Download - JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI
This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]On: 21 November 2014, At: 03:00Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Interventions: International Journal ofPostcolonial StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20
JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTIChandani Lokuge aa Monash University , AustraliaPublished online: 06 Sep 2011.
To cite this article: Chandani Lokuge (2011) JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI, Interventions: International Journalof Postcolonial Studies, 13:3, 483-494, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2011.597603
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2011.597603
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publicationare the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
SituationsJ O U R N E Y I N T O V I S H R A N T I
A Cr i t i co -Au tob iog raph i ca l Re f l e c t i on on D ia spo r i c D i s -
be l ong ing
Chandani LokugeMonash University, Australia
................This essay is based on my experiences as a Sri Lankan diasporic in Australia, my
creative writing and academic research. Using the range of mountains named the
Three Sisters and the Buddhist Vihara in Katoomba, New South Wales as a
creative microcosm, the essay weaves into a philosophical meditation on the
diasporic’s journey into true restfulness (vishranti). It is supported by theories of
postcolonial hybridity and globalization.
................Diasporics are frequently marginalized as the ‘other’, categorized as
‘minority’ or ‘multicultural’ in ways that complement or assimilate into a
host national culture, or they are posed in relation to a homeland; their
narratives of loss or yearning present them in a suspended nostalgia. What
are the possibilities for rethinking the role and theorization of the diasporic?
What is at stake in understanding diasporic imaginations not simply as the
voice of the minority-other but as a strong presence revisioning the centre,
the home and/or host culture from a transnational or intersubjective point of
view? How might diasporics challenge sociocultural formation, histories and
......................................................................................interventions Vol. 13(3) 483�494 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)
Copyright # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2011.597603
Australia
diaspora
hybridity
Sri Lanka
transnational-ism
travel
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
regimes of value? What is disturbed or disavowed in their attempts to
configure transnational interactions and transcultural imaginaries?
Mine is a critico-autobiographical reflection on these questions. I must
admit at the outset that I write from a privileged position. I came to Australia
on a Commonwealth Scholarship to read for my doctoral degree, returned to
Sri Lanka and then arrived in Australia as a migrant. I have resided in
Australia for just over twenty years and return to Sri Lanka almost every
year. My voice therefore is not of the refugee, but of the voluntary diasporic
who seeks new professional opportunities in a new country, and also, sheer
adventure. My current research is on the aesthetics and philosophies of the
return journey of South Asian diasporic literature, and my own novels
confront themes of migration. Here, I hope to offer a combination of my
academic, creative and personal experience. I reflect on the search for a
utopia, not of a third space of communication but a fourth utopian
dimension of home that may be possible in the absence of roots, in the
disappearance of the self from space and place.
Preoccupied with these thoughts, I visited the Blue Mountains in New
South Wales in the spring of 2009. Often, still the tourist in Australia, I
arrived at the scenic lookout to the range of mountains named the Three
Sisters. Popular legend offers several variants of what could be an ancient
Aboriginal Dreamtime story; the earliest was recorded by a white Australian
named Mel Ward as late as 1949. Three beautiful Aboriginal women,
Meehni, Weemalah and Gunnedoo, members of the Katoomba tribe, fell in
love with three brothers from a rival tribe. Tribal law forbade marriage
between them. To prevent the marriage and also to protect the three women
from being captured by the rival tribe, the medicine man of the Katoomba
tribe turned them into stone by casting a spell on them. He was killed in the
ensuing battle between the tribes before he could set them free. As no one
else knew the magic word that could reverse the spell, the women remained
petrified.
Martin Thomas, a serious researcher into the Blue Mountains, maintains
that this recorded story could be the ‘dubious legacy’ and creation of a white
man, who ‘intended to bestow upon the landmark some added ‘‘colour’’’.
Thomas implies that if so, the Three Sisters could be seen as the tourist’s ‘one
foray into a long and complex history of Aboriginal occupation’ (2003: 154).
The lookout was milling with tourists. There was a group of Japanese
tourists and a translator was rendering the legend in Japanese. I looked
around � lots of locals, lots of Southeast Asians, a sprinkling of South Asians.
