This book has examined literary iterations of the simultaneous disintegration and mutation of the gentlemanly ideal in the immediate postwar period as the imperial nation redefined and rediscovered itself. Though the texts that I have considered illustrate insular Englishmen by the English, the argument focuses on how race and empire shape gentlemanliness and its subsequent adaptations. This epilogue turns away from the post-imperial Englishman to consider the opposite end of the dialectic: the postcolonial appropriations of gentlemanliness. It suggests that the study of such literary (cultural and historical) representations in former colonies is the complement to the alterations in, and adaptations of, English hegemonic gentlemanliness in a changing Britain. Building on the critical work that parses the discursive processes through which Indian masculinities were produced as the necessary Other to constructions of English imperial manliness in the long nineteenth century, I make a modest gesture here at moving the argument into the postcolonial period by examining the postcolonial gentleman who extrapolates traits of gentlemanliness to create a new masculine identity. In the process he both undoes and reworks gentlemanliness. Mindful of Anne McClintock’s warning about the potential homogenization of postcolonial identities and narratives, I only study the postcolonial Indian gentleman.
I look at two variations of such gentlemen: Mr. Srinivasan in Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (1964), the Indian gentleman who exemplifies disinterestedness in his ability look to critically at the British, filtered through the narrator’s post-imperial nostalgia; and Saladin Chamcha in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989), whose performative gentlemanliness brings into being a new, fluid diasporic masculine stylization. Both Srinivasan and Saladin Chamcha’s upper-middle-class masculine identities emerge in, and through, the discursive frame of imperial gender formation, that is, in tandem with, and in response to, imperial English manliness. While each nation, region, culture, tribe, and caste inflects postcolonial middle-class masculinities, these forms are often also shaped by the languages of imperial English manliness that appear to function as the master narrative. My brief readings suggest future avenues for the analysis of the contradictory processes of compulsory inheritance and appropriation of gentlemanly ideals by bourgeois men in Britain’s former colonies. The postcolonial gentleman emerges via two intersecting processes that I examine separately: (1) the extrapolation of definitive traits of the English gentleman such as disinterestedness, detachment, and restraint leads to the creation of a new identity, that of the postcolonial gentleman, who subjects the English and Englishmen to a detached, restrained, and assessing gaze; and (2) in embodying these traits, in being “not quite/not white” (Bhabha 131), this new gentleman signifies the disconnecting of manliness from its original constituent factor of race, thereby democratizing, de-racializing, and remaking gentlemanliness.
Mr. Srinivasan in The Jewel in the Crown is an example of the first, an Indian gentleman who turns his gentlemanly, disinterested eye on the English during, and after, their rule. For the brief moment that he is in the novel, his views on the events that he describes function as the authoritative still point of judgment. Srinivasan is an Indian lawyer who had been an active member of the Indian National Congress in the tumultuous 1930s–1940s. The English narrator meets Srinivasan on a visit to Mayapore in independent India, when he arrives to research the events for his historical novel. Significantly, the narrator’s interpretation of, and undisguised respect for, Srinivasan, and the narrative rendering of the relationship between Srinivasan and the imperial administrator, Deputy Commissioner Robin White, trade on ideals of gentlemanliness. To situate this segment, it is perhaps necessary to give a brief summary of the novel. The narrative chronicles the protracted end of the British empire through a detailed study of Mayapore and its inhabitants. The narrative moves back and forth in time, charting Mayapore in its precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods, but the plot, referencing A Passage to India, hinges on the alleged rape of a young Englishwoman named Daphne Manners. It reiterates Forster’s challenge of the easy trope, but makes explicit the charged homoeroticism between the Indian and the Englishman. Scott’s novel creates a homoerotically inflected love triangle between Daphne Manners, Hari Kumar (an English gentleman unable to find a new identity), and Ronald Merrick (the police officer). Here, the novel renders as text the subtext of Forster’s anti-imperial novel. The polyphonic narrative structure foregrounds multiple voices and lives, crisscrossing class, race, and gender lines, as it traces the effects of national/imperial upheavals on the subjectivities of both the British and the Indians. Srinivasan is just one of the many components of the narrative fractal. It is significant because it reveals the professional and personal affinity between an Indian and an English gentleman, an alliance that crosses racial and administrative boundaries. In doing so this relationship exemplifies a facet of the imperial narrative of transition, in which Indian independence was perceived as the transfer of power between two sets of gentlemen.
