Response to Taryn (with grin on face)

Taryn, I energetically signed in all ready to continue my rhapsodic responses to Anand in these 'conversations' and lo and behold--there was your piece! I chuckled out loud in the library--not at WHAT you said, but at your vehemence (which I always feel myself--and yes, with that dose of guilt for feeling "unprofessional.") This is what I love about art and literature--we get to be subjective and educated at the same time, and realize that neither of our responses is more correct than the other--yet they are so delightfully opposite! So... to what I was going to add to my post from Tuesday (which precedes yours in this blog.)

I mentioned how much I enjoyed reading "Under the Chestnut Tree" AFTER reading "Untouchable" because it allowed me to hear/feel/understand Anand better having gotten a clue to what made him tick from his creative work. Well, after Michael's presentation Tuesday night and after reading "Toward a Regional Cosmopolitanism" today, I feel an even greater ability to understand Anand and relate to him on a personal level.

Something that I noticed with a touch of endearment, was the way that Anand, Forster, and Woolf tentatively circle each other in conversation like three people who are testing ground and recording data before committing verbally. Forster gives mild reproof re modes of address, Anand notices that Forster's answer was liberally sprinkled with "Hindustani words, obviously from a more intimate knowledge of India that most Britishers displayed,"(72) and later Woolf expresses surprise at Anand's comparison of a Shakespeare character (Caliban) to Gandhi by "looking from the corner of his eye" at Forster and saying, "I never thought of that equation"(78). Rather than being put off by all these minor details pertaining to movement, reactions,expressions, I am suddenly seeing "regional cosmopolitanism" exemplified in all three of these writers.

The first point I valued in "Toward a Regional Cosmopolitanism" was the statement, "The tension between the local and universal inhabits the history of the word 'cosmopolitan. . . ' "(144). I needed to read that, because I know that I bandy that word around a little to liberally. The conversation between these three highly intelligent men--culturally different in so many ways--is heartening if one buys into Appiah's pluralist version of cosmopolitanism, that being "we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement but because it will help us get used to each other "(qtd in Berman 146). These three men in a garden, jockeying for position, are "getting used to each other" on equal terms. Anand as the "colonized" party does not seem lesser than Woolf and Forster who represent the colonizing party because their literary works earn them equal kudos for attempting to find commonality. Anand's name dropping and English word coinages do not bother me. He has been invited to the table, as it were, and he is talking the talk. Toward the end of Berman's article she upholds Anand in this by saying, "Anand is described as mimicking the language developing around him rather than employing language in an experimental way or using it to force recongnition...of Indian culture. . . .I would argue that reading Anand within the context of his regional cosmopolitanism, and his efforts to 'bridge' 'the Ganga and the Thames' makes clear the inadequacy of describing these quasi-Hindi, quasi-English moments purely in terms of linguistic verisimilitude"(158).

All-in-all, I look forward to discussion tonight!

Ruth