India in the World
India in the World
Edited by
Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández
and Antonia Navarro-Tejero
India in the World,
Edited by Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández and Antonia Navarro-Tejero
This book first published 2011
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2011 by Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández and Antonia Navarro-Tejero and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-3289-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3289-2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix
List of Tables.............................................................................................. xi
Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii
Part I: Postcolonial Issues
Chapter One................................................................................................. 3
The Idea of India in Early Medieval England
Mark Bradshaw Busbee
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17
Exoticism Stops at the Second Hyphen
Elisabeth Damböck
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 39
All the Raj: French-Speaking Comics about India
Corinne François-Denève
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 61
Indian Response to El Quijote
Shyama Prasad Ganguly
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 75
From Inscrutable Indians to Asian Africans
Felicity Hand
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 87
“Indias in Mind”: The Literary Recovery of Absent India
Juan Ignacio Oliva
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 101
The Redefinition of the Concept “Anglo-Indian” in Contemporary
Narrative
Laura Peco González
vi
Table of Contents
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 109
Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” Macaulay and Warren
Hastings—From Orientalism to Globalisation?
Christopher Rollason
Part II: Literature
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 123
Daughter Forsaken: La Résistance of the Indo-Mauritian Girl Child
in Ananda Devi’s Novels
Rohini Bannerjee
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 135
Principles of Sanskrit Poetics in Contemporary Context: The Rasadhvani
Approach to J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man
Bhavna Bhalla
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 143
Framing Interpersonal Violence in A Married Woman
Olga Blanco-Carrión
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 157
Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández
Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 163
The Search for Female Identity in R. K. Narayan’s The Dark Room
Emma García Sanz
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 173
“She had been certain the river would sustain her”: Modernist
Aestheticism in Anita Desai’s Fiction
Maria J. Lopez
Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 183
Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and the Deconstruction
of Traditional Binary Oppositions
Javier Martín Párraga
India in the World
vii
Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 191
Amitav Ghosh’s “Imaginary Homelands”: The Question of Identity
in The Shadow Lines
María Elena Martos Hueso
Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 203
Orpheus and Eurydice as Indian Rock-and-Roll Superstars:
Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet
Ana Cristina Mendes
Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 211
A Paradise Lost: Kashmir as a Motif of Rift in Salman Rushdie’s
Shalimar the Clown
Maurice O’Connor
Part III: History and the Arts
Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 223
The Internal Exile of Dalit Women in Andhra Pradesh
Alida Carloni Franca
Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 233
About the Role of India in Contemporary Art
Eva Fernández del Campo Barbadillo
Chapter Twenty One................................................................................ 247
“City and Non-City”: Political Issues in In Which Annie
Gives It Those Ones
Joel Kuortti
Chapter Twenty Two ............................................................................... 257
A Brief Overview on Feminism in India
Antonia Navarro-Tejero
Chapter Twenty Three ............................................................................. 265
Bollywood and South Asian Diasporic Films in the U.K.:
Gurinder Chadha’s Female Road Movie
Esperanza Santos Moya
viii
Table of Contents
Chapter Twenty Four............................................................................... 277
Sati: A Construction of Reality in With Krishna’s Eyes
Rosalía Villa Jiménez
Chapter Twenty Five ............................................................................... 289
Nativism versus Imperialism? Debates and Interpretations
in the Ancient History of India
Fernando Wulff Alonso
Contributors............................................................................................. 301
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1-1 The World According the Geographer Paulus Orosius in Historia
Adversus ad Paganos ........................................................................................ 6
Fig. 1-2 The “Host” (From Cotton Tiberius folio 81v.) ........................................ 11
Fig. 1-3 The Donestre or divine one (From Cotton Tiberius, folio 83v.) .............. 12
Fig. 20-1 Baranov-Rossiné’s Adam and Eve (1912) ........................................... 234
Fig. 20-2 Delaunay’s Circular Shapes Sun 1 (1912)........................................... 235
Fig. 20-3 Brancusi’s The Beginning of the World (1925).................................... 236
Fig. 20-4 Relief Carvings of the Borobudur stupa............................................... 237
Fig. 20-5 Gaugin’s Never More (1897) ............................................................... 237
Fig. 20-6 Pechstein’s Woman with Indian on a Carpet (1910) ........................... 238
Fig. 20-7 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s copy of an Ajanta painting (1910)............... 239
Fig. 20-8 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Bathers (1910)............................................. 239
Fig. 20-9 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s poster for the MUIM Institute (1911).......... 240
Fig. 20-10 Bhupen Khakar’s Potrait of Salman Rushdie (1995) ......................... 241
Fig. 20-11 Acharya Vyakul (1986) exhibited at Magiciens de la Terre .............. 242
Fig. 20-12 Syed Haider Raza’s Surya (1986)...................................................... 243
Fig. 20-13 Anish Kapoor’s Tarantara (2000) ..................................................... 244
Note
The illustrations are used for purposes of citation only and in accordance with the
fair use principle. The copyright, if the case arises, belongs to their authors.