The English narrator’s encounter with Srinivasan occurs in independent India, where he reflects upon his preferences and prejudices while being acutely aware of his own racial privilege. At the Club, which used to be the exclusive heart of colonial Englishness in Mayapore, the narrator notes the difference between the sophistication and formality of Mr. Srinivasan and the boorish English people who are in India in their professional and corporate capacities: “Mr. Srinivasan is of medium height, thin, punctilious in manner. His skin has a high polish. He is immaculately turned out. The light-weight suit, the collar and tie, point another interesting difference. The inheritors come properly dressed but the Englishmen expose their thick beefy necks and beefy arms” (166). The elegance of his bearing, and the immaculateness of his clothes and manners, are in sharp contrast to the new English arrivals, who do not possess Srinivasan’s sartorial grace and refinement. The word “inheritors” is particularly charged in this instance. At its most obvious, it indicates the inheritance of political and administrative control, which also means the inheritance of the Club. However, it also signifies the inheritance of a gendered mode of being. Srinivasan inhabits the ideal of the imperial gentleman, but it is an appropriated gendered mode, adapted and reworked to formulate a classed Indian gender ideal; while Larkin’s personae and Amis’s and Wain’s protagonists navigated their inherited frames of gentlemanliness to create a postwar English masculinity, Srinivasan exemplifies the bourgeois native, who is both educated into and reconfigures the gendered idiom of the imperial colonizer to create a new Indian masculine identity.
Though the focus of the narrative is not on Srinivasan’s background—he is one of the many peripheral characters—it is not entirely coincidental that there is not much information on his regional and linguistic background.1 Srinivasan, as a lawyer, a member of the English-speaking middle class and the Indian National Congress, is evacuated of any parochial or even any religious affiliations, and is metonymic of the mythicized secular, progressive, newly independent nation. Srinivasan’s detachment and disinterestedness as he looks upon his compatriots (his peers and the younger generation) and the postwar British professionals is distinctly similar to English gentlemanly traits. He oscillates between respect and admiration for someone like Robin White, and disdain for the English and their rule. He is distanced and affectively detached, and he views himself, his relationships with Englishmen, and imperial rule with a rational yet sharply critical eye. His surprisingly non-cynical and astute observations about the new generation of English people in independent India are a testament to this detached objectivity:
He laughs at what the Gymkhana used to represent—which is why I suppose he comes dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts and uses vulgar expressions. He knows almost nothing about British-Indian history, so writes off everything that seems to be connected with it as an example of old-type British snobbery. Which means also that in a way he writes us off too. … In his heart he also shares with that old ruling class he affects to despise a desire to be looked-up to abroad, and shares with them also the sense of deprivation because he has not been able to inherit the Empire he always saw as a purely ruling-class institution. (193)
Srinivasan is able to look upon the explicit racism of the British people in the Club dispassionately; he interprets and situates their racism and resentment within their particular classed background and post-imperial melancholy. Though not in the segment quoted above, he then turns his detached perspective on himself and other members of his class and generation to observe their troubled love-hate relationship with their former colonial overlords. Srinivasan’s gendered subject position—more specifically, his detached, gentlemanly perspective that produces such ambivalently rational and affective responses vis-à-vis the British and the Indians—is the product of the colonial habitus. He is also able to turn what he feels is an empirical gaze on his countrymen. However, his perspective is determined by his Indianizing of gentlemanly ideals.
