To cite this page, please use the following information:

 

 

I

I am often asked about why I set my first novel in India, rather than Britain.

I tend to make decisions intuitively, to understand the logic later, if ever. Now, five years after the event, I think it was because I needed to distance myself, imaginatively, from Britain. I used to be an anglophobe - I hated everything English - and to an extent I still am, though in a more reasoned way. I could, of course, have written about Britain nonetheless, but I chose not to.

In Beautiful Disguises is the story of a young South Indian girl’s loss of innocence. Many first novels are coming of age narratives, though I didn’t know this at the time, and was largely unaware that this was, indeed, what I was writing. It is written in the first person, from the perspective of an unnamed heroine who, in an attempt to evade reality, takes refuge in dreams and in movies. The first line is, "I was born a girl and remained so until I became a woman", establishing, if you like, the distance she has to travel in order to impose subjectivity on objective circumstances determined in spite of her, before her. To do this she has to accept reality, because reality destroys fantasy if unchallenged. All of this mirrored my own condition, though I was only partially aware of this.

Why did I hate England? Because of racism. There is little doubt in my mind that this is at least eighty per cent true. While writing In Beautiful Disguises I didn’t think about racism once, and I didn’t think about England. My narrator says, "…I had developed problems distinguishing between fantasy and reality, or rather, I could make the distinction, but somehow I would invert the significance. I had a habit of trapping myself in that place that lies between dreams and consciousness, and I would stay there until someone pulled me back."

It has been suggested to me that I set In Beautiful Disguises in India because of a longing for my roots, because of a fractured identity. This is largely untrue. It was to liberate my imagination, to impose subjectivity on circumstances, as my heroine does. Like her, I was to find that fantasy can only be a temporary refuge. After finishing the novel I had to write another, and I decided it was time to address the question of England and my relationship to it. It was at this point that I began to implode with hatred and anger.

I began by attempting to write a novel about my childhood, convinced that I was traumatised by my childhood experience of racism and that I had to bring it to the page in order to exorcise its memory. This turned out to be untrue. The novel was bad and I scrapped it. I then decided to write a novel about a man who hates white people, the narrator being a surrogate for me. This also failed, and after two or three attempts, I gave up on the project. Instead, I spent some time reading about the history of racism, without any definite goal in mind.

After weeks of reading I realised that I didn’t hate white people, something I ought to have known earlier. Perhaps there was too much propaganda around me, telling me that I ought to. Trauma and associated psychoses are fashionable. Hatred is encouraged, it seems. I realised instead that I hated the technologies of racism, and the hypocrisy in Britain that leaves its racist legacy and modern day practice unchallenged. It took time to understand this. I was convinced that it was, indeed, white people I hated. This was the easier explanation for an anger that was so intense and unrelenting that, usually, it baffled me. I wanted to justify the anger, to give in to it, and to do this quickly. I didn’t realise that anger is always justified, if it is genuinely felt, but that it empowers demons and not the self. This realisation took a long time.

The irony is that such anger among first generation non-white immigrants is often credited to "crises of identity", another fashionable phrase. This identity crisis is said to stem from torn-out roots, from a loss of history due to migration, to immersion in a new culture, the discontinuity of which is unsettling, baffling. First generation immigrants are said to experience a sense of bewilderment because they do not have an adequate knowledge of "where they came from". This simply wasn’t true, in my case. The problem was that I didn’t have an adequate knowledge of who I was in the eyes of the society I was born into. Hence, there was a crisis of identity, but not as it is usually described.

