Diasporic Cross-Currents in

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and

Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk
HEIKE HÄRTING

I
N HIS REVIEW of Anil’s Ghost, Todd Hoffmann describes Michael
Ondaatje’s novel as a “mystery of identity” (449). Similarly, Ari-
tha van Herk identifies “fear, unpredictability, secrecy, [and] loss”
(44) as the central features of the novel and its female protagonist. Anil’s
Ghost, van Herk argues, presents its readers with a “motiveless world” of
terror in which “no identity is reliable, no theory waterproof” (45).
Ondaatje’s novel tells the story of Anil Tessera, a Sri Lankan expatriate
and forensic anthropologist working for a UN-affiliated human rights or-
ganization. Haunted by a strong sense of personal and cultural disloca-
tion, Anil takes up an assignment in Sri Lanka, where she teams up with
a local archeologist, Sarath Diyasena, to uncover evidence of the Sri
Lankan government’s violations of human rights during the country’s per-
iod of acute civil war. Yet, by the end of the novel, Anil has lost the evi-
dence that could have indicted the government and is forced to leave the
country, carrying with her a feeling of guilt for her unwitting complicity
in Sarath’s death. On one hand, Anil certainly embodies an ethical (al-
beit rather schematic) critique of the failure of global justice. On the
other, her character stages diaspora, in Vijay Mishra terms, as the “nor-
mative” and “ exemplary … condition of late modernity” (“Diasporic” 441)
— a condition usually associated with the figure of the nomad rather than
the diasporic subject — and thus raises questions about the novel’s regu-
latory politics of diasporic identity.
In contrast, Anita Rau Badani’s The Hero’s Walk represents the forma-
tion of diasporic identities as an empowering process shaped by multiple
changes on the local level rather than by transnational mobility. Set in a
fictive seaside town in Tamil Nadu, southern India, Rau Badami’s novel
narrates the story of a genteel but impoverished Brahmin family. In the
midst of globally induced environmental catastrophes and local processes
of social disintegration, Sripathi Rao, the father of the family and the novel’s
 44 SCL/ÉLC
protagonist, has to cope with the death of his estranged daughter, Maya,
and the arrival of his Canadian granddaughter, Nandana. Interestingly, the
novel is not primarily concerned with Maya, who used to live with her fam-
ily in Vancouver and is perhaps the novel’s most conventional diasporic
subject. Instead, it examines how Sripathi’s multiple displacements and re-
rootings, and Nandana’s reversed journey to the Old World, mediate
diaspora through the characters’ everyday life experiences and locally de-
fined events. In the novel, however, the local neither equals antimodernist
traditionalism nor provides a source of romantic liberation ideologies.
Rather, it designates, in Arif Dirlik’s words, a critical “site for the working
out of the most fundamental contradictions of the age” of global capital-
ism (23). As such, the novel’s renderings of the local facilitate competing
readings of diaspora as alternative configurations of social space and human
connections.
This paper, then, argues that Anil’s Ghost and The Hero’s Walk advance
conceptual cross-fertilizations between Canadian literature and diaspora
studies and intervene into current discourses of diaspora. To this end, my
analysis of these novels employs a supplementary and comparative reading
strategy. The former avoids a mimetic reading practice of literary and non-
literary texts and, instead, theorizes diaspora through the dissonances that
might emerge through such a practice. The latter, a comparative reading
practice, yields two specific conceptual and historically situated genealogies
of diaspora. In particular, while Ondaatje’s novel envisions diaspora in
largely ahistorical terms as a condition of Anil’s nomadic identity, cultural
relativism, and political failure, Rau Badami’s novel fashions patterns of
diasporic identification — rather than identity — around moments of still-
ness and disruption that generate new forms of communal and individual
autonomy. Thus, to discern the particular cultural and political dynamics
of diaspora, it is necessary not only to emphasize the dialectical relationship
between diasporic and non-diasporic people, but also to distinguish be-
tween forced diasporas, flexible transnational diasporas, and what I call
intra-national diasporas. As my reading of The Hero’s Walk suggests, the
latter term refers to a form of diasporic identity that is not necessarily bound
to transnational border crossings. Instead, it thematizes the ways in which
the effects of environmental and economic global restructuring, along with
the disintegration of received local forms of national and cultural identifi-
cation, transform the micro spaces of social life. These changes frequently
affect both the dislocation of given identities and the formation of new
personal and political affiliations. Divided into two parts, then, my paper
first discusses diaspora as a contested and, at times, disempowering category
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 45

of cultural knowledge production and, second, investigates diaspora’s po-

tential to act as a political practice able to generate public spaces of politi-
cal dissent and agency.

Locations of Diaspora
Diaspora and diaspora writing denote highly contradictory and contested
categories through which to make and unmake cultural and national
identities. Diasporas can be at once cosmopolitan and particularist,
transnational and nationalist, interventive and parochial, depending on
their position within their new national home, their communal affiliation
with their ancestral homeland, and their internal differences of class, gen-
der, and race. Despite their various differences among and within each
other, historically diasporas have been distinguished into old and new
diasporas. While the former term refers to the massive dislocation and dis-
persal of people through slavery, imperialism, and indentureship, the lat-
ter denotes intersecting communities of migrants and refugees and their
descendants or what Mishra calls the “diaspora of late capital … whose
overriding characteristic is one of ‘mobilitity’” (“Diasporic” 422).1 Simul-
taneously, we need to note that mobility, as such theorists as Gayatri
Spivak and Pheng Cheah aver, must be considered as the privilege of
diaspora that makes the concept complicit with both premature anti-
localist attitudes towards the nation-state and the demands of a global,
deregulated economy.
Another term scholars of diaspora recognize as a distinctive marker
of diaspora is the “homeland” — sacred or imaginary — and its related dis-
courses of an original trauma, a return movement, and a common fate and
history.2 For example, in the context of Canadian literary criticism, Victor
Ramraj explains that diasporic writings “are invariably concerned with the
individual’s community’s attachment to the centrifugal homeland” (216).
Although Ramraj aptly reminds us of the symbolic rather than literal sig-
nificance of the homeland, he nevertheless locates the idea of the homeland
at the centre of a communally and individually defined diasporic conscious-
ness. Being perpetually unmoored and in a state of transition, “diasporans,”
Ramraj argues, along with anthropologist Victor Turner, are “liminal
persona[e]” (216). Like Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, Ramraj sees home
as a discursively constructed category of diasporic writing and cultural be-
longing. Yet, his emphasis on the “centrifugal” effects of the homeland re-
calls the nephew’s search for his elusive Uncle Melech in A.M. Klein’s The
Second Scroll, the allegorical figure of both the history of the Jewish diaspora
 46 SCL/ÉLC
and a perpetually postponed Jewish homeland (rather than Zionist nation-
state).3 My point here is not that the gaze back or towards an ancestral
homeland tends to generate, as Mishra observes, “racial absolutism”
(“Diasporic” 424), but that, in critical discourses of diaspora, it can also act
as a foundationalist narrative of diasporic identity. Such an understanding
of the idea of the homeland risks foregoing the task of interrogating the
totalizing effects of diaspora’s dominant identity markers, even if these
markers are instrumental to the “ideological work of self-consolidation” (the
phrase is Keya Ganguly’s).4 For this reason, it is crucial to examine how and
to what effect Anil’s Ghost challenges and/or reinforces such dominant ap-
purtenances of diaspora as the ancestral homeland and global mobility.
In Ondaatje’s novel, a central location of diaspora becomes legible
at the precise moment when Anil unexpectedly disappears from the nar-
rative. Her unexplained exit from the novel raises questions as to what
extent her presence in Sri Lanka will shape her life once she returns to the
United States. How much would the memory of Sarath, the Sri Lankan
anthropologist teamed up with Anil to identify the skeleton of a politi-
cal murder victim, and Gamini, Sarath’s brother, become a part of her life
“back in the adopted country of her choice” (285)? Will her visit to Sri
Lanka have the same tragic effects on her life as it had on Sarath’s? Cer-
tainly not. After all, Sarath cannot escape his torturers and killers, while
Anil is able to flee from Sri Lanka’s bloody theatre of war. In fact, the pri-
vilege of her mobility marks her as a cosmopolitan traveller in the post-
national world of what Arjun Appadurai calls the “global modern” (21).
Her absence stands as a reminder of the “American or the Englishman,”
who, as Gamini bitterly remarks, “gets on a plane and leaves [at the end
of the movie]. … He is going home. … That’s enough reality for the
West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western
political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit” (285-86). The
sarcasm of Gamini’s words clearly speaks to the hypocritical attitude with
which the West frequently denies its complicit and often instrumental
role in civil conflicts in the so-called “Third World.” But his words also
remind us that such privileged diasporic positions as Anil’s are easily
harnessed to the economic and ideological demands of the global market-
place and dominant identity politics.
Taking a similar critical perspective, Barbara Godard’s essay “Notes
from the Cultural Field: Canadian Literature from Identity to Hybridity”
examines the ways in which contemporary global transformations have
reshaped the dominant discourses of identity in Canadian literature and
cultural theory. Godard suggests that although the geographical “impera-
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 47