LIST OF TABLES
Table 11-1. Evolution of Anger in Astha’s father ................................................ 147
Table 11-2. Evolution of Astha’s emotions in Target Text 1 ............................... 147
Table 11-3. Evolution of Astha’s emotions in Target Text 2 ............................... 149
INTRODUCTION
The title of the present volume, India in the World, quickly reminds of
the Indian diaspora, a dispersion of population from their homelands to a
new world, either from the original perspective of the term—as it was
applied to Jewish diaspora—or an exile framed within capitalism’s global
expansion. The unrelenting idea lingering behind exile and migration
points towards the notion of a pending sense of belonging based on shared
beliefs, whether historical, religious, political or cultural. However,
diaspora is no longer tied to land exclusively; instead diasporas go beyond
national borders to make of it an ungrounded cultural phenomenon. Thus,
exile necessarily entails that cultural identities are essentially characterized
by fluidity, mobility, and become therefore a process themselves. Such
ongoing-ness exacts an unceasing creation of new connections, bonds and
links as well as its counterparts with their fracture. In other words, this
continual course is what becomes crucial. Moreover, some critical
approaches to diaspora also focus, after Salman Rushdie’s well-known
“Imaginary Homelands”, on the informing role of imagination as a tool
which allows the re-creation, re-formulation and re-shaping of the home
through identity. In this sense, migrancy has been also applied to a
transitory state within identity, not only as an action.
In relation to India, the issue of Indian-ness has adopted manifold and
kaleidoscopic forms no matter where such identity/-ies, with all its/their
many possible adjectives, was/were. This problematic and multifaceted
view full of possibilities led the editors, as members of the Permanent
Seminar on India Studies at the University of Córdoba (SPEI-UCO) to
organize the I International Conference India in the World, aimed at both
students—who could attend intensive workshops on Hindi language and
Indian Cuisine for two days—and for a wider community of researchers
and experts on India. Contributions from a variety of fields, including
politics, literary criticism, sociology, philosophy, history, ecology,
anthropology, and others, were invited, but specially those considering the
relationship between India and the world in all its possible manifestations—
states of the mind, commerce, colonization, travel exoticism, the internet,
and so on—and this could only be approached from an interdisciplinary
approach. Therefore, India in the World includes a selection of essays
produced by a variety of South Asian, European, and North-American
xiv
Introduction
scholars who attended the Conference, and which provided the academic
grounds for the founding of the Spanish Association for Interdisciplinary
India Studies (http://www.aeeii.org).
The AEEII is a scientific association which promotes studies on India
with an interdisciplinary approach as well as it focuses on activities within
the scope of university academics. Consequently, the twenty-five essays
gathered in this volume, which explore from an interdisciplinary
perspective the most recent critical approaches to India Studies, deal with
a wide range of topics and do so from equally diverse viewpoints. This
mosaic of essays has been divided into three parts, each of them arranged
alphabetically by the last name of the contributors.
The first section deals with Postcolonial issues, where articles discuss
themes related to transnational identity such as hyphenation, diaspora, and
orientalism. The present collection starts with Bradshaw Busbee’s article,
which analyses three of the oldest existing Anglo-Saxons’ commentaries
on and images of India as a paradise inhabited by monsters. He proposes
“frustrated desire” as an innovative alternative to the traditional oversimple explanation to this phenomenon. Damböck argues that the visible
“other” is increasingly made use of and fetishised in the consumer market
based on expectations of “the exotic”, and consequently its reduction to
hetero-stereotypes, and concludes that authors of multiple ethnic backgrounds
like Shani Mootoo or Farida Karodia subvert stereotypization of the
market as they stress the complexity, hybridity and ambiguity of definitions
of cultural heritage. The next four essays focus on specific locations such
as the reconstruction of India in France, India in East Africa, Spain in
India, India in the UK, and Indias in the mind. François-Denève’s essay
aims at exploring the new Indian “craze” in France as an epiphenomenon
derived from globalization, and debates if the English foe came back to
France through the new guise of the Indian diaspora. Professor Ganguly
describes the Indian reception of Don Quixote, highlighting the reflection
of specific realities of the Indian space in the limited engagements with the
text, seen as an expression of some elements of the Indian national
biography. Hand explores in her essay the ambiguities that constituted the
position of East African Asians in the socioeconomic make-up of the
colonies, and examines to what extent they have had to reassess their
subject position within the larger South Asian diasporas of the world. She
starts with a brief introduction to the historical background of South
Asian immigration to East Africa to later outline the basic ethnocultural differences among all the South Asian communities. Professor
Oliva treats the image of “the self and the Other”, the exploration of
territories, and the mapping of problematic identities in the literary
India in the World
xv
production of contemporary Indo-Canadian and Indo-American writers.