My earliest memories include racism. From the age of four, when I went to an all-white school, I experienced a lot of it, on a daily basis. I didn’t live amongst Asians of my own age, only white children, and all of them, to some extent, were infected with racial prejudices. They did not know about the history of racism. They didn’t know how old their perceptions were, how and why they had distilled and changed over time. It wasn’t so urgent to them. But to me, at least recently, it was very important. I had to know because my sense of self was radically distorted due to the historically constructed perceptions of others that seemed to bore into my own sense of self, splitting it into pieces, mutilating it from the earliest age. Racism cannot be explained by platitudes. It is not a simple thing. It cannot be reduced to fear or ignorance or stupidity. It wouldn’t be a great exaggeration to say that the British psyche is racist, and this isn’t as essentialist a statement as it appears. It is simply that, over time, certain modes of behaviour become embedded in the subject after centuries of practice. Language changes, symbols change, culture changes. History leaves indelible imprints in the present, transforming the present, transforming culture and action. This is what I mean by the British psyche. To transform this one has to interrogate history, counter its effects.

A great many people in the west are born racist. This is a fact. There is nothing they can do about it. To change requires great effort, almost like spinning the earth backwards on its orbit. Migration is a spatial movement, yes. But it is also a temporal one because suddenly anothers history becomes one’s own, not because of ancestry, but because the migrant is constructed by that history, in the eyes of society at least, and comes to occupy that construction, even if the migrant occupies a position of resistance.
So, to understand myself, I had to understand at least three hundred years of European history, the invention of race, the construction of myself.

II

European racism is a very recent invention compared to, for example, Vedic racism in India, three and a half thousand years ago. Before the eighteenth century, there was little or no systematisation of race in Europe. However, the European voyages of discovery, the crusades and the Atlantic slave trade gave rise to crude practices of racialised imitation and mockery that have left their mark in language and culture. When I was a child I used to go to village fairs where I saw Morris dancing, or enactments of St George, the patron saint of England, slaying the dragon; traditional English customs. Morris dancing is properly called Moorish dancing, and refers to English people blacking up their faces and jumping around in imitation of Moroccan folk dances. The dragon St George slew represented the infidel Turkish opponent. The Harlequin, a traditional figure in European custom, was another representation of "the black man", complete with an enormous phallus. These practices cannot be reduced to racism, but they set an important precedent; the representation of the Other, which became a tool with which to construct myths of racial essences.

By the eighteenth century, race entered the field of enquiry of European science due to the maturing of the Atlantic slave trade, and the related preoccupation with the classification of the natural world, taxonomy. To people like Voltaire, it seemed undeniable that we were not one species but several, with different origins; this was called, polygenism. However, the Christian tradition contradicted this; all humans came from Adam and Eve, a single origin. Advocates of this view were called monogenists, and they opposed the apparently blasphemous polygenists, though many of them still believed that the single human species was divided into races which were biologically different. Hence, the distinction between species and race was largely meaningless in eighteenth century Europe.

This confusion persists today. I recently had dinner with a group of highly educated Italians, one of whom reacted with horror when I suggested that there was no such thing as race. He said, of course there is, in the way that in the animal kingdom we have the hedgehog and the donkey and the tiger, we have the Negro and the Caucasian and the Oriental in the human kingdom. I tried to correct him by telling him that hedgehogs and the donkeys are specie, not races, and I challenged him to define race. One of the other Italians, replied that it is equally impossible to define a species. I suggested the definition that two species cannot mate. He said they can, the donkey and the horse for example, but of course their offspring are sterile. He then sat back with his arms folded, as if to say that he had refuted my argument.

He was an academic, and a biologist, and yet what he was saying had no basis either in logic or fact. And yet he clung to his argument because the idea of the species divided into biologically distinct races still carries so much currency today. To rebut it can have a shock value equal to telling certain sixteenth century Europeans that the earth went round the sun. In 1795 the German taxonomist Blemenbach divided humanity into five races; Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. This system was still used in the fifties by the US Immigration authorities! In Britain the police have their own system of racial classification: IC1, Caucasian; IC2, Mediterranean; IC3, Black; IC4, Asian, etc. It is hard to tell people that their deeply held beliefs were discredited in the nineteenth century, if the world around them still operates according to these principles!