tive in Canadian literature discourses” persists, the “discursive constitu-

tion of space” is no longer performed within the boundaries of the Ca-
nadian nation-state (211). Instead, through their multiple national
investments and subject-positions writers such as, for example, Dionne
Brand, Nino Ricci, Rohinton Mistry, and Michael Ondaatje produce
cross-cultural social imaginaries. To Godard, who considers multi-
culturalism a reactionary rather than liberating force of the Canadian
nation-state, this by-no-means new movement from a nationally to a
transnationally defined notion of cultural identity reflects the extent to
which Canadian literature caters to the economic politics of global capi-
talism. “‘Culture’,” she argues, has become an “autonomous and self-regu-
lating force” and acts “as a counterforce to democracy within an all-
encompassing ‘economy’ to whose ends it is subordinate” (211). Like
Ondaatje’s Gamini, Godard alerts us to the marketability and profitability
of diasporic concepts of identity in the global trade of cultures.5
While Godard’s critique is timely, her tendency to subordinate lit-
erature to the economically polarizing and culturally homogenizing effects
of global capitalism risks depriving literature of its potentially interventive
power. Similar to other critics who adhere to the homogenization thesis
of globalization,6 Godard seems too quick to abandon the possibility of
reading diasporic texts for the ways in which they, in Smaro Kamboureli’s
words, mediate “between various realities” (ix) and imagine global citi-
zenship as a commitment to political dissent and economic justice. Fur-
thermore, Godard’s tendency to use the terms diaspora, nomadism, and
cultural hybridity interchangeably underscores the epistemological
slippages between these concepts. It also invites us to redefine our criti-
cal vocabulary in ways that both avoid reducing “diaspora” to an aca-
demic fad and foreground the theoretical purchase these terms have on
their own. Notwithstanding, then, the contested status and terminologi-
cal proximity of the terms diaspora, nomadism, and cultural hybridity,
a preliminary — and admittedly simplified — distinction between them
helps to clarify my reading of diaspora in Ondaatje’s text.
Although all three of these terms function as metaphors for multi-
ple and heterogeneous forms of belonging, each of them has a specific
genealogy and tends to politicize identity formation to different degrees.
Grounded in the eighteenth-century rhetoric of race and the practice of
scientific racism and later adopted as a biological metaphor employed to
destabilize founding narratives of cultural originality and racial purity, the
term cultural hybridity evokes a plethora of contradictory meanings. One
of the most influential and controversial articulations of cultural hybridity
 48 SCL/ÉLC
is Homi Bhabha’s understanding of the term. In his early work, Bhabha
conceptualizes hybridity as a strategy employed to subvert colonial authority
through the play of cultural difference, ambiguity, and mimicry. As many
theorists have convincingly argued, Bhabha’s notion of hybridity lacks a
material and historically specific grounding, a theory of anticolonial resist-
ance, and a socially viable account of postcolonial agency.7 For these rea-
sons, cultural hybridity has been rightly theorized as a hegemonic concept
of identity management that supports the expansion of global capital. For
capital not only accommodates but thrives on cultural difference and
multiculturalism, with which hybridity is frequently associated. As Stuart
Hall (1993), Ajiz Ahmad (1992), and, more recently, E. San Juan, Jr.
(1998) have persistently argued, “capital ethnicizes peoples to promote
labor segmentation[, resulting in] hybridity and other differential phenom-
ena” (San Juan, Jr. 6). At the same time, I feel reluctant to abandon the
culturally empowering aspects of hybridity, namely the concept’s ability to
question the legitimacy and, in Dionne Brand’s words, the “romance of
origins” (Land 35). In fact, Bhabha’s more recent work rethinks cultural
hybridity in ways that account for earlier objections to the concept and
intervene into unequal power relations. “The concept of hybridity,” Bhabha
explains, “describe[s] the construction of cultural authority within condi-
tions of political antagonism or inequity.” “Hybrid strategy,” he argues,
“opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articula-
tion my be equivocal … Hybrid agencies deploy the partial culture from
which they emerge to construct visions of community” and “versions of
historic memory” (“Culture’s” 34). In this context, cultural hybridity serves
to (de)construct cultural authority, build communities, and produce
memory in the midst of particular investments of power and political lo-
calities. Thus, cultural hybridity functions as both a conceptual tool
through which to interrogate the constitution of diasporic belongings and
a discursive reading practice through which to examine the structure of
colonial desire that underlies the making of national and diasporic
imaginaries.8 It is in the latter sense that the notion of cultural hybridity
overlaps with my reading of diaspora in Rau Badami’s novel as a concept
of identity that is independent of transnational mobility.
Yet, with its alleged “antilocalist” bias (Cheah 302), cultural hybri-
dity frequently conjures a triumphalist rhetoric of postnationalism and
evokes a form of cultural nomadism. If cultural hybridity, as I have dis-
cussed it, is anchored in a critique of both colonial modes of representa-
tion and the imperial legacies of Western modernity, the concept of
cultural nomadism is encumbered with modernist and orientalist tropes
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 49

