Abstract
Baumgartner’s Bombay is undeniably Anita Desai’s signal achievement as a novelist, both in terms of the magnitude of meaning and the superb artistry. As a postcolonial novel, it carries the most intricate philosophical meaning of the puzzle of human existence, its obscenity, absurdity and meaninglessness. In a more universal sense, it is a story of the sociohistoric process of man’s degradation and dehumanization by fellow man: it is a discourse on the nature of evil, the structure of human consciousness and the history of fragmentation and the collapse of civilization. Hugo Baumgartner, a German Jew, is forced to flee prewar Nazi Germany to India and even after 50 years of his residence in the country of his adoption he is variously known as a “firanghi,” a “melachha” and “the Madman of the Cats, the Billéwallah Pagal”1 and finally murdered in cold blood by a young German hippie, an Aryan. In a more specific sense, therefore, especially considering the periodization and historiography, one may think that the narrative centers on the ethics of anti-Semitism and the historical treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.
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Notes
Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (London: Penguin, 1989) 10.
See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), especially the discussion in chapters 1 and 2;
Curtis M. Hinsley, “Strolling through the Colonies,” Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996) 119–40;
I am referring to some of the fundamental assumptions in chapter 1 of Georg Lukâcs’s The Historical Novel trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, preface by Irving Howe (Boston: Beacon, 1963).
See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, ed. Ian Gregor (New York: Bobbs, 1971) 81–106.
See Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), chapter 1.
For commentary on Kipling and Forster see Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993) 132–62, 200–06;
and for Desai and Forster see Judie Newman, History and Letters: Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay World Literature Written in English 30. 1 (1990): 37–46.
For variant responses to Forster’s A Passage to India see Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalists (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991).
For Thackeray’s representation of India see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 73–107.
John Clement Ball and Chelva Kanaganayakam, “An Interview with Anita Desai,” The Toronto South Asian Review 10.2 (Winter 1922): 30–41;
Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock, Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992) 156–79.
Michael Valdez Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1995) 192.
Cited by Christopher Ricks in T S. Eliot and Prejudice (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988) 197.
For the figure of Urizen see William Blake’s The Four Zoas and Jerusalem in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake ed. David V Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982);
for the figure of Jupiter see Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Shelley: Poetical Works ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford UP, 1967).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey, rev. ed. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975).
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), especially chapters 1–5.
See Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban:The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990).
See Robert E. Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Men” (1928), Theories of Ethnicity:A Classical Reader, ed. Warner Sollors (New York: New York UP, 1996) 156–67.
See Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation, trans. Willfried Feuser (New York: Monthly, 1974) 65.
See Philip Gleason, “Identifying Identity:A Semantic History” (1983), The-ories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader ed. Warner Sollors 461.
It can be safely assumed that in the European discourse on India the standard conventional groupings are almost along ideological lines. For varied representations of India see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963);
Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia UP, 1984);
Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995);
John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991);
John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1987);
Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990);
Donald F. Leach, India in the Eyes of Europe (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968);
Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992);
Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992);
Jean Sedlar, India in the Mind of Germany: Schelling, Schopenhauer and their Times (Washington, D.C.: UP of America, 1982).
See Anita Desai, “Re-Reading Tagore,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29.1 (1994): 5–14.
Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (London: Chatto, 1956) appeared in the U.S. in 1956 as Mano Majra.
Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1991) had originally appeared as Ice-Candy-Man (1988).
See Graham Huggan, “Philomela’s Retold Story: Silence, Music, and the Post-Colonial Text,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25.1 (1990): 12–23;
Prafulla C. Karr, “Khushwant Singh: ’Train to Pakistan,” Major Indian Nov-els:An Evaluation, ed. N. S. Pradhan (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1986) 88–103;
Also see K. K. Sharma and B. K. Johri, The Partition in Indian-English Novels (Ghaziabad: Vimal, 1984).
For Rushdie’s view of history see David Lipscomb, “Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Con-testing History in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” Diaspora 1. 2 (1991): 3–29.
also see Percival Spear’s description of the country’s “Mood,” in The Ox-ford History of India 1740–1947 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) 376.
See E. M. Forster’s treatment of the epistemology of reality in “Part I: Cambridge,” The Longest Journey (New York: Vinatage, 1962).
Also see Pico Iyer’s “The Spiritual Im-port-Export Market: Journey to Ithaca by Anita Desai” (1995), in his Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions (New York: Knopf, 1997) 164–77.
For the idea of ekphrastic poetry see John Hollander, “The Gazer’s Spirit: Romantic and Later Poetry on Painting and Sculpture,” The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990) 130–67.
See Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1968) 187–93 about the myths of the elite.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: Complete Authoritative Text with Biograph-ical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays, 2nd ed., ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996) 86.
Quoted in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster:A Life $12 vols. (New York: Harcourt, 1981) 2. 125.
See, for example, Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain:A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1969) 298ff.
For the symbology of Shiva I am indebted to Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969);
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva, rev. ed. (New York: Noonday, 1969);
Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of Siva (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981).
See, for example Malashri Lal, “The Shift from Female Centered to Male Centered Narrative in the Novels of the 1980s:A Study of Anita Desai and Nayantra Sahgal,” The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of 1980s, ed. Viney Kirpal (New Delhi: Allied, 1990) 279–86;
Harveen Sachdeva Mann, “‘Going in the Opposite Direction’: Feminine Recusancy in Anita Desai’s ‘Voices in the City,’” Ariel 23.4 (1992): 75–95.
See the discussion in part 5 of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: vol. 1: An Introduction trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
M. Keith Booker, A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism (New York: Longman, 1996) 91.
See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965) espe-cially chapter 1.
The idea of the metaphor of belly comes from Aijaz Ahmed’s “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (1987), Marxist Liter-ary Theory: A Reader ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (Oxford: Black-well, 1996) 375–89.
This phrase is a reconstruction of Diana Brydon’s title of her essay “A Post-Holocaust, Post-ColonialVision,” International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers ed. Robert L. Ross (New York: Garland, 1991) 583–92.
Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (Boston: Beacon, 1966) 163.
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Verma, K.D. (2000). Humanity Defrauded: Notes toward a Reading of Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay. In: The Indian Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61823-1_9
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