So, by the turn of the century polygenism was no longer respectable in the scientific establishment. First of all, the abolitionist movement gained respectability, with the slogan, "Am I not a man and a brother?" Christian humanism took a more evangelical bent, with the idea of the civilising mission in Africa and Asia. Racialised sentimentality and romanticism replaced strict ideas of inferiority and difference. The black man became to be seen as a primitive version of the European who had retained qualities the cerebral Europeans had lost; physicality, a closeness to the earth, raw sexuality, courage etc. Rousseau’s atavistic idea of the noble savage became popular, along with the idea that Europeans could help the blacks, and could regain what they had lost from them. This was reflected in the literature of the day, the imperial romances of Rider Haggard, for example, but this sentimentality is equally apparent in today’s Europe and America. Hollywood, literally, is full of it: "buddy films", like Lethal Weapon, with the black man as loyal sidekick to the white man, or Seven Years in Tibet where Brad Pitt’s sidekick is none other than the Dalai Lama; or the inter-racial love story; or films like Biko, Hurricane or Amistad (returning to the abolitionist root of it all) which appear to be about black heroes, but turn out to be about white heroes who make black heroism possible. In Britain, East is East was a very successful film, telling the story of a white woman who marries a Pakistani man and successfully integrates into Muslim culture. While she is tolerant and self-sacrificing, he is intolerant, weak, and, ultimately, violent.

Similarly, there is the current vogue in England for all things oriental: Madonna wears bindis and sings in Sanskrit, Hinduism and Buddhism appear to have become the official religions of California and Hampstead. I continually hear white people telling me that they, unlike myself, presumably, have lost their spirituality in the modern age, but found it again in India. Alternatively, take the white fascination with black culture, hip-hop, ebonics, all attempts to recover a lost "physicality" that the cerebral modern age has removed from their personas. Or the attitude of middle-class voyagers to Africa or India, re-enacting Tarzan of the Apes and Kim over and over again. This is not hybridity and it is not multiculturalism. Underpinning it all is the romantic spirit, the positivist naturalisation of European thought in the early nineteenth century, which relies on the celebration of difference, the natural laws which separate us into unique cultural groups which can glance sideways at each other but never truly merge because, at the end of it all, white sentimentality does not truly aim to be black, but merely to dip an ankle in the water, admiring its reflection. Transgressive titillation, again.

Of course it is impossible to draw a strict division between sentimentality and hybridity. To reduce all hybridity to racism would be to embrace the racist idea that members of particular groups are so different that they cannot practice one anothers cultures. This is equivalent to the notion of cultural authenticity. Hybridity is opposed to the celebration of difference, as love is opposed to sentimentality. The danger is to confuse the two.

I once heard a white girl say that she knew when she was watching authentic black comedy - comedy for a black audience, not a white one - because she couldn’t understand the jokes. This is ridiculous. Not only is the notion of an authentic black space false, but the presumption that this must be demarcated by the limits of white understanding is arrogant and foolish.

III

Opposed to the romantics were the rationalists, scientific advocates of monogenism, most importantly, Charles Darwin. By the middle of the eighteenth century, imperialist romanticism was on its way out. Buxton’s evangelical mission up the Niger Delta had failed disastrously in 1834. Abolitionism had become respectable and hackneyed. There was a fear for colonial possessions in the West Indies, a fear that colonialism was becoming a drain on the nation, that the blacks should be made to work rather than receiving hand-outs. The American Civil War had convinced many of this. There was a mood of pessimism and anxiety, and hence a hardening of racial attitudes, and so Darwin’s ideas, in the eighteen fifties and sixties, were received during a latent revival of polygenism, and a time when sentimentality towards blacks was replaced by hatred and loathing. Monogenists, like Darwin, were concerned with loose, descriptive ethnology, whereas the polygenists of his day, like Charles Dickens, were more interested in anthropology, the rigid classification of races according to biological difference.