of the desert and the nomad. In her astute study of transnational forms
of identity formation, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Dis-
placement, Caren Kaplan convincingly argues that the metaphor of the
nomad belongs to those “tropes that continue to construct colonial spaces
in postmodern, poststructuralist theories” (65). She observes that “from
T.E. Lawrence to David Lean,” and I would add Michael Ondaatje’s The
English Patient, “the philosophical/literary trek across the desert leads to
a celebration of the figure of the nomad — the one who can track a path
through a seemingly illogical space without succumbing to the nation-
state,” while the “desert symbolizes the site of critical and individual
emancipation in Euro-American modernity” (66). In this context, the
figure of the nomad emerges outside cultural particulars but, instead,
represents a radical form of displacement that is intrinsic to modernity’s
experience of dislocation, loss, and uncertainty.
More frequently, however, the metaphor of the nomad serves as a
dominant referent in Deleuze and Guattari’s postmodern discourses of
displacement and cultural identity. In particular, and perhaps most prob-
lematically, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize the nomadic subject as a
rhizomatic and deterritorialized subject. The former suggests an assemblage
of infinitely combined identity fragments, which are posited in equal rela-
tion to one another and emphasize movements rather than bodies as the
central sites of identity formation. The rhizome signals a volatile form of
identity that lacks memory, location, and history. Furthermore, as a
deterritorialized subject, the figure of the nomad, Kaplan suggests, partici-
pates in “a utopian discourse of letting go of privileged identities and prac-
tices” and must “emulat[e] the ways and modes of modernity’s ‘others’”
(88). The figure of the nomad, then, is the subject of high modernism, for
it seeks redemption through modernity’s colonial disjunctures, finds origi-
nality in a dialectic of cultural and spatial absolutes, and is able to choose
language experimentation (i.e., “becoming minor” in the Deleuzian sense)
over the historical and material realities of the global migrant, while con-
veniently forgetting that deterritorialization is always “reterritorialization,
an increase in territory, an imperialization” (Kaplan 89). The high modern-
ist and postmodern configuration of the nomad in discourses of cultural
difference is, at least in my mind, diametrically opposed to the critique of
Western modernity and the reorganization of social and cultural space
undertaken by current concepts of diaspora.
As a mode of cultural critique, diaspora helps to formulate a “new set
of questions” (Brydon, “It’s Time” 14) about the relationship between the
Canadian nation-state and its constitutive communities. For example,
 50 SCL/ÉLC
“how,” Diana Brydon asks, “can [diaspora] help us to rethink and reenact
local and global belongings” (23)? In a recent article, Brydon insists that one
way of approaching the question productively consists in “wrenching [the
term diaspora] away from the grip of nationally-formed imaginaries and
identity politics toward an alternatively conceived view of space and of
human relations within it” (“Detour” 114). In other words, diaspora facili-
tates a critical inquiry not only into the limits of transnational forms of
identity but also into specific modes of inhabiting and reconfiguring social
and national space. Such negotiations of diasporic space, as James Clifford
underscores, “are always gendered. But there is a tendency for theoretical
accounts of diasporas and diaspora cultures to hide this fact, to talk of travel
and displacement in unmarked ways, thus normalizing male experience”
(313). Conceptualizing diaspora as an analytical category of cultural knowl-
edge production, then, also requires an analysis of the “kinds of thinking
and acting” diaspora “might repress” (Brydon, “It’s Time” 23) and the ways
in which differently gendered identities are performed against “the claims
of new and old patriarchies” and nationalities (Clifford 314). In a less ab-
stract sense, then, we must ask what kinds of knowledge the notion of
diaspora produces in the novels at hand. How, for example, does diaspora
normalize transnational lifestyles and identities?
Anil’s Ghost represents and, as I suggest, regulates diasporic identity
through both the construction of Anil as a nomadic subject and its nar-
rative’s modernist configuration of history. First, Anil’s transnational
mobility and her sense of an absolute cultural and social displacement
mark her as a nomadic character, while projecting a critique of the po-
tentially disempowering effects of diasporic identity concepts. Second, the
narrative links Anil’s character to the political failure of non-governmen-
tal organizations to intervene effectively into the human rights violations
committed by Sri Lanka’s government. To establish this kind of analogy,
however, the narrative represses some of the most vital and empowering
aspects of diaspora identity in favour of a nomadic configuration of iden-
tity, thus subordinating Anil’s potential agency as a diasporic woman to
the novel’s modernist aesthetic and philosophical agenda. The novel’s
critique of diaspora, however, not only accounts for Anil’s character de-
velopment but also shapes its narrative form. The latter is reflected in the
narrative’s dramatization of history as a form of personal amnesia and an
anarchic force of violence, which, in Ondaatje’s literary universe, shapes
individual and collective histories alike.9
From its first pages, the novel presents Anil as a global citizen whose
forensic work for a human rights organization takes her from war-torn
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 51

Guatemala to the Congo and eventually back to Sri Lanka, her country of
origin. Anil initially left Sri Lanka to study in England. During her “years
abroad” (54), she “had courted foreignness” (54) and the clarity that pre-
sumably lies in being a distant observer of cultures. As a cosmopolitan trav-
eller rather than a diasporan, Anil “was at ease on the Bakerloo line or the
highways around Santa Fe. She felt completed abroad. … And she had
come to expect clearly marked roads to the source of most mysteries” (54).
While her “freedom of mobility” (Bauman 3) marks her as a diasporic per-
son, it does not enable her to acknowledge her cultural difference and limi-
nal position in the colonial metropolis in self-empowering or critical ways.
Indeed, the narrative frequently suggests that Anil’s experience of cultural
and social displacement presents a cultural impediment that keeps her sus-
pended in a state of perpetual foreignness and transition rather than allow-
ing her to inhabit multiple cultural and historical spaces at once. She
remains caught in the zone of the nomad, “in the middle, between things,
interbeing, intermezzo” (Deleuze and Guattari 25). Her home is that of a
nomad, “ a home,” in Ian Baucom’s eloquent words, “whose rooms are
walled by the dislocations of travel” (202).
When Anil arrives in Sri Lanka after fifteen years of absence, she in-
sists on not being called the “return[ing] … prodigal” (10). For Anil has
put her Sri Lankan childhood behind her and “the island,” as the omnis-
cient narrator tells us, “no longer held her by the past … She had now
lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance
gaze” (11). Anil, then, assumes an ambiguous position vis-à-vis her coun-
try of origin, a position that is at once invested with power — inscribed
in the technologies of the gaze — and, in contrast to current models of
diaspora, marked not by memory but by a disavowal of the past. In fact,
all of Anil’s past connections with Sri Lanka seem to be defined by ab-
sence, rupture, and failure. For example, her decision to get married to
a fellow Sri Lankan student to assuage her feelings of cultural “uncer-
tainty” (141) leads to disaster and eventually to her abandonment of her
Sinhala language (145) and, by extension, her Sri Lankan past. In con-
trast to Rey Chow’s argument that diaspora constructs at once “perma-
nent” and hybrid belongings and thereby comprises “the reality of being
intellectual” (15), Anil’s diasporic existence frequently generates a state of
nervousness and amnesia that detaches her from her immediate environ-
ment. It is this state of individual and social alienation that also charac-
terizes her relationship with her lover Cullis and her girlfriend Leaf. They
are long-distance relationships without commitment and, at times, are
almost anonymous in their lack of intimacy.
 52 SCL/ÉLC
If the novel’s critique of diaspora is primarily enacted through Anil,
then her representation as an emotionally and socially impoverished char-
acter without social and personal agency negates the possibility of imag-
ining diasporic identities in politically and culturally meaningful ways. It
is, of course, possible to interpret Anil’s psychological detachments as
symptomatic of a traumatized personality. Her alienation might be the
inevitable result of her desire to choose a national home on her own
terms. For, as Rinaldo Walcott maintains, “to belong entails forgetting
and repression of elsewhere” (75) and thus a kind of emplacement, which
acknowledges multiple loyalties to culturally competing places of belong-
ing. It seems to me, however, that it is precisely this kind of multiple —
spatial, cultural, and historical — grounding the novel withholds from
Anil. For, as I argued earlier, Anil’s rather truncated character develop-
ment derives from its inscriptions into a nomadic rather than diasporic
framework of identity. The nomadic constellation of her character also
performs the double task of neutralizing Anil’s gender identity and gen-
erating a conservatively gendered rhetoric of the Sri Lankan nation-state.
Given that the figure of the nomad is often designed as a gender-neu-
tral figure, it seems initially surprising that Anil’s gender identity results, in
part, from her refusal to accept her initially given names. Instead, she of-
fers her brother “a pen set” and “a sexual favour” (68) in exchange for his
unused middle name. Anil’s name, then, appears to foreground a certain
androgynous quality of her character because its shape and sound conveys
a particular “feminine air” (68), while the story of obtaining it speaks to
Anil’s masculine, predatory qualities. Here the novel specifically casts Anil
in the role of the hunter, underscoring the traditionally male connotations
of her name. For, “she’d hunted down the desired name like a specific lover
she had seen and wanted” (68). Yet this particular account of Anil’s name
relies on received gender norms by equating the feminine with passivity and
physical form and the masculine with action and determination. As fore-
shadowed in her name, Anil’s character is instrumental in constructing
gender stereotypes through the logic of cultural binarisms. For her condi-
tion of radical displacement appears as a sort of carefreeness that contrasts
the novel’s idealized mother figures, who “bow in affection or grief” (157),
and selfless female caregivers such as Lakma, Palipana’s niece. Interestingly,
and in contrast to The Hero’s Walk, Anil’s Ghost perpetuates the modern-
ist practice of equating the local with the traditional by, first, inscribing this
space with received female gender constructs and, second, positioning the
figure of the transnationally mobile woman as the abject subject who is
outside of the local. Thus, as a nomadic subject, Anil produces, rather than
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 53

