The South Asian Literature Final Exam

This afternoon, my South Asian Literature students did the final examination. I drafted the questions last night, after a two day struggle as I noted in my previous blog post. Looking at these questions, neither I nor anyone else, I suppose, can believe that it took me a rather long time to create them. For two days, my mind was simply unable to do what I desired.

Eventually, I created three questions, from which the students were required to answer two. I am willing to present the questions here, for whatever they are worth:

1) Discuss the situation of the Parsees in Bapsi Sidhwa's The Crow Eaters and how they deal with it.

2) Discuss one of the characters in Bapsi Sidhwa's The Crow Eaters.

3) Discuss the relationship between any two characters in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef.

Certainly, I could have created a question dealing with narrative techniques or artistry in general. However, considering that the class comprises students of different disciplines, spanning the spectrum from mathematics to exercise science, I decided to ask questions that would be fair to everyone. If this was a class of only English majors, I would create at least one question on the artistic dimension of the literary works.

With the teaching and the final examination over, I am bracing myself for grading the answer scripts, a task that can be full of surprises but is always interesting and refreshing. One of the surprises is simply that a student majoring in, say, biology or economics might be the one with the best performance in an examination like this one, which, according to conventional wisdom, is outside that student's field. In a liberal arts college such St. Olaf, however, such surprises are not uncommon. That, at least, has been my experience.

My South Asian Literature Course Just Ended

My South Asian Literature course ended yesterday, if I can frame things that way. In any case, yesterday we had our last class of the semester. We still have to prepare for the final examination, scheduled for Monday, barely two days away.

I don't know about other professors, but creating examination questions is rather challenging for me. Every time I teach a course, it is a different experience from any previous offerings of the course. My thoughts about any literary work change, influenced by various factors, such as the books and other writings I read all the time.

There is also the fact that rereading a literary work yields new insights. Then, each class of students is different in many ways from any previous class, resulting in different discussions of any given literary work. Nor is the sequencing of the readings constant from year to year. I also complicate matters more because I like to include, in the course, a text or texts I have never read.

In view of all this, I cannot simply give the students questions from past examinations. I have to think hard in efforts to capture the uniqueness of each iteration of the course. Since we did not manage to get to the end of Gunesekera's Reef, our last text for this semester, I have also to figure out how to incorporate this text in the examination., or how to give students the opportunity to use or invoke it. I cannot omit it entirely, since we have spent considerable time and effort on it.

That is the challenge I am facing this weekend. However, I am not overly concerned. I have always encountered such challenges and produced what I consider suitable examination questions.

We Are Reading Gunesekera's "Reef"

This is the last week of classes for this semester here at St Olaf College. We are reading, in my South Asian Literature course, Romesh Gunesekera's Reef, a novel I had taught before. We are a little more than half way through it, going at a comfortable pace. Everybody is tired at this time of the semester, and I have told my students that I do not believe the reading of any work of literature should be rushed or done under pressure.

Rereading Reef, I am enjoying the discovery of aspects of it that I might have missed the first time around. For example, I am gaining a better understanding of Mister Salgado, one of the main characters. I have shared with my students my sense that he is eccentric, what with his obsession with lists, for example, which the narrator, his servant, describes thus:

Early on I learned the value of making lists from watching Mister Salgado. He was a great one for lists. He would listen to The Mikado and write page after page of lists: shopping lists, laundry lists, book lists, betting lists, things-to-do lists, diary lists, repair lists, packing lists, record lists, larder lists, letter's to write lists (p. 33)

No less peculiar is his habit of using the same tooth brush, never replacing it, according to the narrator, "until there was practically nothing left but the plastic handle. I would watch the bristles get shorter and more squashed day after day, until sometimes I myself would go and buy him a new one and place it in his mug" (p. 19-20)

In class today, I waxed profusely about Gunesekera's narrative skill. To illustrate this, I read the following passage, which invites much comment on account of its use of language and figures of speech:

We drove for hours; whistling over a ribbon of tarmac measuring the perpetual embrace of the shore and he sea, bounded by a fretwork of undulating coconut trees, pure unadorned forms framing the seascape into a kaleidoscope of bluish jewels. Above us a tracery of green and yellow leaves arrowed to a vanishing-point we could never reach. At times the road curved as though it were the edge of a wave itself rushing in and then retreating into the ocean. We skittered over these moving surfaces at a speed I had never experienced before. Through the back window I watched the road pour out from under us and settle into a silvery picture of serene timelessness. We overtook the occasional bus belching smoke or a lorry lisping with billowing hay; we blasted through bustling towns and torpid villages. We passed churches and temples, crosses and statues, grey shacks and lattice-work mansions.

This description of the Sri Lankan countryside, I find not only vivid, but very pleasant to read, and I shared my thoughts about it with the class.

There is, of course, much to say about Reef, as is the case with any work of literature worth the name. There is no way we can grasp and express the plethora of meanings it can generate. A literary text signifies ceaselessly, as Roland Barthes would say. Someday, hopefully, I will write more about this remarkable novel.

Update on my South Asian Literature Course

My plan for the South Asian Literature course this semester has undergone some changes. After teaching Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, we moved on to Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi. However, hardly had we gone beyond the half-way point than my health, which has been uncertain for many months, deteriorated, and I had to be hospitalized again, at the Abbot Northwest Hospital in Minneapolis.

Fortunately, after slightly over a week, I was released. During my absence, an English Department colleague graciously stepped in and taught Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. When I heard that she was teaching this novel, I was delighted, having taught it myself several years ago, as part of the South Asian Literature course.

Upon resuming my teaching of the course, a week ago, we started reading Bapsi Sidhwa's The Crow Eaters. When I was choosing texts to use this semester, I made a point of including Sidhwa, largely because I wanted some example of writing from a Pakistani writer. Having taught The Crow Eaters before, as well as Sidhwa's other novel, Cracking India, I knew that Sidhwa's writing is accessible to undergraduate students.

We are approaching the midway point of this novel now. Then, we will read Romesh Gunesekera's Reef, another novel I have taught before. Like Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Reef affords memorable insights, from a fictional point of view, into the Sri Lankan experience.

Time seems to have gone by very fast, and I know we will not be able to read Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. What a pity. In the future, I plan to change my strategy: I will use Rushdie's novel early in the semester, to ensure that my students have some experience of reading and reflecting on this very gifted, albeit controversial writer. I also doubt if I will be able to introduce any poetry, although I prepared myself to teach some poems from that part of the world, such as Michael Ondaatje's.

Though I have some regrets, I take solace from the fact that by the end of the semester, my students will have a fairly good idea of South Asian Literature, a tradition that, rich and vibrant as it is, appears rather remote to many people.

Teaching South Asian Literature Again

The St. Olaf College Fall semester started a week ago, on September 4. I am teaching two courses: Writing and South Asian Literature. I wish to say a few things about the South Asian Literature course, which I taught for the first time in the Spring of 2011, as I reported on this blog.

I am using Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi, Bapsi Sidhwa's The Crow Eaters, and Romesh Gunesekera's Reef. For the first time, I am using Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, a work I had not read before but am reading now, in preparation for teaching it later in the semester.

I was eager to include a Rushdie work after teaching his Midnight's Children and finding it both intriguing and interesting, on account of its narrative techniques--which are somewhat complex and confusing--its historical, cultural and religious references and allusions, as well as its style of presenting characters.

I wanted to teach this novel, prompted by, and regretting, the fact that I had not read it. I felt ashamed of myself for not having read this famous literary work, even though I know there are dozens of other famous works I will not be able to read. Sadly, one can only do so much in a lifetime.

One thing I would really like to do is include some poetry, as I told my students today. I hope we will have a few days at the end of the semester to read some poems. Currently, I am reading The Cinnamon Peeler, a collection of poems by Michael Ondaatje, both for my own education and also in order to prepare a selection of poems I can use when or if the opportunity arises. I plan to complement any poems I might choose from this collection with poems from other sources.

Overall, the semester has started well, and I am looking forward to a rich learning experience for my students and me.