What Darwin did was to synthesise his monogenism with polygenist attitudes, such that while he refused to accept that humanity was divided into different species, he maintained that, from ancient times, the species had divided into races via sexual selection who, over time, had become so different that they might as well have been different species. He predicated that the Caucasians, the most civilised race culturally and intellectually, would eventually wipe out the lower, savage races. Darwin’s used words like species, sub-species and race interchangeably because, for him, there was no empirical difference, and Darwin was an empiricist, and not a romantic.

So, with Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection, the difference between polygenism and monogenism became irrelevant. The Darwinian world view holds that the human species is divided into different races which are so different that they might as well be separate species, and that the Caucasian race, the most civilised, will wipe out the other, more savage races through the process of natural selection. This is genetic racism, racial theory, biological determinism.

The Victorians began to use the word "race" to classify any group which they wanted to exclude. The working class and the Irish, who were depicted as monkeys in the press, included. Race at this point was not about skin colour but about perceived biological difference. However, by the turn of the century democracy had made it unacceptable to talk about the working class as biologically different, and so race difference gradually came to refer to colour difference, particularly after the scramble for Africa. There is a clear logical progression between the Victorian view of race and Nazism, which classified homosexuals, Jews, blacks, gypsies etc. as biologically different.

IV

After the holocaust and the defeat of the Nazis it became unacceptable for the allied powers, the self-proclaimed opponents of racial theory, to use the discourse of racial theory. That was when the word ethnicity emerged - the Oxford English Dictionary dating its first recorded use as 1954 - as a substitute for race. However, to distance this new discourse further from racial theory, ethnicity came to refer to both racial and cultural uniqueness. And this set the tone for the Britain I grew up, post-Powell Britain.

To suggest that cultural difference can separate groups as rigidly as biological difference, is the same argument that the romantics used. It is the same, in effect, as genetic racism, and it is equally false, but it does not ostensibly refer to biology. This is post-holocaust political correctness. Its romantic legacy is clear. It is the same thing as white people imitating Eastern religious and cultural practice without understanding its meaning or social function, or even realising that it has a social function. The attraction is in its difference from their own culture, a difference that they perceive as rigid, unbreakable, and hence do not try to seek points of comparison or to understand. It reflects also the shift in the discipline of anthropology from racial classification to the description of alien cultures, as opposed to functional anthropology which examines why and not simply how. For the romantic anthropologist there is no why. They do it because the Other is incommensurably different. This attitude is very common among white liberals today. However, the cultural pluralist argument is a genetic argument. Cultural pluralists believe no culture is superior to another, but that cultures are uniquely different, that members of one culture, or nation, cannot possibly understand members of another. That they live in different worlds. This has to be because they are biologically different. There is no other logical cause. What prevents them from understanding a different culture? What creates these incommensurably different cultures? The answer must lie in the genes, unless your understanding of history is so radically misguided as to suggest that people have never mixed or changed, that hybridity has never happened. But even if you do believe this, why have cultures never mixed? It seems so easy. We are back to Darwin’s "separate species in effect". Powell was the same as Hitler, in effec, except Powell was a hypocrite and a liar. Hitler was only a liar.

Enoch Powell applied this discourse to black and Asian immigrants in England. Powell was a pure cultural nationalist, or cultural pluralist. While he called for racial inter-marriage, he simultaneously said the Asian community was incapable of it due to the practice of arranging marriages, and hence would remain a separate nation. He said that use of the word race was incorrect, that the issue was culture, which was the basis for nation, and that nations were unique and pure. "Nation is not a rational thing", he said. "What you belong to is a matter of feeling. Nor do I think it is correct to describe a sense of belonging to one community and not to another as "base". If you called it "fundamental" perhaps that would be more accurate".

So, for Powell, communities, cultures, could not mix. This is why he warned that in ten or fifteen years time "the black man will had the whip hand over the white man" and that the nation was "literally mad" to let in people who were so different. So, logically, the solution was repatriation and to prevent immigration. Even more logically, if the blacks and Asians are here to stay, then social exclusion is the answer to prevent them from getting the whip hand.