subverts, the local and the national as a gendered space, while inadvertently
securing its regulatory boundaries.
Configured as a nomadic character, Anil projects a radical critique of
diasporic forms of (un)belonging and their potential to intervene effectively
into normative patterns of identity. More precisely, by giving prominence
to perpetual displacement and spatial mobility, Anil’s character bolsters
dominant models not only of identity but also of cultural knowledge pro-
duction. During her work abroad, Anil “had come to expect clearly marked
roads to the source of most mysteries” (54). She believes in the grand nar-
ratives of Western civilization, in the empirical Truth and Reason that
punctuate “songs of anger and judgement” (70). For her, as Sarath observes,
“the journey was in getting to the truth” (156) so as to identify the perpe-
trators of political killings in a war that was fought for its own sake and
where truth had become meaningless. Anil’s “permanent truths” consist in
the “facts of … death” she can surmise from a skeleton (64). They are the
“same for Colombo as for Troy” (64), implying that death as well as its
causes are universal and ahistorical occurrences. Similar to the binary logic
and moral principles of the American western movies Anil likes to watch,
her strategies of knowing are determined by her desire to find a single truth
with which to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. Anil liter-
ally grounds her ways of knowing, to quote Stuart Hall, “in the archeology”
rather than in the “re-telling of the past” (“Cultural” 393). Linked to the
technologies of remembrance and memory, the “re-telling” of the past is a
critical site of diasporic knowledge production, which is, however, largely
absent from the narrative of Anil’s Ghost.
To account for this absence, we need to address the ways in which
the novel’s discourse of history rethinks the constitutive role of history in
processes of nation formation and operates as a critique of diaspora em-
bedded in the novel’s narrative structure. Anil’s love for the unexpected
details and imprints of history reflects an understanding of history that
bursts the conventional linear frames of time and place. What archeologi-
cal findings teach her is that
The most precisely recorded moments of history lay adjacent to the
extreme actions of nature and civilization. … Tectonic slips and bru-
tal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives.
A dog in Pompeii. A gardener’s shadow in Hiroshima. But in the
midst of such events, she realized, there could never be any logic to
the human violence without the distance of time. (55)
Here, the arbitrariness of primordial chaos and the anarchism of violence
 54 SCL/ÉLC
not only govern nature and humans alike but also supersede history and
politics. They indiscriminately compress the grand narratives and petit recits
of history into a total, singular present of perpetual uncertainty and political
unaccountability. In a similar vein, the anthropologist David Scott has re-
cently called for strategically “dehistoricizing” Sri Lankan history (103).
Scott suggests that devaluing history as a founding category of Sri Lanka’s
narrative of the nation breaks the presumably “natural … link between past
identities and the legitimacy of present political claims” (103). This strat-
egy is certainly useful because it not only uncouples Sri Lanka’s colonially
shaped and glorified ancient Sinahalese past from its present claims to
political power, but it also de-ethnicizes Sri Lanka’s conflict in order to
facilitate peace negotiations. But in the context of Ondaatje’s novel, de-
historicizing the present posits violence as a transhistorical category that fails
to address the unequal political power relations, which, after all, lie at the
heart of Sri Lanka’s war. Moreover, to substitute history for the erratic
operations of violence also betrays the novel’s modernist signature and its
desire to seek refuge in Robert Duncan’s prose.
Following the suicide attempt of Ananda, a traumatized war victim
and eye-painter of Buddha statues who eventually initiates a symbolic proc-
ess of communal healing, the narrator finds comfort in Duncan’s words:
“’The drama of our time … is the coming of all men into one fate’” (203).
While the reference foregrounds the interdependence between acts of pri-
vate and public violence, it reflects a yearning for a creative amnesia and
universal human community. In his reading of H.D.’s work, Duncan speci-
fies that the act of “coming into one fate” is also the
‘dream of everyone, everywhere.’ The fate or dream is the fate of more
than mankind … We have gone beyond the reality of the incompa-
rable nation or race, the incomparable … species, in which identity
might hold and defend its boundaries against an alien territory. All
things have now come into their comparisons … We go now to the
once-called primitive — to the bushman, the child, or the ape — not
to read what we were but what we are. (91)
Like the narrator’s desire to dehistoricize Sri Lanka’s past in Anil’s Ghost,
this passage buttresses rather than questions a modernist belief in the pos-
sibility of living outside of history. Yet, as with most universalizing pro-
nouncements of a common humanity, Duncan’s erases cultural and
political particularities and locates, in Bhabha’s words, an implied tran-
scendental subject “at the point where conflict and difference resolves and
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 55

all ideology ends” (“Representation” 104). Duncan’s emphasis on the

modernist quest for redemption through the arts of indigenous peoples
perpetuates an imperial process of self-constitutive Othering and thereby
exposes the hegemonic nature of his brand of universalism. It is this proc-
ess of Othering that, I believe, is also at work in the novel’s representa-
tion of artisanship. With a view to Anil’s Ghost, Duncan’s vision of one
human fate translates into the novel’s repudiation of cultural differences
and its faith in the transformative power of art and local craftsmanship.
Both aspects contribute to a depoliticized and dehistoricized understand-
ing of Sri Lanka’s past and present.
On a formal rather than thematic level, Duncan’s notion of “the com-
ing of all men into one fate” and “all things … into their comparison”
underlies the narrative logic of Anil’s Ghost. Each of the novel’s stories acts
as a fragment and is juxtaposed to another story. Yet, none of them seems
to be more significant than the other, when considered in relation to each
other. Together they make up a perfect assemblage, whose mode of disper-
sal is that of the rhizome. For example, Gamini’s and Sarath’s private war
over a woman reflects Sri Lanka’s civil war; Anil’s search for Sailor’s past
mirrors her friend Leaf’s struggle against Alzheimer’s disease; Western
movies assume the same significance as the Culavamsa, one of the found-
ing chronicles in Sinhalese nation narration; “One victim can speak for
many victims” (176); and the torture and violence committed against the
people in the Congo, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sri Lanka all have come “into
their comparison.” The particularities of each victim’s life and each war’s
historical and political genealogy give way to an understanding of war as a
universal and perennial catastrophe. As Lakdasa, Gamini’s colleague says,
“The problem up here is not the Tamil problem, it’s the human problem”
(245). Like the dispersal of the rhizome, then, the novel’s narrative frag-
ments the particular genealogies of war and individual experiences of vil-
lages and war victims into the “simultaneous sprouts” of one story of
human tragedy (Kaplan 87). Yet, by bringing all “things into their compari-
son,” the novel not only risks acts of comparative victimization, but it also
reflects what the political scientist Mary Kaldor describes as a “fatalistic”
response to the “new wars” (113).10 She suggests that “because the [new]
wars cannot be understood in traditional terms, they are thought to repre-
sent a reversion of primitivism or anarchy and the most that can be done,
therefore, is to ameliorate the symptoms. In other words, wars are treated
as natural disasters … [and] emptied of political meaning” (113). Thus,
with its emphasis on a relational understanding of human conflicts and its
 56 SCL/ÉLC
modernist desire to treat history as an instance of anarchic violence or a
“natural disaster,” the novel’s narrative structure continues and reflects its
critique of the limits of diasporic agency inscribed in Anil’s character.
The novel’s modernist articulation of history, then, negates the pos-
sibility of crafting politically productive concepts of diasporic identity. In
this context, it is no coincidence that the novel’s critique of the inefficiency
of non-governmental human rights organizations is coupled with its rep-
resentation of Anil as a diasporic character. As a human rights worker and
forensic specialist, Anil has travelled the globe on several fact-finding mis-
sions and knows about the compromises, “back-room deals and muted
statements for the ‘good of the nation’” (28), that are necessary to accom-
plish at least a fraction of her work. An earlier human rights investigation
in the “Congo” failed because of the group’s dependency on the goodwill
of the government it sought to indict. After the overnight disappearance of
their data, the human rights activists, including Anil, “had nothing left to
do but get on a plane and go home. So much for the international authority
of Geneva” (28-29). The narrator’s disillusioned comments reflect a few of
the critical arguments leveled against NGOs and their ambiguous position
in the field of global politics. Pheng Cheah, for example, argues that “in-
ternational human-rights NGOs” are anti localist and “creatures of intel-
lectuals aimed at promoting a wider consciousness of humanity as a whole
through the power of rational or affective persuasion” (315). They often
depend on and work through a postnational political order that detaches
them from the people on whose behalf they work. It is this kind of discrep-
ancy between international human rights workers, such as Anil, and those
stranded in the midst of international theaters of war, such as Sarath, that
explains Anil’s misjudged trust in Dr. Perera, which ultimately leads to the
failure of Anil’s investigation and Sarath’s death.
The ambiguous status of NGOs, especially their difficulty — if not
ineffectiveness — to intervene into the diplomatic rule of non-interference
in a nation’s internal affairs, then, is mirrored in Anil’s blindness towards
the ways in which her identity evolves in relation to dominant ideologies
of gender, history, and transnationalism. As with Alice Gull’s ultimately
failed socialist commitment to “responsible citizenship” (Davey 253) in
Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Anil’s Ghost refuses to confer political
agency to Anil and, instead, prefers the arts as a conduit of cultural syncre-
tism and human reconciliation on a global scale. While Anil’s Ghost draws
attention to the theoretical pitfalls of diaspora and teaches us about the
spectral presence of the West in Sri Lanka’s postcolonial civil war, it can-
not conceive of diaspora in terms other than the culturally and politically
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 57