Peco González makes an overview of how the term “Anglo-Indian” has
been re-defined in contemporary narrative. This section ends with a
reading of Poe’s narrative by Rollason. He argues the Poe’s narrative
points to the subversion within the text of the Orientalist discourse,
resulting in an anticipation of the “reverse colonialist” dynamic of today’s
Indian economy vis-à-vis the Anglo-American empire, offering an
uncanny parallel to the post-Macaulayan appropriation of the English
language by a resurgent India to counter-hegemonic ends.
Section two closely examines specific literary texts and authors such as
Ananda Devi, J.M. Coetzee, Manju Kapur, Jhumpa Lahiri, R.K. Narayan,
Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie, from feminist or
comparative approaches. Bannerjee analyses the girl child in two of Devi’s
novels based on Roland Barthes’ term the image déformée of the girl child
employing Ross Chambers and Michel de Certeau’s oppositionality theory
in order to explore the Mauritian identity of girl children. Bhalla delves
into Sanskrit poetics, seeking to prove that the rasadhvani theory is
appropriate not only for Indian literature, but also for culturally alien texts,
as she demonstrates with J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man. Blanco-Carrión
approaches Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman from a cognitive linguistics
perspective in order to explore the construction of violence and the
scenarios in which such violence takes place by paying attention to the
linguistic expressions used in these situations. Gámez-Fernández delves
into the strong relationship between identity and naming in Jhumpa
Lahiri’s The Namesake, as the main character struggles with being the
descendant of an Indian family in the U.S. and having a Russian name.
García Sanz deals with female identity as it is constructed through the
different roles they play in life and the relationships they establish with
male family members in R.K. Narayan’s The Dark Room. Lopez maintains
that Anita Desai’s novels are clearly indebted to modernism as regards
human consciousness and scrutinizes features and scenes where there is a
conflict between inner desires and social conventions, or where those inner
impulses are conveyed by an intense sense of aestheticism. Martín Párraga
unveils the special ways in which Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters
deconstruct traditional binary oppositions such as individual vs. social or
story vs. history. Martos Hueso borrows Salman Rushdie’s famous
“Imaginary Homelands” in order to look into the nuances of identity in
Amitav Gosh’s The Shadow Lines, as they follow Gosh’s endeavor to
undermine the myth of cultural purity and the rigidity of national
discourses. Mendes studies Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her
Feet by focusing on Rushdie’s re-invention of the Greek myth of Orpheus
xvi
Introduction
and Eurydice as rock superstars in substitution of Orpheus’ lyre. She ends
her article by acknowledging Rushdie’s move into a worldwide fictional
territory, consistent with his beliefs of postcolonial identities. Finally,
O’Connor carries out an analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown
as it, together with Midnight Children, is strongly engaged with the motif
of Kashmir as a terrainal Paradise which, O’Connor points out, unveils
several Rushdie’s personal stances.
And finally, section three focuses on History and the Arts, that is, there
are contributions on films, anthropology, Ancient history, sociology, and
contemporary art. First, Carloni Franca describes the life of a Dalit woman
in the Rural Development Trust Vicente Ferrer, in Anantapur, as an
example of the strategies to overcome double discrimination, that of
gender and caste. Fernández del Campo Barbadillo examines the role
played by India in the “Art Autre”, a contribution largely ignored up until
now. Kuortti and Santos Moya take up on films. The first analyses how In
Which Annie Gives It Those Ones by Arundhati Roy expresses social
concerns and critiques political and gender issues, and the second focuses
on Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, which offers its viewers a
female perspective on diversity within ethnic minority groups. Navarro
Tejero offers an overview on the history of women’s movement in India,
which dates long before Independence from the British Empire, although
the concept of identity politics acquired currency mainly in the early 90’s.