Rather than unthinking mimicry of a prestigious racial ideal, Srinivasan’s affect is the reformulation of an imperial ideal to fit his own national purposes. Srinivasan embodies the adaptation of gentlemanliness as it emerges as one of many versions of Indian middle-class masculinity. He emblematizes gentlemanliness that is de-racialized and nationalized, and in his inhabiting this contradictory gendered style, he undoes the superiority of English gentlemanliness, and uses it for his national and ethical purposes. The traits of disinterestedness, detachment, and restraint, imperially structured in the Englishman, discursively circulate as the racially, culturally, superior manly traits, desirable precisely because of their whiteness and Englishness. However, while the bourgeois Anglicized native might have been educated into the desirability of these traits, his particular circumstance, as colonized native subject to the rhetoric and reality of imperial power, allows him to critically engage with the myth of Englishness and Englishmanliness. Srinivasan is the bourgeois native man who is critically aware of both the strengths and failings of imperial authority and imperial gentlemanliness. As evident from the above passage, he turns his colonially inculcated detached eye on the English in independent India, but more powerfully, he turns his gaze on Englishmen, Clubland, and English fairness during the final days of the empire. In Srinivasan, detachment and disinterestedness are abstracted from their English imperial setting and turned upon the imperial Englishman himself to challenge his right to claim superiority over the Indian and India.
The apparent disinterested gaze implies that Srinivasan notes that which is praiseworthy and also that which falls short of an implied standard of judgment. In short, he judges the English by their, and now his, gentlemanly standards. In describing his meeting with Robin White, Srinivasan reveals that he and his colleagues were initially cautious about White, waiting to see what sort of man he was, whether he was “clever and well-disposed” to the cause of Indian independence, or was “a fool,” and if so, “a useful fool or a dangerous fool?” (187). White’s subtlety and care in dealing with bureaucratic, political, and religious tensions set Srinivasan’s mind at ease. The perspective is Srinivasan’s, and the reader is drawn into his assessment of the English administrator.2 The disciplinary gaze is turned back onto the Englishman.
Perhaps most noteworthy is that White earns Srinivasan’s trust and respect through his careful and diplomatic use of the English language. Through the reading and writing of official memoranda, they come to realize not only how attuned they are to the nuances of language, but also that they share a similar set of values. Srinivasan approves of Robin White precisely because he understands the power of words and knows how to deploy them. For Srinivasan, the defining moment occurs when White diplomatically asks the Mayapore division of the Indian National Congress to reconsider their policy of making the “salutation of the Congress flag” compulsory in the local primary schools (189). Srinivasan appreciatively quotes “the perfect English flexibility” of White’s sentence: “It is perhaps unwise to leave an impression on their minds of the kind of exclusion Congress is itself at pains to eradicate” (190). Srinivasan recognizes both White’s diplomacy and his skillful revelation of his own sympathies with the Congress agenda. White confirms Srinivasan’s perception of his intelligence and rhetorical precision when he identifies the one sentence of a redrafted response from the Congress committee to White as written by Srinivasan. They recognize each other as like-minded men through their skill at the written and spoken word. Their respect and admiration for each other is cemented through a love for, and ability to, skillfully wield the English language; this shared love of language becomes the means through which they realize that they share a value system. As Srinivasan says, “From that moment we were friends” (191). It is a case of like meeting like, but the story is Srinivasan’s and the judgments are his, and it is White who is judged and found to be acceptable, not the other way around—a reversal that undoes the usual flow of narrative and discursive power that characterizes empire.
This reversal of the disciplinary gaze is evident in the description of that sanctum of Englishness, the Club, since it is, once again, Srinivasan’s perspective that the narrative offers. The beginning of his description is laden with irony: “Do you know what struck me most about it? Its old fashioned shabbiness” (187). Srinivasan’s characterization echoes and invokes Orwell’s description of the Club in Burmese Days, where the dilapidation of the “dumpy one-storey wooden building,” with the “forlorn” library of “mildewed novels” and its “mangy billiard table,” reflects the obsolescence of its members (17–20). Unlike Orwell’s narrator, Srinivasan is not English, nor does he dwell on the hypocrisy of the Club, because he takes for granted the corruption of its members. In his interpretation, precisely because it is from the perspective of the educated Indian actively involved in campaigning against colonial rule, the Club’s shabbiness signifies ordinariness. He demystifies the Club, which he refers to, rather mockingly, as “this sacred edifice,” since its sanctity was maintained by the systematic banning of Indians.
