Granddaughter of Lord Byron, Anne Isabella Noel became Lady Anne Blunt on her marriage with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in 1869. Together they formed a travelling couple, embarking on a series of journeys in the Muslim world beginning with Anatolia (1873) Algeria (1874) the Egyptian Western Desert (1876), Mesopotamia and Persia (1877–78) and the deserts of Central Arabia (1879). Lady Anne reports the last two in Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (1879) and A Pilgrimage to Nejd (1881). Her travel writings were developed from notes taken on the spot, and rewritten material initially based on impressions and dialogues (Hout DLB/174: 44). Wilfrid added introductions and also acted as ‘editor’, by no means an unusual practice given the unequal gender relations of the period, which required: ‘a woman's representation of the exotic Other … to be authorized by a male orientalist’, and demarcated roles ‘between the woman as fieldworker and the man as analytical theorist’ (Behdad 1994: 95, 97). These writings propose an ideal of an Arab aristocracy of the desert, initially stimulated by Palgrave and later by the Blunts' contact with sheykhs and emirs on their travels. They established a winter retreat, Sheykh Obeyd, in the desert outside Cairo from which Wilfrid was banned for several years after his involvement with the nationalist side in the Urabi revolution of 1881–2. They also assembled a stud of Arabian horses at Crabbet, their Sussex estate.

Nayantara Sahgal's Rich Like Us (1985) is her most ambitious and complex novel. Its importance, both artistic and political, was recognized in its being awarded the Sinclair Prize for fiction and the Sahitya Akademi award for the best Indian book in English for the year 1986. It is also the key novel to consider if we are examining how the women characters respond to the tradition–modernity issue. In it we find Sahgal's most scathing attack on tradition and her most radical political critique of India. Finally, in Rich Like Us, Sahgal properly enters the fictional domain of postmodernism. So far as the narrative shift is concerned, The Day in Shadow (1971) marks the end of the phase of straight narration. A Situation in New Delhi (1989) is a transitional novel in which the style becomes clipped and elliptical, the closure uncertain and abrupt. Sahgal has moved into new pastures formally. But the real breakthrough occurs, as I shall show, in Rich Like Us. From the more or less chronological progression of her previous work in which the fictional mode might be termed mimetic, Sahgal uses symbolism and allegory extensively in Rich Like Us. The earlier novels are, formally, somewhat dull and stodgy; they are boring in an upper class, well-bred, genteel, ‘club’ manner. But Rich Like Us attempts an adventurous form which is both challenging and refreshing.

INTRODUCTION

Nationalist historians for long have interpreted the impact of colonial policies on Indian agriculture in terms of stagnation. It has been argued that British revenue policies, which functioned as a ‘built-in depressor’, effectively resulted in the flight of capital from the countryside and precluded any form of improvement in agricultural production. Challenging the nationalist paradigm in recent years revisionist historians, notably C A Bayly (1988), have argued persuasively that British rule in course of the nineteenth century had in fact resulted in the ‘consolidation of the Indian peasantry’ as pastoralist groups and shifting cultivators were increasingly forced to take to settled cultivation. It is assumed that the sedentarization of marginal groups, such as the tribal and nomadic pastoralists thus contributed significantly towards agrarian expansion. Yet, as this paper argues, expansion of settled cultivation did not necessarily negate the pauperization of the peasantry as is evidenced by developments in West Singhbhum, a remote district located in the southwestern part of Chota Nagpur Division of the erstwhile Bengal Presidency.

In Singhbhum, as in other parts of Chota Nagpur, the most significant change associated with the colonial period was the expansion of settled cultivation in the late nineteenth century. This constituted one of the ways in which the early colonial administration sought its control over the tribal people of the region. Extension of cultivation served the dual purpose of ‘civilizing’ both the countryside and the ‘savage’ through sedentarization and control of their volatility.

The crucial role of institutions in agricultural development has been widely discussed, be it with regard to credit or land reforms or to incentives like support prices and subsidies. The institutionalist perspective has also been extensively used for understanding the role of institutions in natural resource management. Within both areas of study, namely agriculture and environment-related issues, scholars have tended to include the international dimension when analysing the process of designing, adapting and enforcing institutions which operate nationally and regionally. In particular, some of them have observed the emergence of a so-called global phytogenetic governance, a concept ‘commonly used in the discussion of global environmental issues to denote the more or less binding application and enforcement of norms, rules, and procedures in a given issue area’ (Thomas, 2002: p. 177). The field of agricultural biodiversity is particularly interesting, because it is regulated by two broad global regimes, one pertaining to agriculture and trade and another related to environmental conservation issues. This so-called global governance, which, in turn, impacts on local realities through the action of institutions which are designed and/or implemented at the national level, attempts at balancing competing interests. Constrasting pressures are exerted on these regimes to evolve. Bringing social movements into the picture is a way of making sense of the resistance met by institutions at the local level and also of their potential role as a pressure group impinging on institutional evolution.