Villa Jiménez examines how the practice of sati has possibly been
constructed and likely reconstructed under Eastern and Western eyes. And
finally, Professor Wulff Alonso presents some innovative thoughts related
to the Ancient history of the Indian subcontinent, setting his argument in
the current debate about collective identities, in the critique of nationalist
models and, specifically, in their application to history and Ancient
history.
This volume, thus conceived and designed, wishes to promote highly
academic research on India Studies and to provide an interlocking network
of ideas that emerges from the contemporary social-cultural and political
world. This is just the departure point for future publications of the AEEII,
the year zero so to say. The first forthcoming volume, which focuses on
the relation India-Canada, promises to be as thorough as this one.
We would not like to end this introduction without acknowledging our
editor Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars Publishing and the
contributors of this volume their enormous patience. We are glad this book
saw the light of day in spite of the obstacles. We would also like to thank
our colleagues and students who helped to organize the I International
Conference India in the World with enthusiasm, and the institutions
India in the World
xvii
implied. Our special thanks go to Professor Bernd Dietz, our favorite
ideologist, for his implication in this project, his expert guidance, and for
continuing to be such an important advocate for the value of India Studies
in general and the Association in particular. This book is dedicated to all
the founding AEEII members, who unconditionally supported the idea to
create this Association and who encouraged us in many ways.
Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández
Antonia Navarro-Tejero
Editors
PART I:
POSTCOLONIAL ISSUES
CHAPTER ONE
THE IDEA OF INDIA IN EARLY
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
MARK BRADSHAW BUSBEE
What part did the idea of India play in the collective imagination of the
Englishmen living in the ninth and eleventh centuries? Where did they
think India was located? What did these Anglo-Saxon peoples imagine the
topography, natural resources, and people of India to be like? And in a
broader line of questioning: what were their attitudes toward the unknown
land called India?1 This essay offers some answers to these questions by
briefly surveying some early appearances of “India” in three broad
categories of Old English writings: Anglo-Saxon statecraft and history,
Christian legendary history, and Anglo-Saxon imaginative literature. In
these three areas, India was appreciated as a place of world importance, as
an exotic, threatening place where tests of spiritual purity might be held,
and as a remote world of fantasy where hopes and fears intertwine.
Throughout these writings in the Old English language, one tendency
remains constant: the Anglo-Saxons relate the idea of India with notions of
exoticism, sometimes with fear and sometimes with wonder.
“India” in Anglo-Saxon Statecraft and History
A group of interrelated manuscripts begun during the reign of King
Alfred the Great (r. 871-899), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the most
important source for the political history of early medieval England, from
the time of the earliest settlements to the Norman Conquest in the mid
eleventh.2 It is a record of Anglo-Saxon statecraft and a manifestation of
King Alfred’s desire to strengthen his people’s sense of their place in the
world and to enhance the potential for foreign diplomacy. For the year
883, “India” appears in the following entry:
4
Chapter One
In this year the [English] army went up the Scheldt to Condé, and stayed
there for a year. And Pope Marinus sent some wood of the Cross to King
Alfred.3 And that same year Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome the
alms, and also to India to [the shrines of] St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew,
when the English were encamped against the enemy [Viking] army at
London; and there, by the grace of God, their prayers were well answered
after that promise (Whitelock 1961, 50).
The oldest manuscript of the Chronicle, known as the “Parker Chronicle,”
ends after the first sentence in this entry. The “C” manuscript (also known
as Cotton Tiberius B. i.) gives 884 for the year.4 All of the other six
existing manuscripts include the passage about India, with its many
verifiable, historical details. Sigehlem was likely the army-leader and
nobleman whose death is recorded for the year 905, and Athelstan was
possibly the priest who assisted Alfred in his studies (Stevenson 1904,
290). Later historical records of this event further corroborate The
Chronicle entry, with slightly differing details. The Latin manuscripts of
Florence of Worcester (ca. 1125) state that in 883 a churchman, rather than
a soldier, named “Swithelm” bore Alfred’s alms to the shrine of Saint
Thomas in India (Thorpe 1848, 98-99). Athelstan is not mentioned. And in
History of the English Bishops), William of Malmsbury, a thirteenthcentury English historian writing in Latin, asserts that a journey to India
was successfully carried out by Bishop Sigehelm.