Hardly any visibility of Aboriginal presence. Why would they be there? �they were not tourists. Later, I would find something terrifying � a
photograph of a sculpture of the Three Sisters exoticized, eroticized and
othered for tourist consumption (see Figure 1).
interventions � 13:3 484.........................
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Caricatured into Hollywood film stars, peddled for tourist gaze, the legend
and the sculptures sent a chill down my spine � would this be the fate of
all but the white Australian population? Would I too end up either
homogenous, swallowed up by white Australia or be turned into an
unrecognizable stone fossil of who I once was? This is not unique to
Australia � dominant cultures all over the world take over minority cultures
if the minority cultures do not assimilate. As Homi Bhabha theorizes: ‘When
the content of a cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the
act of translation’ (2004: 323), ‘an absorption of the particular [culture] by
the general’ (1992: 48) takes place.
I follow another track � the vision of the Three Sisters imprisoned in stone
like this in the land where they would roam free reminded me of Ariel in
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, locked up in the wood-bark to be released into
slavery by Prospero, and of Caliban’s agonized words, ‘this island’s mine, by
Sycorax my mother’ (1.2.332). I wondered what would happen if someone
discovered the magic word that would free the sisters from their rock
imprisonment. Would they rush across the Divide and drive all intruders out
of their land, which after all had been their home for 40,000 years or more?
Would they engage with debates on Native Titles and European Property
Law legislation? Or would they revile, as Caliban did, the colonizer’s ‘cursed
language’ (1.2.340) by which they have been subjugated? Where would I be
Figure 1 Tourists congregate around the Three Sisters sculpture group
outside the Scenic World entrance in Katoomba, New South Wales. Photo-
graph: Vmenkov (2008).
JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI 485........................Chandani Lokuge
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
positioned in all this? A relatively recent Australian citizen, am I not
seriously removed from this Anglo-Celtic versus Aboriginal history of
conflict? I belong to another category � multicultural Australia. But,
Aboriginal novelists such as Kim Scott would persuade me into the
continuing conflict, seeing it as ‘a significant component’ of the nation’s
psychological infrastructure and ‘a core part of our national identity’ (2005:
19).
Ownership . . . belonging . . . I merged with the tourists, but a sense of
aloneness took hold of me. I query these concepts in my new novel, Softly,
As I Leave You. ‘And who granted Uma Australian citizenship?’ asks Uma’s
father of Chris, her Italian-Australian husband. The conservative Sri Lankan
parent replies to his own question:
The white squatters � what right have they to make anyone a citizen of a country
that does not belong to them? The owners are the Aboriginals � it is their home.
Did anyone ask them how they felt about all this? Don’t you see that you are
as much a squatter there as Uma? How can you fail to see that? You know, I
think you people have given an entirely new dimension to squattalogy. (Lokuge
2010: 56)
It does not have to be so in a country like Australia that is built on migration,
that welcomes migrants. And yet, there are complexities that taint this
welcome, as for example Australian policies of border security and detention
camps developed by successive Australian Governments in recent years.
Once again, I am moved by Kim Scott’s thoughtful reflections. At the height
of Australian border security in 2004, Scott talked about Aboriginal
hospitality, about how Australian Aboriginals welcomed the white settlers
when they first arrived. He censured the Howard government for closing
doors on the refugees:
What a shame that the confidence and generosity with which our earliest white
immigrants were treated, and the accommodating manner in which we welcomed
them into our ways hasn’t persisted as a characteristic of contemporary Australian
identity. (Scott 2005: 20)
It is surely this human spirit of hospitality and inclusiveness that a nation
must celebrate, and for that we must all � indigenous, settler and immigrant �transcend conservative notions of land and culture ownership. However, it
does not come easy, not to any of us diasporics, wherever we roam and
whatever part of the world we cleave to. In her autobiography Out of Africa
(2001), the Danish woman Karen Blixen wonders on the eve of her departure
from Africa where she has homed for twenty years:
interventions � 13:3 486.........................
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
I know a song of Africa . . . Does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the
plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which
my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel on the drive that
was like me? (Blixen 2001: 75�6)
How powerful is our human need to inscribe ourselves on the place that we
think belongs to us, and to which we think we belong. But, then, perhaps
preoccupied with more contemporary issues such as globalization, the 1986
film adaptation of the novel offers another philosophy when Karen’s British
lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, tells her: ‘We’re not owners here, Karen, we’re
just passing through.’
