| BOOKS: INREVIEW
A Life in Black and White
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue cover-dated July 25, 2002
The Impressionist,
By Hari Kunzru. E P Dutton, $24.95
WHEN HARI KUNZRU turns Orientalism on its
head, the effect can be hilarious. "Ah, the mystic Occident!
Land of wool and cabbage and lecherous round-eyed girls!"
his protagonist reflects en route to England.
Hari Kunzru can spin a yarn. The hero, or anti-hero, of his
debut novel, The Impressionist, has a gorgeous face, several
names and no core character. He starts out as Pran Nath Razdan,
the child of a mixed-race union between a wandering Englishman
and a Kashmiri woman on her way to Agra to get married. The
Englishman dies immediately after the encounter, and Pran's
mother dies in childbirth, leaving the boy to be raised by her
husband.
When a servant reveals who Pran's father is, he is thrown out
of the house at the age of 15 to make his own way on the streets
of India. The boy spends the remainder of the novel trying to
pass off as white, only to realize that his quest to become
the most pukka sahib of them all has left him neither black
nor white -- just empty.
Pran first seeks refuge in a brothel. The Nawab of Fathepur
buys him to use as bait, to trap the paedophiliac Major Augustus
Privett-Clampe, an officer of the British Crown. Privett-Clampe
rapes the boy, names him Clive, dresses him up as a schoolboy
and makes him recite poems like Casabianca and Gunga Din.
"You've got some white blood in you," Privett-Clampe
says. "The thing is, boy, you have to learn to listen to
it. It's calling to you through all the black, telling you to
stiffen your resolve. If you listen to what the white is telling
you, you can't go wrong."
Pran escapes to Bombay and, heeding Privett-Clampe's advice,
passes himself off as an English lad called Pretty Bobby. When
an Englishman called Jonathan Bridgeman dies in a riot, our
hero takes not only his name but also his whole identity, and
travels to England to claim his inheritance. He goes on to study
at Oxford, finally becoming a "proper" Englishman.
"How easy it is to slough off one life and take up another!"
he ruminates.
Things begin to go wrong for Jonathan when Astarte Chapel,
the woman he loves, rejects him because he's too English. A
dilettante, she is in love with a black man called Sweets. ".
. . He actually shot someone once . . . Things like that happen
to Negroes. That's why they have soul," she says. When
Jonathan asks her if she would love him if he "wasn't so
-- white," she replies, "But you are, Johnny,"
proving his lie an unfortunate success. Astarte Chapel finds
him boring.
Readers too will find the protagonist's apparent blandness
problematic. Kunzru takes pains to emphasize that the protagonist's
lack of personality is purposeful. He writes that the impressionist
"hints at transparency, as if on the other side, on the
inside, there is something to be discovered."
But the impressionist is soulless. Even when he travels to
the "heart of darkness" in Fotseland, Africa, to study
his "whiteness," the darker inside we discover is
hardly worth the journey.
Most of the attendant characters are not fully drawn, given
-- like Privett-Clampe -- to shouting "Tally Ho,"
"On! On! On!" and "View Hallooo" in the
throes of sexual passion. This cartoonish levity may fall flat
with some readers, as might some of the banal wink-and-nudge
Orientalisms uttered by a drug-addled playboy, Prince Firoz,
who, for example, says, ". . . if Mohammed cannot go to
the Riviera, then the Riviera must come to Mohammed."
There are funny moments, however, particularly when Kunzru
shows us the West through Eastern eyes. For instance, when the
person charged with organizing a tiger hunt for a group of Englishmen
cages and drugs two tigers before the hunt, another character
chortles, "When the Angrezi (English) come to hunt there
are some things it is better not to leave to chance."
"This degree of predestination might disappoint some of
the guests," muses the hunt's organizer in response. "However,
their hosts take the view that politics demands certain sacrifices
from sportsmanship."
A more experienced novelist would have lent muscle to these
sly takes on colonialism and colour, which appear only in glimpses
in the novel. The Impressionist, which lacks a coherent theme
or a character of compelling humanity, is entertaining but strangely
empty.
Shailaja Neelakantan is a writer based in New Delhi
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