ambiguous position of the nomadic subject and returned native inform-

ant.11 Anil’s Ghost’s profound critique of the political limits of diaporic
agency in bringing about global justice and exposing sustained international
human rights abuses stands as a crucial warning against the fabrication of
diaspora as yet another “closet idealism” (Cheah 302) to assuage the unset-
tling effects of globalization. But, as I have argued, Anil’s Ghost also filters
the concept of diaspora through its modernist or nomadic idiom. As a
corollary, Ondaatje’s novel remains hard pressed to account for the ways
in which diaspora critically interweaves global and local forms of belong-
ing while generating “intensely inventive, renewing forms of identity and
embodiment” (Crane and Mohanram ix).

Dis-Locations and Cross-Currents of Diaspora

In contrast to Anil’s Ghost, The Hero’s Walk dramatizes the formation of
diasporic identities as an interdependent process of individual self-discov-
ery and social reconnection on a local rather than a global level. This process
frequently depends on the protagonist Sripathi Rao and his ability both to
remember and reluctantly reevaluate his own and his family’s pasts. Hav-
ing never left his hometown of Toturpuram, Sripathi initially depicts a
culturally rooted rather than mobile character. It is not until he has to move
his granddaughter Nandana from Canada to India that he comes to occupy
a diasporic space. But such a space, as Avtar Brah argues, is “inhabited not
only by those who have migrated and their descendants, but equally by
those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. … The concept
of diaspora space … includes the entanglement, the intertwining of the
genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’” (209). At first glance,
Brah’s notion of diaspora raises two issues that continue to haunt diaspora
studies. First, it implies that diaspora functions as an idealized umbrella
term for all forms of cultural displacements when, in fact, it is necessary to
make a historical distinction between old and new diasporas. Old diasporas
generally encompass those African, Caribbean, and South Asian cultures
that were brutally deracinated from their homelands and experienced per-
manent dislocations during the intertwined histories of slavery, Indian
indentureship, and colonialism. The term “new diasporas” refers to the
massive displacement and migration of people and refugees whose coun-
tries of origin often bear the brunt of long-term Western and imperial con-
trol, are plagued by neocolonial and corrupt governments, and are marked
by the erosion of the civil structures of the postcolonial nation-state. Sec-
ond, Brah’s understanding of diaspora might be read as a way of appropri-
 58 SCL/ÉLC
ating spaces of native self-representation and, to adapt the Maori theorist
Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s term, “trading” colonially constructed images of
“the Other” (89) on the global marketplace.12 Thus, a concept of diaspora
that includes those who are forced to “stay put” or do so on their own ac-
cord may be misread as a relativist construct of cultural identity. For it risks
ignoring the specific histories of indigenous peoples in which becoming
diasporic meant and still means to be divided as a people and dispossessed
of land and rights.
In a second reading, which, I believe, does more justice to Brah’s
understanding of diaspora, we may argue that the “genealogies of disper-
sion” intersect “with those of ‘staying put’” in that both are subjected to
dominant technologies of cultural representation. Brah’s dialectic of
diasporic and native underscores the ambiguous nature of diaspora as a
category of cultural knowledge production. More specifically, while
diasporas interrupt the nation’s dream of homogeneity and clearly defined
borders, they are also forced into the service of the nation-state. By assimi-
lating displaced people or fostering the desire and possibility of returning
to their place of origin, the nation-state exerts a constraining power and
regulates diasporic flows of people. In this way, the state cultivates what
Mishra calls the “reactionary streak” in diasporas (“New Lamps” 67).
Moreover, by constructing diasporas as inherently unified and closed cul-
tural entities, the state permits the “dominant society” to exercise, in
Kamboureli’s astute words, its “disciplinary gaze,” which commodifies and
“fetishiz[es]” “ethnic” and diasporic “imaginaries” (110). In order to under-
stand their different historical genealogies and political effects within the
nation-state, it is necessary to differentiate between forced diasporas, flex-
ible transnational diasporas, and intra-national diasporas. The political ef-
fectiveness of the latter notion of diaspora depends on how, to quote Paul
Gilroy’s terms, it “problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of
belonging” and breaks the presumably natural bond between “place, loca-
tion, and consciousness” (123). Intra-national diasporas, then, engage in a
critical discourse of emplacement rather than transnational mobility and
designate the fragmentation and reconstitution of social space through the
local effects of global events. In The Hero’s Walk, becoming diasporic en-
tails breaching the different political, social, and psychological regimes of
the normal. In fact, Sripathi and Arun emerge as diasporic characters pre-
cisely because they “stay put” and witness the ways in which the material
effects of global developments transform their quotidian lives. At the same
time, their diasporic agency is contingent on the diasporic configuration of
Maya and Nandana and, thereby, raises questions about the ways in which
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 59