Passing through. Acknowledging diasporic life as a journey, Paul Gilroy
writes in The Black Atlantic that for the diasporic, home is simultaneously
about ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. And the longer I live in Australia, the more I travel
around the world, I feel I lose more and more of the vertical axis while the
horizontal leads me on and on, ever stretching towards a horizon that
recedes even as I run towards it. I think with a sense of dis-ease of Milan
Kundera’s eloquent title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I see a host of
uprooted diasporic personalities, afloat here and there. . . . Bill Ashcroft
defines this as horizonality. And he does not regard this as a negative concept
or illusion because it does not require the abandonment of the local or of the
cultural, but its reconception, its reinscription: ‘Place, like subjectivity, is not
subsumed, but located more clearly in the horizon’ (2003: 32). In that
horizon, every subject is liminal; every subject is global.
On the way back to the car, I listened to a young boy busking to tourists.
His voice was husky and beautiful. A roughly crafted didgeridoo lay unused
beside him on his mat. He looked an inextricable mix in this mellow light �brown gold-dusted skin, deep brown hair and eyes, wide charming smile �vaguely familiar. Is he descended from the earliest Sri Lankans who came to
Australia in the late nineteenth century, to be put to labour in the cane-fields
around Mackay and Bundaberg, or as boatmen in Thursday Island � I mused
whimsically. Research on this history is sparse and limited to a ‘narrative’ by
Stanley Sparkes which is reliant on Magistrates’ Courts records and
contemporary newspapers ‘whose editors displayed values and attitudes
that are untenable today’ (1988: 1). It concludes with Sparkes’ assumption
that ‘Today, many of the descendents of those early migrants are
indistinguishable from the white population, but some who intermarried
with Aboriginals, identify as Aboriginals’ (87).
I drew closer to the busker. He sang in a plaintive elegiac voice:
They couldn’t make out why the drover and the boy
Always camped so far away.
JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI 487........................Chandani Lokuge
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
For the tall white man and the slim black boy
Had never had much to say.
The twist in the song, that the drover’s ‘boy’ was an Aboriginal girl
kidnapped and forced to disguise as a boy to work for and be the lover of a
British drover, hung in the air. If most of us gathered around were more
interested in the singer and his tuneful voice, a few (perhaps locals) seemed
not to know how to react. They dropped a few coins on his mat and moved
uneasily away. The song ended hauntingly, an embarrassing chronicle of the
settler-Aboriginal power politics: ‘Cut her hair, break her in, and call her a
boy, the Drover’s boy’. Lest we forget . . .
R oo t s
I left the scenic lookout and took to the road once again. Ever the hungry
tourist in search of exotic food, I yearned suddenly for a meal cooked and
served by Aboriginal Australia. No such cafe around, of course. I would have
to settle for a glass of chilled Chardonnay, wholesome fish and chips. On the
way, I stumbled into a small Buddhist temple in Cliff Edge. I would soon
discover that it is one of the oldest Sri Lankan Buddhist temples in Australia,
sponsored by a white Australian couple � a magnanimous gesture of
openness to other cultures, or a search for respite in an alternative
philosophy?
A blessed moment, this, for me. The gate was open as if I were expected.
I stepped out of time and place and was wafted back to the Sri Lanka of my
childhood when the temple was so integrally a part of my life. As I stood at
the entrance to the modest building, I was reminded fleetingly of the
ambalama � that traditional resting place in Sri Lanka lying by the edge of
the road for weary wayfarers. In Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje recalls that
‘the wooden ambalama felt like a raft or four-poster bed drifting in the black
clearing’ (2000: 12). A sanctuary, a place of rest, a place for meditation and
self-denial constructed by generous villagers, the pot of crystal-clear drinking
water at the entrance.