In categorizing the Club as ordinary, Srinivasan does not condemn it for its banality, but rather sees it as a signifier of respectability and professionalism. In its ordinariness, it fits someone like Robin White, and not the people who usually populate it: the racist pukka sahibs and colonial Blimps who do not conform to Srinivasan’s ideas of ethical and acceptable behavior. White and the Club, on the other hand, reflect each other in their shabby ordinariness and well-appointed comfort—like a good middle-class home, in fact. For Srinivasan, White was a good man and worthy friend/opponent because he possesses a “sense of responsibility that enabled him to accept his privileged position with dignity” (192). It is White’s professionalism that Srinivasan admires. He sees White practice, in good faith, the ideals of disinterestedness, fair play, justice, and responsibility, but one that is not contained by racial boundaries. He says as much when he contends that in the moment of recognizing the Club and Robin White as reflective of each other, he “understood what it was the English always imagined lay but only rarely succeeded in showing did lie behind all the flummery of their power and influence” (192). In White, the personal-ethical coalesces into good professional practice, traits that Srinivasan recognizes and values, as they are qualities that he embodies. Though Srinivasan clearly does not believe in the idea of England’s destiny as bringer of civilization to the world, he nevertheless sees, though for the first time, what the English saw as their best selves, or at least the myth of their best selves. The narrative, once again, emphasizes that it is Srinivasan who functions as the standard of professionalism and gentlemanliness, and it is White who is perceived through Srinivasan’s parameters.
Srinivasan is engaged in an ethnographic study, dissecting the structures and myths of imperial Englishness in India through his observations of both White and the Club. He looks at and classifies the English and Englishmen to parse their culture and their motivations, but does not lose sight of the personal, as his scrutiny of Robin White leads to genuine respect and admiration for the man. What the narrative structure makes explicit, thereby privileging Srinivasan’s voice, is that if White can earn the respect of someone as intelligent, subtle, and ethical as Srinivasan, then he must be a worthwhile man. Srinivasan occupies the still point of discernment. In this reversal, the narrative emphasizes the idea of an appropriated gentlemanliness that is entirely Indian, and is neither imitative nor representational. The inheritors of a colonial nation and colonial/imperial gender style have remade them into a postcolonial nation and a postcolonial gentlemanliness. Srinivasan’s upper-middle-class or middle-class masculine identity is restrained and detached, but it is entirely Indian in its perspective. He situates the English, both past and present, within their deluded myths and prejudices. While he condemns their imperial and racist practices in India from his own confident position of Indian man, who has/had right on his side—by virtue of fighting for independence and “the rights of man”—he can also see the virtues of individual men in the race that oppressed him.
At this point it is necessary to address the obvious fact that the novel is written by an Englishman in the first blush of the loss of India and during the dismantling of empire. Though the novel is anti-imperial, it still engages in nostalgia about India as a former colony. Moreover, the narrative is entirely mediated by an English narrator. Both of these factors contribute to the characterization of Srinivasan, who—though critical of, and distanced from, the English imperialists—speaks with affection about individual imperial administrators, such as Robin White. While I have been reading this as symptomatic of Srinivasan’s confident attitude of a gentlemanly Indian masculinity, which it is, the potential for reading him as a permanent residue of Englishness in India, even after the empire has collapsed, always exists. Yet to do so would be to ignore the fact that Srinivasan’s identity is forged both within and against imperial discourses. His agency in this case is mobilized against the English and not for the perpetuation of the status quo. While it is an English description of an Indian man, the English narrator makes a distinction between the Indian Srinivasan and Hari Kumar, who does not know what he is.
