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Summary: Chapter 9

On the evening after Yvette’s party, while they stood talking by the river, Salim reflected on the two different portraits Indar had offered of Raymond. Before the party, he had praised Raymond as an intellectual celebrity, but afterward, he had underscored Raymond’s increasing irrelevance. Salim concluded that Indar wanted him to understand what lay beneath the glamor of life in the Domain.

Salim observed a mounting depression in Indar, who began to tell Salim the story of his life since he left to attend university. Salim recreates an account that Indar provided in pieces over the course of several weeks in a unified story. Indar began by claiming that people in most parts of the world are constantly moving and hence cannot afford to dwell on the past. Yet he also recognized that turning one’s back on the past is no easy task, and he told Salim he found solace in “the image of the garden trampled until it becomes ground.” Indar said this image came to him at a difficult moment during his third year in England.

Indar recalled his unhappiness when he left East Africa, worried as he was about his family’s future. He tried to shake off his worry once he arrived in England, which initially dazzled him. He soon realized that the civilization he’d grown up in had imprisoned him in a single, limited point of view that rendered him incapable of understanding the outside world. He realized that he and his people took the world for granted and never considered making individual contributions to the wider world.

Indar explained that, despite proving himself able to cram for exams, he learned little of value at university. This derived in part from his own attitude. He likened his attitude at university to that of a person who arrives at the London airport from a developing nation and pretends to be underwhelmed so as not to draw attention to themselves. Likewise, Indar spent his university years disappointed and failing to understand.

Near the end of his degree, the other young men in his class had excellent job prospects, but Indar felt unable share in their success. He visited the Appointments Committee at the university, but it became clear to him that the officer there only prioritized putting “English boys in English jobs.” Around this time, a woman lecturer with whom he frequently took lunch suggested that Indar’s status as “a man of two worlds” prepared him well to serve as a diplomat. Buoyed by her confidence, Indar made an appointment at the Indian embassy. However, his experience there proved disastrous and humiliating.

Leaving the embassy, Indar walked to the river and thought about how it was time to go home. Yet when he thought of home, he didn’t think of his home on the coast but of an idealized African village. Realizing that this was a mere fantasy, Indar awoke to his surroundings. He realized that, in contrast to Africa, where everything was bush, London was a place where every detail had been designed or otherwise put in place by people. This realization enabled an epiphany: namely, that Indar belonged to himself alone. Not only would he need to devise a job for himself, but he would also need to settle in a place like London. Refusing to remember the great men of his Indian heritage, such as Gandhi and Nehru, Indar pledged to abandon the past altogether.

Indar caught his lucky break when he met an American man with an unusual interest in Africa. The man grew curious about the way Indar spoke about African affairs, and Indar quickly realized that his status as “a man without a side” made him uniquely suited to influence international interests in the continent. He developed a program of “continental interchange” that enabled first-generation African intellectuals to live in various parts of the continent and so develop a more positive view of Africa, which would in turn jumpstart “the true African revolution.” With his new understanding of his position in the world, Indar wanted to leave complacency and loss behind and instead start “to win and win and win.”

Analysis: Chapter 9

Indar’s image of the trampled garden registers a need to both reject sentimental attachment to the past and find a new sense of security in non-attachment. Upon arriving in England, Indar felt trapped in a point of view that he’d inherited from the community he grew up in. Unable to escape from that narrow perspective and see the world for what it was, Indar decided to make a radical break with his past. Yet he also understood that breaking with his past had the potential to make him feel ungrounded, dislocated, and existentially homeless. For this reason he came up with the image of a “garden trampled until it becomes ground.” In this image, the garden symbolizes the past, idealized through the power of nostalgia. He wished to trample this garden, whose beauty he understood as a mere illusion. But Indar didn’t simply want to destroy the garden; he wanted to smash it so thoroughly that the garden, now free of enticing illusions, could serve as a new ground on which to stand. In other words, Indar detached himself from his past and transformed this detachment into a foundation for his new life.

Throughout his first few years living in England, Indar felt even more like an outsider than usual. Like Salim, he grew up as part of an Asian community on the East Coast of Africa. This upbringing endowed him with an in-between status and a sense of cultural dislocation. The uprising that ravaged his home community after he left for England made him feel even more adrift in the world. Now doubly displaced and without a clear home to return to, Indar felt his outsider status in new, more intense ways. Most obviously, as a student from a former colony in Africa, Indar did not share the same cultural, racial, or economic privileges as his English classmates. As he discussed with Salim, his difference directly translated to a lack of suitable job prospects at the end of his degree. Perhaps less obvious that these social and financial imbalances is the difficulty of Indar’s existential arrival in England. In an attempt to maintain his sense of pride, he pretended that everything in England had disappointed him. Yet this disaffected attitude prevented him from feeling like he’d fully arrived, and as a result, he only ever felt half awake during his school years.

For all that Indar’s status as “a man of two worlds” contributed to his sense of cultural dislocation, it also became his secret weapon. Learning to see his greatest disadvantage as his greatest advantage required a significant shift in perspective. This shift occurred when one of Indar’s lecturers referred to him as a man of two worlds and hence suited for diplomatic service. Although his pursuit of a diplomatic career immediately ended, the image of himself as belonging to two worlds enabled him to detect a hidden source of power. His experience of feeling marginalized gave Indar a unique perspective as both an insider and an outsider. Despite not feeling like he truly belonged anywhere, he nonetheless occupied a strategic position between cultures that allowed him to integrate the perspectives of both oppressor and oppressed. Furthermore, because he lacked any clear allegiances and responsibilities, Indar could lay full claim to his own destiny and transform himself into a truly self-made man. This major shift in perspective offered Indar a sense of freedom that he’d never previously experienced.

In designing his program for “continental interchange,” Indar drew from his own life experience as a man between worlds in an attempt to help Africans come to a deeper social and political self-understanding. During his time in England, Indar gradually came to realize that his status as an outsider gave him an advantage. Not only did it allow him to see the world with greater objectivity, but it also enabled him to understand himself with greater clarity. In short, his perpetual in-between status provided the unexpected gift of independence. When Indar developed his interchange program, which gave first-generation African intellectuals the resources necessary to travel to other parts of the continent, he applied the lessons of his own life to promote a greater African self-understanding. By showing Africans what life was like in other parts of the vast continent, they could develop a broad yet experience-based idea of what Africa was as it moved in the direction of political independence and modernity. Indar believed that such a perspective would spark solidarity across the continent. It would also jumpstart an African revolution that might ultimately prove truer than the disconnected minor rebellions that had afflicted many post-colonial African nations.

 

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