Sigehelm was sent across the seas, to further the almsgiving of the king
and also to visit [the shrine of] St Thomas in India, successfully
completing a journey that anyone nowadays might well regard with
wonder. He brought back with him exotic gems of the kind abundant in
that country; some can be seen still, set in objects ornamenting the church
(Winterbottom 2007, 279).
William also does not mention Athelstan, but his point that treasures were
brought back from India agrees with the 885Chronicle entry.
Despite these historical accounts, inconsistencies within The Chronicle
text itself cause raise doubts that Alfred sent an emissary to India. The
most blatant problem lies in the orthography of the entry: all manuscripts
give the word Iudea (Judea?). Most attribute this spelling to scribal error:
“J” and “I” are interchangeable and mistranscription of “n” and “u” is
common in medieval manuscripts. The idea that Saints Thomas and
Bartholomew were martyred in India, not Judea, seems to support the
reading of “Indea.”5 Also, the phrase “and also to India to St. Thomas and
St. Bartholomew” seems artlessly appended to the previous line or
couched between two sentences that carry historical merit. It is possible
The Idea of India in Early Medieval England
5
that Alfred sent emissaries to Rome—Alfred himself was sent there in
853, when only four years old6—but no enemy Viking army was in
London between 883 and 884. Skeptics also point out that Alfred
promised to send alms to India rather than that he actually sent them (Lees
1919, 191). (The promise, not the mission, is what God rewarded by
answering the prayers of the Anglo-Saxons.) Most strange is that the
outcome of this mission—whether Anglo-Saxon emissaries ever made the
trip, ever returned or, if they did, ever recorded what they saw—receives
no mention anywhere in Old English literature. These inconsistencies,
however, do not undermine the fact that India was important enough to be
mentioned in conjunction with historical events for the year 883/4.
Some scholars contend that Anglo-Saxons used the term “India” to
refer to the “East” in general. Mary Campbell (1988, 48) writes, for
example, that “‘the East’ is a concept separable from any purely
geographical area. It is essentially ‘Elsewhere’.” Campbell’s point finds
support in the writings of the late eighth-century English priest Alcuin of
York (ca. 730-804), who uses “India” to describe Asia in general (Ruge
1881, 5). The simple fact that the name consistently appears in relation to
the shrines of saints means that the Anglo-Saxons shared a common
appreciation of India’s spiritual importance. It is also reasonable think that,
if King Alfred did promise to send an emissary to particular shrines there,
he must have had some (though confused) idea of its physical location.
After he supposedly sent his emissary, Alfred commissioned a
translation of Orosius’ History against the Pagans, which contains a
chapter on world geography. It attempts to locate India geographically.7
We know that India is bounded by the Himalayas to the north, the Indian
Ocean to the south, the Arabian Sea to the west, and the Bay of Bengal to
the east. Depending as he does upon Orosius’ geography, King Alfred
situates India south of the Caucasus Mountains, north of the Red Sea, east
of the Indus River, and west of the Indian Ocean. He reports that the
mouth of the Ganges flows into an ocean in the middle part of Asia, and he
mentions “Caligardamana” (modern Calcutta) as an important port city on
the Indian Ocean (Sweet 1883, 10). King Alfred may have used a mappa
mundi, a traditional map of the world, as an aide (Bately 1972, 45). The
following map is a recreation of the theologically inspired geography of
the known world as Alfred (and Orosius before him) understood it. This
map gives a sense of Anglo-Saxon practical and ideological conceptions of
India.8
6
Chapter One
Fig. 1-1
The world assumed a tripartite shape, divided between Europe in the west,
Africa in the south, and Asia in the east. India (which is visible at the top
of the map) lay in Asia on the eastern borders of the world, which,
according to Genesis (ii, 8), is also the position of the Judeo-Christian
Paradise. India is inaccessible through experience, but still fascinating and
provocative to contemplate.
“India” in Anglo-Saxon Christian Legend
The idea of India also resonated in the teachings of the Christian
Church. Tenth-century Old English saints’ lives establish India as a stage
for scenes of spiritual endeavor. Seventh-century churchman Aldhelm (ca.
640-709), whose poetry was one of Alfred’s favorites, begins his Latin
poem about Saint Bartholomew by asserting that “mighty India stands as
the last of the lands of the earth” (quoted in O’Leary 2003, 110).9
Christian writers followed Aldhelm’s example so as to intensify the
martyrdoms there.
