Approaching Ondaatje's "The English Patient"

As my South Asian Literature course enters its final phase, we have begun reading Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I had never read this work before, but have taught Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost and read his collection of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler. I have always been aware, however, of the great reputation of The English Patient, winner of the Booker Prize, and I feel I should have read it long ago. However, as the saying goes, better late than never.

Having begun reading The English Patient, I find myself recalling several literary works, including Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences. Abandonment as an existential reality seems to unite all these works.

The main character in The English Patient fell from the sky after his plane was shot down over the Sahara desert during the Second World War and was rescued by Bedouins. Soon, we see this badly wounded person, the English patient, being taken care of by a nurse in Italy. His memories constitute a major part of the novel as it evolves. I am not able at this point to say much, but I am eagerly following the story, with the figure of the wartime nurse reminding me of Florence Nightingale.

Although I have only started reading The English Patient, I have begun to notice the pain that permeates it, much as it does in Anil's Ghost and "Letters and Other Worlds,"one of the poems in The Cinnamon Peeler. It is tempting to surmise that Ondaatje's vision of the human condition is rather somber. That is my initial impression, to be corrected or vindicated through further reading of Ondaatje's work.

My South Asian Literature Course is Underway

My South Asian Literature course has completed its third week, and I am pleased with it. We have read Bapsi Sidhwa's Water and watched Deepa Mehta's movie of the same name, on which the novel is based. Having taught two other novels by Sidhwa--Cracking India and The Crow Eaters--I found it easy to introduce Sidhwa to my class, situating her within the South Asian Literary tradition.

Reading Water has been eye-opening. Never had I encountered a novel that explored so deeply and passionately the situation of widows in Hindu society. I had some understand of Hindu traditions regarding widows, such as the concept and practice of sati. Water, however afforded a more detailed, more nuanced understanding of the existential condition of widows sanctioned by the religious doctrines going back thousands of years.

The central character is a young girl, Chuyia, married when she was barely ten to a man in his fifties and widowed soon thereafter. In accordance with Hindu Brahmanic tradition, she is taken away from her parents' home and put into an ashram, a home for widows. Chuyia's experiences in the ashram elicit the deepest sadness and sympathy especially since she entertains the hope of returning home sooner rather than later, little knowing that that is not possible.

Before Chuyia is widowed, we hear about the illness of her husband, Hira Lal, through the thoughts of Bhagya, her mother:

She and Somnah [her husband] both knew that if Hira Lal managed to recover, Chuyia would be allowed to return home; but if he didn't recover she would be a widow and she would never return to them....Bhagya's thoughts tormented her all night. She knew that in Brahmin culture, once widowed, a woman was deprived of her useful function in society--that of reproducing and fulfilling her duties to her husband. She ceased to exist as a person; she was no longer either daughter or daughter-in-law. There was no place for her in the community, and she was viewed as a threat to the society. A woman's sexuality and fertility, which was so valuable to her husband in his lifetime, was converted upon his death into a potential danger to the morality of the community. Bhagya's heart was filled with dread (p. 31-32).

When I think about the relationship between films and novels, I assume that the novels came first, inspiring the film makers. Sidhwa's novel, however, reverses this pattern. Watching the film after we had read the novel, I had a hard time keeping this in mind. I appreciated both, nevertheless, touched by the film's vivid portrayals of scenes, characters, and scenery that I had encountered in the novel. The colours and sounds in the film brought back memories of the month I spent in India in 1991.

Teaching South Asian Literature Again

We have just begun the fall semester, here at St. Olaf College. I am teaching two courses: First Year Writing and South Asian Literature. I just want to say a word about the Literature course.

Having included various South Asian writers regularly in my Post-colonial Literature course, I moved into teaching South Asian Literature rather easily. Year after year, I have developed a broader and deeper understanding of the literature and cultures of this region. Therefore, I have been eager to teach new texts, confident that I can situate them in the context of the tradition they spring from and participate in.

This semester, I have chosen to use texts I have neither read nor taught before. These are The Artist of Disappearance, by Anita Desai; Noontide Toll, by Romesh Gunesekera; The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri; Jasmine, by Bharati Mukherjee; The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje; and Water, by Bapsi Sidhwa.

Unlike in the past, I have decided to focus on contemporary writers. I will, of course, be making references to the long tradition going back to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and other Sanscritic texts, incorporating well known literary giants like Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, and more recent ones like Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie.

As always, since the field of South Asian Literature is so vast and ever-changing--like any other regional literary tradition--I am going to be asking myself why I have chosen particular authors and not others, why particular texts and not others. Nevertheless, I look forward to a memorable learning experience, for my students and me.

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.