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EFL and Art: Learning English with all our senses : selected papers from the XXXV FAAPI Conference
/ compilado por Mario López Barrios ; edición a cargo de Elba Villanueva de Debat ; Daniel
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ISBN 978-987-26208-0-6

Anita Desai’s The Village by the Sea: Trapped between Two Discourses or Inhabiting a Third
Place? (Panel: Perspectives on Postcolonial Literature)

Florencia V. Perduca, MA
I.E.S. en Lenguas Vivas “J.R. Fernández”
Universidad del Litoral

Can a post-colonial character, a writer and a novel be trapped between two contending
discourses and thus be silenced? If so, can any of them, as subalterns, speak? (Spivak,1985). In
The Village by the Sea (1982), a multilayered novel written in English and yet full of signs of
Indianness, by German-Bengali writer Anita Desai, Hari starts an initiatic trip in search of his own
individual and cultural identity and is at the crossroads between Indian tradition and Western
modernity in post-independence India. Hari’s in-betweenness synecdochally represents the liminal
space of the non-native writer and the Indian English novel, since it is a site of struggle for the
recovery of the voice of the formerly oppressed, displaced and dispossessed. Can the voice of a
character, a writer and a novel be ever truly recovered? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian
postcolonial theorist and Marxist critic, is particularly concerned with this in her seminal essay “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” (1985), in which she explores the condition of the postcolonial subject as a
“silenced” being who can not become the agent of discourse, since s/he is trapped between the
voices of two contending cultures (coloniser/colonised; East/ West, etc). To develop her argument
on the inability of the postcolonial subject to speak, Spivak analyses colonial debates on the
practice of Sati, or widow self-immolation, in India to illustrate her point that the combined workings
of colonialism and patriarchy make it extremely difficult for the subaltern, in this case the brown
woman, to articulate a point of view. “The British abolition of it [Sati] has been understood as the
case of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’. Against this is the Indian nativist
statement ‘the women wanted to die’. These are examples of ventriloquist complicity. One never
encounters the testimony of the women’s voice consciousness: one cannot put together a voice”
(1985: 126). Gayatri Spivak argues that these widows are burnt since Satis are absent as subjects,
and she reads this absence as emblematic of the difficulty of recovering the voice of the oppressed
postcolonial subject.
Yet, in a later revisionist essay in her book The Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999: 296),
Spivak questions her own tenets: “Between patriarchy and development, this is the subaltern
woman’s situation today […] within the two contending versions of freedom, the constitution of the
subject in life is the place of the differend”. Within this line of argument, Homi Bhabha (1994: 126),
and Claire Kramsch (1993: 233), echoing his words, have asserted that subaltern people can speak,
and that a native voice can indeed be recovered in an “interstitial” or “third place”. As Bhabha
(1994:127) puts it, “in the third space of enunciation, as the assertion of difference in discourse, the
transformational value of change lies in the re-articulation of elements that are neither the one nor
the other but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both”. Indeed, this
third place is “itself defined as a place of in-betweenness. We have to view the boundary not as an
event but as a state of mind as a positioning of the subject in the intersection of multiple social roles
and individual choices” (Kramsch, 1993: 26, 234). So were does voice lie in a displaced sudra
(Dallapiccola, 2002: 178) such as Hari, in a German- Bengali writer such as Anita Desai and in an
Indian novel written in English such as The Village by the Sea? Is voice silenced by being torn
between two contending discourses or is it empowered by being inscribed in the in-betweenness of
a “third place”?
The Village by the Sea (1982) delves into post-independence rural India’s march towards
industrialisation, its increasing westernisation, and the many tensions and crises this has brought
into the life of the old and the new generations, particularly within the agrarian population, or
members of the sudra caste. The incoming factories initially appear to bring in new opportunities for
locals, who soon see through the mirage of progress and acknowledge themselves as unskilled
potential workers. This challenges who they are and who they want to become, both as individuals
and as a culture. So, as Spivak proposes (1985: 121), “let us now move to consider the margins of
the circuit marked by the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an
earlier economic text, men and women among the illiterate peasantry. On the other side of
international division of labour from socialised capital, can the subaltern speak?” Subaltern, to refer
to the economically dispossessed within capitalistic society, is a term borrowed from the work of
Gramsci and adopted by a well-known group of Indian Historiographers, The Subaltern Studies
Group, (Spivak and Guha, 1998: 20) seeking to recover the voices of the silenced peasantry,
suppressed under imperialism. A study of the The Village by the Sea reveals how, when faced with
the impact of modernity and the irreversible sweeping change in the form of a fertilizer complex, the
elder and the younger sudras react differently. The former show considerable apprehension while
the latter evidence gradual resilience. Yet, can the young generation, ‘the subaltern of the
subaltern’, voice out this necessity to adapt to the changing times without betraying tradition? Can
they possibly honour the past without betraying themselves and their future?