the constitution of diasporic identities is contingent on normative gender

identities. In different ways, the novel’s narrative construction of diasporic
subjects effects a critique of the postcolonial nation-state without subscrib-
ing to a unified, one-world vision of global belonging.
In light of the psychic and political interdependence of the state and
the various diasporas living within its borders, diaspora designates less a
postnational phenomenon than heterogeneous communities that might
generate or regulate political dissent. In either case, these communities
mediate the legitimacy of national boundaries and forms of government in
their imperial past and their global present. Moreover, in contrast to
multicultural narratives of the nation, diasporic narratives, such as The
Hero’s Walk, do not rely on the nation to redeem its migrant or diasporic
subjects. On the contrary, it is, in Ian Baucom’s words, the “space of cul-
tural [and I would add, domestic and national] inhabitation which must
be redeemed” (208-09) through the disaporic presence. This, at least, is the
case with Sripathi’s son, Arun, whose political activism is directed against
both India’s lackadaisical environmental politics and their locally devastat-
ing effects and the ecological catastrophes generated through the ruthless-
ness and irresponsibility of global economic politics. At the same time,
initiating a critical dialogue between the nation-state and its diasporic con-
stituencies often presupposes acts of remembrance that deal with the indi-
vidual and collective traumas suffered by those who experienced “forced
dispersal and reluctant scattering” (Gilroy 123). These experiences of
trauma and violent psychic and cultural dislocation must be retold through
everyday life-events in the present location of displacement and reenacted
through genealogical forms of diasporic remembrance. Indeed, the devel-
opment of a diasporic consciousness relies on a critical awareness of the
dangers that, in Gilroy’s words, consist in “forgetting the location of ori-
gin and the tearful process of dispersal” (124). In The Hero’s Walk it is
Sripathi’s traumatic loss of his daughter and his journey to Canada that
compel him to remember and reenact the past, and, eventually, mark him
as a diasporic character.
The novel’s main narrative focusses on the relationship between
Sripathi Rao, a middle-aged, jaded copy-writer and family man, Nandana,
his Canadian granddaughter, and Arun, his son. At the beginning of the
novel Sripathi appears as a contemptuous, egocentric, and paternalistic
character. Embarrassed by his son’s work as an environmental activist and
unable to forgive his daughter Maya for having married a white Canadian
rather than the man of his choice, Sripathi has isolated himself from his wife
and children. Instead of confronting why he “allowed himself to forget”
 60 SCL/ÉLC
(46) the reasons for the present disintegrated state of his family, Sripathi
finds it easier to “express his deepest thoughts … [and] emotions” (8) in
letters to the editors of various local newspapers. Ironically, he writes these
letters under his chosen pseudonym “Pro Bono Publico.” The signature —
“on behalf of the people” (9) —, he imagines, makes him a secret hero, “a
crusader” of “the “world in pen and ink” (9), when, in fact, his letters ironi-
cally contrast his impending unemployment as a writer and emphasize his
increased alienation from his family and social community. For example,
although Sripathi dedicates a letter to the environmental pollution of his
neighbourhood, he largely ignores how, in Roy Miki’s words, the negative
effects of globalization have seeped into the “nooks and crannies of [his]
everyday li[fe]” (214): the sewage canals regularly overflow until they flood
Sripathi’s house, his mother considers having a TV as a social status sym-
bol, and the “traffic policemen” no longer wear turbans because “the lat-
est chief minister had a passion for Hollywood westerns” and changed the
uniforms of the entire police force (133).
The breakdown of public services and the travesty and arbitrariness of
local politics that shape Sripathi’s environment raise further questions about
the relationship between the nation-state and the process of becoming
diasporic. Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the
Transnational World” offers a useful elabouration of my earlier discussion
of the role of the nation-state in the context of diaspora. More specifically,
Spivak challenges conventional articulations of diaspora in terms of “glo-
bal hybridity” from “the point of view of popular culture, military inter-
vention, and the neo-colonialism of the multinationals” (89). Instead, she
aptly argues, diaspora should be read as a result of the “failure of a civil
society in developing nations. … The undermining of the civil structures
of society is now a global situation … [and] the manipulation of civil so-
cial structures [takes place] in the interest of the financializaton of the globe”
(91). Spivak squarely situates diaspora within a critique of the postcolonial
nation-state and insists on the limits of diasporic concepts of identity as they
are embodied in the figure of the indigenous, female subaltern. On one
level, Spivak’s unconventional reading of diaspora elucidates the global
entanglements of Toturpuram’s local politics, Sripathi’s home. On another,
reading diaspora through the dismantling of the social and public structures
of postcolonial and, as I wish to add, Western civil societies delinks diaspora
from the dominant imperative of spatial mobility and, instead, stresses its
function as a political discourse of intersecting genealogies of local and glo-
bal displacement.
Although The Hero’s Walk explores national and local configurations
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 61

of diasporic space, its narrative centres on Sripathi’s development of a

diasporic consciousness. When Sripathi and his family receive the news
of Maya’s and her husband’s fatal car accident, they experience a dramatic
upheaval. For Sripathi, this event functions as the trauma that inaugurates
his cultural and personal process of transformation and is played out on
different levels. First, his daughter’s death requires him to travel to
Canada to arrange for his granddaughter’s reverse journey to India, a
move that marks her as doubly diasporic. What Sripathi calls his “foreign
trip” to Vancouver turns out to be an experience of profound psychic and
cultural dislocation, for it completely “unmoor[s him] from the earth
after fifty-seven years of being tied to it” (140). Sripathi’s sense of
deracination establishes a historical continuity between the psycho-bio-
graphies of nineteenth-century Indian indentured labourers — narrated
in, for example, V.S. Naipaul’s and M.G. Vassanji’s novels and Cyril
Dabydeen’s and David Dabydeen’s poetry — and Sripathi’s own
emerging diasporic condition. Not only must he confront his own fear of
a world that is no longer knowable to him, but, more importantly, he must
face his granddaughter. Nandana has been literally silenced by the trauma
of her parents’ death, and her relocation from Canada to Tamil Nadu ini-
tially exacerbates her psychological condition. To Sripathi, however,
Nandana’s presence acts as a constant reminder of his regret of not having
“know[n] his daughter’s inner life” (147) as well as her life in Canada. He
now recognizes that in the past he denied his daughter his love in order to
uphold his authority over his family in light of a materially alienated and
politically insecure world around him. To maintain a sense of patriarchal
control, if not power, Sripathi relies on culturally purist narratives of be-
longing and disavows what appears to have shaped his life all along, namely
his fear of social demotion and the diasporic reconfiguration of his family
and social relationships. Both of these aspects are connected in that Sripathi
is initially unable to consider his situation in the larger context of
Toturpuram’s belated entry into global modernity. More precisely, his fear
of losing his social status is rooted in his estrangement from his commu-
nity, workplace, cultural traditions, and family, which characterizes, as Keya
Ganguly explains via Walter Benjamin, “the subjective condition of being
modern” (52). To Sripathi, becoming diasporic entails that he recognize the
impossibility of stemming the tide of global modernity through an act of
personal self-enhancement that prevents him from reconnecting with his
dead daughter, his family, and larger community. In fact, Sripathi’s sym-
bolic act of “cutting [Maya] off as if she were a diseased limb” (32) — of
expelling from his personal life everything that is unsettling yet always
 62 SCL/ÉLC
already present — comes back to haunt him through his own experience
of having to contend with an increasingly dematerializing body.
After his return from Vancouver, he “become[s] more aware than ever
that the world [is] full of unseen things, of memories and thoughts, longings
and nightmares, anger, regret, madness” (172). And dealing with these
memories becomes inevitable because, like Saleem’s body in Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Sripathi’s body registers and mediates par-
ticular memories and discourses of race and the nation. At various points
Sripathi feels that parts of his body are regularly vanishing and he experi-
ences what could be diagnosed as phantom limb pain. But unlike phantom
limb pain, the physical inscriptions of Sripathi’s traumatic experiences
appear in various places of his body so that the pain he feels can neither be
restricted to a clearly defined area nor tied to a single source. The pain it-
self seems to emulate diasporic movements. Sripathi’s vanishing body parts
indicate his loss of a holistic self-image, while symbolically enacting the
ecological decay and political corruption of the nation. Indeed, such a read-
ing of Sripathi’s body corresponds to a historical materialist understanding
of the traumatized body as either a “conductor for the thrusts and repeti-
tions of everyday life in the modern world” or a “mechanism for ‘absorb-
ing’ … the alienation produced by a system in which money is the real
measure of man” (Ganguly 15). While Sripathi’s physical pain reflects his
psychic state of displacement and the decay of his material world, we need
to note that Sripathi’s body is not merely a receptacle but also a producer
of power. Given the body’s configuration as a material product of power,
the disappearance of Sripathi’s body parts performs his sense of powerless-
ness in the face of the past events and their global magnitude (39). The
dissolving body parts also signal a change of the ways in which Sripathi
produces knowledge. No longer can he subscribe to the existence of a sin-
gle truth with which he previously judged his daughter’s decision and de-
fended his own self-righteous behaviour towards Arun. Instead, he is forced
to acknowledge that “he could never be sure of anything in the world again,
not even his own body” (162). It is through his body’s enactments of his
experiences of trauma and dislocation that Sripathi must rearticulate his
body and identity in non-foundationalist terms. He learns to reread his
body as both a product of capitalist power relations and a site of cultural
agency. Being subject to representation, his body is product and producer
of the regimes of the normal. To put it differently, his body denotes the
totality of his being — the “sum of all that happens in the world around
us” (213) — as well as the excess that prevents this totality from metamor-
phosing into yet another normative or naturalized form of identity.
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 63

