Language and Mobility

Unexpected Places

By Alastair Pennycook

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Alastair Pennycook
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-764-6

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Series Editors’ Preface,
1 Retracing Routes: Manjari Seeds and Nutmeg Trees,
2 Turning Up in Unexpected Places,
3 Through Others’ Eyes and Thinking Otherwise,
4 Constrained Mobilities: Epistolary Parenting,
5 Resourceful Speakers,
6 Elephant Tracks,
7 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard,
8 Beyond the Boundaries of Expectation,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Retracing Routes: Manjari Seeds and Nutmeg Trees

The rough road to the manager’s bungalow at Lahai Estate in Kerala winds its way up to the top of the hill between the rows of rubber trees that march in straight terraced lines around the sloping plantation. From the rubber tappers’ spiral cuts in the dark grey bark, white latex drips slowly into the half coconut shells hanging below. The ancestors of these rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) grew quietly in the Brazilian rainforests, tapped only by indigenous people, before the demand for rubber disrupted and destroyed this way of life. When seedlings finally germinated and pushed through the soil of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London – the great greenhouse of the British Empire – the days of the Amazonian wild rubber trade were numbered. Shipped in 1876 to Ceylon and Singapore, these first shoots of the British control of rubber started a dynasty of rubber trees across India and Malaysia, where indentured Tamil labourers were transported to work on the plantations. ‘Imported men, an imported plant, and imported quinine to control malaria all combined to make the Malay States an embodiment of the ideal colony, and to make rubber the most satisfactory plantation crop in all of British controlled Southeast Asia’ (Brockway, 2002: 164–165). The unexpected Tamil on today’s street signs in Singapore was carried there to care for these transplanted trees.

It is this estate road that my mother drove down in 1933, leaving the lawns of Lahai where she had played with her pet rabbit, the mango tree where the monkeys used to come to eat the young fruit, the dark stone bungalow with its white beams supporting the red-tiled roof, the cool of the wide verandas either side of the living room, with its doors opening to the steps down to the lawn. She is setting off for England, a distant country she has visited but once before, the big black car winding down the road through the rubber trees – the luggage has gone ahead on a buffalo cart – past the tappers’ huts by the roadside and on through Ranni, Mallappally and Kottayam, until it reaches the coast at Cochin (Kochi). Cochin, that bustling port of people and spices: ‘Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama’s tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar coast; first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in that period called Discovery-of-India – but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before? – we were “not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment”, as my distinguished mother had it’ (Rushdie, 1995: 4–5).

In Cochin my mother, along with her younger sister, Jenifer, and their mother board the British India Steam Navigation (BI) Company ship the SS Chakdina. With them too is a nanny, Maude Bartlett, a ‘mixed blood’ Anglo-Indian. Like other mixed children of colonial encounters, she had been brought up in an orphanage in Coonoor, the high hill station in the Nilgiri Hills, surrounded by tea plantations. She had been hired to help with the journey back to England, where she hopes to stay and find work. They are bound first for Colombo, Ceylon, the city where my grandparents had been married 11 years earlier. There the four of them board the Orient Steam Navigation Company ship the SS Ormonde and begin the long voyage back to England, a country that only my grandmother knows with any familiarity. Sea voyages between India and England became a defining part of these empire lives, and companies such as P & O or the British Steam Navigation Company held a special place in their lives. The SS Ormonde had been launched as a troop carrier in 1917 and sailed regularly between Britain, Suez and Australia between the wars. My grandmother would make this journey numerous times; for my mother, although she did not know it at the time, this journey from the familiar surrounds of Lahai to the unexpectedly unfamiliar textures of England was to be her last such journey.

Travelling in the opposite direction – from Cochin up into the hills of the Western Ghats towards the tea and rubber plantations – I pass again through this city of trade, travel, mixtures, peppers, spices: ‘Christians, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-notsaris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns … can this really be India?’ (Rushdie, 1995: 87). Returning to Cochin, May Joseph (2007) too feels this history of traders, boats, merchants and sailors that have always filled this port: ‘The sweeping views of the magnificent Cochin harbour and the islands of Vaipin, Bolghatty and Willingdon greet me. A momentary flicker to the fifteenth century when elaborate Chinese junks with their fan-shaped sails, high freeboard and square transom; Arab dhows; catamarans, Portuguese ships and a flotilla of Kerala vallams filled the harbor, flashes across my mind’ (Joseph, 2007: 74). She is drawn again to the ‘graceful architectural legacy of that encounter’, the ‘long trail of cantilevered Chinese fishing nets’ (Joseph, 2007: 74). These elegant nets, lowered into the water by giant counter-weighted wooden hands, draw photographers: I, like my grandfather (according to his photographs taken 70 years before) like May Joseph returning to Cochin, am drawn to these stately nets (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2).