Just like the Satis, trapped in the dichotomy of whether or not to immolate themselves (Spivak,
1985), Indian younger generations, as portrayed in The Village by the Sea, are silenced by two
contending discourses. Appropriating Spivak’s terms, the children in the novel are trapped between
the imperialist promise ‘white men will save brown children from brown men’ and the nativist
statement ‘the children want to reject change’. This paralysing duality is what keeps Hari
throughout the first four chapters of the novel stagnant, silent and absent as a subject, since he is
always in two minds due to the stasis that this generates: “What should he do? Should he take the
part of the factory and try to find work in the new manner brought to them from the distant city? Or
must he stand beside his fellow villagers and fight for the right of farmers and fishermen to earn their
living by the traditional ways?” (VBS: 99). Hari cannot find a discourse that could empower him to
break free from “their dark, gloomy house and the illness and the hopelessness that surround them
like the shadows of the night” (67). The introductory chapters in the novel (VBS: 1-102) connote this
duality in the very texture of the narrative by means of foregrounding the vivid colours, pleasant
sounds and lively movement of the village (7-9, 21-25, 32-33) and contrasting these with the dull
colours, discordant sounds and lack of movement of Hari’s house (5, 7, 66, 71). Even nature
appears to be in sympathy with Hari and his apparently inescapable condition.
Thus, at this point, dwelling on the village merely by the sea, trapped in such binarity,
becomes useless to Hari, and he starts inwardly articulating his own discourse “everything belonged
here, everything blended together—except for himself…he could not settle down to belonging. He
had to soar up in the sky instead of being tied to the earth” (VBS: 59). The only way out of
postcolonial duality for Hari is to inhabit an “interstitial” or “third space of enunciation” (Bhabha,
1994: 5), and to apply the Indian integration of opposites (Keay, 2002: 54) to come up with a new
hybrid discourse of his own that would allow him to speak out his mind: ‘brown children can save
brown children without wanting to reject change’. This is evidenced in his decision: “he would
have to go to Bombay, a rich city, a great city with people who had jobs, earned money and made
fortunes” (VBS: 68). As Kramsch puts it (1993: 234), “growing into one’s own is by essence
recognising the faultlines in the social fabric. This also means acknowledging differences within
oneself and giving voice to feelings of being forever betwixt and between, no longer at home in the
original culture”. Hari’s enlightening decision may come as no surprise in the novel, and how it
works, since his exile is subtly hinted at throughout these chapters by the resourceful use of motifs
such as the “pariah floating kites” (VBS: 18-19, 59), the “birds flying out of the shadow” (4, 59) and
the “roaring sea and wind” (4, 18, 60), which connote the novel’s central theme of adaptation to the
flow of change for survival.
However, upon his arrival in Bombay, Hari will be recurrently trapped between conflicting
discourses and will try to articulate his own voice out of them. Yet, two instances are central to the
story and pivotal to his identity (re)construction. One is Hari’s looking forward to seeing “the Kala
Ghoda, the black horse” (VBS: 116) in the central square of Bombay, which he imagines as “great
black horse as a kind of deity, a god” (118) only to find that “it was taken away when the British left.
The people of Bombay did not want to see a foreign ruler after independence, not even a stone
one”. This leaves him “in gravest disappointment, for he would dearly have liked to see the emperor
upon his horse” (119). It is worth mentioning that Kala means ‘black’, but it is also used to refer to
time, fate and destiny. Besides, it is the name of Shiva, the destroyer of evil (Dallapiccola, 2002:
107). This play of the signifier may metaphorically suggest that the meaning of Hari’s life, and his
culture’s, will be resignified. Indeed, the emblematic empty pedestal symbolically stands for
decolonisation. Hari’s initial reaction to the Kala Ghoda points to how starving sudras are completely
unaware of the true breadth of their changing reality. Yet Hari is not trapped for long in the
dichotomy of whether or not to pine for the conqueror, since as Homi Bhabha (1985: 32) rightly
observes, “the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and
authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference”. This will soon have an effect on Hari
“even the empty pedestal began to look ominous, the absence of he Emperor’s statue began to look
a kind of message to Hari” (VBS: 135).