The constitution of diasporic identity, then, involves processes of both

emplacement and embodiment. So far, however, these processes have been
linked to the construction of male diasporic identities, even though the
fragmentation and emasculation of Sripathi’s character indicate a certain
blurring of received gender categories under conditions of social and cul-
tural displacement. This, however, does not mean that Sripathi’s diasporic
transformation takes place outside the technologies of gender. On the con-
trary, it is contingent on both Nandana’s and Maya’s unsettling effects on
the everyday life of the Rao household. Nandana’s arrival in Toturpuram,
I suggest, symbolically restructures domestic (i.e., traditionally female) space
in terms of public space. Through the death of her parents, Nandana ex-
periences the instability of her home environment and the illusion of safety
and harmony often attached to the notion of home. Moreover, Sripathi’s
resolution to “take her home to India” (143) further complicates the ways
in which Nandana negotiates home as a locus of diasporic displacement.
More specifically, Nandana brings the postcolonial moment of what Homi
Bhabha has famously termed the “unhomely” (Location 9) into the privacy
of the Big House, Sripathi’s family home. The “unhomely” reconfigures
domestic space as “sites for history’s most intricate invasions” (9) and con-
fuses “the home and the world” (9). Thus, the “unhomely,” Bhabha argues,
enforces a “vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (9). This experi-
ence of cultural disorientation literally shapes diasporic forms of embodi-
ment, as Nandana’s loss of speech and Sripathi’s disappearing body parts
amply testify. If Nandana is an agent of the “unhomely,” carrying in her
baggage the global realities of displacement and uncertainties of belonging,
her arrival in India also unsettles the neatly gendered and “patriarchal …
symmetry of private and public” spaces (Bhabha, Location 11). For exam-
ple, with Nandana’s entry into the lives of the Rao women, Putti, Sripathi’s
sister, finally manages to rebel against her manipulative mother and,
against the caste prejudices rampant in her family and society, marries a
man from the dalit caste. In fact, it is the domestic space of the home which,
through Nandana’s witnessing eyes, becomes a site of conflict and crisis that
“is converted into criticism of the [patriarchal] status quo” (Ganguly 70).
In light of the operative modes of the “unhomely,” becoming diasporic en-
tails disturbing the regimes of the normal of everyday life and destabilizing
received configurations of the private and the public.
In contrast to Nandana, Maya acts as the novel’s most conventional
diasporic character. She is the defiant and heroic daughter who “had
dared everyone” (46) and lives as a haunting presence in her father’s and
brother’s consciousness. Interestingly, the novel’s dramatization of Maya’s
 64 SCL/ÉLC
and Sripathi’s relationship suggests that Sripathi’s painful “labour of self-
erasure and self-fabrication” (Baucom 202) — the labour of becoming
diasporic while “staying put” — results from a crisis of patriarchal authority
rather than from an experience of spatial dislocation. From the time of her
birth, in the eyes of Sripathi, Maya was the “perfectly formed creature” he
“had fathered” (95) and designated “to reach for the skies, nothing less”
(96). While these sentiments might reflect no more than the proud hopes
of a young father, they are also symptomatic of Sripathi’s fears of social fail-
ure, poverty, and decline in class status (70). In Sripathi’s life, to adopt Seyla
Benhabib’s apt phrase, Maya serves as “the symbolic-cultural site” upon
which Sripathi inscribes his patriarchal “moral order” (84). It is only with
Maya’s admission to an American university and “an offer of marriage” that
“Sripathi’s life began to acquire a glow” (70). Indeed, Maya’s engagement
to Prakash Bhat, the son of a rich family who “had just started a job in
Philadelphia” (99), is a match that would have permanently marked Maya
as a diasporic subject and increased her father’s social and financial stand-
ing. As a dutiful daughter, Maya is expected to honour her father’s name
and wish and, as her prospective father-in-law remarks, as the wife of a mid-
dle-class Indian expatriate, she is also expected to “fit into life in the West
without losing sight of our Indian values” (100). In short, she would be the
custodian and nurturer of cultural traditions in “renewed patriarchal struc-
tures” (Clifford 312) to foster an imagined unified and self-sufficient cul-
tural community with strong ties to the Old World. But Maya cancels her
engagement with Prakash to marry a Canadian man. By defying her father’s
wishes and forsaking her family duties (116), Maya, on the one hand, ini-
tiates her own transformation into a diasporic subject with multiple belong-
ings and groundings; on the other, she confronts Sripathi with the changing
reality of his social, personal and work environment and the decay of the
civil society of India’s nation-state. Both aspects eventually facilitate
Sripathi’s diasporic transformation. In other words, Maya’s refusal brings
to crisis Sripathi’s patriarchal authority and thus undermines his last resort
of control and power. What remains problematic, however, is that the novel
assigns Maya the traditional task of diaspora women, namely the painful
role of “mediating discrepant worlds” and of “connecting and disconnect-
ing, forgetting and remembering, in complex, strategic ways” (Clifford
314). Thus, in the narrative logic of the novel, Maya’s death is not an ac-
cident but a symbolic necessity that facilitates Sripathi’s diasporic transfor-
mation.
Central to Sripathi’s further development of a diasporic consciousness
is his understanding of Arun’s involvement in a non-Eurocentric environ-
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 65

mentalist movement. If Sripathi initially considers his son’s activism as just

“some other saving-the-world project” (238), Arun insists that his work is
about a fight “against daily injustice, [against] our own people stealing our
rights” and against globally sanctioned ecological irresponsibility (239).
Directed against World Bank politics and the pressure exerted on the
postcolonial nation-state to meet its debt obligations regardless of environ-
mental consequences, Arun’s environmental activism exemplifies what I
have called an intra-national concept of diaspora. In contrast to Anil’s
Ghost’s narrative of diaspora, The Hero’s Walk dramatizes diaspora as a
political category of identity not necessarily dependent on transnational
mobility. On the contrary, it explores the intersections of local and global
genealogies of belonging and displacement and, most of all, is essential to
the constitution of translocal communities of “popular dissent” (Bleiker 1).
In contrast to the role of NGOs in Anil’s Ghost, Arun’s activist group
cannot be easily co-opted by the ruling government. Instead, it assumes a
critical position vis-à-vis the postcolonial nation-state. In Spivak’s words,
Arun’s grassroots movement tries to “learn from subalternity and woman-
space, areas that have not been considered as central resources for the
conceptualization of the modern state” (“Supplementing” 114-15). As with
other “non-eurocentric, globe-girdling” ecological “movements,” Arun’s is
“not interested in state power” but risks what Spivak calls the “uncalculable”
(“Supplementing” 115). The “uncalculable” refers to the risk of employ-
ing knowledge forms that are marginalized or scorned in mainstream West-
ern academic institutions. Resistance movements such as Arun’s then
generate what Spivak calls “a sense of sacred nature” that “can help mobi-
lize … a globe-girdling ecological mind-set beyond the reasonable … terms
of long term global survival” (115). Sripathi’s development of a diasporic
consciousness, namely a consciousness that recognizes the interdependence
of local and global developments on a personal and political level and risks
the “uncalculable,” is contiguous with his understanding of Arun’s politi-
cal commitment. When Sripathi finally agrees to accompany Arun to the
beach to watch the arrival of the Olive Ridley turtles, he develops a sense
of the importance of his son’s work. For the first time, Sripathi is able to
relate not only to his son but also to his dead daughter. While this act of
recognition enables Sripathi to reconnect with his family and social envi-
ronment, it does not result in a narrative closure. On the contrary, as time
goes by, Sripathi once again writes a letter to the editor, but this time his
letter remains unfinished and unsigned. I would like to see Sripathi’s un-
finished letter as a concession that diasporic identities, as I have discussed
them here, remain an open process punctuated by complex mediations
 66 SCL/ÉLC
between narrative absences and presences, between individual life-stories
and globally interdependent economic and ecological structures.
Read together, Anil’s Ghost and The Hero’s Walk question such notions
as the ancestral homeland and transnational mobility as foundationalist
determinants of diaspora. From different perspectives both novels illumi-
nate the theoretical fallacies that consist in turning the concept of diaspora
into another all-encompassing allegory of postcolonial subjectivity. Perhaps
more than Anil’s Ghost, The Hero’s Walk elucidates the ways in which be-
coming diasporic relates to the ruptures and rituals of everyday life and
necessitates the abdication of one’s privileges of gender, cultural location,
race, and class. Particularly through the figure of Sripathi, The Hero’s Walk
suggests that being diasporic is not a cultural given but “a mode of oper-
ating within a cultural and historical canvas of understandings and misun-
derstandings about the emergence of this particular [diasporic] subject”
(Ganguly 13). With a view to Canadian discourses of identity, Ondaatje’s
and Rau Badami’s novels teach us to think global and national forms of
belonging in diasporic terms as modes of reading and critique of both capi-
talist late modernity and the normalizing role of the nation-state. In many
ways, then, The Hero’s Walk and Anil’s Ghost dramatize diaspora as a form
of cultural critique that questions the very categories of identity. It is this
ability to interrogate the nation and its quotidian regimes of normalization
from within rather than against their global, cultural, and political discrep-
ancies that makes diaspora a productive category of cultural knowledge
production and literary analysis.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
I would like to take the opportunity to thank Smaro Kamboureli, Diana Brydon, and
Donna Palmateer Pennee for their critical comments and encouraging words at various stages
of this essay. Their intellectual rigor has helped me to think through some of the complexi-
ties and ambiguities of diaspora studies in Canada and the dangers of constructing a mimetic
relationship between postcolonial theory and literature. I would also like to acknowledge the
support of SSHRC.