Out of long habit, I removed my sandals as I stepped eagerly down the
narrow stone stairs. At the curve of the stairs, a statue of the reclining
Buddha. The eyes looked into mine and away from mine with remembered
remote compassion. It reminded me of what I am, what I have been � in a life
beyond the moment. I felt myself pause. I was home, held in the cocoon of
memory. In Divisadero, Ondaatje reiterates the significance of the past and
our memories on our present:
interventions � 13:3 488.........................
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the
villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at
those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. . . .
For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout
our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms
and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We
live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.
(Ondaatje 2007: 136)
But for people like Willy Chandran in V. S. Naipaul’s novel Magic Seeds, the
past (the homeland India and the adopted land, Britain) is terrifying in its
capacity to quell any idea of peace. Willy begins his journey into his past,
nervously, ‘fearful of encountering his old self’ (Naipaul 2004: 188). He is at
once life’s drifter, its participant and observer. With small epiphanies, Willy
is constantly reborn into some ‘other, new person’ (185) in some other,
hostile place. These thoughts are more than Willy’s � they reflect, I believe,
the truths that most diasporics confront today, as they search desperately for
who they are and where they belong in the globalized world. Between worlds
past and worlds new, in the disunity of his half-lives lived in India, England
and Africa, Willy seeks ‘to get away to the upper air’ (143). But he constantly
feels ‘old stirrings, the beginnings of old grief’ (176), as if he were ‘serving an
endless prison sentence’ (242).
I cast out this bleak philosophy. There was the aroma of sandalwood and
burning wicks. A tall brass lamp stained with burnt oil stood in a glass case
at the entrance to the vihara. And looking over the precipice � a Bo tree
shielded from the wind and rain. I gazed long at it � protected by the
spreading branches of such a tree Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment �nibbana � the liberation of the soul. It was being grafted � silver foil wrapped
on two branches catches the sun and sparked into my eyes. Gradually, other
Bo trees may spread their shade among the Eucalypt, in this foreign land,
eons away from home.
The resident monk came up to me and spoke to me in Sinhala � my first
language. His words and gestures cut inroads into the crevices of my
memory. He invited me to sit upon a reed mat and withdrew into a private
inner chamber. I looked around me � a few people sat crossed legged on the
mat, their gaze held by the verdure framed in the long wide glass pane � they
seemed to have just completed a meditation session with the monk. I sat at
the edge of the mat and tried to compose my mind. I remembered Bhabha’s
vision of a reed mat as a third space � a dialogical site of ‘in-betweenness’ �between the ‘violent and the violated, the accused and the accuser, allegation
and admission’, conducive to ‘discussion, dispute, confession, apology and
negotiation’. To illustrate this idea, Bhabha draws our attention to Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness in which Marlow initiates in the reader a third space
JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI 489........................Chandani Lokuge
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
through his sudden unexpected curiosity to learn about the ‘other’, the
African. Marlow asks: ‘He [the African] had a bit of white worsted round his
neck � Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge � an ornament � a charm � a
propitiatory act?’ (Bhabha 2009: xi�xii).
Redescribing Bhabha’s concept of ‘Third Space’, Robert Young writes:
If anything, it is more like a shifting caravan site, a place where people come
unobserved and where they go without a trace, the place which determines their
lives for the moment they pitch their tent there, a place which is not a space because
it is a site of an event, gone in a moment of time. It is the non-place of the no-fixed
above, the NFA people, migrants, those torn from their homes, cultures, literatures,
a multitude always on the move, shifting sites riven with the lapsed times in
between one pitching and another, the moment from one location to another, the
place where you find yourself momentarily in situ, a literal lieutenant, standing in,
holding the place while something else happens � which is why, therefore, it is in a
sense no more place than space . . . an untimely place of loss, of fading, of
appearance and disappearance. (Young 2009: 81�2)
R ou t e s
There was an Aboriginal woman sitting on the mat, holding a little girl by the
hand. Why was she there? Perhaps for the child who had a lighter mixed-blood
complexion. She turned her face in my direction, acknowledging my presence.