The tenth-century Old English poem “Fates of the Apostles,” for
example, confirms the popularity of the passions of the Saints Thomas and
Bartholomew when it states that “it has been no secret abroad that
Bartholomew (…) went to live among the people of India” and that
“Thomas bravely ventured into other parts of India” (Bradley 1982, 155156).10 Homilies by the tenth-century English priest Aelfric of Eynsham
(c. 955-c. 1010) offer detailed accounts of these two saints’ reluctance to
travel there, their encounters with Indian demons, their acts of healing and
other miracles, and their eventual torture and deaths at the hands of cruel
The Idea of India in Early Medieval England
7
Indian kings. These homilies appear in Aelfric’s Lives of the Saints, which
the author acknowledges are in large part translations from the works of
Augustine, Jerome, Bede, and Gregory. Aelfric’s Passion of “St.
Bartholomew the Apostle” (composed in the early tenth century), however,
offers additional insights into how the Anglo-Saxons had come to imagine
the religion and physical location of India. Aelfric writes,
There are three nations called India. The first India lies toward the
Ethiopians’ realm, the second lies toward the Medes, the third on the great
ocean; this third India has on one side darkness, and on the other the grim
ocean. (Thorpe 1844, 454)
Bartholomew travels to this third, darkest and most remote India to
“render vain all the idols which these Indians worship” (Thorpe 1844,
457). After he heals the “foolish people” of India who had been under the
spell of the god Astaroth, described as a black-faced devil, King Polymius
tries to pay Bartholomew with gold, silver, precious gems, and purple
garments. Bartholomew refuses the gifts, saying that “the Lord Christ (...)
has sent us among all nations, to drive away the devil’s ministers(...) But
we receive not gold, nor silver, but despise [them], as Christ despised
them; for we desire to be rich in His kingdom” (Thorpe 1844, 461). Won
over by Bartholomew’s piety, the king is baptized and shown by an angel
the real nature of Astaroth. Aelfric describes the demon as “immense
Ethiop, with sharp visage and ample beard. His locks hung to his ankles,
his eyes were scattering fiery sparks; sulphureous flame stood in his
mouth, he was frightfully feather-clad” (Thorpe 1844, 467).
Aelfric’s homily on “The passion of Saint Thomas” suggests that
Indians might be won over by Christian ideology and Roman innovation.
Thomas encounters no fire-breathing demons, but he has to overcome his
fears of India itself. Christ tells him that the king of the Indians is seeking
a skilled workman to build a palace in the Roman fashion. (The king’s
interest in Western technology allows missionaries into the confidence of
formidable, alien cultures.) Anticipating Christ’s request Thomas replies,
“Oh! Thou my Lord, / Send me wherever Thou will, except to the
Indians!” Christ consoles Thomas, telling him that He will be with him
and that “after you have gained for Me the Indians, / you shall come to
Me” in martyrdom (Skeat 401). Armed with knowledge of Roman
architecture and the power to heal, Thomas has great initial success. He
converts tens of thousands of Indians; he heals the blind and even raises
the dead. The king of the Indians and his brother are so impressed with
Thomas’ craftsmanship that they spare his life. His troubles begin when he
travels beyond the protection of these Western-leaning monarchs, “to the
8
Chapter One
farther India,” the “third India” mentioned in the “Passion of St.
Bartholomew,” and when he begins to convert Indian women, particularly
the sister-in-law of a king named Mazdai. He refuses to urge the Indian
wives to return to their husbands, so Mazdai tortures him and leads him
before “lifeless gods, / that he might lay his gift before them in offering.”
Thomas responds by commanding “the devil who dwelt in the magic work
that he should come out of the image” (Skeat 1881, 425). The devil obeys,
the image is destroyed, and the furious idolaters kill Thomas. In the end, it
seems that Thomas’ increasing dual intimacy with India and its people are
what lead to his torture and eventual death. At the abrupt end, when
Aelfric explains that Thomas’ body was moved to Syria from its resting
place in India, there is lingering doubt that Thomas’ influence might
endure. India once again falls back into anxiety-ridden obscurity.
Other Old English texts from the late tenth- and early eleventh century
indicate that the anxieties in Aelfric’s depiction of India might result in
part from a growing connection of India with the Islamic world and
therefore these anxieties contribute to a negative picture of Indian culture.
