, since it allowed
them to be part of the empire as teachers,
officials, journalists, lawyers, doctors etc.,
at the cost of the annihilation and
Anglicanization of their Indian identity.
This system also became the starting point
for the migration of the native population
throughout the imperial domains as subjects
"qualified" by the British Raj.
The first immigrants from India to
Britain from the 18th century onwards were
crew members working on the ships of the
British East India Company (Metcalf,
2003). There were also domestic servants,
nannies, teachers and ayahs who
accompanied their employing British
families when they returned to the United
Kingdom. In many cases, Anglo citizens
who married Indian women sent their
"mixed-race" children to England without
their mothers to be educated there (Gutman,
2009). Indian families of the wealthy elite
also sent their children to the prestigious
English colleges and universities. During
the 19th and 20th centuries migration
continued, especially after World War II, as
Indian workers were recruited to fill the
labour shortage caused by the war. Today,
the Indian diaspora has become one of the
largest ethnic minorities in the United
Kingdom.
Indian Counter-Colonial Literature: The
Empire Writes Back
The resistance to imperial power
and the construction of new national
identities by the ex-British colonies
produced and continues to produce a large
number of literary texts and fictions.
Between 1836 and 1921 there was a series
of uprisings by the Indian population
(especially Muslim sectors) who
demonstrated against British imperialism.
However, the suffering and discontent of
India was materialized not only through
popular revolts, but also through discourse
(Gupta, 2003). Journalism and literature
became vehicles of demand, protest and
denunciation of the British imperialist
SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 48
RESEARCH ARTICLE
violence. Literature channeled the point of
view of its fictions into the construction of
narrators and characters inspired by the
weakest subjects of the imperialist system,
"the others" who were silenced and
excluded from the hegemonic discourse:
peasants, railway workers, domestic
servants, etc. An example of this resistance
literature is the play Nil Darpan (1860) by
the Bengali playwright Dinabandhu Mitra.
This play dramatizes the 1859 Indigo
Revolt in which Bengali peasants refused to
harvest their indigo fields as a form of
protest against the exploitative agriculture
of the British Raj. Another example of such
protest literature, but which is closer to the
period of Indian pre-independence, is the
novel Untouchable (1935) by Mulk Raj
Anand. The plot revolves around the double
oppression suffered by the lower castes
called "untouchables" (outcasts) at the
hands of the upper castes and the British
colonizers. It was a revolutionary novel that
spoke out against both European
imperialism and the Indian landowning
class in collusion with the British political
power.
Once India became politically
independent from the United Kingdom in
1947, after almost three painful centuries of
domination, the Southeast Asian country
began a process of liberation also in the
cultural field. New writers emerged who
were trying to break free from the colonial
yoke and whose intention was to explore
their own sense of cultural identity.
According to Mexican theorist Anaya
Ferreira (2001):
[...] they are people who write in
English, but who are neither English
nor American. They come from
countries that were part of the
British Empire and, more recently,
the Commonwealth of Nations,
although they no longer accept
being included in that classification.
They are descendants of ancestral
cultures, but delegitimized by
imperial authority and virtually
destroyed. (p. 11)
1
Indian writer Salman Rushdie
coined the phrase The Empire writes back
(1982) to refer to the literature produced by
the British colonies both during the colonial
yoke and after the periods of emancipation.
The semantic and ideological impact of this
phrase is given, on the one hand, by the
mentioning of the political and economic
dimension of the historical phenomenon of
imperialism ("The Empire"), and on the
other hand, by the inclusion of the textual
and discursive dimension ("writes back")
that instituted one of the most effective
tools for the repression of the colonized
countries.
Both from India and from its
diaspora, fiction and literary criticism
1
Author’s translation.
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International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
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ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 49
RESEARCH ARTICLE
writers have begun to question the cultural,
political and moral primacy of Western
civilization and the discursive practices
formulated from the academic, scientific
and literary spheres of Europe and the
United States over the rest of the non-
Western world. Theorists like Homi
Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Amit Chaudhuri
and fiction writers like Rasipuram Narayan,
Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Arundathi
Roy –among others- are some of those who
stand out in the arena of Anglo-Indian
literature.
