The Conquered as They Drown in a Sea of Conquerors

  23 May 2019

The Conquered as They Drown in a Sea of Conquerors

The struggles of colonized people in their attempts to assimilate into the dominant culture, as well as the result of intercultural relations developed, are demonstrated through Salman Rushdie’s collection of short stories, East, West, particularly the short story "The Courter." Through the development of a cultural contact zone surrounded by the dominating culture, Rushdie is able to illuminate the influences of the dominant culture on the oppressed cultures and how contact zones influence both groups. While the dominant culture makes way for a vast spectrum of new freedoms, such as new opportunities for economic advancement and an escape from oppression, it comes with the price of a loss of culture and connection to one's culture of origin as well as the introduction of intercultural biases. When a contact zone is engulfed in the dominant culture, the minority group surviving in the contact zone is negatively impacted and grows apart from its culture. 

"The Courter" follows the lives of an Indian family of immigrants living in an Indian apartment complex in London and their relations with English civilization. "The Courter" takes place after England had formally colonized India. Their apartment complex is a primarily Indian residence in the middle of London and this acts as a contact zone for the family and their culture with the dominant culture of England. Having been colonized by the British people, many people from India have immigrated to England in search of opportunity and in doing so are pressured to assimilate to the English culture. In the effort to assimilate within England, the younger characters lose the devotion to their Indian culture by seeking conformity with the dominant culture, and the adult characters demonstrate the oppression caused by the dominant group through the reaction of the dominant culture to their differences, and how it is further enforced by being in a contact zone surrounded by the dominant culture. The contact zones make way for internal and external impacts on the characters. 

The characters demonstrate these impacts in different ways depending on their exposure. For the younger characters who are second-generation immigrants, or have spent a majority of their time in England, there is more of a desire to conform than the adult characters, as that is primarily what they are exposed to outside their homes. The main character of "The Courter" is a young man who, as a result of being surrounded by the dominant culture, has developed an obsession with assimilating. He longs to get his British passport and escape his Indian family. The young children already separate Indian culture in their minds, referring to names heavy with consonants as “Communist consonants, all those z’s and c’s and w’s walled up together without vowels to give them breathing space” (Rushdie, 179).  By referring to Indian words with many consonants as “communist consonants”, they are putting those words in a negative mindset.

The adults, however, having grown up in India, struggle to adjust in a different way. They struggle in part with differences in diction. For example, when the father asked a girl in the pharmacy if she had any nipples and she slapped him, because, as the son remarks, “Here they call them teats” (184). The cultural differences in aspects of life such as dialect cause a rift between the cultures within these contact zones. Difficulty communicating across cultures can lead to an inability to grow together and create a utopia where both cultures can exist. This rift leads to violence and biases. 

The rift is further enhanced through post-colonialism. In “Rushdie, Islam, and Postcolonial Criticism,” various authors discuss their evaluation of Rushdie’s works amongst his academic circles, finding “a good deal of talk about ‘hybridity’” in Rushdie’s work and how Rushdie depicts this intermingling of societies and culture (Ergas 275). The goal of this essay was to evaluate concepts of post-colonialism and their view of the West. The “hybridity” Rushdie manages to show is the intermingling of cultures seen throughout "The Courter", where the worlds of India and England interact both within the characters and their interactions with the world around them. When a contact zone is developed as an island in a sea of the dominating culture, those within the contact zone develop contact zones within themselves. They begin to understand the melding of cultures, while they may not fully understand or embrace either culture within themselves. 

Since "The Courter"  takes place in a more modern era, it is easy to analyze how British colonialism in India has impacted the greater communities long term. Ergas et al agree in their essays arguing, “Criticism, I think, needs to evoke the current torments and threatening gestures of an imperialism we are now living, rather than suggest an unsettling space left behind by an older system, already quaint, that democracy has swept into the past” (276). By this, they are arguing how we, as a society need to be aware of the threatening nature and impact of the colonialism of the past. We often forget that many racial biases and violence are born out of colonialism in the past. For example, in "The Courter", Ayah Mary and the mother are grouped together with other, non-related Indian women, simply for being Indian. Violent, British thugs harass them because the biases they’ve developed through colonialism’s impact keep them from seeing the difference between Indian women. Thus the contact zone of their meeting is mostly influenced by the surrounding dominant culture, swaying it in the ways of violence. 