A tenth-century Latin text known as the Durham Ritual, an interlinear Old
English gloss edited by Aldred the Provost (Bishop of Lindisfarne from
947 to 968), discusses where St. Thomas is said to be buried. Aldred
glosses this part of the Latin text with the phrase “India saracina”
(Lindelöf 1927, 196). Katharine Scarfe Becket (2003, 172) writes that “no
other Old English text describes India as a home for the Saracens.” She
conjectures that the adjective “saracina” might have been intended “to
distinguish the land of India which Thomas visited from other regions with
the same name.” In the hands of churchmen, “India” was commonly used
in expressions for “ends of the earth”; therefore, Aldred’s gloss and even
Alfred’s poetic addition to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy may be
purely figurative in their use of “India.”11
It stands to reason that if India represents the ends of the earth—a place
as far away as can be from Britain—then it might become a convenient
origination point for archetypal transgression. In a manuscript from the
eleventh-century (BL Cotton Claudius B. iv), which contains notes on
Genesis, the third India to which Thomas travelled is further distinguished
as the location for the first murder. One of the notes states that Cain killed
Abel there (Prinz 1985, 6), and later, a note explains that after Adam’s
death, Seth divided his progeny from those of Cain, and Cain remained
where he slew his brother (Crawford 1922, 421). Through these notes, the
physical realities of India remain unrealized but ignoble spiritual
associations begin to accumulate there.
The Idea of India in Early Medieval England
9
India in Anglo-Saxon Imaginative Literature
about the East
Early eleventh century Anglo-Saxon scriptoriums began producing
manuscripts that included imaginative texts about India. Among the most
famous of these manuscripts are the so-called Exeter Book and the
Beowulf Manuscript. One poem, known as “Widsith” (Wide Traveler), in
the Exeter Book (folios 84b-87a), features a curious passage in which the
poem’s narrator says that he was “with the Asyrians and with the Hebrews
and with the Indians and with the Egyptians” (lines 82-83).12 This passage
is not integral to narrator’s story; rather, the lines seem to have been
“inserted at random, without very close attention to their appropriateness
or to the smoothness of the transitions” (Krapp and Dobbie 1936, xliii).
Possibly thinking about The Chronicle entry for 883/84, some editors of
the poem have argued that instead of “Indeum” the word should be
“Judeum.” Other scholars go so far as to print the lines featuring Indians
and Egyptians separately in a footnote in prose thereby asserting that they
have no place in the poem as it was originally intended. A few editors omit
them entirely. One scholar of Old English argues that the lines give the
poem a “grotesque effect” appearing as they do in the middle of a passage
otherwise concerned with the world of Old English legends (Malone 1936,
6).
The poet may have intended such an effect by including exotic peoples
and places. Or it may be that the reference to India is an allusion to other
Old English stories that mention India. At line 22 of “Widsith,” for
example, the name “Wada Hælsingum” (Wade of the Hælsings) appears.
Wade was well known in early Anglo-Saxon culture as a mythical hero
with a link to India. The original tale has been lost, but a version of it was
preserved by Walter Map in late twelfth-century Courtier’s Trifles. In
Walter’s retelling, Wade (whom Walter calls “Gado”) left “England for
the farthest parts of India (...) as one who was a sword in the Lord’s hand,”
and “having freed the Indians from their difficulties and now hurrying by
sea, was born by winds to his father’s kingdom [in England].” He returns
“in likeness angelic and made glorious by God” (James 1983, 169-171).
Wade’s ability to travel easily between India and England fits easily with
Widsith’s claim of greatness for having been to India and back. As an
implied cultural reference, the allusion to Wade also testifies to the
evocative power of the idea of India as an exotic ingredient in Old English
storytelling.
In other manuscripts from the same period, exoticism is increasingly
associated with the East. The most important of these Old English texts are
10
Chapter One
The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the Liber Monstrorum, and The
Wonders of the East.13 All are essentially translations from an ancient
tradition of foreign exotica that started with the Greeks in the early fifthcentury B.C.14 These source texts about the East “determined the western
idea of India for almost 2000 years, and made their way into natural
science and geography, encyclopedias and cosmographies, romances and
history, into maps, miniatures and sculpture” (Wittkower 1942, 159).
Imaginative literature featuring India had likely made its way to England
long before the ninth century and Alfred’s reign. English churchmen and
scholars likely extended interpretive value to these tales in order to bring
them in line with Christian theology and tradition.