Identity and Encounter among Cultures:
Some Key Concepts in Homi Bhabha's
Theory
The Courter is a story in which there
are various cultural misunderstandings,
clashes between subjects from different
cultures, stereotyping of migrants by the
dominant culture, hybridizations and
negotiations of meanings. In order to
understand such cultural dynamics, we
resort to certain concepts proposed by the
Indian critic Homi Bhabha, such as
hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence and
cultural difference.
The notion of hybridity is profusely
developed by Bhabha in his book The
Location of Culture (1994, 2002) and it
implies new forms of subjective
construction originated from the colonial
encounter, difficult to classify in a single
and closed cultural, political or ethnic
category. According to Bhabha (2002),
from the encounter between colonizing and
colonized, the cultural hybridity would be
the most direct and clear effect of the
confluence, within that new space of
agency, of the ambivalence of colonial
discourse and of its inherent mimicry.
Ambivalence is the denial and
rejection of difference, but at the same time
it constitutes in itself a recognition of it. In
order to be able to reject the Other, it is
necessary to recognize his existence as
different. The identity of both the European
and the oppressed native is crossed by
ambivalence alternating fantasy and
repulsion, aggressiveness and narcissism,
desire and hate. For Bhabha (2002), the first
protocol to consider in relation to the
ambivalence of colonial discourse is the
rigidity of the representation of the different
Other; immutability that he calls "fixity" or
"stereotype". The colonizing identity
overcomes the difference of the Other
through the use of fixed and immutable
stereotypes: a fixed idea (the Other as wild,
violent, uncivilized, exotic) that justifies its
domination and submission. The stereotype
appears in the colonial discourse as a way
of configuring subjective identity from
ambivalence, denying and recognizing the
differences of otherness. It is a mechanism
to control and dominate the heterogeneity
of the Others.
SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
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ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 50
RESEARCH ARTICLE
The second aspect that Bhabha
(2002) highlights of ambivalence is
mimicry. Colonial mimicry is the desire for
a reformed, recognizable Other as the
subject of a difference that is almost the
same, but not exactly the same (Bhabha, p.
112). It emerges as the representation of a
difference that is itself a process of
renegation. Mimicry is then the sign of a
double articulation; a complex strategy of
reform, regulation and discipline, which
appropriates the Other (Bhabha, p. 112). It
is therefore another tool of domination to
make the colonized subject similar to the
colonizer, who accepts the new imposed
customs and does not resist assimilation.
However, the mimic native is never a
faithful representation of the colonizer; he
is similar, but never an identical copy, he is
an imitation, a camouflage. It is again the
ambivalence of "not being exactly white"
(Bhabha, p. 114). Mimicry strips the
colonial subject of his identity and provides
him with only a few elements of the
dominant culture that give him a certain
functionality, but does not allow him to
become independent.
Bhabha (1990) sees culture as the
defining element of identities. The idea of
cultural hybridity denies the essentialism of
a culture and assumes that all cultures are in
a continuous process of change. Hybridity
is a "third space" that allows for the
emergence and acceptance of other cultural
possibilities. Therefore, the third space is a
liminal zone in which cultures meet,
interact and hybridize: an interstitial and
productive space, of the construction of
culture as difference in the spirit of
otherness (Bhabha, 1990, p. 211). The
process of cultural hybridity gives rise to
something different, something new and
unrecognizable; a new territory of
negotiation of meanings and
representations.
The processes of change and
negotiation between cultures are possible
from the conception of "difference" and not
of cultural "diversity" (Bhabha, 1990, p.
207). Many of the democratic and
pluralistic societies promote their interest in
encouraging and nurturing cultural
diversity. However, such societies end up
becoming ambivalent essentialist traps, that
is, on the one hand they promote diversity,
but on the other, they "contain" it. Diversity
is then accommodated within the rigid
framework of the dominant culture; within
an essentialist grid that encloses, dominates
and represses difference. The universalism
that paradoxically allows diversity masks
ethnocentric norms, interests and values
(Bhabha, p. 208). Cultural difference
implies that difference among cultures
cannot be accommodated within a
Universalist framework. Different cultures,
the difference between cultural practices,
the difference in the construction of
cultures within diverse groups, give rise to
a certain incommensurability that can only
SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 51
RESEARCH ARTICLE
occur in a third space that makes hybridity
possible.
