My body’s experiences in India have helped me plot these elusive biographies. I first visited India in 2001; I have returned every year, and since 2011, I have been living in Delhi more or less permanently. Watching the ways in which my own body has adapted to the weather, landscapes, diseases and foodstuffs of India might not allow me to recover in precise detail the diverse experiences of my predecessors. After all, my body is different from theirs. And the particular India to which I have adapted—urban, middle—class, mostly Anglophone and largely airconditioned, therefore westernized in its climatic as well as its linguistic preferences—-is a world away from the India's in which poor sixteenth and seventeenth—century migrants settled. But my body’s experiences in India have taught me something about the lives of these earlier migrants. It has repeatedly alerted me to the fact that the dislocations of migration aren’t simply mental or emotional. Ever since my first visit to India, ‘my’ body has increasingly felt not like my own, at least not in the sense of being entirely within my control. It has been felled by food poisoning in Delhi, sunstroke in Chennai, and viral fever in Kolkata. It has tripped and broken its big toe on a stray root in the Deer Park of Hauz Khas. It has been pushed and shoved by pickpockets in the throng at Moinuddin Chishti’s dargah in Ajmer. Yet these disabling experiences have also been matched by the acquisition of new competencies fitted to my body’s new environments. My body has developed a tolerance, even a craving, for mirchi (chilli). It has perfected the art of the head waggle. It has adapted sufficiently well to the heat and humidity of the north that it can now run a half marathon in Delhi.
To understand what it means to become Indian demands attending to the agonies and the ecstasies of the migrant body’s encounters with new environments. Indeed, ‘ecstasy’ is a useful word in this context: it derives from the Greek ‘ek—stasis’, meaning standing outside oneself. We might regard ecstasy as simply an emotional state. But in its Greek usage, it is also an embodied condition: standing outside oneself means having a body that is no longer one’s body. Or rather, it means finding that one’s body has become something very different-‘after entering into a new mode of being. After all, standing outside oneself still implies legs on which to stand, no matter how much one’s body has been transformed by the ecstatic experience. This condition has recognizably Indian counterparts. The Sufi concept of the mast qalandar, a person overcome with ecstatic love for Allah, refers not simply to a religious or spiritual ideal. It more precisely describes someone who has surrendered to, and been transformed by, an overpowering bodily intoxication. Likewise, Tantric forms of Hinduism recognize a state of ecstasy that is not just spiritual but also profoundly embodied: in this state, one transcends the singular bounded self and finds within one’s body the traces of an infinite universe that has previously seemed exterior to it. Rather than a solipsistic exercise in navel—gazing, then, looking at my own body’s diverse experiences in India has provided me with ecstatic points of entry into the larger environments and historical processes that have differently transformed me, Roch and Simitt, and many other migrants to the subcontinent.
To write the biographies of migrants from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, I have drawn on my own experience of becoming Indian. That experience is detailed here in a series of seven modern—day interludes that punctuate my tales of individual migrants.The interludes detail the vicissitudes of my encounters with Indian food and diseases, cityscapes and landscapes, nicknames, clothes, languages, weather, and so on. In other words, the interludes are mini—biographies in the sense I have suggested here——stories of how a body has been newly imprinted and changed by its time in India. I should stress that these are not exemplary success stories, let alone inspirational guides on How to Become Indian. The process of becoming Indian is not one that can ever culminate with finality in a pure Indian identity: I can no more erase all the mental and bodily habits of my middle—class New Zealand childhood, my English postgraduate training, and my twenty—three years in America as a professor of Shakespeare than I can give up my green eyes and easily sunburned skin. My body’s previous histories in other parts of the world has made for some spectacular stumbles in India, actual as much as metaphorical. And I have no doubt that many more await me. But my own mini-biographies underscore how the tales of individual migrants to India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are always also tales of the larger ecologies, physical and cultural, that have shaped and re-shaped them.
What it meant to become Indian before the heyday of British colonialism additionally demands that we rethink the very ideas of ‘India’ and the ‘Indian’. Of course, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was no single political entity called India. The subcontinent was divided up amongst a diverse collection of empires, sultanates, kingdoms, smaller colonial dominions, and tribal areas.These territories were not culturally, linguistically or religiously homogeneous: they differed within themselves as much as from each other. Nor were they uniform in terrain or climate. So to become Indian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not to become one monolithic thing. What one became varied on the basis of one’s environmental as much as cultural and economic location. To become Indian in the coconut—rich hinterland of Goa meant something quite different from what it meant in the typhoon-drenched, mosquito and tiger—dominated terrain of the Sundarbans or in the arid hills of the Deccan plateau. Likewise, to become Indian in the fakir-congested galis (lanes) of Ajmer meant something quite different from what it meant in the luxurious havelis of Agra or in the Mughal harem of Lahore. Each location prompted different bodily transformations.
For all their diversity, however, these locations did have one thing in common. To lesser and greater extents, and for different reasons, each was a multicultural space in which migrants found new homes. Although Portuguese Goa was the first major European colony in India, and had imposed the Inquisition in 1560 to prosecute non—believers, it was temporarily a haven for various religious dissidents—Sephardic Jews and English Catholics—from Europe. The Deccan sultanates were ruled by Persian and Turkish elites who brought foreign merchants, physicians and soldiers—including enslaved Africans or habshis—-into cities such as Aurangabad, Ahmadnagar and Hyderabad. In addition to installing Central Asians as courtiers and retaining mercenary soldiers from Europe, the Mughals also welcomed Christian artisans, traders and priests into their main cities—Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, Lahore, Delhi, Ajmer. Other Portuguese—speaking zones outside the official Estado da India such as the pirate communities of the Sundarbans brought together Bengalis, Europeans and Burmese Arakans. And, as Arnitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land shows, the Malabar Coast of south India may have been the most ‘cosmopolitan zone of all, with cities like Cochin, Quilon and Calicut providing homes to Arab, Jewish and Chinese merchants and sailors. Each of these different multicultural spaces asked migrants to cultivate distinctive new bodily skills and habits.
Which is to say: these spaces not only offered migrants new homes. They also functioned as engines of bodily transformation. The foreigners who joined them altered their bodies in ways I have already discussed—by eating Indian food, wearing Indian clothes, succumbing to Indian illnesses and learning Indian languages. Just as importantly, their bodies were also transformed by the acquisition of new skills specific to the spaces. Those who joined local armies, such as Roch and Simitt or the Flemish captain Dillanai, often brought with them knowledge of how to handle firearms—a new yet devastatingly effective technology introduced to the subcontinent in this time. But they also had to master new bodily techniques: riding horses, enduring military manoeuvres in the heat, moving efficiently through intimidating terrain such as the rocky highlands of the Deccan, the parched deserts of Rajasthan or the Ghats of south India. The warrior sailors of Gujarat and Kerala, such as the Russian slave Malik Ayaz who became admiral of Diu and the Malaccan slave Chinali who joined a rogue Malabari navy, may have developed sea legs before coming to India. But in their new subcontinental locations they also had to adapt their bodily reflexes to tropical cyclones, Arabian Sea currents, and the predations of mosquitoes...
~~The First Firangis -by- Jonathan Gil Harris
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