Powell changed the discourse of racism in Britain forever. He took the biology out, and put culture in its place, but the conclusion is the same. He did not need to say it; whites all over the country decided that they would perform their national service of excluding alien communities, and encouraging voluntary repatriation, by terrorising them, destroying their property, and, by simply killing them.

Others, the educated classes usually, espoused a more elegant solution, equally logical. If blacks and Asians wanted to stay then they could not remain culturally alien and separate. They had to assimilate. They had to give up their culture and become like the whites. This, they claimed, could prevent the rivers and blood, and also, presumably, keep the whip out of the black man’s hand.
The distinction between assimilation and violence applies equally to differing colonial policy across Africa and India, and to different types of racism. In Africa indirect rule was substituted for direct rule, genocide and brutality for the creation of an African ruling elite. at In India this was not the case. A class of assimilated, often English educated elites was formed, the Macaulayites or brown sahibs. They assimilated not only English culture but also Victorian prejudices, a hatred of their own kind and of the lower classes, qualities essential for ruling elites. In Britain, Asians have tended to assimilate more successfully, to be perceived as less of a threat to the system than blacks because of this colonial legacy.

V

On the playground, when I was a child, I heard words like "nigger", "coon", "spear-chucker", "black bastard", and "nig-nog" directed at me. While perhaps a little confused, this is the language of biological racism, which, despite post-holocaust political correctness, was still used in private, the playground in a white school being a private space for racism. In the same way, after it became unacceptable for Victorians to speak of the working class as a separate race, they would still do so in private, amongst each other and, when they could get away with it, to the working-class themselves.

Racial insults directed against Asians tended to be of the anti-national variety, having their origins in colonial India, land of the assimilated elites. Hence, "wog", "paki", "stani", "curry-muncher". Insults and jokes directed at Asians tended to refer to culture and not race: joke about food, dress, language, corner-shops. As I child I decided that the more assimilated I became the less abuse I would receive. This didn’t work, because they also had the biological argument in reserve, and, in any case, my parents had spent most of their lives in India and it was far harder for them to assimilate than it was for me. Assimilation, as stated, requires more than simply imitating English cultural practices and abandoning one’s own. It is also an ideological and political transformation. It helps to ridicule one’s own culture and people, to make racist jokes just as the whites do, to be self-hating, ashamed of one’s skin colour, determined to eradicate any trace of difference. And never, never complaining about racist injustice, either because it isn’t injustice, or because it does not exist. Assimilation is root and branch. There are all too many examples of black children trying to remove their skin with knives or leaping into baths full of boiling water in order to become white.

VI

I left school having assimilated to a high level. I had had to, to survive, or so I thought at the time.

I decided to spend a year travelling before university. I don’t know whether I was aware of my need to start down the path to counter-assimilation, but that was what I spent my sixteen months doing. I went to Zimbabwe, South Africa, Spain, Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Jordan. I encountered racism in many places, but I also made close friends who were not white or assimilated, and I lived in communities which were exclusively non-white and unassimilated. It was enough. I began to encounter myself with the construction taken out.

My path to counter-assimilation begun, I went to Oriel College, Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics. Oriel College is perhaps the most right-wing of all Oxford Colleges, and is the closest I have come to living within a fascist institution. It was around this point that I began to become angry.

Oriel College’s benefactor and most heralded alumni is Sir Cecil Rhodes. Oriel College faces onto Oxford’s High Street, from where his statue towers above the pavement. Rhodes was a major player in the scramble for Africa, and he sought to bring every part of the world under the control of the Anglo-Saxon people, ‘to paint the map red.’ For this purpose, he established Rhodes Scholarships to enable (at that time white) citizens of commonwealth countries to study at Oxford and to form a secret aristocratic elite. Traits most desirable in Rhodes Scholars were, in his words, ‘smugness, brutality, unctuous rectitude, and tact.’ This doesn’t, by any means, apply to all Rhodes Scholars today, but it did apply to many of the people I met at Oriel College.