Srinivasan’s identitarian certitude and Indian gentlemanliness stand in stark opposition to Hari Kumar. Hari Kumar’s or Harry Coomer’s identity crisis is brought on by being rejected by the English, who he thought were his people. In fact, the juxtaposition of the two reveals that Hari Kumar, deliberately educated to be an English gentleman, is a cipher. His sense of self is imitative; he is not fully aware of the racial and national axes that structure his gentlemanly identity until he is forced to confront his Indian background. Brought up as English in England, Kumar is sent to the upper-crust public school Chillingborough. He fulfills his father’s ambitions and sees himself as wholly English. He only becomes aware of his not being English, and being different, when he realizes that his Englishness and his gentlemanliness are not recognized when not underpinned by his father Duleep’s wealth. Indeed, Kumar’s gentlemanliness is completely revoked by Duleep’s suicide, prompted by his financial demise. Duleep’s English lawyer interprets the suicide as an effect of his going “right off his head” when his “financial manipulation” took a turn for the worse. For the lawyer, Duleep’s suicide is the moment when “blood, background, that sort of thing, finally begin to tell” (225). Kumar’s English gentlemanliness, so carefully cultivated by his father and so unconsciously inhabited by Kumar, disappears, and he is forced to return to India, where he drifts, unable to craft a new identity for much of the novel. Though he is supported by a network of aunts and uncles, in the relative comfort of a lower-middle- to middle-class existence, he lives, as he sees it, in squalor and poverty that “drain him layer by layer of his Englishness” (228). He despises Indians, whom he still considers “they”; he also comes to hate the British in India, who, bound by the racial prejudice of the pukka sahib, cannot see past the color of his skin to recognize in him the Englishman he is (232). Kumar’s tragedy is that he sees himself as an exile who longs to return home, but for him, home no longer exists. His exile is one of the foreclosed tragedies in The Jewel in the Crown; the moment he returns to India, his fate is sealed. The narrative is merely an unfolding of his inability to create a new identity for himself, despite coming into contact with young educated Indian men actively involved in the fight for political and national freedom with whom he could potentially forge friendships. Kumar resembles the many literary versions of “mimic men,” who emerge from vastly different colonial situations, ranging from V. S. Naipaul’s novel of the same name published in 1967 to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, published in 1988. However, unlike Hari Kumar, these “mimic men” eventually manage to carve their distinct postcolonial masculine identities, adapting components of gentlemanliness to their own needs, moving away from their initial slavish internalization of superior English manliness.
Saladin Chamcha, né Sallahudin Chamchawalla, in The Satanic Verses is a surreal diasporic variation of a masculine style determined by the discourses of English manliness circulating in postcolonial India and post-imperial Britain. While it is difficult and unnecessary to summarize the labyrinthine plot of the novel, a short mapping of Chamcha’s trajectory is pertinent here. The son of a wealthy Bombay businessman, Saladin Chamcha dreams of escaping to England, away from his father’s iron control. He longs to be English, as a repudiation of his father and the chaos of India. In his desire to both possess and become one with England, he marries an Englishwoman and constructs a successful career as a voice-actor. At the point at which the novel begins in medias res, Saladin Chamcha, one of only two survivors of a bombed flight from India (along with Gibreel Farishta), is transformed from man to hairy goat, only to be humiliated, incarcerated, admitted to hospital, and, eventually, forced to go into hiding in the heart of the lower-middle-class/working-class Asian neighborhood in London. Chamcha’s post-disaster transformation and journey are allegorical of the immigrant experience in Britain. He miraculously becomes human again, returns to India to reconcile with his dying father, and decides to settle in India.
His very name, in true Rushdie fashion, delineates his character. Though Chamcha translates into “spoon” in Urdu, it also has a secondary meaning: toady, mimic, and suck-up. Saladin Chamcha blindly and obsessively imitates Englishness and English gentlemanliness. Rushdie’s definition of the phrase connects it directly to the empire: “Colloquially a chamcha is a person who sucks up to a powerful people, a yes-man, a sycophant. The British Empire would not have lasted a week without such collaborators among its colonized peoples” (“Empire Writes Back” 8). Having internalized his Indian inferiority at a very early age, Chamcha desires Englishness and England, “that dream-Vilayet of poise and moderation” (Satanic Verses 43). He wants “to become the thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, a goodandproper Englishman” (43). In wanting to be an Englishman and the antithesis of his father, Chamcha clearly echoes Hari Kumar’s Englishness and his racialized Oedipal issues. In becoming such a man, Chamcha sheds the confusion and “superabundance” of Bombay and India (37), which, for him, is filtered through the prism of his comfortable upper-middle-class existence. Chamcha’s transformation into “proper” English gentlemanliness begins, unsurprisingly enough, in an English public school, where, humiliated by his inability to eat kippers, that quintessential English breakfast of the upper and middle classes, he vows to conquer the fish and the culture symbolized by the bony fish. For Chamcha, “The eaten kipper was his first victory, the first step in his conquest of England” (45).
