The Buckingham Players on the (rainy hot) road in India, circa 1952 (1965 Shakespeare Wallah)
For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Six Wednesdays, 9:40 to 11:05 pm,
June 23 1 to July 28
4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032 but conducted online via zoom
Dr Ellen Moody
Description of Course:
In this class we will explore identity and gender politics, colonialism, emigration & slavery in three novels, viz., Caryl Philips’s Crossing the River, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s East into Upper East, and Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River. We will look at how history, law and custom, violence, cultures, economic and geographical circumstances, and the sheer need for survival affects people. What is it like to invent a new country? to live in a country that is being invented and excluding or exploiting you? Or a curiously isolated upper class who don’t belong to the country and yet are supposed to be in governing positions? Or to live in an old country where you are not allowed to belong? We’ll also see/discuss three movies: Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala’s 1965 Shakespeare Wallah; Mira Nair’s 1993 Namesake & Jane Campion’s 1993 film, The Piano. We will imaginatively go right round the world in books & movies.
Required books (in the order we’ll read them):
Phillips, Caryl. Crossing the River. NY: Vintage, 1993. ISBN 978-0-679-75794-8
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. East into Upper East. Washington, D. C. Counterpoint, 1998. ISBN 1-58243-034-9 (Alternative edition: London: John Murray, 1998. ISBN978-0719555862)
Mander, Jane. The Story of a New Zealand River. 1975 reprint: USA, London, New Zealand, Hong Kong: Robert Hale/Whitcoullis Publishers, 1938. ISBN 0-7233-0364-9 (Alternative edition, 1920 first edition reprinted online: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Story_of_a_New_Zealand_River/JMAkAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover; also facsimile of this: Andesite, 2017, ISBN 978-1375466561).
Movies (in the order we’ll discuss them):
Shakespeare Wallah. Prod/Dir. IMerchant/MIvory. Script: RPJhabvala Perf. Shashi Kapoor, Geoffrey and Felicity Kendall. Filmed in India, distributed first in the UK, India, US. Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Wallah-Madhur-Jaffrey/dp/B084GHY9RG/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=shakespeare+wallah&qid=1623697479&s=movies-tv&sr=1-1. Also for rent as a DVD from Netflix, and for sale as a DVD on Amazon & elsewhere
The Namesake. Prod/Dir. Mira Nair. Script: Sooni Taraporevala. Adapted from novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. Perf. Irfann Khan,Tabu, Kal Penn. Filmed in India & Boston. Available on Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Namesake-Irfan-Khan/dp/B009EE88XE/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+namesake&qid=1623697870&s=instant-video&sr=1-1 Also for rent as a DVD from Netflix, and for sale as a DVD on Amazon & elsewhere
The Piano. Prof/Dir/Script. Jane Campion. Perf. Holly Hunter, Sam Neill, Harvey Keitel, Anna Paquin. Filmed in New Zealand, Australia and France. Available on Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Piano-Holly-Hunter/dp/B00DNO3DS6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GM1OZD6JFH0I&dchild=1&keywords=the+piano&qid=1623697947&s=instant-video&sprefix=The+piano%2Cinstant-video%2C152&sr=1-1. Also for rent as DVD from Netflix, and for sale as a DVD on Amazon & elsewhere
East Into Upper East (detail from cover illustration by C. S. H. Jhabvala)
Ashoke Ganguli (Irfann Khan) on the train (2006, The Namesake)
Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. For the first week I recommend reading Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River before we start — it is very powerful. I suggest you alternative between movies and stories in the way ordered below:
June 23 Introduction: Post-colonialism and the novel. Slavery, Africa, Race: US & UK: Caryl Phillips, and then Crossing the River.
June 30: Crossing the River. Anglo-Indian films & books: Shakespeare Wallah.
July 7: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: 9 stories from East into Upper East: We will read “Farid and Farida,” “Independence,” “Development and Progress” (these stories are set just after India achieved its independence from the UK), “A New Delhi Romance” and “Husband and Son;” (and set in NY): “A Summer by the Sea,” “Great Expectations,” and “Broken Promises” and “Two Muses”
July 14: Finish East into Upper East. Mira Nair. The Namesake. (There is a novel by Jumpa Lahiri if you want to read or read about it but amazingly on line is the whole of her Pultizer prize winning volume, Interpreters of Maladies, and I can suggest one close in themes — finding or building a new identity, and will send the pdf; click here to access it online: http://jhou.weebly.com/uploads/3/0/8/0/30800919/interpreter_of_maladies.pdf)
July 21: Jane Mander, New Zealand & Australian colonialism, The Story of a New Zealand River.
July 28: Finish New Zealand. Jane Campion’s The Piano. Thoughts about colonialism.