The text that best demonstrates the spread to the British Isles of
fantastic ideas about India is Old English “The Letter of Alexander to
Aristotle,” which dates from the beginning of the eleventh century.15 In it,
Alexander, imagined as having recently reached India, sends his teacher a
report “concerning the situation of the great nation of India” (Orchard
1995, 225). He tells how he came into “Indie lond” (the land of India),
took control over “the entire nation,” and was “enriched with many royal
honors.” But he is not satisfied and wants “to see the interior of India”
(229) so that he can see first-hand “anything in that land had been hidden
or concealed from me” (243). At first incredulous about what he is told
about the wonders of India, Alexander’s tireless curiosity pays off. He
encounters giants, two-headed snakes, white lions the size of bulls, giant
bats (237), a rhinoceros (239), a crocodile, and an attacking herd of
elephants, which he scares away with his own herd of pigs (243).
As naïve as these images might seem to the modern reader, they were
likely quite impressive to the Anglo-Saxons. Alexander carefully describes
the various races of native peoples he meets. In particular, he notes habits
of eating and clothing, as well as how the natives respond to him and his
army. The following passage is representative of Alexander’s attitude
towards the Indians he meets:
We saw shaggy women, and men who were as shaggy and hairy as beasts.
They were nine feet tall, and naked, not bothering about clothing. The
Indians call these people Ictifafonas, and they snatch up whales from the
neighboring rivers and lakes, and eat them and live on them, and drink the
water afterwards. When I wanted to take a closer look and observe these
people, they immediately fled into the water and hid themselves in stony
hollows. After that we saw amongst the wooded groves and trees a great
multitude of Cynocephali [creatures with dog heads] who came because
they wished to wound us, and we shot them with arrows, and they soon
fled away and went back into the woods (243-5).
The Idea of India in Early Medieval England
11
Alexander also pauses frequently to praise the abundance of India:
It was a place spacious and pleasant, and balsam and incense were there in
abundance, and welled out from the boughs of the trees and the people of
that land ate them and lived thereby. Then we took a closer look at that
place, and went through the groves, and I was amazed at the loveliness and
beauty of the land (247).
Elsewhere Alexander describes India in language reminiscent of Christian
descriptions of heaven. He tells how the palaces have golden and ivory
walls and columns and how the leaves in the vineyard are gold, their
tendrils and fruits crystal and emerald (229). Throughout, he assumes the
attitude of a collector, alternatively full of wonder and awe.
Another text known as “The Wonders of the East” follows the tradition
set forth in “The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle.”16 Unlike “Letter,”
“Wonders of the East” attempts to describe objectively the topography,
plants, animals and legendary peoples of the East. There are people who
are “fifteen feet tall and have white bodies and two faces on a single head,
feet and knees very red, and long noses and black hair” who “travel in
ships to India, and bring their young into the world there” (Orchard 1995,
191).
The following set of images (Cotton Tiberius folio 81v.) gives an idea
of the types of peoples inhabiting this imaginative India. Figure one
depicts the “Host,” which translates as “enemy.” In the left frame, the
creature appears to be stepping out of his frame in an attempt to greet
viewers, in an inviting gesture; in the right image the results of the
accepted invitation are depicted: another “Host” in the process of
devouring a newly-arrived guest dressed in traditional Anglo-Saxon
clothing.
Fig. 1-2
12
Chapter One
The text accompanying the image does not describe this series of events. It
states only that Hostes catch and eat men. The image therefore reflects the
illustrator’s imagination, inviting viewers to participate in the Indian
creature’s world and to imagine the consequences of traveling there in
body. Another image features the Donestre, or divine one (Cotton
Tiberius, folio 83v.).
Fig. 1-3
This image follows the text closely. Donestre are half-human, but they
know all human speech and, by referring to the Anglo-Saxon visitor’s
family by name, gain his confidence, eat him up except for the head, and
weep over him afterwards. The melancholy of the Donestre after eating the
visitor seems to lessen his monstrosity and emphasize his humanity.
These imaginative texts and arresting images reveal that to the AngloSaxons India was “more than a dark region of uncertain danger or wild
opportunism; it was also a place where […] fantasy and imagination met
with uncertainty about an unknown land and people (Cohen 1996, 17-18).
Alexander’s attitude of wonder at what he sees and his willingness to
engage the native peoples encourages readers/viewers to entertain fantastic
ideas about India “Wonders of the East” offers descriptions and images of
India that pull the reader/viewer into imagined scenarios of interaction
with intelligent, awesome beings in a land of wonders.