During my time at Oriel College, I heard, on a huge scale, the biological argument together with a spoonful of imperial romanticism and quite a lot of Powellism. It was the biological argument that amazed me the most. I suppose I had expected the rest, but not racist genetics! And all this from Britain’s future ruling class!

I left Oxford so angry that I was barely able to function. I received a scholarship to study for an M.Phil in Development Studies at, of all places, Cambridge University. But free money is free money, and I went, did not study, and wrote my first novel. By then I refused to pay even lip service to the Oxbridge system. I understood it. While a liberal aristocratic tradition exists of disinterested study, right wing Oxbridge, as embodied by my former college, is about prejudice and conditioning, about the creation of Rhodes’s "unctuous elite". This returns us to the upper middle-class side of Powellism, assimilation.

At Oxford you are virtually taught upper middle-class cultural norms, and you cannot escape them. It is a story well-documented in the sixties, that of the bright working-class eighteen year old who arrives at Oxford, loses his regional accent, becomes accustomed to ruling class manners and prejudices, and becoming alienated from his former self in the process. For blacks and Asians, it is a process identical to that which created the Indian ruling elites during colonial times. Overseas students who are successfully assimilated can return to their countries and take up their position in the neo-colonial system as ministers, civil servants, World Bank officials, and economists. British blacks and Asians can become lawyers or bankers, or, more "unctuously", work in the media, presenting a politically compliant image of black and Asian Britain to "the nation". This is dangerous.

The media actively seeks black and Asian spokespersons who will write books or newspaper articles, or appear on TV, claiming to "represent their communities", whilst pandering to racist prejudices and misconceptions. They become virtual heroes to white liberals who can scarcely control their excitement at hearing a black voice telling them exactly what they want to hear. Look, they can say to dissenting black and Asian voices, it is true!

This system of community representation may appear to be subtle and nuanced, but it isn’t. It is crude, and obvious. As established, racism has no actual justification, but it requires its apologists nonetheless. And what could be more effective, in multicultural Britain, than black and Asian apologists for racism, black and Asian patriots who feel they have to loudly declare their loyalty to their nation before saying anything else, whose agenda is to persuade the audience that they are "like them", who affect racialised sentimentality and exoticism, or embrace the rhetoric of cultural pluralism and deliberately accentuate stereotypes. Some spokespersons are less assimilated than others, some attempt to "play the system", by telling the whites what they want to hear while cherishing a secret agenda of truth and openness. A dangerous game, the same game played by so many Labour politicians. They began with principles, gained power, and when it came to action saw that there was nothing left of their principles any more. They had become power, and were enjoying it.

VII

So, having written my first novel, In Beautiful Disguises, I decided that I had to set a novel in Britain. There is no such thing as catharsis in literature, or, I believe, in life, but I wanted to prove to myself that I could set a novel in Britain wherein I would liberate my imagination as I had done in my first novel. I realised that rather than turn the lens onto hatred, and onto racism, I should simply incorporate it into my story, into the reality imitated in my fictional world, as I might include a chair or a street or a city. There was no need for any rigid demarcation between fantasy and reality; let the two merge, I decided, as they do in life. Fiction requires a borrowing of the codes of reality, as the author perceives them, and, for me, racism is an indelible part of reality, as are love, hatred, war, death. To fixate on it would be for me to become racism, to become the reverse side of the racist construction of the other, to make my life a narrative of resistance to something external to me, that predated and limited me, made me two-dimensional and caged. I wouldn’t do this. But neither would I deny reality.

The important thing was that I accepted the reality of racism, but not the fantasy of racial difference. This is no such thing as race. There are, of course, superficial physical characteristics found in localised populations; skin colour, shapes of eyes, nose, lips, but, not only do these account for less than 0.1% of our biological make-up, but they have no necessary relation to our more socially significant genetic characteristics; muscle size, intelligence, personality.