Thematization of the Indian Diaspora in
Salman Rushdie's The Courter
One of the critical aspects of
migration is the issue of the identity -
especially cultural- of migrants. In
diasporic processes, there occur socio-
political and cultural changes that affect the
movement of individuals from their place
of origin to the new space of exile. These
processes and changes involve uprooting,
translation and the mixing of cultures,
ethnicities, religions and languages. "The
space inhabited by migrants also involves a
new conceptualization between here and
there" (Mardorossian, 2002, p. 16).
Likewise, due to their displacement, the
identity of migrants suffers transformations
that modify their self-perception and result
in an ambivalence between their past and
their present.
The construction of the cultural
identity of Indian migrants in England is
one of the issues that Salman Rushdie is
concerned with, and which he captures in
the short story The Courter. This story
belongs to the collection East, West (1994)
and it problematizes the paradox of the
migrant identity both divided and merged.
It is a story of displacement, of migrants, of
cultures that clash and mingle. It is possible
to detect in the narrative a "third space", in
which hybridity is the core that challenges
monolithic and dichotomous values of
culture and identity. Through this space, the
story challenges the cultural homogeneity
of both the diaspora and the host culture. It
also explores how racism and xenophobia
arise from societies that preach cultural
diversity and mask ethnocentric norms.
The story takes place in London in
the early 1960s. It is told from the
perspective of an Indian teenager who was
sent to a boarding school in the United
Kingdom. The now-adult narrator recalls
the time during the 1960s when his family
(his parents, his three sisters and his ayah)
joined him in London and he lived with
them at Waverley House. The story
explores the microcosm of immigrants at
Waverley House, where two Indian
maharajahs also live, and the porter, who
has migrated from a Slavic country.
In the foreground is the love story
between the porter and the narrator’s ayah,
Mary, who because of her Indian accent
cannot pronounce the "p's" and replaces
them with "c's". In this way, he transforms
the name "porter" into "courter". Both Mary
and the porter have to deal with their
dislocation, being separated from their
respective homes and living in an
environment where they have trouble
finding their place, which is constantly
articulated through language and language
barriers. Still, they find a way to
communicate with each other through the
SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 52
RESEARCH ARTICLE
game of chess. The Courter is also the story
of the narrator himself, which is intertwined
with the love affair of his ayah. The
narrator tells us how he deals with his
immigrant status, as he feels he belongs
neither to India nor to Britain, and how he
faces his situation as a hybrid individual.
Textualization of Migrant Identities in
Rushdie’s fiction
Rushdie's short story The Courter
fictionalizes the reality of migrants in
England who belong to the Indian diaspora,
and it questions cultural homogeneity and
essentialism, affirming the possibility of an
identity that is not homogeneous but mixed,
impure and juxtaposed. This challenge can
be understood if analyzed from the
categories of hybridity, mimicry, cultural
difference and third space proposed by
Bhabha (1990, 2002).
Hybridity, cultural contamination,
mixture and difference appear in The
Courter as symbolic keys through a sort of
game that is established with language.
Language is the main site of hybridity and
change that is materialized through
linguistic creativity in relation to names and
nicknames, the mixture of languages
(English, Hindi) and the conflicts of the
characters with Standard English.
The creation of names, the invention
of nicknames, the generation of new words,
the association of meanings are all
mechanisms that creatively attack the
absolutism of the pure and that celebrate
linguistic carnival and hybridization. The
ayah calls the porter a "courter” and thus
establishes a phonetic and semantic
interplay between the terms "porter" and
"courtier" through which his identity is
transformed: he becomes a doorman that
courts the ayah. Likewise, the Slavic porter
also resignifiesthe ayah’s name, Mary,
which metamorphoses into Certainly-Mary,
as she always holds the white, red-rimmed
sari in front of her and nods with the adverb
"certainly". Besides, the porter, who is a
Slavic immigrant, is nicknamed "Mixed-
up" by Indian children because his real
name -Mecir, pronounced “Mishirsh”- "[is]
so full of communist consonants, all those
double z's and u's walled up together, with
no vowels to leave them breathing space"
(Rushdie, 1999, p. 152). Scheherazade, the
name of the narrator's little sister, is
derisively transformed into "Scare-zade" by
her brothers; the name of the family's old
friend, Sir Charles Lutwidge-Dogson (a
symbolic name in the British literary canon)
is reinterpreted and transformed into
"Dodo". Thus, new and unexpected ways of
calling and representing the Other emerge
from the encounter between the different
migrant characters, immersed in a new
space of cultural agency. The new names
transform and hybridize the identities
giving rise to something new.
