Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain by Ashley Dawson

Author:Ashley Dawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780472025053
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

RELIGIOUS COMMUNALISM AND THE RUPTURING OF

NATIONAL ALLEGORY

Gibreel’s ghazal-chanting during his drop toward the drink may be more charismatic than Saladin’s rigid mimicry of British nationalism, but it is no less flawed a response to the traumas of migration. For his celebration of the hybridity of the Indian everyman is predicated on an Page 130 → increasingly hollow representation of national reality. Indeed, in Gibreel’s reaction to the Bostan disaster, Rushdie is satirizing one of the most powerful representations available of Indian national identity: the Bollywood hero. The song Gibreel sings is, in fact, lifted from a famous Bollywood film that emphasized the adaptive capacity of Indians. As Sumita Chakravarty’s work on Indian popular cinema suggests, the malleable persona of the male film protagonist serves as an allegory of the successful fusion of the multiple forms of difference, from class and caste to region and religion, that characterizes the Indian nation.33 Consciously exploiting the resources of male masquerade and impersonation, the Bombay film star reconciles national binarisms such as the Hindu-Muslim split by suggesting that such differences are merely superficial, that difference is, after all, only skin deep. Drawing on Bombay cinema’s textual practice of male masquerade, Rushdie’s work initially intimates that such hybridity may serve as an allegory for the identity of the migrant. Yet while the mutability of the hero’s body in Bombay cinema may suggest the potential resolution of the intractable contradictions of national identity, it nonetheless also intimates the fear of the disjunction and dissolution that animates essentialist reassertions of communal identity. As recent cultural theory has emphasized, the performative aspect of masquerade underlines the nonessential character of gendered being.34 While this constructivist approach might provide a convenient unifying allegory for an increasingly fragmented polity, it also makes explicit the experience of instability that affects culture and identity within a globalized world and often acts as the catalyst to various forms of ethnic and cultural absolutism. If Gibreel’s celebration of hybrid identity allegorizes Indian national identity, it is a consciousness that is ultimately not marked by the easy reconciliations imagined by the cinematic tradition.35

But of course the Bombay film industry has been kind to Gibreel, and so it behooves him to embrace the form of hybridity that it purveys. Born of a poor dabbawalla (porter) who wears himself out catering to the bloated bellies of film industry moguls, Gibreel climbs to stardom by impersonating the myriad deities of India (17). Rushdie casts Gibreel in the role of the ultimate reconciler, the chameleon onto whom the incredibly various population of India can project its greatest hopes and most intimate desires. By literally incarnating the various belief systems that animate much of the nation’s populace, Gibreel becomes a metaphorical embodiment of national identity. In fact, the “theological” Page 131 → genre that Rushdie invents for Gibreel to star in is based on one of the perennial and defining forms of Indian cinematography: the mythological.36 One of the pioneer genres in early Indian filmmaking, the mythological quickly came to signify

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