Chamcha’s Englishness, then, is entirely regressive, a “traditional” Englishness that was disseminated to such great effect in the former imperial colony. Chamcha longs for and becomes a defender of an Englishness that is predicated not only on a racial, but also a classed, cultural homogenous totality, entrenched in an exclusive upper-middle-class world. Englishness is “that voice stinking of Yorkshire pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty rubicund voice of ye olde dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit” (186). So enamored is Chamcha with this idea of heritage-site, Waugh-inspired Englishness that he marries an upper-class woman whose voice instantly invokes that world. In marrying Pamela, Chamcha continues his endeavors to conquer England, fulfilling the classic colonial trope of the black man possessing the white world that oppresses him through the conquest of the white woman. Ironically, Pamela marries Chamcha to escape the claustrophobia and snobbery of that world, while he marries her because, for him, she is the quintessential English Rose. In this way, he sheds his Indianness and attempts to meld into Englishmanliness. The narrative emphasizes the deliberate creation of such an identity by making Chamcha an actor: he begins “to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us” (44). Chamcha’s greatest skill is at becoming ”people-like-us,” that is, a distinct and exclusive upper-middle-class English world.
It is of note that in a novel where everyone, immigrant and native, focuses on listing England/Britain’s shortcomings, Chamcha—blinkered by his obsession with mythic Englishness—is the one who defends the nation. His only companion in the defense of Englishness is the media producer, the Thatcherite Hal Valance, who celebrates traditional Englishness only to commodify and “sell the arse off it” for his own self-interested socioeconomic advancement. Valance is an example of the Thatcherite rhetoric of aggressive individualism and ambition (277). However, unlike Chamcha, he despises the “wooly incompetent buggers from Surrey and Hampshire,” or “the dead men” (278–79). In other words, Valance hates gentlemen, those who comprise Oxbridge and the civil service, those who have been mythicized as metonymic of a great nation. Moreover, he associates the English south, the land of pastoral beauty and signifier of idyllic Englishness, with the despised plutocracy. It is precisely this group of “dead men” of the South that Chamcha venerates, and on whom he models himself. Valance, in contrast, is a man of the lower-middle class, one of the excluded and “hungry guys with the wrong education” (278–79). He has become successful by sheer determination, aggression, and a complete lack of ethics. Traditional Englishness for Valance is a commodity from which he wishes to profit, while Chamcha believes in it as an ideal of moderation and civilization. In an interesting twist, Chamcha attempts to embody traditional gentlemanliness while Valance endeavors to overthrow the Establishment ideal. Yet both of them are a threat to the established plutocracy, mythic or not. While one is of the lower classes and decidedly not of the public school, the other, though an old-boy, is not of the right ethnicity, but they threaten the classed and ethnic homogeneity of traditional Englishness.
There are two contradictory effects of Chamcha’s process of becoming a “goodandproper” Englishman. On the one hand, Chamcha, public-school-educated-kipper-eater, crafts a masculinity that is determined by the gentleman colonial-administrator and upper-class English plutocracy. Through his constructed gender identity, he glorifies an Englishness that excludes not only immigrants and former colonials, like himself, but also the working classes, whose labor and marginalization produced the gentlemanliness and Englishness he so desperately covets. He eventually realizes that the Englishness he idolizes is a myth that does not exist anywhere, and only deluded colonials like him still continue to believe and defend it. On the other hand, though he becomes aware that this Englishness, and in particular English manliness, is a fiction crafted for, and perpetuated, by the English imperialists abroad and the upper and middle classes at home, nevertheless, in inhabiting this particular style of English manliness, he has made it his own. In being an Indian man who is nevertheless an English gentleman, he brings into being a new type of English man. Though it begins as internalization of the powerful discourses of imperialism, Chamcha has remade the gendered ethno-national discourse, disconnecting it from its ethnic and cultural moorings to restylize it as a gendered diasporic identity. This process echoes Srinivasan. Chamcha’s diasporic location in Thatcherite Britain makes his gendered practice more fraught and fragile, determined as it is by diasporic frames of class-inflected Indianness in Britain, and the oppressive and discriminatory weight of a racialized Englishness. Chamcha’s gendered practice, and its gradual evolution, disrupts the naturalized assumptions of a classed racialized English manliness from which it is drawn, and the monolithic notions of Indianness that he apparently repudiates.
