Fascination and Repulsion: Otherness in Calcutta Fiction

Otherness and Self: Theoretical Framework

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) describe a sociological dynamic by which a sense of subjective superiority in a dominant social class is constructed through a process of abjection. In the aesthetic domain, "high culture" is constituted by identifying what counts as "low culture," then disparaging and rejecting it. In a similar manner, otherness can extend to racial, erotic, legal, health, and economic domains: an (often unmarked) sense of "whiteness" is derivative of identifying non-white "people of color" against which to form the distinction; sexual "normality" is defined against sexual deviance; the innocent are defined against the criminal; the able-bodied in relation to the disabled; the rich against the poor. In the era of French and British colonization of Asia and the Near East, the Western self was defined against the "inferior," "childlike," "impoverished," and "depraved" Oriental Other (Said, 1979).

In short, the subjective self can bolster its own social status by identifying a contrasting group as "non-self" and then rejecting them as "other." The self is always implicitly defined against the other, just as a perpetrator is defined in relation to a victim: without a pair of actors to inhabit both irreducible elements of the "penal couple," there can be no crime (Mendelsohn, 1956, p. 26).

Stallybrass and White contend that social and aesthetic categories can be ranked along certain evaluative lines: high and low, self and other, good and evil. These basic divisions apply to concrete symbolic domains such as the human body or geographical space, but also to more abstract domains such as social relationships and psychology (1986, p. 276). Although these evaluative hierarchies of self and other can admit of gradations, the starkest contrast is between the high and the low, the most exalted and the basest. Stallybrass and White further contend that sublime literature, with its lofty moral ends, deploys debasement and degradation to provide a point of contrast differentiating heroes from villains (Stallybrass & White, 1986, p. 277).

The producers of high cultural forms position themselves as arbiters of the dominant value system, defining what constitutes the "low" in contrast to their own privileged position. Furthermore, this social interactionist model of hierarchical distinctions does not claim that all social actors are equal in their capacity to fill a central or marginalized role. As Edward Said's framework of Orientalism and David Spurr's (1993) commentary on Western surveillance of the Oriental Other make clear, "the gaze upon which the journalist so faithfully relies for knowledge marks an exclusion as well as a privilege: the privilege of inspecting, examining, of looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation" (p. 13). Through the act of observing and reporting, members of the dominant group tacitly assume the power to define the terms of the relationships in the hierarchy of symbolic social distinctions.

Both Dan Simmons (1985) in his horror novel Song of Kali and Dominique Lapierre (1985) in his journalistic novel The City of Joy belong to this Orientalist tradition of presenting the Other as spectacle. The authors describe the journeys of white men into the space of the Oriental Other, framed as a quest or a challenge within self-imposed constraints. The main storytelling preoccupation for both novels is alterity and other space. Calcutta becomes a realm of social symbols in which to stage the shifting, transformative dynamics of Western versus Other. For Simmons, the protagonist Robert Luczak's sense of self is violated by the perfectly evil embodiment of the radical Other in the form of the goddess Kali, the novel's main antagonist. Lapierre, in contrast, imagines an ideally good and noble Other in the Indian peasant and slum-dweller Hasari Pal, who contrasts with the saintly Polish priest Stephan Kovalski — two outsiders who venture into the slums of Calcutta from different starting points and for different ends.

Western Protagonists and the Space of the Other

Simmons's protagonist, Robert C. Luczak, is depicted as an educated, white male member of the American creative class. Luczak is employed as a journalist by Harper's magazine. He is self-conscious about his privileged position, and is socially aware enough to ironically distance himself from WASP pretensions. Luczak describes himself as a "Chicago Polack" who is married to an "Indian princess" (p. 4).

The pretext for Luczak's trip to India is to write a piece for Harper's on M. Das, a celebrated Indian poet whose new collection of writings is poised for publication in the United States. In an introductory scene, Luczak appeals to Indian high culture to defend a stanza from one of Das's poems against charges of vulgarity leveled by his editor, Abe. Commenting on Das's submission, Abe reads to Luczak: "according to the translator's copy [the stanza] means, 'Maddened by lust, Kama and Rati fuck like dogs.' Sweet. It has a distinctive lilt to it, Bobby. Sort of early Robert Frost-ish." Luczak defends the artistic merit of the poem with an affectation of cultural sensitivity to Hindu civilization, admiring how the poet blurs the boundaries between low folk art and high Vedic literature: "It's part of a traditional Bengali song… Notice how Das has embedded the rhythm of it in the general passage. He shifts from classical Vedic form to folk-Bengali and then back to Vedic" (p. 8). Later in the narrative, Luczak turns considerably less generous in his judgment of Indian culture.

