The Home and the World: Queering Diaspora and Recasting the Nation in Ananda Devi’s Indian Tango

Abstract

This article attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in the construction of women as integral to the territorial sense of Indian nationhood. Specifically, it examines Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007), which rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare-Baire (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Tracing the novel’s historical intertexts in Indian nationalist and anti-indenture discourses, the article argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation through queer kinship, challenging the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation.

Keywords:

• Ananda Devi
• diaspora
• feminist
• indenture
• Indian Ocean
• Mauritius
• nation
• queer
• Rabindranath Tagore
• Satyajit Ray

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback, Maïté Marciano for her comments on early drafts of the paper, and Sara Appel for copyediting.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Gaurav Desai, ‘Oceans Connect: The Indian Ocean and African Identities’, PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 713–20; 716.

2. Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘Locating the Indian Ocean: Notes on the Postcolonial Reconstitution of Space’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 9, no. 3 (2015): 440–67; 445, https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2015.1091639.

3. Fiction writers who have explored these themes include Abdulrazak Gurnah from Zanzibar, Sophia Mustafa and M.G. Vassanji from Tanzania, Peter Kimani and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor from Kenya, and Barlen Pyamootoo, Shenaz Patel and Nathacha Appanah from Mauritius. For Indian Ocean perspectives on East African writing, see Dan Ojwang, Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 [2012]); Gaurav Gajanan Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Tina Steiner, ‘Writing “Wider Worlds”: The Role of Relation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fiction’, Research in African Literatures 41, no. 3 (2010): 124–35, https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.2010.41.3.124; Meg Samuelson, ‘Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral’, Comparative Literature 69, no. 1 (2017): 16–24.

4. Ritu Tyagi, Ananda Devi: Feminism, Narration and Polyphony (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013); Cécile Vallée Jest, ‘Ananda Devi, Indian Tango: Écrire à La Première Personne, Entre Réalité et Fiction’, Continents Manuscrits 6, no. 6 (2016), https://doi.org/10.4000/coma.656.

5. Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–31; 523.

6. Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2005).

7. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 171.

8. Ayo A. Coly, Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women’s Discourses of the Female Body (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019): 129.

9. William J. Spurlin, ‘Contested Borders: Cultural Translation and Queer Politics in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb’, Research in African Literatures 47, no. 2 (2016): 104–20; 108.

10. Sangeeta Ray, En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000): 8.

11. Ananda Devi, Indian Tango, trans. Jean Anderson (Austin, TX: Host Publications, 2011): 46. Unless specified otherwise, all English translations are from this edition.

12. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993): 120.

13. Chatterjee, The Nation, 126.

14. The ‘reformed tradition’ or the ‘new patriarchy’, as Chatterjee calls it, rejected ‘the patriarchy of indigenous tradition’ that, for instance, opposed schools for women or sanctioned child marriage (127).

15. Anandi Devi, Indian Tango (Paris: Gallimard, 2007): 90; Devi, Indian Tango (2011), 54.

16. Chatterjee, The Nation, 130.

17. Ibid., 131.

18. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 132.

19. Nishant Shahani, ‘“Resisting Mundane Violence”: Feminism and Queer Identity in Post-Colonial India’, Michigan Feminist Studies, 17, Gender and Globalisms (2003), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0017.002.

20. Devi, Indian Tango (2011), 32.

21. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 55.

22. Devi, Indian Tango (2011), 32.

23. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 241.

24. Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Indian Nationalism and Female Sexuality: A Trinidadian Tale’, in Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean, ed. Faith L. Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011): 101–24; 119.

25. Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 222.

26. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Premonitions of the Past’, The Journal of Asian Studies 74, no. 4 (2015): 821–41; 830.

27. Karen A. Ray, ‘Image and Reality: Indian Diaspora Women, Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse on Empowerment and Victimology’, in Women and the Colonial Gaze, ed. Tamara L. Hunt and Micheline R. Lessard (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 135–47; 143.

28. Niranjana, ‘Indian Nationalism’, 121.

29. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Totaram Sanathya’s Fiji Mein Ekkis Varsh: A History of Empire and Nation in a Minor Key’, in Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, ed. Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015): 169–89; 185.

30. Devi, Indian Tango (2011), 9.

31. Ibid., 136.

32. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 220.

33. Ray, En-Gendering India, 96.

34. Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994): 14.

35. Ray, En-Gendering India, 120.

36. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 32.

37. Devi, Indian Tango (2011), 16.

38. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 12.

39. Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, ed. William Radice, trans. Surendranath Tagore (London and New York: Penguin Classics, rev. ed., 2005): 31.

40. Ray, En-Gendering India, 115.

41. Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘The Home and the World: The Invention of Modernity in Colonial India’, Visual Anthropology Review 9, no. 2 (1993): 19–31; 24.

42. Devi, Indian Tango (2007): 76.

43. Aarti Kawlra, ‘Sari and the Narrative of Nation in 20th-Century India’, in Global Textile Encounters, ed. Marie-Louise Nosch, Feng Zhao and Lotika Varadarajan (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2015): 213–26; 214.

44. Kaamya Sharma, ‘The Orientalisation of the Sari—Sartorial Praxis and Womanhood in Colonial and Post-Colonial India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, no. 2 (2019): 219–36; 225.

45. Chatterjee, The Nation, 130.

46. Sharma, ‘Orientalisation of the Sari’, 230.

47. Ghare-Bāire (Home and the World), directed by Satyajit Ray (India, NFDC, 1984), DVD, Eclipse, Series 40, Late Ray (New York: The Criterion Collection Distributor, 2014): 1:43:40.

48. Françoise Lionnet, Écritures féminines et dialogues critiques: Subjectivité, genre et ironie (Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender and Irony (Trou d’Eau Douce, Ile Maurice: Aé, 2012): 242.

49. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 12; Devi, Indian Tango (2011), 3.

50. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 47, emphasis added.

51. Devi, Indian Tango (2011), 25.

52. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 47, my translation.

53. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 171.

54. Lionnet, Écritures féminines, 270.

55. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 31.

56. Devi, Indian Tango (2011), 15.

57. Chatterjee, The Nation, 131.

58. Lionnet, Écritures féminines, 254.

59. Chatterjee, The Nation, 129.

60. Devi, Indian Tango (2007), 275, my translation.