Tut write-up: Outside the Whale by Salman Rushdie

Outside the Whale: An essay by Salman Rushdie

In 1981, Salman Rushdie had released Midnight’s Children to worldwide acclaim – a book which immediately put him among the world’s foremost thinkers and is, even today, referred to with critical admiration. Rushdie had written about India in a way that had never been seen before. A way that reflected his own “Indianness” and the subaltern take on India’s history. In this essay, written in 1984, Rushdie goes a step beyond. He invokes the context in which Midnight’s Children becomes relevant – when the relationship between the East and the West is muddled, misrepresented and glorifies one party while denigrating or marginalizing the other. He confronts the wider socio-political context which has led to this blurred direction that “mass art” has taken and finally, calls out for a role that literature can play in bringing accuracy back into the picture. A role, and a space, in which civil, academic, intellectual or plain truthful discussion and argument can take place. By invoking and criticizing an essay (Inside the Whale) by THE giant of British literature that is George Orwell, Rushdie does what he does best – that is, to express himself in a way that cannot be ignored.

This write up proceeds in the following order: First, there is a brief overview of the cultural conditions in Britain in which this piece was written, followed by a brief introduction to the academic foundations on which Rushdie’s arguments rely. Then, I briefly summarize the essay; ending with some personal thoughts on what I feel are Rushdie’s key points.

Britain in the 1980s

During the 1980s, Britain, particularly England was marked by a nostalgic return to the days of Imperialism which showed itself in the form of Raj-centric TV Shows, movies, books and other forms of mass culture. During 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party had been elected to power, and Britain had won the Falkland Islands in a war with Argentina. Propaganda was definitely aimed at putting the “great” back into Great Britain. However the reality was that the British Empire was a thing of the distant past, and Britain’s position as the world’s foremost power had long been taken over by the USA. But when Britain’s contemporary generation overlapped with the generation which had experienced the British Empire in its heyday, had memories of the “good old days” and “glamorous years”, given the situation in the 1980s, one could observe a sort of cultural escapism to the glory of the past. This went hand in hand with the prevalent conservatism in the political sphere.  

However, another phenomenon was taking place – the influx of the Pakistanis, Indians, Polish, Bangladeshis, Iranians and others in Britain had led to culture shocks and racial tensions between “natives” and “immigrants”. Tensions which spilled out in the form of riots in Brixton, Southall, Leeds and so on during the early 80s. Whether the “white” British defined and defended their self-perceived “cultural superiority” through the depiction of non-whites as “inferiors” in mass productions is certainly arguable. However, one cannot deny that increasingly, popular British opinion, in panic perhaps, began to resemble the Imperialist mindset more closely than one would like.

Orientalism: The Elephant in the room

Given this cultural background, perhaps it is not surprising that Edward Saïd’s seminal work Orientalism (1978) gained prominence around the same time. It invited much academic and public commentary (bolstered by Saïd’s own very public personality) and much unwarranted criticism – reflecting some of the bigoted opinions based in the racial politics of the era. In this work, Saïd makes the contention that Western thought and scientific study of “Eastern” cultures is very much coloured by the standard tropes and stereotypes that are products of an older, more ignorant Western culture. He contests that this tendency of the West derives from the need to define itself by first defining the “other” and that “other” is conveniently, the East. What does this lead to? Saïd and others have explored this issue in great detail and refer to a “flattening” of all “Oriental” cultures into common tropes – effeminate men, uncouth masses, uneducated and outmoded philosophies, inferior cultural and scientific traditions and so on. This was the moral logic behind Colonialism – an attempt at bringing civilization to the East (Saïd, a huge appreciator of Joseph Conrad, uses his masterful novels to illustrate this point and to provide an insight into the all-encircling colonial mindset that was prevalent in Victorian times and evolved as a part of Orientalist thought later). This flattening is what has prevented sophisticated thought and exploration of Eastern cultures and effectively prevented the experience of the colonized nations to be translated into a form that could be understood widely by Europeans. All of this changed when English became a language of the colonized – as writers like Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka etc.

Rushdie’s contention in this essay is that this Orientalist thought process exists even today. What is sad is that no one acknowledges its presence in the “TV trash” that the masses consume. It is, essentially, the proverbial Elephant in the Room.

There is no Whale

Rushdie’s essay, essentially works in 3 sections. In the first, he introduces the reader to poor reproductions of the British Raj in India such as The Far Pavilions, Jewel in the Crown, The Raj Quartet etc. and in typical Rushdie-like fashion, humorously and acidly takes them apart exposing their lack of accuracy and quality. In the second section, he refers to George Orwell’s essay Inside the Whale (1940). What Rushdie does here is what, possibly, cannot fail to grab English attention – he points out to the inconsistency between George Orwell’s own firmly political works such as Animal Farm and Orwell’s espousal of the “quietist” philosophy. He proceeds to lambast Orwell’s usage of Henry Miller as an example of the supreme expression of the common man’s sentiment. Rushdie, here in essence, argues that there is no writing or literature that is political. Rushdie asserts that what Orwell asks for – a return to the stomach of the proverbial “Whale”, an insular acceptance of the world as it is in literature, and literature as a lofty field which should not be sullied by politics – is impossible. He asserts that in today’s world, there is no whale. One cannot hide from politics. No writing is apolitical. What he instead calls for is open speech and a space for literature to be political and unashamed in being political. Rushdie says that literature’s firmest role is acknowledging the truth – in ensuring that Elephants such as Orientalism are at least brought out into the discussion and acknowledged, he asks for people to take a stance – whatever it may be. Because argument, even inertial, non-progressing argument establishes that there IS a case.

In the third section, he ties this up to the original idea presented in his essay – that of dishonest representations of life in Imperial India, where Indians were marginalized characters in their own lives. For Rushdie, this is not how things were and should be. Where writers such as Forster were honest and open, M.M. Kaye has distorted their truth. For Rushdie, there must be more work such as Midnight’s Children where the colonized come out and SAY that this is wrong, there must be more scholarship like Edward Saïd’s brand to acknowledge the issue and that literature cannot be apolitical, precisely because of this need to show the truth. That is, one must be Outside the Whale to write literature that has meaning.

Food for Thought

Given this essay and the background in which it has occurred and knowledge of the texts studied in class (namely, Midnight’s Children, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and A Hundred Years of Solitude), I leave the reader to think about questions that, I feel, help in comprehending what Rushdie means to say. Firstly, English as a language was what historically kept Indians and other colonized nationalities from contending with the West on their own grounds regarding representations of culture. However, owing to the growing stream of Indian (and African and Caribbean and Pakistani and so on….) writing in English, which is markedly different from older English accounts of India, one can argue that the colonized are increasingly contributing to better understanding of their experience. Is this true? If yes, to what extent?

Secondly, if this is true, why is it that Europeans often find it difficult to acknowledge the shortcomings in their own body of literature and culture regarding these episodes in their past? As proved by the criticism that Edward Saïd faced, this is in fact, the case.

Thirdly, is there truly a political space in which one can freely express their opinions? If yes, is it literature?

I believe that by thinking about these questions, Rushdie’s arguments become clear and informative whether or not they achieve the effect they intended to.