Cochin, like many port cities, has seen religions, cultures, languages flow across its quays and through its streets over its 3000-year history (it was mentioned by the Romans), and has been home to many people of different origins. According to Ashis Nandy (2006, np), in ‘600 years of recorded history there is no instance of any serious ethnic or religious violence’ between its many communities – Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Portuguese, some 14 identifiable communities. Attributed at first by locals as a result of being progressive, educated and secular, such harmony, Nandy maintains, has been more a result of the fact that in ‘Cochin, nobody liked anybody else – Cochin’s religious and ethnic amity alas was built on mutual dislike.’ But this dislike, Nandy continues, was informed by three cardinal principles: First, that others are not only others: you may dislike them, but they are a part of yourself, they are introjected, they are internalized, so they are recognizably part of yourself. Second, everybody also knew that while they disliked others, others also disliked them, and they granted that right to others, because they felt this was a kind of natural order of things – that some of those whom you do not like, do not like you either. And third, they cannot imagine Cochin without the others; somewhat akin to an epic where the gods and demons both have to be there for the story to be complete. Traditional societies, Nandy suggests, may have lived together like this – not because they were all oozing brotherly love, but they could not imagine the world without the others, the world was defined partly by these people they did not like. And these newer arrivals, these hill-dwelling white people, are added to the list as they pass through, part of a new era of mutual dislike.

Port cities give us insights into contemporary diversities, for in an era of airports, every city becomes a port city. Much is made of current urban diversity brought about by increased levels of immigration, but port cities have always been places where people of many backgrounds came to trade and live. The denial of diversity has been a strange artefact of colonial and modernist thought, but diversity has always been both ubiquitous and ordinary (Higgins & Coen, 2000). Lee Su Kim describes the Baba/Nyonya (Peranakan) culture that grew up around ports such as Malacca on the West cost of Malaysia, when Chinese (mainly Hokkien, but also Teochow and Cantonese) moved to the region in the 15th and 16th centuries, as ‘a rare and beautiful blend of many cultures — Chinese and Malay, mixed with elements from Javanese, Sumatran, Thai, Burmese, Balinese, Indian, Portuguese, Dutch and English cultures’ (Kim, 2010: 12).

These European influences only came later as the representatives of new trading empires blustered their way into already diverse trading ports. Even the adopted terms Baba (male) and Nyonya (female) have travelled diverse routes, the former (used as an honorific for grandparents) shipped by Indian traders from Persian into Malay via Hindustani, the latter probably coming from Italian or Portuguese (nona or dona) via Javanese, as an honorific for foreign women or women married to foreigners. From Malacca to Hoi An in Vietnam, which was once the largest harbour in South East Asia, and where the Cham people controlled the spice trade with Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Indians and many more, on through to Cochin, port cities have always been diverse places of linguistic and cultural mixing, where the people may not necessarily have liked each other, but they made do with these languages turning up in unexpected places.

Beyond the bustle of Cochin, the road crosses and recrosses the Kerala backwaters, the rivers, estuaries, lakes, canals where once black-hulled barges ferried coconuts, coir ropes, toddy and rice to Cochin, and where today black-hulled barges, with their newly traditional basketwork superstructures, bring tourists punting slowly through the calm waters; on past the Kumarakom bird sanctuary, where Siberian stalks, fleeing their northern winter, swoop down in long-legged greed on the life-filled waters, and ducks and cormorants dip their bodies between the floating clumps of weeds; up to Kottayam, a town of unexpected, old Christian Orthodox churches and seminaries that moved inland when the Portuguese started pushing Catholicism along the Malabar coast. The Syrian Knanaya Christians had come to this coast long before in the fourth century. The many bookstores of this literate town are closed this Sunday, not because of the churches but because of Kerala’s long-term communist government, itself responsible for the almost universal literacy in the district, as well as the injunction to allow workers a day of rest.

Near Kottayam is the small village of Aymanam that becomes Ayemenem in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: ‘May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear window panes and die, fatly baffled by the sun.’ (Roy, 1997: 1). So starts The God of Small Things. The twins, Esther and Rahel, who, ‘even when they were thin-armed children, flat-chested, worm-ridden, Elvis Presley-puffed’ did not get the usual ‘”Who is who?” and “Which is which?” from oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox Bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem house for donations’ (Roy, 1997: 2). They learned to swim in the river, the Meenachal, ‘Greygreen. With fish in it. The sky and the trees in it. And at night the broken yellow moon in it … The first third of the river was their friend. Before the Really Deep began. They knew the slippery stone steps (thirteen) before the slimy mud began. They knew the afternoon weed that flowed inwards from the backwaters of Komarakom.’ (Roy, 1997: 203). Arundhati Roy and her characters also make this trip, to Kottayam, to Cochin, down the coast to Allepey.

