Introduction
M.G. Vassanji’s novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, narrated by the protagonist Vikram Lall, the novel depicts how his community, East African Asians, had complicated the colonial scenario of a white-black racial clash with their “in-betweenness.” Vassanji formulates a first-person narrative in a dialogical structure: the “in-between” protagonist Vikram is constantly impelled to undergo numerous modes of negotiations between different temporalities and localities, in Kenya and Canada. By representing the lives of the “in-between” East African Asians in modern Kenya, Vassanji succeeds in “spanning the literary record” of the Mau Mau rebellion. This paper will explore to the extent Vasanji has accentuated this “in-betweenness” of Lall.
Synopsis
M.G. Vassanji’s novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, covering fifty years of Kenyan history, focuses on neocolonial difference and the elaborate postcolonial re-evaluation of cultures. At the beginning of the text, the Kenyan people are on the lowest rung of the social ladder with whites and Indians in power. In 1965 after Kenya assumed political independence and Jomo Kenyatta became president of the new nation, an elaborate repositioning of the classes occurred.
This tumultuous period contributed to chaos that fed lawless activities, realigning individuals in Western nations with Kenyan politicians and private citizens in the extortion that harmed the Kenyan people yet again. Vassanji’s elaborate novel depicts an international racketeering allowing some individuals like the protagonist to get very rich. The novel begins with a confession:
“My name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa’s most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country’s treasury in recent years. I head my country” (Vasanji 3).
As an Indian child growing up in 1950s Kenya, Vikram Lall is at the center of two warring worlds — one of childhood innocence, the other ‘a colonial world of repressive, undignified subjecthood’ in which the innocent often meet with the cruelest of fates. He passes his early days playing with his sister, Deepa, their neighborhood friend Njoroge, and English expatriates Annie and Bill Bruce. Though he is a third-generation African, he understands that Njoroge is somehow more African than he or his family will ever be.
The British police regularly raid Nakuru looking for Mau Mau rebels, who are terrorists in the eyes of Europeans, but freedom fighters to native Kenyans; one-day tragedy strikes the Lall family’s English friends. Haunted by a grisly description of the crime scene, the Lalls eventually pick up and move to Nairobi. Fast-forward to 1965, when Kenya has achieved independence and Mau Mau sympathizer Jomo Kenyatta is now the president of the nation. Njoroge, who worshipped Jomo from an early age, becomes a rising star in the new government.
He tracks down the Lalls in Nairobi and begins an innocent courtship of Deepa, much to her parent’s chagrin. Meanwhile, Vikram continues to allow his memory of young Annie to define his life and, as a result, makes some morally ambiguous judgments when he lands a position in the new government. Telling his story from Canada, where he fled after getting top billing on Kenya’s ‘List of Shame’ as one of the most financially corrupt men in his country, Vikram is a voice for all those who wonder about the price of the struggle for freedom. Vassanji explores a conflict of epic proportions from the perspective of a man trapped in “the perilous in-between”.
The “in-betweenness” of Vikram
In a 1985 essay “The Postcolonial Writer: Myth Maker and Folk Historian,” which is included in his edited collection of essays A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature, M.G. Vassanji explicates his idea of a “postcolonial writer.”(42) Contending that a postcolonial writer is “a preserver of the collective tradition, a folk historian and mythmaker” (63), Vassanji begins his introduction of such a writer’s obligations with the following passage:
If we project onto a mental canvas, side by side as it were, the fictional spaces of V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Cyril Dabydeen, and Clyde Hosein, we find that they loosely hang together, like segments of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle: not quite fitting yet belonging together. They all tell us about the lives of South Asians in the British Caribbean. They complement each other in time and space, and together they span the literary record of a collective experience. (63)
In The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, Vassanji explores a significant part of his life experience. Set up in the form of a memoir, the novel is a nostalgic story of the protagonist Vikram Lall, who is a descendant of a family of South Asian ancestry living in Africa for several generations. Earning the ironic “distinction of having been numbered one of Africa’s most corrupt men,” (Vasanji 3) Vikram is now leading an exilic life in his new “home” on the shores of Canada’s Lake Ontario. Here Vikram slowly unfurls the past—a story about his family’s multiple migrations and their entwinement with Kenya’s modern history over the past one hundred years.
Vassanji has deliberately inscribed this historically-constructed “in-between” situation of East African Asians into the act of crafting Vikram’s family drama. As part of the labor mobility within the British Empire, Vikram’s grandfather was “recruited” by the colonizers to participate in the British Empire’s colonization of East Africa, mainly working as “plantation workers, railway builders, clerks, custom officials, policemen, and soldiers” (Sarvan 512), these Indian immigrants came to occupy positions disparaged by white settlers. and, with the completion of the railway, he decided not to return to his “homeland” back in India but to adopt the place he had been working for years as his new “home”. As if in accordance with the grandfather’s initial displacement, “homelessness” becomes a major theme of this family’s story.