His British-Indian reworking of classed English manliness disrupts the easy assumption of manliness and Englishness in Britain, even as it validates it. He is an upper-middle-class Indian immigrant who is more English and gentlemanly than the Englishmen he meets such as Hal Valance. In the process he reconceptualizes Englishness and gentlemanliness, because he is a brown English gentleman. For instance, for Pamela, Chamcha “turned out to be too much like” her parents and the upper-class English world from which she tries to escape, and yet he is unlike them, because it takes her years of being married to him to come to a realization of his similarity to her English parents. He is “not quite/not white.” Critics have often read Chamcha and The Satanic Verses as transforming, reflecting, and producing the narratives of diaspora.3 Indeed, Homi Bhabha famously reads the novel as emblematizing “the indeterminacy of diasporic identity” and the “heresy” of hybridity (322, 38). Bhabha argues that “Chamcha stands, quite literally, in-between two border conditions” (320). Though Bhabha refers to Chamcha’s being caught between the defensive insular migrant position of his landlord, Hind, and the secular “’colonial’ metropolitan” understanding of the migrant as posited by her husband, Sufiyan, I read Chamcha’s initial absorption and imitation of English manliness as already definitive of a border condition: he is not quite an Indian man, and he is not quite an Englishman, yet he is both and neither, or a new version of each.4 Though others, native and immigrant, accuse him of being a pathetic mimic and a traitor to his roots, nevertheless his performative gentlemanliness is disruptive on both ends, particularly in terms of the gendered identity that he consciously creates. Chamcha is, after all, one of the examples of how “newness come[s] into the world” (8). Chamcha as Indian-English gentleman simultaneously challenges and validates the myth of the “goodandproper Englishman.” He both legitimizes the power of the myth and undoes it as he endeavors to inhabit the ideal.
While much of the narrative focuses on Chamcha’s English-Indian manliness, the narrative foregrounds the shifting and fluid nature of the process of masculine stylizations. Chamcha’s English-Indian manliness is neither permanent nor confining, though neither is it purely willed or agentive. The simultaneously determined and agentive changeability of masculinity is borne out by the end of the novel, when Chamcha returns to India and the process of fashioning a new masculine self begins anew. He contemplates the end of his previous life and the beginning of a new one: “If the old could not die, the new could not be born” (561). To begin a new life in a place that was once home carries with it the implicit assumption of the emergence of a new identity, which necessarily means new masculine modes of being.
Srinivasan and Saladin Chamcha, along with their English counterparts in the works of Philip Larkin, George Orwell, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and even Ian Fleming, signify the changes in gentlemanliness as it devolves from an ethno-national, classed, imperial gender code into various forms of masculinity, a process that reveals the democratization, disintegration, and dissemination of the ideal. Gentlemanliness, increasingly evacuated of its racial and imperial connotations, exists as a vaunted myth, valorizing the virtues of manly restraint, disinterestedness, decorum, and “dominance and deference.” At the same time, now split into its constituent parts, gentlemanliness is no longer the national-imperial hegemonic masculinity or personal-ethical code, but one that is/can be parsed and appropriated by all men, including those whose exclusion enabled its consolidation: the formerly primitive colonials and lower classes. The myth of the gentleman, disseminated at a global-cultural level, persists and fascinates. At the same time, the gentlemanly ideal, now accessible across ethnicities, cultures, and classes, is but one model of masculinity among many.