She seemed encased in a strange stillness. She made no eye contact and I did not
know how to react. How ignorant I was of this culture of gesture and silence,
how incurious I have been. Later I would discover that in traditional
Aboriginal culture, direct eye contact was impolite, suggestive of the assertion
of power or reprimand. Researching deeper, I would confront Marcia
Langton’s thesis that Aboriginality ‘only has meaning when understood in
terms of intersubjectivity, when both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal are
subjects, not objects’ (cited in Muecke 1997: 32). As Stephen Muecke
comments in his fictocritical study on travelling in Australia, for what
Langton proposes there is no ‘other’, there is only self and self � ‘I and I’ (32).
I think this tells us one way to go now, today, in the globalized world
where so many cultures swirl around us. We achieve home in intersubjectiv-
ity, and it begins with individuals being curious about each other � making
bridges rather than walls. Home for the global citizen, then, is in
transcending traditional notions and opening up to inclusiveness � which
John Ralstan Saul (2006) defines as the pathway to positive nationalism. In
People Like Us: How Arrogance is Dividing Islam and the West, Waleed
interventions � 13:3 490.........................
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Aly, a Muslim born and raised in Australia, explores what he calls ‘a world
of radical misunderstandings’. He explains the title of his book as follows:
The phrase embodies both problem and solution. Our stubborn egocentricities lead
us to believe that that world must be run according to our own templates; that all
would be well with the world if only it were populated with people like us. Only
when we come to understand each other’s complexities can comprehension begin.
Only when we apprehend each other as human, with the contradictions, beauty
and frailty that implies . . . only once we internalize that those we do not
immediately understand are nevertheless people like us � will the world begin to
make sense. (Aly 2008: 27)
My consciousness returned to the mat in the temple. The woman had turned
back into the landscape. The child looked down. A missed moment.
Voices suddenly drew close. A group of devotees walked down the stairs
carrying alms for the monk. He invited everyone gathered to share the meal.
I embraced the mood � the remembered hospitality of the temple. After-
wards, I lingered in the courtyard with a young woman who had sat across
from me during the meal. We conversed in our mother tongue, inducing an
immediate bonding that transcended polite, impersonal exchanges between
strangers. She had come to reside in Australia two years before, when she
had married a Sri Lankan Australian. I looked around for him.
‘He’s not here . . . he runs a cleaning business back in Paramatta, he’s very
busy’, she said. ‘He was an engineer back in Sri Lanka, but he could not get a
job here because he had no Australian experience. Language is also a
problem, Madam.’ With the honorific, she relegated herself to a lower social
stratum. Drawing closer, I tried to close the gap, and hoping to cheer her up,
asked whether she would be visiting Sri Lanka any time soon.
‘Maybe in a year or two’, she said. Tears seemed very close. We sat down
on the low courtyard ledge and looked over the precipice. Through the dense
foliage, a little distance away, I spotted a small lotus lake, and at its edge a
homely shrine of the kind that villagers in Sri Lanka used to construct in their
gardens. Surely, the custom became obsolete a long time ago. We looked at it
together. ‘I am an only child and it is so sad to be away from my parents who
have done everything for me. Now when they need me most . . .’
I sighed. Migrant guilt, so familiar, along with homesickness and nostalgia �sentimental for some, a gash for others. And her husband? ‘He’s been in
Australia for much longer � 12 years. It was an arranged marriage, he said he
was an engineer, and my parents wanted me to escape the war in Sri Lanka.’ It
was a familiar story related in a shamed voice, filled with the pain of betrayal
and loneliness. Would it have worked out better for her in Sri Lanka? She had
indeed escaped the war when it was at its worst. Would she return home now
that the war was ended? ‘I like to, very much. But my husband likes it here. He
JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI 491........................Chandani Lokuge
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
says he’s been in Australia for too long to make another life all over again in
Sri Lanka. But’, she said brightening, ‘we are better off than those boat people.
They’ll be in detention camps for years. Worse than going to prison, isn’t it?’
It saddened me that she measured her situation against her compatriots
who were in worse turmoil. Those ‘boat people’ swindled by people
smugglers. Among them victims of the war, opportunistic post-terrorists
and poverty stricken ordinary people. Those ‘Sri Lankan and Afghani boat
people seeking asylum’ (Barkham 2001), unwanted baggage uncomfortably
and indiscriminately dumped in detention centres (BBC News 2010). Among
them, children screaming in nightmares (Stephen 2002), stitching up their
lips to gain government attention (Tenenbaum 2002).