With their multiple migrations and displacements, these East African Asians develop a “multiplicity of affiliations” (Malak, 277). Straddling cultures and places, they have oscillated between different loyalties. Thus the eight-year-old child Vikram intriguingly finds that he is bestowed with conflicting role models that stand at the two poles. On one end stands his “proudly Kenyan, hopelessly… colonial” (Vasanji 21) father Ashok, who plays a willing-to-be-possessed colonial subject. Vikram’s maternal uncle, Mahesh, Labeled as a newly-emigrated political radical continues his advocacy of anti-colonial resistance in his “new home” in Kenya. Viewing the Mau Mau rebellion as the Kenyan struggle for freedom, Mahesh becomes a supplier of goods for the Mau Mau rebels hiding in the forests.
By dramatizing how this East African Asian family has been affected by the twisting forces of history, Vassanji forcibly represents the “in-between” situation of Vikram as he finds that he is stuck between his father’s total submission to colonialism and his uncle’s radical anti-colonial activism.
To further reveal the state of “in-betweenness” experienced by Vikram, Vassanji deliberately investigates the most domestic period of one’s life: childhood. Vikram’s own personal story starts amidst the high tide of the Mau Mau rebellion in 1953. Vikram along with his sister Deepa befriend a Gikuyu boy Njoroge, who is the grandson of the servant of Vikram’s neighbors, and William (Bill) Bruce and Annie Bruce, the children of a white settler family. While the “friendships” of these children seem to form a promising picture of harmony, the force of the Mau Mau rebellion is ready to encroach on the “innocence.”
The brutal killings committed by the Mau Mau rebels; the following police raid in cracking down the rebellion; and eventually Bill and Annie’s ranking as the newest victims of the Mau Mau rebellion—Vikram’s “innocent” childhood is completely consumed by the Mau Mau rebellion. In his early texts “Vassanji presents—consistently and concurrently—bifocal images of private drama within communal crises” (Malak, 280).
Vikram’s loss of innocence is a major plot in the first part of the novel. The supposedly “innocent” play-acting among the children in Vassanji’s novel is found to be already inscribed by political awareness: while the white boy Bill can unquestionably assume the role of winner/ruler, Vikram and Njoroge, who are both colonial subjects. Through their play-acting games, the positions of these children within the colonial structure in Kenya are revealed and strengthened.
As Vikram begins to detect his difference from Njoroge through these play-acting games—he observes that “I do recall that his being different, in features, in status, was not far from my consciousness. I was also aware that he as more from Africa than I was” (Vasanji 27) —he soon learns more about his perilous position. Such a “three-tier plural society” in colonial East Africa in which, as concisely summarized by Michael Twaddle, “white officials and settlers lived at the top of the colonial hierarchy, black Africans survived at its base, and brown settlers fitted themselves into its middle layers” (111).
His “friendships” with a black boy and two white children in colonial Kenya eventually initiate him into realizing his role as an “in-between” Indian. While Bill and Njoroge are dichotomized into playing their respective roles as a white colonizer and a black colonized, Vikram has no apparent place in this antagonistic relationship. Under the white-black racial clash of the Mau Mau rebellion, he is stuck as an “in-between” subject.
Undertaking the project of writing/remembering in his “Canadian retreat,” Vikram reaches out to engage in holding conversations with several characters, among whom his best friend Njoroge’s angry young son Joseph figures prominently. Like his father Njoroge, Joseph is a fervent political activist, being sent to Vikram in Canada to “escape the clutches of the police following a large riot” back home in Kenya. Enraged by the post-independence state’s persecution of “his people, the Kikuyu”, Joseph styles himself as one of the “Sons of Mau Mau,” who enjoin their fellow Gikuyu youths to “Come to Kenya and fight” with the oppressing government. Thus obsessed with his ideas of and assumptions about political justice—his thoughts of “revenge” and “war”—Joseph refuses to interact with Vikram but rather prefers to retain the racial category of seeing Vikram as “an Asian”.
The most racist person in the in-between planet turns out to be Vikram’s mother, whose brutal squashing of Deepa’s romance with Njoroge mixes the worst Hindu traditions from the subcontinent, caste-consciousness, communalism and abject disregard for individual will, with the nastiest elements of colonialism. This further accentuates the “in-between” world that Vasanji so dearly portrayed in the book.
If Vassanji dramatizes Vikram’s abortive relationship with Joseph to suggest the urgency of undergoing history-remembering—that the opening up of history is for the sake of building up communication—his text further presents a second targeted audience: Vikram’s sister. Vikram’s failure to communicate with this targeted audience indicates, “how much the political imagination, by its tendency to allegorization, denies people’s humanity” (Kortenaar, 182).
The suggestion of Deepa in Vikram’s memoir-writing points out the intimate character of remembering. A caring and thoughtful sister who sends Joseph to Vikram to strengthen the “bond” between the two, Deepa works like a guiding “light” to accompany Vikram to undergo his reconstruction of their collective memories. Her presence reminds Vikram of the importance of his writing; and, through his writing, Vikram has managed to preserve the collective communal memories—like the ones he shares with Deepa—that are otherwise ready to disappear: “How the past was slipping away; soon the untold stories among the older Molabuxes and the Lalls would simply have disappeared into the winds” (Vasanji, 284)
Functioning as a tool for communication and preservation of collective experience, Vikram’s writing works to open up memories to invite a wider participation in the project of exploring the past. The gradual significance of the librarian Seema Chatterjee in the latter part of the novel suggests the operation of such a process.