Luczak journeys into Calcutta as a journalist assigned to write an article on a contemporary literary figure for an upper-middle-class American audience. He feels entitled to take from Indian society what he finds of value — a beautiful wife, a lovely daughter, the rights to publish a work of literary merit — but is free to visit the country for a short stay in a high-end hotel, then leave when he has had enough adventure. In contrast, Lapierre's two main protagonists, Hasari Pal and Stephan Kovalski, are drawn to Calcutta precisely because of the harsh economic realities that Simmons's protagonist finds most disturbing: the Indian peasant Hasari out of financial need and the Polish priest Kovalski out of religious idealism.

Lapierre's Indian protagonist, Hasari Pal, confronts his own version of the low-Other as he undergoes a transformation from a proud, rural peasant farmer to a lowly rickshaw puller, beholden to mob bosses who exploit his labor. Although the narrative gives considerable space to following the history of the Pal family from their own perspective, the political viewpoint of Lapierre avoids subaltern critique. Hasari and his family endure repeated demotions in their status and sense of self as they establish themselves in the "City of Joy." For example, within a short time after the family's arrival in the city, Hasari finds he lacks the funds even to buy bananas to feed his family. Hasari's wife suggests they send their young daughter to beg in front of the train station. Hasari rejects this as a supreme humiliation, saying, "we are peasants, not beggars" (p. 25).

The Pals resist the abhorrent idea of broaching the peasant/beggar distinction for several days, before the threat of hunger forces the parents to send their children to beg from wealthy travelers as they exit their taxis. In Lapierre's world, this first act of humiliation, and the many to follow, are portrayed as fortifications of the human spirit — a purging away of pride as a means of entry into the joyous mass of suffering humanity. For in Lapierre's world, whatever Hasari becomes, he will be of no less intrinsic value, and will be cared for by the surrounding community: "In these slums people actually put love and mutual support into practice. They knew how to be tolerant of all creeds and castes, how to give respect to a stranger, how to show charity toward beggars, cripples, lepers, and even the insane. Here the weak were helped, not trampled upon. Orphans were instantly adopted by their neighbors and old people were cared for and revered by their children" (Lapierre, 1985, p. 40).

Thus, from the perspective of the bottom rung of Indian society, Lapierre contends that the self/other dichotomy, if not fully eradicated, at least becomes practically irrelevant. Lapierre's slum dwellers refuse to entertain invidious distinctions between self and other. The familiar as well as the stranger, the healthy and the diseased, the old and the young — all are taken in and cared for in one harmonious community of the urban poor. In a society of unfortunates who all must struggle simply to survive against great odds, no one is rejected as "marginal." The denizens of Calcutta's slums, Lapierre tells us, "had reconstructed the life of their villages in urban exile" (p. 41).

Stephan Kovalski, an expatriate Polish priest, is the main European protagonist of Lapierre's novel. Originally written in French for publication in France and translated within a year of publication into Spanish, Dutch, German, Italian, and English, many readers may have identified most closely with Kovalski as the central character, though the third-person omniscient narrative alternates between Kovalski's and Hasari's stories.

Kovalski's sense of self and other was formed at an early age by an overriding desire to seek social justice. This commitment to helping the poor was reinforced by his Roman Catholicism and strengthened in the aftermath of his father's suicide. Kovalski's father had been badly maimed in a violent confrontation with police during a coal miners' rebellion over low pay and poor working conditions. Following this incident and a period in prison, his father became radicalized and plotted acts of terrorism as a member of a militant Marxist League. After a series of struggles with the authorities, Kovalski's father hanged himself in a prison cell.

Upon learning of his father's death, young Kovalski shut himself in his room to meditate over a picture of the Shroud of Turin his father had given him at his First Communion. When he resolved to become a missionary, he explained this as born of "a desire to achieve by other means what [his father] had attempted to accomplish by violence" (p. 45).

Kovalski's central drive to fight on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged Other is thus central to his sense of self. His fascination with the non-European Other is an extension of his life mission. The struggling and vulnerable Other provides Kovalski with an opportunity to act on his saintly ideals. The poorer and more wretched the Other, the greater the occasion they present for the priest to perform supreme acts of charity and humility.

