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January 1, 2002
REVIEW: What lies on the other side
A PROLIFIC writer of fiction which spans several genres and includes four novels, two travelogues, as well as a memoir about his childhood in India, Stephen Alter has remained consistent in his literary commitment to the place of his birth. More than any other theme, it is simply the fact of India — its teeming multitudes and multitudinous contradictions — that has thus far served as the binding force in Alter’s expansive range of creative endeavours.
Born in 1956 to an American missionary couple in the hill-town resort of Mussoorie, Alter spent his formative years in India, a country in which he has intermittently lived and travelled for the past four decades. Since 1995, Alter has been teaching in the Programme in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also held the position of Writer-in-Residence for 2000-01.
In the ‘author’s note’ to his latest book, Amritsar to Lahore, Alter positions himself as ‘a traveller with a longstanding grudge against borders’, whose journey is largely instigated by ‘an enormous curiosity and fascination for what lies across the border’. Alter’s decision to travel from India to Pakistan by train can be seen as a primary indication of his desire to experience this border crossing in as real and physical a sense as possible: an encounter which enables him to better understand the complex social and cultural ties between two countries that remain tragically divided and yet inextricably linked to each other.
During the course of Alter’s narrative we discover that the journey to Pakistan also holds considerable personal significance for him. As he first visits the Murree Christian School (an institution in which his grandfather played a founding role), and then sees his father’s childhood home in Abottabad (his grandparents lived here in the 1920s and 30s), Alter instinctively responds to these ‘unknown’ places with an odd sense of familiarity. Towards the end of his travelogue he explains this predicament of simultaneous estrangement and belonging thus:
“When I visited the mission compounds in Pakistan....I felt something of the same emotional pull as I do when I return to my own birthplace in Mussoorie...if these bonds with the land are as strong for someone who has willingly moved from country to country for most of his life, as I have done for the past twenty-five years, how much more powerful must they be for those refugees who are forcibly uprooted and denied the opportunity of returning home.”
Indeed Alter’s sympathetic stance towards the millions of refugees who were displaced on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border at the time of Partition and his insightful, apparently objective, representations of the violent political history of these neighbouring countries, can make us overlook the ambivalence that pervades the author’s positionality with respect to the people and places he writes about. As a white American, Alter projects his ‘natural’ identification with India on the basis of his birth; a premise that conveniently overlooks his problematic missionary origins which historically root him in the ‘civilizing mission’ promoted during the colonization of the subcontinent.
Despite his careful disassociation from the crude nationalist divisions reinforced by border politics in this part of the world, Alter’s estimation of Pakistan as the ideological ‘other’ of India, as ‘a nation that was still struggling with its own identity...created in opposition to India...immediately declared an Islamic state...[in which] the concept of representative democracy was never given a fair chance’ suggests a latently Indianized view of Pakistan.
Ironically, even as Alter relies upon his apparently objective ‘outsider’ status to transcend the binary politics of blame that is sadly rampant in both countries, he ultimately falls prey to psychically reinforcing the very borderlands he initially set out to subvert. In fact Alter’s final, telling view that Partition was ‘a mistake....[which led to] the wholesale separation of identities, the exclusiveness of citizenship and an opposing sense of national allegiance’, appears to question the validity of Pakistan as an Islamic nation more than it problematizes the myth of secularism in India today.
Alter’s writing has received much praise in the West for its capacity to evoke a physical sense of India, specially for the culturally unfamiliar reader located outside the subcontinent. An informed and compelling travelogue, Amritsar to Lahore may hold great appeal for that portion of Alter’s Western readership which hopes to figuratively experience the adventure of crossing borders, from a safe distance.
However, in a Pakistani reader like myself, Amritsar to Lahore induces a certain degree of trepidation and scepticism with regard to Alter’s literary agenda that above all, stands testament to the uneasy reality of negotiating identity in borderlands.
Amritsar to Lahore: crossing the border between India and Pakistan
By Stephen Alter
Penguin Books, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi 110 017, India. Website: www.penguinbooksindia.com
Available with Liberty Books, Park Towers, Clifton Karachi. Tel: 021-5832525.
Ahmed Chambers, 5 Temple Road, Lahore. Tel: 042-7314178.
Email: l.book@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 0 14 029664 6
239pp. Indian Rs250
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