In the recent past, non-government agencies in several parts of south India have been active in raising issues related to the landlessness of the Dalit communities. (In the early 1970s, a group of radical intellectuals for the first time employed the term ‘Dalit’ to convey the militancy on the part of certain social categories, who had been regarded as ‘untouchables’ and had been the victims of upper caste domination.) These organizations with the support of civil rights activists have placed demands for the release of bonded labourers, implementation of minimum and equal wages and for the basic rights of Dalit groups. In Tamil Nadu, the nongovernment agencies have emphasized the importance of investigating into the local land records, publicizing the ownership details and exposing the loopholes present in the land ceiling laws. However, such activities have failed to protect the Dalit communities from verbal insults and physical abuses. In course of little more than a decade, the upper caste groups in several districts of Tamil Nadu have been involved in reasserting their claims over the Panchama lands (lands which had been kept reserved for the ex ‘untouchable’ communities, who for several centuries had been denied the privileges of land ownership) which for centuries had been utilized by the ‘untouchable’ agricultural labouring groups for residential purposes. In most cases, with the active connivance of the police officials, they unleashed a reign of terror on the indigent Dalit communities.

The first imitated action of Prometheus Unbound shows its title character doing something very appropriate for a divinity said to have, “[given] man speech, and speech created thought,/Which is the measure of the Universe” (II.iv. 72–3). It shows an uncharacteristically forgetful Prometheus struggling toward the fully recalled (and reheard) words of a curse he knows himself to have once uttered. And then when Earth responds to her dismayed son's, “Were these my words, O Parent?” with a terse, “They were thine,” he disowns them:

In building toward this palinode, the opening of Prometheus Unbound introduces its protagonist as a responsible but baffled agent of the word. “Be it dim and dank and grey/…[or] Be it bright,” Prometheus wants to get straight just what he has breathed forth into the “atmosphere of human thought” (I. 676–80). But his words have gotten away from him.

Orientalist scholars with specialist knowledge about an essentialist Orient were pressed into service as Western ‘territorial acquisition in the Orient increased’ (Said 1978: 223). This was especially the case as Britain and France parcelled out Asiatic Turkey between themselves; Said listed David Hogarth among the key ‘experts’ who aided this process. Hogarth was an academic whose Classical interests drew him to the Eastern domains of the Ottoman Empire, as confirmed by the title of his travel narrative: A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (1896). He began his travels there in 1887 and as a specialist with interests in the ancient Hittites returned in 1890. Academic recognition came with the publication of Phillip and Alexander of Macedon in 1887, and in the same year Hogarth was appointed Director of the British School of Athens. Confirmation of his fame as an archaeologist came when he was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1905. His interest in the Arab lands developed in the early 1900s and he published his account of Western exploration of that region, The Penetration of Arabia, in 1904. But it wasn't until the summer of 1916, when he went to Jeddah as part of a British delegation to negotiate with Husayn Sherif of Mecca, that Hogarth actually set foot on the Arabian Peninsula. By this time he was director of the Cairo Arab Bureau ‘of intelligence and diplomatic officers…[set up] to organize Britain's role in the Arab Revolt’ (Mansfield 1992: 168).

Introduction

Nepal is a landlocked country of 23 million people with an area of 147,181 square kilometers (km). The country lies on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, bordering only two countries: the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the north and India to the east, south, and west. The geographical situation facing Nepal presents a formidable challenge to domestic economic growth and development. Nepal has an open border with India, but for access to the world economy, the nearest seaport is that of Kolkata in India and is more than 900 km away from the country's border. Most of Nepal's terrain is mountainous or hilly, and only 20% of the total land area is arable. These factors contribute to country's high transport costs, hindering market development and creating a near-complete dependence on India for trading routes. The open border with India and the high cost of access to the markets of the rest of the world have been decisive factors in putting Nepal in this situation of de facto integration with India.

Nepal and the PRC have remained close friends and neighbors, with diplomatic relations being established in 1955. An agreement was signed between the two countries in 1961 to construct a 120-km highway linking Kathmandu to the border of the PRC's Tibet Autonomous Region and on to Lhasa.