Both novels use the domain of physical space as a contrast between Western and Other. The Luczaks reside in a middle-class neighborhood in Exeter, New Hampshire. Luczak describes their home as "clean and open as a Scandinavian designer's dreams, all gleaming bare wood, comfortable modular seating, immaculately white walls, and works of art illuminated by recessed lighting," and contrasts this with his Indian wife Amrita's childhood home in Delhi: "bar walls encrusted with grime and ancient handprints, open windows, rough sheets, lizards scrabbling across the walls at night, the cluttered cheapness of everything" (Simmons, 1985, p. 16). Thus the basic contrast of the novel — between clean, white, American self and dirty, dark, Indian Other — is introduced from the outset.

Lapierre's Western protagonist Kovalski, in contrast, idealizes the Other, desiring to enter their space and participate in their suffering. While still in Europe, Kovalski identified with displaced workers. He came to think of the North Africans, Senegalese, Turks, and Yugoslavs who visited his family home as members of his own family. A challenge from a Senegalese immigrant was formative in his desire to leave Europe and embrace the Other: "You're always saying you're close to us but do you really know anything about us? Why don't you go live for a while in a shantytown or in our poor countryside? Then you'd have a better idea of why we were forced to leave and come here to break up stones all day at the bottom of a mine" (p. 46).

Kovalski took this challenge to heart and chose to devote his life to living among the poor as a missionary. In his youthful idealism, he describes the allure of poverty in glowing terms:

India! A subcontinent with exceptional potential wealth — yet where areas and social groups of overwhelming poverty survived. A land of intense spirituality and savage racial, political, and religious conflicts. A land of saints like Gandhi, Aurobindo, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda, and of spiritual leaders who were sometimes odiously corrupt. A land that manufactured rockets and satellites but where eight of ten of its inhabitants had never traveled faster than their oxen could pull their carts. A land of slums of Bombay or Calcutta. A land where the sublime often stood side by side with the very worst this world can offer, but where both elements were always more vibrant, more human, and ultimately more attracting than anywhere else. (Lapierre, 1985, p. 47)

Calcutta as Infernal Spectacle: The Kipling Legacy

In contrast to The City of Joy's full spiritual embrace of the Other, Song of Kali establishes from its first page the white protagonist's total alienation from and rejection of the South Asian Other, as represented by Calcutta and the city's patron goddess. Luczak contrasts the foul air and filth of the chawl¹ with the environmental hygiene of an American city: "Slums of tin roofs, gunnysack walls, and mud-path streets… extended for miles and were terminated only by gray monoliths of factories belching flame and unfiltered soot toward the monsoon clouds… The air in Calcutta, already sweetened by raw sewage, burning cow dung, millions of tons of garbage, and the innumerable open fires eternally burning, was made unbreathable by further effusion of raw auto emission and industrial filth." He concludes, "I found it almost impossible to imagine myself living in one of those floorless hovels, working in one of those grim factories," adding that "sweeping philosophical convictions such as ecology and pollution controls were luxuries of our advanced industrial nations" (Simmons, 1985, p. 125).

(1. A South Asian slum or shanty town.)

When later in the narrative Luczak is challenged over a glass of premium imported Scotch by an upper-class Indian host, Mr. Chatterjee — who lives separated from the pandemonium of the city in a walled residential section built by former British colonial officials — to give his frank opinion of the city, Luczak politely defers. He tells Chatterjee that he finds Calcutta "fascinating" and wishes he had more time to explore it. Mr. Chatterjee keeps pushing for an honest assessment: "You are diplomatic, Mr. Luczak. What you mean to say is that you find Calcutta appalling. It has already offended your sensibilities, yes?" (Simmons, 1985, p. 130). Chatterjee then comments to Luczak's Indian wife Amrita that "the American psyche is as predictable as sterile as vulnerable as the American digestive system when it encounters India." He says that when Americans encounter Calcutta, they "react in either one of two ways: they will find Calcutta 'exotic' and concentrate only on the tourist pleasures; or they will be immediately horrified, recoil, and seek to forget what they have seen and not understood" (p. 131).

Both authors deploy the beautiful and hideous image of the monstrous goddess Kali as a central metaphor for the city of Calcutta, following a tradition of Western writers who depict the city as a "metropolitan nightmare," with its urban sprawl, overcrowding, filth, poverty, disease, and crime (Moorehouse, 1971). The association of the frightful deity as the city's patron goddess has an etymological basis in the native language as well: Kolkata (anglicized as "Calcutta") derives from "Kali-khata" — the city of Kali ("Kolkata," 2001). The Kalighat, one of Calcutta's oldest neighborhoods, is a site of pilgrimage for worshippers of Kali.

The name Kali, in turn, derives from the Sanskrit for "She who is black" or "She who is death" ("Kali," 2011). A consort of Lord Shiva, she is associated with darkness, sexuality, violence, death, and — paradoxically — motherly love. The Hindu goddess is often depicted nude or semi-nude, with black or blue skin, a lolling tongue protruding through fangs, enraged red eyes, and disheveled hair. She wears a necklace of skulls and frequently wields a saber in one of her multiple arms and a severed head in another.