This conflict is further demonstrated in the contrast of television programs. At first “The Flintstones” plays and Ayah Mary loves the show. Even with her limited English language skills, she still expresses a deep connection with the characters, which the courter shares “poin[ing] first at Certainly Mary, then at himself, grinned… and said ‘Rubble”” (189). She saw the people in her life and related them to the characters on the show confiding in Mixed-Up that “Fred and Wilma reminded her of Sahib and Begum Sahiba upstairs” (189). Despite this being a Western show, she is able to connect it with herself and her Eastern life, creating an ideal contact zone within herself. However, immediately following the children’s program, a newscaster appears on screen to remind the audience of the brutal clashing of cultures in the outside world. The newscaster warns of immigration, an alleged threat to the cultural integrity of England. Not surprisingly, Ayah Mary does not take well with this program. 

By depicting both the idealist contact zone and the reality of how the contact zones negatively impact the colonized, Rushdie keeps from dividing the East and the West. Beyond the story "The Courter", Rushdie brings the ideas of the conversation between cultures through contact zones to the work of East, West as a whole. Even within the title, simply by establishing the difference in the East and West.  As Oscar Clarke says in his essay,  “East, West: Salman Rushdie and the Question of Civilization”, “The author who decided that he was the comma that he placed between East and West in the title of one of his collections of short stories has never been a proponent of the Clash of Civilizations” (Clarke, 44). Through the addition of the comma, Rushdie is emphasizing how these cultures are entirely independent and are only intermingling through contact zones. He divides the book into three parts, “East”, “West”, and “East, West”, identifying how each culture can stand independently but also as a unit through contact zones and as a result of colonialism. 

Through these contact zones, there is the development of “cross-fertilization” across cultures. (Brennan, 938). Essentially, where cultures meet there is a mingling and combining of elements of both cultures into a sort of hybrid. By embracing these hybrid cultures, there is a movement away from racial and cultural biases and inter-cultural violence. Society must “embrace a cross-philosophical approach that may integrate a wide spectrum of wisdom traditions the world over in order to maximize fruitful dialogue and cross-fertilization” (938). In order to ensure that the varying cultures of the world can coexist, especially in the areas impacted by colonialism such as India, it is important to develop contact zones and integration and appreciation of elements from cultures around the world. It is important to “cross-fertilize” between cultures through contact zones because through the blending of cultures and the spread of understanding, there becomes less violence and disruption. 

Through colonialism, cultures have become divided in their desire to overcome one another. Immigration from conquered countries to the land of their conquerors creates pressures for immigrants to remove themselves from their culture to create comfort for the sea of conquerors around them. By cross-fertilizing between cultures and creating a better understanding and acceptance of these cultural differences, pressures to assimilate and change dissipate. The children in "The Courter" would no longer feel the need to remove themselves from their parent's culture and could easily create contact zones in the world and accept both parts of themselves. Warring cultures can exist in harmony. Children of a culture forgotten can rediscover their roots, and not feel the pressures to change in the mindset of assimilation. These contact zones developed amidst the dominant culture are important because while they may lead to violence and distraught for the minority culture, acknowledging them and allowing them to grow carves a path to where society can move from colonialism to understanding and accepting the differences between individuals and cultures. 

Works Cited

Brennan, Tim. “Philosophy East/West: Exploring Intersections between Educational and 

Contemplative Practices” University of Hawaii Press, 2017.

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Clarke, Oscar. “East, West: Salman Rushdie and the Question of Civilization” American 

Humanist Association, 2013. 

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fiu.edu/eds/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=81f9d618-0c9

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%3d#AN=edsgcl.329066368&db=edsgao. Accessed 06 May 2019.

Ergas, Oren, and Sarah Todd, editors. “Rushdie, Islam, and Postcolonial Criticism” Coda 

Press, 1992. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.fiu.edu/stable/466231. Accessed 06 May 

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Rushdie, Salman. “"The Courter"”. East, West, Vintage International, 1994, pp. 175-211.