As my mother rode down the slopes of Lahai estate in 1933, she was on her way to school, across oceans to a cold, damp country she did not know. As Buettner observes, the lives of families in parts of the British Empire such as India that were not regarded as places for permanent settlement were ‘defined by long-term patterns of work and residence overseas that alternated with time spent in Britain for schooling, on periodic furloughs, and ultimately in retirement. This created specific forms of racial, class, and geographical identity that enabled them to remain separate not only from Indians but also from members of European-descended communities domiciled in India who failed to participate in ongoing cycles of migration’ (Buettner, 2004: 2). Sending children to school in England was one of the common reasons for such voyages. As Buettner shows, there were strong arguments concerning the detrimental effects – physical, moral, cultural and educational – of bringing children up in India, and in favour of the benefits of an education in Britain: ‘Leaving the subcontinent enabled children to benefit from exposure to Britain’s climate, culture, and schooling provisions, factors that, taken together, inculcated highly coveted forms of cultural and career competence connoting whiteness and respectability’ (Buettner, 2004: 110). Such separations, however, sometimes came at considerable emotional cost, especially, as was to be the case in my mother’s life, when unexpected circumstances (Second World War) turned this period of separation into a decade of distant letter writing (see Chapter 4).

Yet while these voyages and separations, these journeys from one unexpected place within the empire to the unexpectedness of ‘home’, were part of a designed separation, part of a carefully regulated process of cultural and racial identification, something always rubbed off, some trace was left behind. This journey into the past, to the places of my mother’s birth and my grandparents’ working lives, is more than some nostalgic attempt to revisit the past, as if it were some tourist destination waiting immobile for visitors. Instead, by revisiting landscapes, histories, objects, feelings and senses, by retracing routes taken long ago, I am asking what these traces are that I am following, what I can learn from what Joseph calls mnemonic traces: ‘Amidst the fury of modernity’s upheavals float the fragments of cultures in transition, of peoples adrift. These shards of exchange are borne by a myriad of actors such as migrants, nomads, seafarers, travelers, refugees, immigrants, exiles and the curious. Their mnemonic traces are embedded in the debris of transoceanic contact and permeate the ebb and flow of global social exchange’ (Joseph, 2007: 62). Many of us live lives of movement, travelling here and there, living elsewhere. What rubs off in this process? What mnemonic traces are left in these places and in ourselves, and where do they find their unexpected places in language?

On the way to Lahai, as the road climbs into the hills of rubber, we stop at Mundakayam Estate. This is the world that Kannan in David Davidar’s The House of Blue Mangoes enters, working for the ‘Pulimed Tea Company … located high in the central Travancore hills …’ (Davidar, 2002: 305). ‘No sooner had they left the brawling heat of the plains behind, than the hills began to place their enchantments before them. Forests quiet with rain, and valleys where clouds came to rest’ (Davidar, 2002: 322). For the Europeans that ran these tea and rubber plantations, there was not only good business to be had in these hills, but also temperate weather, misty mornings, flowering gardens. ‘The mossy smell, the hills helmeted with tea or forest, the sound of running water, the fresh cold breeze on their faces … Pulimed lay before them. It was a sunny day, and every detail of its beauty was sharply etched, though the mist had already begun smoking out of the crevices and crags of the hills, streaming across the tea bushes that democratically massed on every slope as far as the eye could see’ (Davidar, 2002: 322). Driving through these hills of Kerala – what was then Travancore – I feel again the softness of these hills, the congregations of light-green tea bushes, the light scents of flowers and spices on the cool air.

My grandparents moved from Peravanthamam Estate near Mundakayam in October 1927 to take up the new position at Lahai. The workers at Peravanthamam presented them with a farewell address: ‘To Frank Hawkings Esq., Manager Peravanthamam Estate, Mundakayam’ from ‘Your most obedient and loving boys, The staff of Peravanthanam Estate.’ ‘Dear Sir,’ it opens, ‘With painful feelings of deep and genuine regret, we, the Staff of the Peravanthanam Estate, Mundakayam, venture to avail ourselves of this opportunity, so kindly offered by you, to bid you farewell on the eve of your departure from our midst, to take up the Management of the Lahai Estate. While soliciting every good fortune for you, we still wish you had been longer spared to us. But rather than selfishly pine at our bad luck our hearts go with you, let us assure you Sir, at every tide of your fortune.’ The letter goes on to praise his ‘uniform kindness, unruffled patience and amiable manners’ that ‘have left their indelible impression on our hearts and shall ever stand as examples for our future guidance’. Thanks are also given to my grandmother, ‘who has always bestowed a mother’s love and solicitude on us’. It closes by praying that ‘you will pardon any wrongs that unknown to us and innocently we might have done to you … Our sincerest prayers shall waft your footsteps to the goal you desire and help to crown all your efforts with the success that they richly deserve, making a long life happy and prosperous to you and useful to others’. These farewell addresses (see Chapter 6), beautifully produced, lavishly written, became treasured items, unexpected material mnemonic traces of those years in the misty hills of tea and rubber.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Language and Mobility by Alastair Pennycook. Copyright © 2012 Alastair Pennycook. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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