In Britain many people get it the wrong way around. They accept the fiction of race but deny the reality of racism. Racism is social exclusion. Race is its invented justification. Even Hitler agreed. "I can think of no such thing that I can call rac", he said, "but for me, as a politician, it serves my purposes very well". I am not a politician. The concept of race is of no use to me. But the concept of racism forms an unavoidable part of my reality.

Britain remains a racist country, with a government that behaves, more often than not, in racist ways, with a racist press and a racist history. This is undeniable. The biggest genocides in the last millennium have been against racially demarcated groups: the black holocaust, the death of fifty eight million Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the death of up to fifty million colonial subjects due to the socially engineered famines of the late nineteenth century; and the Jewish holocaust. And yet, the only holocaust we ever hear of in Britain is the holocaust effected by the nazis, because, in rhetoric at least, this is the only one that the British opposed.

Britain has not even begun to contemplate or accept its own past. The slave trade and the late Victorian holocausts have to become part of the national psyche, of collective memory. We need a generalised historical awareness of them, and then racism will become easy to avoid in day to day existence. As it stands, it is tremendously difficult for the average white Briton to avoid racism, whether conscious of it or not, and equally difficult for the average black Briton to avoid at least a degree of self-contempt and political assimilation. These are constraints that we did not create. They are historical and institutional, and there is little we can do about them. This is our reality, one of holocaust-denial. It is simply staggering how little consciousness of this exists, how effective is the stranglehold of the British conspiracy of silence. It is barbaric, and indefensible, and it persists, and persists, and persists.

In In Beautiful Disguises, my heroine dreams of being a film star, but instead, after running away from home to escape reality, finds herself working as a maid. She tells the reader a story from The Mahabharata about Arjuna, the Pandava, who, with his four brothers, is forced to spend his thirteenth year of exile in hiding. If they are discovered then they have to return to the forest for another thirteen years. Arjuna takes on a woman’s identity under the name Brihannala, and teaches dancing. However, when the Kauravas invade he throws off his disguise, takes up his bow, and fights, returning to his original warrior’s self. My heroine reflects: "The point of the story, as I saw it, was that a warrior is always a warrior, even when he’s disguised as a woman, or a servant. And a film star is always a star, even when she’s a maid. The problem was that Arjuna had been born a warrior and had chosen his disguises on purpose. I had been born a girl, as Ravi kept telling me, and not a star, and I had never really wanted to be a maid."

My heroine analyses the story in a different way, too. "There is an alternative interpretation. Perhaps Arjuna had been born a warrior, but deep inside himself he really wanted to be a woman, and a dancer. So when the opportunity came he grabbed it with both hands. But if that was true, then why did he go back to killing people for a living? I had a horrible feeling the answer had something to do with duty, but at the moment I wasn’t interested in such things".

This is what I mean by life becoming a narrative of resistance. If it is unreasonable to expect someone to merge his sense of self with an imposed identity, is it reasonable to expect a person to spend his entire life resisting this identity, attempting to throw it off, to substitute it with another which, in the worst of all cases, would be that of "Asian representative", or "race writer".
In the end, if we are honest, I am not certain that such a thing is even possible. This reminds me of a second story from The Mahabharata, where Dushana attempts to undress Draupadi in front of the entire court, but Draupadi appeals to Krishna and so, with every layer of her sari that he removes, another appears, and another, and another.

I hate racism; I hate having to live with it. It confuses me with its infinite variety of disguises, with its history of obfuscation and distortion. It resembles some hideous beast that has been starved for hundreds of years and is now demented and crazed, barely recognisable, virtually mythical, and incapable of anything but destruction, whether it is acknowledged or not. This beast has wounded me, and I cannot imagine not being angry about it. But I cannot destroy it. I simply have to live with it as best I can, without trying to wish it away, or to eliminate it. This task is beyond me. Otherwise I will become like Dushana, tearing at Draupadi’s sari for the rest of his life.