With the missing statue, the novel comes to connote the end of paralysis for Hari and his
people as a whole. And this is reinforced by the sweeping winds of change that will start blowing
and which will be materialised in the coming of the monsoon (181-186, 193-197, 215). This is
precisely when Hari’s life starts flowing, since he starts working at the Sri Krishna Eating House and
is apprenticed to a watch mender, Mr. Panwallah. Yet since nature in the novel is fused into
character and theme, the pattern of the ceaseless monsoon winds and rain will also be used in
order to convey the incessant thoughts and the tumult in the mind of Hari, once again trapped in a
dichotomy: “Now his head filled with the thoughts of that first night in Bombay […] should he keep
the watch-mending he was learning from Mr. Panwallah and with saving the money to take home?
Or should he take part in that fairy tale of world of cars, servants, holidays, money and freedom?”
(VBS: 194). Yet against Hari’s duality, there emerges a supplement, a further “third space” that
grows in the interstices between cultures. And as the monsoon comes to an end, so will Hari’s
confusion and doubts: “So Hari the fisherman, Hari the farmer will have to become Hari the poultry
farmer or Hari the watch-mender” (VBS: 209). Hari seems to be already assimilating the lesson that
Mr Panwallah will soon teach him: “Learn, learn, learn –so that you can grow and change. Things
change all the time, boy, and if you want to survive, you’ll have to change too” (210-211). So Hari’s
decision to “come back home when the monsoon is already over, after Coconut Day” (213), or
Shravani-Purnima, a ceremony to propitiate god Varuna, responsible for maintaining the universal
order (Yule, 2004: 59) will signal that there will be cultural continuity and order despite change.
Thus, the “text articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the
conditions of its possibility (Spivak, 1985: 124). And within this new order, and new cycle, the
´subaltern´, in this case Hari, will truly have a voice that will allow him to constitute himself as a
subject. “He knew he could make choices and decisions now. He had known he belonged to Thul
and that he would go back. It was wonderful to choose what you would do in life, and choose he
would” (VBS: 212).
The question now arises whether or not the author and the novel are trapped between two
contending languages and cultures. The answer will depend on how language, symbols, particularly
those conveying Indianness, and narrative technique are read. At this point it, is relevant to discuss
how the novel works, how as shown so far, “the post-colonial construction of language is not a
simple binary contestation but a centrifugal process of coming into being” (Tiffin and Lawson, 1994:
42). As Gayatri Spivak (1999: 271) rightly observes, “a text must traffic in a radical textual practice
of differences” for the subaltern to articulate their voice in the historical fabric. Even though the novel
is written in Standard English, it is not about people speaking English. We know that Hari speaks
“Hindi or “Maharati” (VBS: 147) and that in Bombay he cannot understand those speaking “Tamil”
(148). Indeed, the two people who actually do speak English at times, Sayyid Ali and Mr. de Silva,
are both marked in the novel as “the Sahib” (176, 140), an English speaking person (Yule, 2004:
315). In fact, the novel appropriates English to provide a literary representation of Indianness that
will inscribe cultural difference. This further shows in the lavish use of untranslated Hindu terms,
some of them explained in the glossary at the beginning of the book, others, particularly those
foregrounding distinctiveness, left unexplained inviting the reader to do extra-textual research.
These unglossed words are metonymic of the untranslatability of cultures and of languages as sites
of struggle and difference. The Village by The Sea actually retells the story of people who are
referred to as bai or bhai (VBS: 22-5) in Thul, Alibagh, and Gurajat (24), or in Goa, Marashtra and
Gowalia (145); some of them living in zopadpattis (186) wearing dhotis, saris, turbans (117), while
eating their chapatis (24), or treating themselves with jalebis (225) on bullock carts, cycle ricksaws,
hand-carts (115). It also portrays a multicultural India that practices Catholicism (54), Parsism and
Hinduism (214); worships Rhada, Krishna, Rama, Sita, Nala, Damayanti (38), Ganesha (215),
Lakshmi (249); celebrates Coconut Day, or Shravani-Purnima, (214) Diwali (237, 246-49) and
performs pujas (1-3, 260).