Although Lapierre intends no irony in calling Calcutta "the City of Joy," he also associates it with the dark goddess. In Lapierre's (1985) words: "In many respects the city resembled the goddess Kali whom many of the inhabitants worship — Kali the Terrible, the image of fear and death, depicted with a terrifying expression in her eyes and a necklace of snakes and skulls around her neck. Even the slogans on the walls proclaimed the disastrous state of this city. 'Here there is no hope,' said one of them. 'All that is left is anger'" (p. 30).

Simmons's protagonist Luczak learns of the city's association with the goddess from Krishna, his native guide. Krishna explains to Luczak, "Kaliksetra. It means 'the place of Kali.' Certainly you knew that this is where the name of our city originated?" (p. 57). The guide goes on to explain that Kali is a sacred sakti (feminine aspect) of Siva, then elaborates: "She is a goddess; obviously she has four arms! You must see the great idol in Kalighat… very terrible. Beautifully terrible. Very tall. Very gaunt. Her mouth is open. Her tongue is long. She has two… what is the word… The teeth of a vampire? … She alone of the gods has conquered time. She devours all things… Her beautiful feet tread on a corpse… In her hand she holds… A sword and a severed head" (Simmons, 1985, pp. 57–58).

Thus, the terrible goddess serves as metaphor for the central object of fascination-repulsion in both novels: the city of Calcutta itself. The squalor of Calcutta's garbage-strewn streets and miles of decrepit slums present an obscene spectacle to the Western gaze. The poverty, civic disorder, and disgust of urban blight provide the inspiration that both authors deploy for different ends. Both narratives follow the journey of "innocent" Western outsiders into a place of danger and despair — a horror myth reminiscent of Dante's descent into the Inferno.

Written from the viewpoint of white Western men drawn into the passion and pathos of a sprawling, decaying complex of overcrowded slums inhabited by a mass of exotic, dark-skinned peoples, these works manifest the First World's fascination with and attraction to the spectacle of misery in the periphery. In both books, the Inferno-esque spectacle at once enthralls and repels the Western imagination, and the books themselves are representative of Western phobia and fascination regarding the city.

The travel trope of a journey into the pit of despair in both Simmons and Lapierre harks back to an Orientalist theme in Kipling. Both novels reveal a shared allegiance to the Kipling-esque identification of Calcutta as a "City of Dreadful Night." Kipling's 1888 short story "The City of Dreadful Night" is itself a journey into the underworld, also in the tradition of Dante's Inferno. Kipling's Calcutta is an oppressively hot city, muggy and wet, where the sounds of insects and jackals conspire to disturb sleep, and even the dead are ejected from their graves:

The dense wet heat that hung over the face of land, like a blanket, prevented all hope of sleep in the first instance. The cicalas helped the heat; and the yelling jackals the cicalas. It was impossible to sit still in the dark, empty, echoing house and watch the punkah beat the dead air. So, at ten o'clock of the night, I set my walking-stick on end in the middle of the garden, and waited to see how it would fall. It pointed directly down the moonlit road that leads to the City of Dreadful Night. The sound of its fall disturbed a hare. She limped from her form and ran across to a disused Mahomedan burial-ground, where the jawless skulls and rough-butted shank-bones, heartlessly exposed by the July rains, glimmered like mother o' pearl on the rain-channelled soil. The heated air and the heavy earth had driven the very dead upward for coolness' sake. (Kipling, 2009)

Kipling took the title of his story from an 1873 poem by the Scottish poet James Thomson, in which Thomson presents a bleak view of early industrial London through the despairing eyes of an atheist. The ravages the industrial revolution exacted on the urban center of the British Empire are projected outward onto a colonized other. In Simmons's novel, the elite upper-class Indian Mr. Chatterjee turns Kipling's Orientalist projection on its head in an attempt to call out Luczak for the racial and nationalistic superiority he politely refuses to acknowledge. Asking if a passage offered a "fair and reasonable description of Calcutta," Chatterjee read:

… a dense mass of houses so old that they only seem to fall, through which tortuous lanes curve and wind. There is no privacy here and whoever ventures into this region finds the streets — by courtesy so called — thronged with loiterers and sees, through the half-glazed windows, rooms crowded to suffocation… the stagnant gutters… the filth choking up dark passages… the walls of bleached soot and doors falling off their hinges… and children swarming everywhere, relieving themselves as they please. (Simmons, 1985, p. 132)

Upon finishing the reading, Chatterjee informed Luczak that it was not an account of Calcutta at all, but a contemporary account of London in the 1850s.² The presumption is that Third World societies must be permitted to pollute the environment and exploit workers in sweatshops as a necessary stage of industrial development, just as the industrialized nations did at a comparable stage in their history.