Linguistic hybridization also seems
to be linked to the emergence of new spaces
and areas of negotiation of meanings, which
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International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 53
RESEARCH ARTICLE
become unstable, provisional and
negotiable. The porter uses the word ghats
(mountain in Hindi) to describe the stairs as
he helps Mary to climb them. The ayah
makes it clear that ghats also means stairs
in her language, as they are a metaphor for
mountains. Thus, through their semantic
association, the Slavic porter is able to see
the world as the Indians represent it through
the Hindi language. The name of the
narrator's cousin, Chandni, becomes
provisional according to the cultural
context. When the girl is with her family,
she is called by her Indian name "Chandni",
but with her English friends she responds to
the equivalent or translation "Moonlight".
Perhaps the clearest example of hybridity in
the story is the presence of the English
language reformed, recreated and mixed
with other migrant languages:
- "Hai! Allah-tobah!" - cried my
mother fussing. "Who hit you? Are
you injured? (Rushdie, 1999, p. 183)
- "Khali-pili bommarta!", she
objected, and then, for her host's
benefit she translated: "For nothing
he is shouting, shouting. Bad life!
Switch it off!" (Rushdie, 1999,
p.189).
- "It is like an adventure baba". -
Mary once tried to explain to me. "It
is like going with him to his country
you know. What a place, baapré!"
(Rushdie, 1999, p. 195).
-I, to see Miss Mary, come, am" -
said Mixed-up (Rushdie, 1999, p.
184).
New words, syntactic alterations, semantic
modifications and code switching are some
of the strategies that Rushdie embodies in
the language of his migrant characters. The
linguistic habits of Hindi appear juxtaposed
with English and generate a new form of
communication and a new linguistic-
cultural reality. These new codes, however,
do not find a place within the dominant
culture but appear culturally and
linguistically orphaned (they are neither
Indian nor English), placing themselves in a
third space of enunciation.
In addition to representing hybrid
linguistic identities, The courter crystallizes
the characteristic mimicry of colonial
discourse. This protocol is fictionalized as
an ambivalent process that hybridizes the
hegemonic culture. The characters, who
have moved from their native place, imitate
the "original" English culture, which is
problematized and decentralized, by
creating something new. The original
culture is presented as incomplete and open
to "translation" -in terms of Bhabha (2002)-
, that is, the essentialism of the hegemonic
culture is weakened by the fact that it can
be simulated, imitated, parodied,
transformed, turned into simulacrum and
cannibalized by an Other-culture that
contradicts its authority. In the story, the
SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
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ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 54
RESEARCH ARTICLE
migrant characters imitate the English
culture and this translation is materialized
in cultural intertexts that provide them with
alternative frames of reference from which
their experiences find meaning. Such is the
case of the teenage narrator who tries to
deal with his emotional frustrations in
falling in love with a Polish immigrant,
through a repertoire of 1960s pop songs that
includes Elvis Presley and The Beatles. Or
the love affair between Mixed-up and
Certainly-Mary that is shaped by the game
of chess, metamorphosing from its
traditional formalization of war into the
symbolic language of love. Likewise,
Chandni finds a way to relate to her English
friends through the adoption of Western
clothes (jeans and sneakers), but at the
same time she links to her ancestral roots
by taking classes in Indian classical dance.
