Every time you arrive at a crossroad, you return to your writing desk (that is where your gravity awaits you), and make what Regis Debray so memorably defined as "a settlement of all accounts" which relate to "accounts of the states of your mind." I had just finished reading Edward Said's 1993 Reith Lectures The Representations of the Intellectual and decided to borrow his compelling categories to see how they impacted me.
As an exile, the intellectual is forced to separate himself from the familiar; not to reject the familiar but to test himself and whoever or whatever he chooses as the familiar. If that test produces no changes in the old accustomed familiarity, in spite of the geographical changes and the historical distances, then it is a battle won for life. The exile as marginal is often an act of instinctive instigation. One finds the intellectual justification for it later on. For instance, when confronted with the choice to teach at a central location in one of Bombay's major colleges and at a suburban location where one of the marginalized colleges was situated, I choose the latter in 1972. Seventeen years later, in America, when I had to decide, once again, to teach at a central university or a marginal community college, I chose the latter.
The Indian decision was compounded on a purely intrinsic level. I was a cantonment shikari of knowledge and needed a small town environment in the big city to which I had emigrated in order to pursue my adventures in the human mind. This happened to also coincide with my deliberate lack of professional ambition. I did not want to pursue any academic goals that related to power and success, marshal controversial opinions to shake the system up, or drink wine and break bread with carefully chosen opinion makers. I wanted merely to change the minds of my students, and have my mind changed by the subjects I was free to choose and teach, and given the limitations of an outdated and hopeless academic material find a way, to transcend it.
If I couldn't, then I would quit. So, when America offered herself as a new territory to explore, I took it and plunged into its approval-oriented academic center. There again, I was determined not to play the role of the consummate careerist. I wanted approval, but not of that world which insisted on cultivating a mentor, reading constantly at important conferences, publishing regularly in refereed journals, conducting seminar classes when the great man or woman originally assigned to teach the course was constantly away at a sabbatical. All of these sanctioned an illustrious career amongst notables, but then to call oneself an accomplished intellectual was to be one, in spite of it all!
I chose instead to be the amateur intellectual, advancing my mind by experimenting with different critical texts in the community college classroom. I wanted my community college students to be implanted with the texts and authors I taught and not me; so when the war in Iraq erupted they would remember the month we had spent with Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers; that when their teenage son erased his family image one day, suddenly on the computer, they were reminded of how we had used Freud to determine James Dean's indeterminate position on the staircase in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause. Such amateur excursions into the mind are critical because they force us to reach some eternal version of an authenticity we can call, depending on the circumstance, truth, or morality, or justice, reassuring and reassuming an ethic that helps qualify always the aesthetic that follows.
Instead of using the institution of learning to become well known, either as a public intellectual or as a private intellectual, I chose to be an adrift intellectual entering and withdrawing from both areas of light and darkness. I was not interested in starting any new theory but getting hopelessly lost in as many theories as I dared to enter. I wanted to expose myself to my own fallibilities first and then bare them in the classrooms, not before experts, but before my fallible students themselves with whom I could strike some kind of chord. That was what Forster meant by "only connect" where the nominated roles assigned to the 'teacher' and the 'student' disappeared and only the initiated 'human being as a friend' remained.
But practicing this has required a lot of "silence, exile, and cunning". The silence is the first to recommend itself in the complete absence of a predetermined ambition. It creates a strange kind of certainty which looks forward to an exciting unknown. It also makes you measure all your failures, especially those committed in the neglected domestic sphere and at the same time concludes quietly that you did your duty, combining the householder and the scholar as best as could even when your home is empty now and you are all alone. Then the homeless exile reasserts itself and charts an adventurous return, back to that familiar, across so many oceans and so many mountain ranges which you temporarily abandoned, and in this resolve the cunning comes into play, especially since a future has to be shaped from a present in which you have never felt at home. At a time when all grand narratives are extinct, this becomes indeed the grandest narrative of them all. You don't see it as just one more opportunity, but rather as a monumental conviction, perhaps the most important one, in the few years left before you completely empty yourself and succumb to that eternal silence from which no traveler returns.
If death is that final metonymy, then the actual conditions of one's exile are better determined by giving them a metaphorical significance. This, I think, is the best way I can deal with my post-determined exile from my family and from my Parsee upbringing. It resurfaces, interestingly, every time I come home in that month, where I say goodbye to the old year and namaste to the new one which is added to the twenty six years that I have endured in America. The metaphors that I have collected from these journeys will not be examined here. I will deal with them in the Parsee novel I intend to write. What is interesting, however, is when I write my book. It cannot be now, because America is not the place for me to settle my accounts with my Parsee intrinsicness. I can only write it after I settle down, once again, in Bombay, living by myself, but at the same time being near my family and close friends and walking and breathing freely in the dominant Parsee and cosmopolitan ambiance of the city. I need this intrinsicness in order to make the settlements of those accounts authentic, irrespective of the epiphanies and the mine fields that will explode at regular intervals.
Metaphors are exciting because they never complete you but continue to explain you to yourself and others in entirely new ways. I became Indian, for example, not in the thirty years when I was in India, but in the twenty-six years I have been in America. That is one gift I will always be eternally grateful to America for: but the prospect of confronting and living in a postmodern Bombay that threatens to become like America in the future sets up a new unsettlement. How can I return or even try to save that part of Bombay which I calculatedly abandoned once. "Bring a camera," a close friend informed me just the other day "and we will photograph all of that Bombay you might not see, anymore, when you come back here for good. Bring a camera. Our Bombay is dying."
If I cannot go back to that entity called Bombay, then what am I arriving at? The certainty in my friend's voice frightened me, and yet it excited me, because once again, the idea of the unknown being at the end of this uncertainty makes the idea of retirement exciting. It keeps the amateur intellectual alive in me; it makes me search for the larger pictures far beyond the smaller ones; it frees me from some specific ties and binds me with others and keeps the empty squares of my mind always expectant for ideas and values that any and every kind of specialization would have otherwise made me miss.
This is just, in the final words of one who treats words as all those important breaths one takes in the course of a single day, an amateur's attempt to define that intellectual who never went in search of any halos and refused all those that life tried to impose on him.
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