Besides language and local imagery, Indian texture and style also convey theme and
articulate Indianness. There are two layers of meaning in the novel, that of the surface structure, or
plotline written in English, and that of the deep structure with its many linguistic allusions and Indian
references, which operate as the very points of entry into cultural meaning. Yet the novel’s narrative
technique works on an “interstitial place”, and this is precisely what re-signifies and re-semanticises
the text, shifting the emphasis from the external to the internal world, or what lies beneath. As Anita
Desai puts it, “reality is merely the one tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the
surface ocean; and truth, the remaining nine tenths of it that lies below the surface” (Ray,1978: 5).
This is conveyed by the fusion of man and nature, the integration of opposites, as already discussed
when analysing Hari’s trip, and above all, by the use of circularity, which strikes the keynote of the
novel: there will be cultural continuity despite change. This is powerfully connoted by the novel’s
ending with the same cultural practice, the puja, an act of worship for preservation and well-being
(Dallapiccola, 2002: 157), with which it starts. The puja is initially practised by Lila— since her ailing
mother and drunken father are silent, absent subjects— but it is finally performed by the mother,
suggesting that tradition will not ‘fall apart’. Moreover, the mother speaks at this point, since she
storytells the origin of ancestral legends and cultural practices and, in doing so, she (re)inscribes
them. In her appropriated space of enunciation, the mother speaks of Diwali, (VBS: 248) the festival
of the lights (Dallapiccola: 62), in which the worshipping of gods and goddesses, such as Lakshmi,
the Goddess of Prosperity, Luck and Wealth (Dallapiccola: 122) and Ganesha, the god of Wisdom
and the giver of success in all undertakings (Dallapiccola: 80), and her narratives the (hi)story of her
nation. Diwali also coincides, in the novel, with Hari’s homecoming, whose name actually means
“fire”, the “sun” and “lightning” (92), connoting the beginning of a new cycle of life for the family and
for decolonised India as a whole. Hari’s return has also been anticipated in the non-linear, actually
circular, path of his journey which has been signalled by the motifs of the “spiralling kites” and
“migrating birds” (VBS: 179, 252-7) and reinforced with the recurrent images of the “watch” and the
“wheel turning” (210, 211, 257), which for time, progress and fortune. Besides, the strong presence
of Sayyid Ali, the ornithologist, first in Bombay, and then in Thul, studying the behaviour of
“migrating birds during the monsoon” (VBS: 178), metaphorically stands for India´s necessity to
understand that young generations may need to fly away during the harsh times to be able to
survive, only to come back strengthened and renewed.
The Village by the Sea is dense with cultural signifiers which reveal, or unveil, the absence
which lies at the point of interface between two cultures. As the author puts it, there is a “fictional
level and a non-fictional level underneath her novels” (Ray, 1978:5). Hari, and his outer and inner
trip, synecdochally stands for the second generation that has to be displaced to forge a new hybrid
identity within a dismembered decolonising country; and his parents represent the first generation
that needs to rearticulate subjectivity after years of silence. Both generations change from darkness,
stasis, binarity and silence to light, action, in-betweenness and voice. Needless to say, this starts to
unfold as from the turning point in the novel: the missing Black Horse or, better put, Indian
independence and decolonisation, and comes full circle when the sweeping monsoon, symbolising
the destruction of the old system and the birth of a new India, brings in the role reversal of all
characters, and paves the way for Diwalis and pujas, or cultural continuity to take place. As Anita
Desai (Ray, 1978: 5) herself puts it, “artistry is the use of imagery to carry theme forward, to unite
structure, to create the feeling of wholeness, seeing a novel as a pattern or a design”. Anita Desai’s
appropriation and hybridisation of English enables her to articulate Indianness by means of
conveying “the Indian holistic conception of nature, the universe and the human being, and the
Indian belief in transcendence through change, particularly in the circular integration of opposites”
(Keay, 2004: 113). Through her narrative technique, Desai positions herself within the borderlands
of language and culture, a “third place” in which the ‘subaltern can speak’, a space of enunciation
which dialogically articulates cultural difference inscribing hybridity.

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