The ayah's nostalgia for its distant India and
her Christian Goa
2
is tempered by the
traditional English Christmas celebration in
the narrator's family, with the classic tree
and carols in Latin: "It was so strange to see
a Christmas tree in our house that I realized
things must be pretty serious" (Rushdie,
1999,p. 162). These intertexts show that the
"original culture" is never finite and pure in
itself and that, on the contrary, there are
immeasurable forms of cultural translation
that encapsulate its difference, take away its
power and make it unstable.
2
Goan Catholics are Catholics from the former
Portuguese colony of Goa, a region on the west
coast of India.
On the other hand, The Courter
represents an English society ordered on the
basis of a homogeneous, dominant, host
culture that "accommodates" other cultures.
It is the diasporic identities that destabilize
the "achieved order"; an order that is based
on the accommodation of a supposed
cultural diversity but that masks
ethnocentric norms and xenophobic values.
The English characters in the story,
identified as "first Beatle" and "second
Beatle", represent what they perceive as
essentially British: they dress like the
Beatles and speak Standard English. These
characters reject the cultural difference
personified by Certainly-Mary and Mixed-
up, who dress differently, speak "impure"
English and have split identities. The
Beatles characters, through violence rooted
in cultural purity, attempt to restrict the
entry of migrants into their society to make
it one-dimensional. The rhetoric they use to
address the ayah and its Indian employer
3
is
based on the fixity and stereotype that
Bhabha (2002) consider as strategies of the
colonial discourse to justify the submission
and denial of the difference of the Other:
—“Fucking wogs” —he said—. “You
fucking come over here, you don’t
fucking know how to fucking behave.
Why don’t you fucking fuck off to
3
Both women are confused as being the wives of the
Indian maharajas who live in their same building
and who are engaged in prostitution.
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fucking Woginstan? Fuck your
fucking wogarses. Now then” –he
addes in a wuite voice, holding up the
knife- “unbutton your blouses”.
(Rushdie, 1999, p. 164)
Although the above-mentioned xenophobic
incident arises from a case of mistaken
identities, the Beatles characters do not
consider that there is any confusion at all.
This is because they assume that all Indian
immigrants are the same (wogs), and that
they all behave similarly. The fixation
instituted by these characters might be
rooted in the belief that immigrants
constitute social errors, therefore justifying
any kind of mistreatment or attempt of
elimination. One of the Beatles holds a
knife with which he threatens the Indian
women and with which he finally stabs
Mixed-up while trying to defend them. The
violent stabbing, considered as "an honest
mistake" (Rushdie, 1999, p.165) by the
Beatles, symbolizes their feelings of
superiority and their longing for cultural
homogeneity. Furthermore, it suggests "a
declaration of their desire to incorporate
them into a new kind of empire, a domestic
colony, in which immigrants remain
subordinate" (Walkowitz, 2006, p.134).
Ironically, it is Mixed-up who, with his
"broken" English and identity, saves the
Indian women, thus embodying the positive
aspects of the peaceful message conveyed
by the Beatles as a cultural symbol, and
whose philosophy rejected violence and
embraced ethno-racial harmony.
The story then proposes a "third
space" where identities are recreated to give
rise to something totally new, but which is
finally annihilated by the host society
which does not admit true cultural
difference. After the violent incident, the
cultural blends and the hybrid language that
brighten up the narrative at the beginning,
and which figuratively originate in a Third
Space, fade away and give rise to a
melancholic, hopeless and confusing
atmosphere. The ayah returns to Bombay,
the Slavic porter disappears, the narrator's
Indian family moves to Pakistan. The
migrant community that had been created
through the hybrid games of language and
culture vanishes. However, the narrator's
divided identity remains in a liminal
positionality that he refuses to relinquish.
Born in India, but having migrated during
his childhood to England, the narrator feels
identified with both cultures. The
parliament that closes the story -and also
the collection East, West (Rushdie, 1999)-
becomes a statement of in-between
identities:
And the Passport did, in many ways,
set me free. It allowed me to come
and go, to make choices that were not
the ones my father would have
wished. But I, too, have ropes around
my neck, I have them to this day,
pulling me this way and that, East and
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West, the nooses tightening,
commanding, choose, choose.