GOLDEN HAND

It's a Sunday evening. There's uproar and laughter around a small pristine cottage next to the Derbinsk almshouse. Carousels are crushing fallen firtwigs, an orchestra of three violins and a make-shift clarinet squawks away, and exile-settlers are dancing the trepak. On a small stage a wizard and magician, “origins forgotten,” is chewing hot oakum and pulling a multicolored ribbon out of his nose. Corks are popping from bottles of kvas. Drunken voices resound from the kvas shop. From its windows you hear: “Bardadym. Dead, a ruble maza. Sheperka, a pip per bundle. Again. Again-again. A lady. Two on the side.”

The owner of this Sakhalin kvas shop, as well as the gambling den, carousels, dance school, inn and café chantant is the “peasant-formerly-exiled” Sofia Bloeffstein. She was famous throughout Russia and most of Europe as “Golden Hand.” At her trial, the table for material evidence glittered with necklaces, bracelets and rings—the evidence of her booty. “Madame witness,” a court official turned to one of the plaintiffs, “do you see any of your jewelry here?” With altered countenance a lady approached this “Golkonda.” Her eyes burned and hands shook as she touched and handled each piece. Then, “from on high” in the dock, a voice mocked, “Madam, don't worry. No need to be so gentle: the jewelry's phony.”

I remembered this event when, at six o'clock in the morning, I left to visit Golden Hand for the first time.

Lloyd George emerged from the war with his prestige at an all-time high. All the political crises he had provoked through his inept deviousness were forgotten. He was hailed as the “man who won the war” (not the least by himself), a characterization that was patently untrue. For one thing, the war was not won by Britain alone but by a coalition of powers. For another, there were factors that probably weighed more than Lloyd George's leadership in the final victory: the strangling naval blockade that hastened Germany's capitulation; Kitchener, who built a formidable army, which became the mainstay of the Entente after the spring of 1917; American help; and Haig, who learned from past defeats, and adopted a formula in 1918 that would produce a string of brilliant victories.

Still, there are many modern day historians who consider that Lloyd George was the indispensable man in the First World War, just like Churchill would be in the second. They argue that he brought talented men into government, cut through red tape to achieve his objective and conciliated the workers, and that he could withstand relentless pressure, maintain his composure in the face of adversity and possessed dogged determination, a fertile imagination, boundless energy and the ability to inspire those with whom he came into contact. In other words, there was no one else on the political scene better suited to cope with the myriad and complex problems stemming from the worldwide conflict.

When the Rapollo conference broke up, it only remained for the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel, to approve the decisions that his government had taken. Accordingly, the three delegations left by special train for Peschiera on Lake Garda, where the king had established his military headquarters. The British were surprised at his diminutive size, described as being not much taller than a dwarf (actually he was 4 feet 11 inches) and “rather a pathetic figure with his country tumbling about his ears.” But they liked him because he seemed sincere, resolute, plucky and good-hearted. He readily consented to the removal of Cadorna, but he was less accommodating over the choice of his successor. Foch and Robertson wanted the Duke of Aosta, Italy's most accomplished soldier, but the king, never very secure, was jealous of his charismatic and popular cousin and deemed him unacceptable. Instead, he appointed General Armando Diaz, a fifty-five-year-old officer who had been a corps commander for only three months. Very little was known about him and the fact that he had spent most of his career on staffs did not exactly inspire confidence among the British and French delegations. But while his résumé was not overly impressive, he proved to be an excellent choice. He was sensible, courageous, concerned about the welfare of his troops, possessed combat experience and was tactically astute.

My first move in this essay would be to problematize the notion of boundaries in the words ‘Canadian’ and ‘Indian’. This question becomes especially pertinent when we try to map the connections between these two countries, the most obvious of which is that both are ‘post-colonial’. However different the two post-colonialisms might be, the obvious common ground is in the condition of being what we might call the Other of the metropolis. A common refrain in ‘Canlitcrit’ is the trauma of being marginalized by the two metropolitan cultures of the ‘mother’ countries in Europe and the big bad brother to the south, nearer home. Our difference from the dominant culture of our erstwhile imperial masters and our continuing link with it is also the running theme of modern Indian culture and life. Both countries also share the sense of being marginalized and reduced to a state of inferiority because of such colonization.

In the Canadian imaginary, this feeling has led to what has been called the ‘cringe’ mentality. In his introduction to one such ‘standard’ work on the subject, The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, David Staines cites the correspondence of an early Canadian writer, Susanna Moodie. Moodie wrote two major books whose titles are nothing if not self-explicatory: Roughing it in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearing versus the Bush (1853).