On the one hand, Seema is posed as a total outsider in Vikram’s story—unlike Joseph and Deepa who share the same past with Vikram, she is Vikram’s new acquaintance in Canada; on the other hand, however, Seema shares Vikram’s experience of displacement: a Bengali immigrant whose family were also “rendered refugees by the Indian partition,” Seema establishes a bond with Vikram in terms of their shared “tortuous histories and migratory roots”. With her double roles, Seema works as an alienated yet intimate audience on whom Vikram’s memory-writing leaves a conspicuous effect.
Like a “detective-woman” who digs out Vikram’s past to expose his real status as an unconscionable businessman Emerging from “corrupted Africa,” Seema nevertheless undergoes a noticeable transformation as her “discovery” of Vikram grows deeper: her quick and harsh judgment of Vikram as “an evil genius” who mercilessly exploits the suffering Africans inevitably becomes murkier and less righteous after she hears Vikram’s account of his own story and ends up establishing an intimate relationship with him.
Apparently Vikram seems to be a person who seems to understand love, as seen from his relationships, friendship, etc. and he expects a similar kind of feeling from others and often gets disappointed. However, as he becomes older, this sense of concern for others seems to disappear. His heart does become numb. Disappointment in others too often makes him cynical. The only person that Vikram seems to show concern for, even later in his life, is his sister.
While Vikram never experiences true love and thus is always unable to be truly committed heart and soul (to his wife for instance) one can never doubt that he does understand the love between brother and sister. But for poor Vikram, even though he has a strong relationship with his sister, somehow he always remains displaced; he is always without a place or person that he can rely on. Even in his later years all he was left with is the telephone as his way of communicating with his sister. While love can still be expressed, intimacy can never be passed through wires. Vikram only understands what it means to be “in-between,” it is a role he plays and knows well, and thus stays in that’s state because it is safe and familiar. However for Vikram, that state is a place in which he has always and will always walk alone.
Years later, while snowbound in his Canadian “home”, Vikram is dispassionate about the moral choices he’s made. In his urge to tell his story without moral judgments or frills, Vikram is ever the objective chronicler.
Titled as “Homecoming,” the last part of the novel is composed of a single chapter that traces how Vikram returns to Kenya to “meet [his] destiny” (412). With the termination of Vikram’s memoir-writing in Canada, the two parallel narrative threads of the novel converge into a present-tense narrative that dramatizes how Vikram is attempting to “start anew”(418) —his maneuver to cleanse his disreputable past by reconciling with the “Anti-Corruption Commission” in post-independence Kenya. Thus ending the bifocal narrative that runs throughout the novel with a present-tense narrative, Vassanji forcefully brings the readers into the fore.
What do “we” make of Vikram Lall, who has introduced himself as one of “Africa’s most corrupt men,” after hearing his story? Is he really an amoral man who, though surrounded by numerous ethnic clashes and killings, made his “millions; tens, hundreds of them” (374)? Eventually, as suggested by Vikram’s failed attempt to pursue a brand new start in Kenya, Vassanji does not offer a transcending reconciliation for his readers to “solve” these questions. Ending the novel with the disturbing image of Vikram’s unknown fate amidst a blazing fire, Vassanji alerts us that history has not yet been “enclosed”—our project of memorializing the past is still ongoing.
Conclusion
East Africa needs novels because its stories need to be told” (Interview with Chelva Kanaganayakam 25). With a depiction of Vikram’s “in-between world,” Vassanji forcefully brings into view how his ambivalent in-betweenness has rendered him a non-existent figure in dominant representations of the Mau Mau rebellion. Vassanji’s view of Kenya’s Asians appears as ambivalent as his “in-between” protagonist’s identity crisis. Throughout the book we experience a lack of self-identification in Vikram and in the end this accentuates to a different level. In Vikram, Vassanji has created a character that is at once sympathetic, a fractured man still suffering from the climate of fear of his childhood, but also a villain, making the protagonist permanently stuck in the void of “in-betweenness”.
Works Cited
Vasanji, M.G. The In-between World of Vikram Lall, Canada, 2003.
Sarvan, Charles Ponnuthurai. M.G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack: A Reflection on History and the Novel. Modern Fiction Studies 37.3 1991.
Malak, Amin. Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M.G. Vassanji. World Literature Today. 1993.
Twaddle, Michael. The Development of Communalism among East African Asians. Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora. Ed. Crispin Bates. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
ten Kortenaar, Neil. Between Ethics and Politics. Rev. of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, by M.G. Vassanji. Canadian Literature. 2004.
Interview with Chelva Kanaganayakam. ‘Broadening the Substrata’: An Interview with M.G. Vassanji. World Literature Written in English 31.2, 1991.
The Postcolonial Writer: Myth Maker and Folk Historian. A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature. Ed. M.G. Vassanji. Toronto: TSAR, 1985.