(2. The passage is in fact quoted from Michael Crichton's (2002) The Great Train Robbery.)

Both Simmons and Lapierre follow Kipling in their accounts of hellbound quests, tracing their characters' descent into Calcutta's underworld. There is a foreboding that accompanies the trespass into a place these characters do not belong, in the mode of Kipling's exploration of Calcutta as an off-limits journey for Westerners. Simmons looks up "the most evil place on earth," while Lapierre visits and tries to reach out to "the poorest of the poor."

For Simmons's character, the first glimpse of hell is viewed from above the city as the plane circles to make its descent. Luczak looks down upon a literal inferno: "'My God,' I said again. Calcutta was stretched out below, over 250 square miles of city, a galaxy of lights after the absolute darkness of cloud tops and the Bay of Bengal. I had flown into many cities at night, but none like this. Instead of the usual geometries of electric lights, Calcutta at midnight was ablaze with countless lanterns, open fires, and a strange soft glow — an almost fungal phosphorescence — that oozed from a thousand unseen sources. Instead of the predictable urban progression of straight lines — streets, highways, parking lots — Calcutta's myriad of fires seemed scattered and chaotic, a jumbled constellation broken only by the dark curve of the river. I imagined that this was what London or Berlin must have looked like — burning — to awed bomber crews during the war" (Simmons, 1985, p. 21).

Once the plane has landed, Luczak is greeted by a bedlam of shouting porters grabbing for his bags, and a strange taxi driver he describes as predatory. He then relates images from his harried taxi ride to the hotel: "The buildings seemed decayed beyond age, decayed remnants of some forgotten millennium — some pre-human age — for the shadows, angles, apertures, and emptiness did not fit the architecture of man. Yet on every second or third floor there were open-windowed glimpses of humanity inhabiting these druidic shambles: bare bulbs swinging, bobbing heads, peeled walls with plaster rotting off the white rib-bones of the building, garish illustrations of multi-armed deities clipped from magazines and taped crookedly to the walls or windowpanes, the cries of children playing, running, fleeing through the knife-blackened alleys, the wail of infants half-heard — and everywhere the random movement caught in the corner of one's vision, the sibilant rush of the bus's tires on wet clay tarmac, and the sight of sheeted figures lying like corpses in the sidewalk shadows" (Simmons, 1985, p. 27).

Simmons proclaims, like Kipling, his hostility toward the "City of Dreadful Night." The ideal of radical alterity once celebrated and championed by Kipling is revoiced and revoked in Simmons's novel. Simmons revisits Kipling's racial thesis and clearly situates himself within the same tradition of representing Calcutta as an inferno-esque journey.

Lapierre, for his part, takes the cue of the slumming narrative from Kipling to propel a new myth of "low life" — as Kipling termed it — that revolves around an inferno–purgatorio–paradisio arc. While Lapierre also presents hellish descriptions of disease, death, and desperation, his characters struggle heroically to improve the lot of the poorest of the poor, claiming to find inspiration and redemption in this setting:

The arrival of successive waves of destitute people had transformed Calcutta into an enormous concentration of humanity. In a few years the city was to condemn its ten million inhabitants to living on less than twelve square feet of space per person, while the four or five million of them who squeezed into its slums had sometimes to make do with barely three square feet each. Consequently, Calcutta had become one of the biggest urban disasters in the world — a city consumed with decay in which thousands of houses and many new buildings, sometimes ten floors high or even higher, threatened at any moment to crack and collapse. With their crumbling facades, tottering roofs, and walls eaten up with tropical vegetation, some neighborhoods looked as if they had just been bombed. … In the absence of adequate garbage collection service, eighteen hundred tons of refuse accumulated daily in the streets, attracting a host of flies, mosquitoes, rats, cockroaches, and other creatures. In summer the proliferation brought with it the risk of epidemics. Not so very long ago it was still a common occurrence for people to die of cholera, hepatitis, encephalitis, typhoid, and rabies. Articles and reports in the local press never ceased denouncing the city as a refuse dump poisoned with fumes, nauseating gases, and discharges — a devastated landscape of broken roads, leaking sewers, burst water pipes, and torn-down telephone wires. In short, Calcutta was a "dying city." (Lapierre, 1985, p. 30)

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