I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I
kick. Ropes, I do not choose between
you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither
of you, and both. Do you hear? I
refuse to choose. (p. 167)
The narrator decides not to choose between
East and West; he chooses to remain in an
area between the two, in a third space, in
which hybridity, cross-breeding and
cultural juxtaposition constitute new
identities. Through his "impure" identity,
the narrator celebrates the erosion of limits
and definitions, and in doing so, necessarily
rejects the purity of "dogmatic truths that
threaten to confine the individual within
uniform and totalizing categories" (Sánchez
and Carazo, 2004, p. 5).
Final considerations
India's diasporic identities have
been shaped by a social, political and
cultural history marked by a long-standing
colonial experience. The strategy of the
British Raj was to produce Anglicanized
subjects, culturally mimicked to be like the
English, but not completely English. This
cultural and identity schism caused by the
colonial regime has become a constituting
part of Indian identities. Since the 18th
century, the eastern bodies that moved from
India to Great Britain have had this split
inscribed in their cultural fabric. By settling
in a new exilic space, feelings of nostalgia,
of not belonging, or of belonging here and
there, have caused new fragmentations in
identities. Likewise, identity conflicts
began to be different for the various
diasporic generations, that is, both for
migrants at different historical moments
and for the children of migrants born on
English territory.
Narratives of displacement occupy
an important place in the literary arena,
since, according to Hall (1994, p. 227)
identity is also thought, elaborated and
produced through cultural practices and
from within representation. Indian diaspora
writers, such as Salman Rushdie, write
fictions that problematize the issue of
migrants' identity, their stories, their
silences and their conflicts.
East, West(Rushdie, 1999), the
collection of stories to which The Courter
belongs, already anticipates through the
spatiality of the title the problematization of
split cultural identities. The comma in the
title could then be interpreted as a bridge or
a gap between both hemispheres, since the
author does not choose to use the
conjunction "and". According to Eagleton
(1994), the encounter between the East and
the West cannot take place through
harmony or fusion but through
undesirability and aporia. The conflict of
the identities of the Indian diaspora in
England is presented in the story by the
coexistence between different generations
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
of Indian migrants, a Slavic immigrant, and
the English hegemonic culture; however, it
remains an almost unsolvable paradox. The
key would seem to lie in the creation of a
third space, and yet the violence generated
by the host society does not give room to
either difference or cultural hybridity.
The Courter rejects the notion of a
pure and homogeneous culture in favor of a
hybrid, mixed and blended society. The
names given to the main characters in the
new agency space in which they operate is
an indication of this fact: Mixed-up and
Certainly-Mary. The Slavic immigrant's
name literally indicates that it is an identity
constituted from diversity. Both names
symbolically represent split identities, in-
between subjectivities, by linking both
terms with a hyphen. Thus, the creative
game that gives rise to the formation of new
names and the theme of language hybridity
(from the mixture between English and
Hindi) are narrative strategies that Rushdie
uses to problematize cultural fixity. A new
language is created giving rise to new
relationships and bonds, which emerge in a
new territory of negotiation of meanings. It
is a space-Other, a symbolic liminal
territory that belongs neither to the English
nor to the Indian culture but that is
transcultural: a third space in terms of
Bhabha (2002).
The theme of stereotyped identities
is fictionalized by the encounter between
the foreign characters and the British ones.
It is a violent encounter, caused by the
xenophobic gaze of the characters called
"Beatles", who reject the Indian migrants
and a potential redefinition of their English
culture. The idea of a third space seems to
vanish because of the violent encounter,
which ends up annihilating difference and
hierarchizing the superiority of one culture
over another. However, at the end of the
story the narrator recovers the vision of a
liminal space between cultures: he decides
to live in London, to make choices that do
not respond to what his father would have
wanted, and to travel to his native India as
well. However, it is a space that does not
cease to be painful and paradoxical (and
perhaps utopian) as his identity remains
fragmented between East and West.
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SP Publications
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES)
An International Peer-Reviewed Journal ; Volume-3, Issue-8, 2021
www.ijoes.in ISSN: 2581-8333; Impact Factor: 5.421(SJIF)
ISSN: 2581-8333 Copyright © 2021 SP Publications Page 58
RESEARCH ARTICLE
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