NOTES
1
Mishra’s division of diasporas into old and new ones seems at times too schematic and
unable to accommodate overlaps between both categories, especially since those overlaps are
marked by gender constructions. Nourbese Philip’s essay “Dis Place — The Space Between”
reads black women’s sexuality as a public space of female exploitation and subversion. “Dis
Place,” which is both the “outer space” of “the plantation” and “the inner space between the
 ONDAATJE AND RAU BADAMI 67
legs” (77) links the history of black slave women (i.e., the old diaspora) with the present of
Trinidadian Jamette women, namely with prostitutes, dancers, or domestics, who are “re-
garded … as transgressive” (111) (i.e., the new diaspora).
2
For a discussion of the defining elements of diaspora and an introductory historical
survey or individual diasporas, see Cohen, Global Diasporas, and Safran, “Diasporas in Mod-
ern Societies.” While Cohen places less emphasis on the idea of the homeland than Safran does,
and, instead, foregrounds a “sense of co-ethnicity” (ix) as a shared trait of diasporas, his own
table of common features of a diaspora nevertheless lists six out of nine points that are either
directly or indirectly related to the role of the homeland in the diasporic imaginary. Neither
of the theorists, however, addresses the internal contradictions and differences of diasporas.
For an early and highly influential notion of diasporic identity as a “disaggregated identity”
(721) that allows for difference within the subject and decentres the notion of the homeland
in favour of a “dialectical synthesis” (720) of diasporic identity markers, see Boyarin and
Boyarin, “Diaspora.”
3
At the end of The Second Scroll and following the death of his uncle, the nephew re-
alizes that “across the continents I had looked and searched for my kinsman, and now that
I had found him — I would not ever look upon his face. Forever would I have to bear in my
mind my own conjured image of Uncle Melech” (85). Here the death of the uncle creates the
nephew’s liminal identity and constructs the homeland as an elusive and uncanny space of
diasporic desire within the particular history of the Jewish diaspora. These two contradictory
markers of diasporic identity — liminality and the homeland — draw attention to the ambi-
guous position these two concepts occupy within diaspora theory in general. While I do not
want to dispute their ability to intervene into totalizing discourses of nation formation, I want
to remind us that they also derive from the biblical, thus foundationalist, narrative of
diaspora. For, in Deuteronomy (28: 64-68), which is also and not coincidentally the title of
The Second Scroll’s last chapter (excluding the Glosses), the scattering of the tribes into the
liminal spaces of foreign nations and the longing for an ever-receding homeland are part of
God’s punishment for disobeying His commandments.
4
My argument is indebted to Keya Ganguly’s proposition that in order to understand
the material and historical dynamics of diaspora it is necessary to examine “how the appurte-
nances of diasporic consciousness — memory, myth, belongingness and tradition — are not sui
generis. They are cast in their own shadow of inclusions and exclusions, all of which attempt
to introject an image of totality that must be contested even as it is thematized as part of the
ideological work of self-consolidation” (61-62). What I want to add to her argument is sim-
ply that the homeland and transnational mobility should be counted as dominant elements in
the formation of a diasporic consciousness in need of further examination because, like the other
“appurtenances of diaporic consciousness,” they have been naturalized in both the diasporic
imagination and in contemporary diaspora theory. For a recent attempt to “de-naturalize” the
homeland in the context of Caribbean Canadian writing, see Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door
of No Return: Notes to Belonging.
5
I believe it is possible to argue that the reconstruction of the Buddha figures and the
boy’s consoling gesture at the end of Anil’s Ghost project a syncretic vision of a globally shared
humanity uninterested in the power and politics of the Sri Lankan nation-state. It is through
this reluctance to engage critically with the postcolonial nation-state that the novel inadvert-
ently participates in the dominant ideologies of globalization. After all, as Makarand
Paranjape argues with a view to India, the “world powers are not in favour of a strong inde-
pendent, self-directed [postcolonial nation-state], but would prefer a weak, divided and pliant
country that can be controlled and manipulated by them for their own convenience” (235).
6
See, Barber, Wallerstein, and Jameson. To different degrees and from different politi-
cal perspectives, all of these writers consider globalization as a phenomenon that homogenizes
 68 SCL/ÉLC
the world through the worldwide dominance of American consumerism, popular communica-
tion technologies, and global capitalism.
7
See, for example, Ahmad, In Theory; Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies; Parry, “Problems.”
8
For some of the most influential and recent discussions of cultural hybridity, see
Young, Brah and Coombes, and Werbner and Modood. For a recent discussion of hybridity
by an indigenous artist and critic, see McLeod.
9
For an excellent discussion of Ondaatje’s metaphorical use of violence, chaos, and fear
as integral aesthetic elements of his metapoetic writing and poetry, including Handwriting,
a collection of poetry that artistically and thematically anticipates Anil’s Ghost, see Vigurs.
10
The new wars, or what some call low-intensity conflicts, are interested less in terri-
torial control than they are in popoulation control. Their goals, according to Kaldor, “are
about identity politics in contrast to the geo-political or ideological goals of earlier wars” (6).
The new wars, she argues, generally entail “a blurring between war …, organized violence …
and large-scale violations of human rights” (2). They reflect a “predatory social condition”
(107), take place in “a context which could be represented as an extreme version of globali-
zation,” and are highly rational in their application of violence and their “refusal [of] norma-
tive constraints” (Kaldor 100). I consider Sri Lanka’s civil war as a “new war” because, first,
the period from the mid 1980s to the 1990s — which is the period dramatized in Anil’s Ghost
— has marked the war with a new and unprecedented degree of violence that, in part, resulted
from the corruption and erosion of the state’s monopoly on legitimate organized violence.
Lakdhasa may be correct in saying that the war is not a Tamil problem, but not, as he suggests,
because the war has turned into a human problem. Rather, as with other new wars, Sri Lan-
ka’s war no longer revolves around issues of territorial reorganization but around population
and identity control.
11
In this context, I use the term “native informant” in its conventional meaning as a
colonial intellectual educated and working in the West. For a discussion of the Native Inform-
ant as a figure of foreclosure and disclosure in the canonical texts of Western literature, his-
tory and philosophy, see Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
12
For a critique of diaspora as silencing those who cannot or do not want to leave their
land of origin, see Paranjape.

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