Suggested Outside Reading:
Bari, Deepika, “The Namesake: Deepika Bahri is Touched by Mira Nair’s Vivid, Sonorous Account of Immigrant Life in an Adopted Home City.” Review in Film Quarterly, 61:1 (Fall 2007):10-15
Friedman, Natalie. “From Hybrids to Tourists: Children of Immigrants in Jumpa Lahiri’s Namesake,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50:1 (Fall 2006):111-28
Hoeveler, Diane Long, “Silence, Sex, and Feminism: An Examination of “The Piano‘s” Unacknowledged Sources,” Literature/Film Quarterly 26:2 (1998):109-116 (I will send this by attachment)
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. “Myself in India” (reprinted in An Experience of India). Or Heat and Dust. NY: Simon & Shuster, 1980 (Book Prize winner)
Ledent, Benedicte. Caryl Phillips. Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002
Lahiri, Jumpa. The Namesake. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Lazarus, Neil. The Cambridge Companion to Post-Colonial Literary Studies. Cambridge, 2004.
Moffatt, Kirstine. “The Piano as Symbolic Capital in New Zealand Fiction, 1860-1940,” Journal of New Zealand Literature (JNZL) 28 (2010):34-60
Moody, Ellen. Early Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala, “The Householder/Shakespeare Wallah” to Roseland/Heat and Dust” (& The Europeans, w/bibliograph), Ellen and Jim have a blog, two, online at: https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2021/06/12/early-merchant-ivory-jhabvala-films-the-householder-shakespeare-wallah-to-roseland-heat-and-dust/ June 12,2021
Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge. NY: Vintage, 1991. Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 19/11. London & NY: New Press, 2011; The European Tribe. NY: Vintage, 1987. And “One Grim Evening: The Colonial Migrant in Britain,” Times Literary Supplement, December 18, 2020.
Pym, John. The Wandering Company: Twenty-One years of Merchant-Ivory films. London: BFI, 1983.
Singh, Rishi Pal. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Novels: Woman amidst Snares and Delusions. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2009.
Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. NY: St Martin’s, 1989.
Turner, Dorothea. Jane Mander. NY: Twayne, 1972.
Ada (Holly Hunter), Flora (Anna Panquin) and their piano and goods on the beach waiting to be moved into Alisdair Stewart’s house by the Maoris (The Piano 1993)
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
For those wondering why I put a syllabus whose topic is not women’s art per se, not the 18th century and not Austen, do notice: two of the books assigned are by women, in two of the movies central film-makers and sources are just about all women, and Caryl Phillips is unusual in preferring women narrators and writing convincingly. Many links in Indian and 18th century art and culture too.
[…] I have a book to tell you of, A. N. Wilson’s Stray; a new serial, Us, a four part BBC serial, based on a book by David Nicholls, which reviewers denigrated as a comfort book about divorce; a couple more thoughts on listening (once again) to a four book roman fleuve in translation: Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale (aka My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein who I’ve now seen often enough to know she is dumb when it comes to having ideas about literature) — and the opening spiel for the the course I’ll be teaching the next five weeks, now called more adequately called Writings about Colonial Experiences. […]
Towards the end of the class I remembered another superb film (better than The Piano for my purposes): The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, available on Prime Amazon and also YouTube
Shepisi’s Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. It is set at the turn of the 19th century, just when a referendum for federation (what Trollope is so intent on as needed) is about to be voted upon. Also talk about the colony separating from the UK.
It’s the story of an aborigine – -this is so rare because it’s hard to tell their stories as their way of life does not lend itself to European narrative and they are not individualist in their worlds overtly. Shepisi and the writer, Kenneally (who won all sorts of prestigious awards in this case rightly — but then he was saying what everyone says they believe) do it by dramatizing the story of an aborigine young man said to be half white – -it’s how he is educated to be Christian and modern and tries to find work and not only cannot find work commensurate with his education but at every turn is cheated, insulted, mocked, threatened, kicked, debased. When he marries a white girl servant he has gotten pregnant (turns out the child is not his) he lives with the revelation but finds almost immediately he is not being paid enough to eat because the boss’s daughter wants that girl servant as cheap servant and to part them. Finally in a mad rage he begins to kill and in killing brings down the brutal vengance of this society on him. A couple of the whites – the original pastor — a schoolmaster — could be and are decent but in the circumstances can do little. The pastor blames himself for taking Jimmie out of his culture.
We see too how aborgine culture has changed a lot — how they do dress in a sort of modern style and how they are prevented from developing a reasonable way of life with parts of their culture intact because what’s wanted is their disappearance. Jimmie is hurt at one point because he persists in seeing his relatives and they are “on the place.
He becomes an officer briefly and is complicit and learning to repress and hurt aborigines and getting a cut for the first time – -not true amount. But when the boss gets drunk and one night tortures and kills an aborigine Jimmie cannot stand this and runs off. Makes an enemy this way.
I cannot speak highly enough of this film — again it’s the weird melancholy (Marcus Clarke, author of For the Term of his Natural life) used that phrase that is central to the film’s effect. This is not a bush frontier story in the sense we see towns, we go into houses with women and children trying for Australian version of middle classdom.
I have yet to watch the feature and film with commentary. you can’t get it from Netflix, it’s not available except as a used DVD from Amazon. Oh Picnic at Hanging Rock is not at Netflix either. Another book and film that came to mind towards the end: Rosalie Ham’s Dressmaker, and the film, and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Peter Weir’s film. All these I brought up on our last day of six week’s journey’s end.