These are harrowing narratives that shadow my own.
F ou r t h S pa ce
I am led into another truth � Stephen Muecke writes:
What would it be if I wasn’t here? The post tourist may ask, or ‘How can I lose
myself in this place by following a track of disappearance instead of imagining
myself ‘‘at one’’ with a place, a plodding spirituality, might I not just imagine that
I’m already gone � that much will be certain and in this lightness, lift ever so
slightly from the ground’. (Muecke 1997: 135)
It seems that Muecke is looking forward; his words suggest to me a fourth
space beyond the third space of transitional intersubjectivity � a momentary
home between self and other. Losing oneself, the disappearance of self,
suggests a detachment from the sensory experience of identification with a
physical place or a relationship, even from our own bodies that deter us from
the liberation of the spirit. Perhaps I could describe it as vishranti � that state
of true restfulness that can be achieved through thoughtful reflection of the
sensory experience. Harsha Dehejia, in accordance with Kashmir Shaivism,
defines vishranti as follows:
The all important concept of vishranti . . . is a rich and full epistemic rest, it is the
rest that comes at the culmination of a joyful activity, it is the pleasurable stillness
. . . the silence that follows speech and yet contains within it all sounds, it is the
glow of restful knowledge that seeks knowledge no more, it is the serenity of self-
awareness that need not look outward anymore, but only inward to enjoy that
awareness, it is the stillness of self-reflection, it is the freedom of consciousness
turning in on itself, it is the beauty of cosmic vision, it is the glory and majesty of
vishvarupa. (Dehejia 1977: 83)
interventions � 13:3 492.........................
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
So, I too may pick truth from any and all philosophies that I encounter on
my journeys back and forth and make them my own. I returned home on this
thought. As I opened the door of my car, my little grandson Rohan came
running out to greet me, a beautiful child with his black hair, pale golden
skin and amber eyes � the hybrid product of a Sri Lankan mother and
Scottish-Australian father, so naturally himself, unfettered as yet by this
culture or that, enriched by all our differences. As my arms closed around
him, my mind tracked back to the last time I visited the temple in Sri Lanka
before migrating to Australia. As I tied the blessed thread of protection
around my wrist, the monk said to me:
My child, you are going on a long journey into a foreign land from which you may
never return. Emulate the legendary swan of medieval Sinhala literature � extract
the pure milk out of an impure mix of milk and water. Extract the essence of each
culture that you visit and you’ll drink a rich brew.
I have made Australia my home. But how may I claim it? This island is not
Caliban’s, it does not belong to the three sisters in the Blue Mountains, nor
to white Australia. It is not mine. I am a traveller on a long journey. I would
end this reflection with a kind of blessing � a poignant truth � the sacred song
offering that my father used to read to me so long ago, from Rabindranath
Tagore’s Gitanjali:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depths of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of
dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. (Tagore 1959:
27�8)
In conclusion, I’d say that for me, home in this restless world seems more
ethereal than rooted, the vertical axis no longer moving deep downwards but
spiralling upwards into another kind of home that transcends the spatial. I
would travel lightly on the horizontal route, in and out of places, cultures,
religions and philosophies. Home may lie here and there on this journey if I
draw sustenance from those I pass without surrendering to the obsession of
possessing them � belonging at once � to nothing and everything. But, I
cannot cling even to this theory with any permanence. Where am I, if not in
transit?
JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI 493........................Chandani Lokuge
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
References
Aly, Waleed (2008) ‘Standing at the intersection ofEast and West’, in Go Boldly, Melbourne: MonashUniversity Press.
Anonymous (18 December 2009) ‘From the heart ofAustralia’s postcolonial irony’; online at http://www.sa.org.au/racism-and-refugees/2548�from-the-heart-of-australias-postcolonial-irony.
Ashcroft, Bill (2003) ‘Post-colonial transformationand global culture’, in Silvia Albertazzi and Dona-tella Possamai (eds) Postmodernism and Postcolo-nialism, Bologna: Il Poligrapho, pp. 17�32.
Barkham, Patrick (2001) ‘Paradise Lost awaits asylumseekers’, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/11/immigration.uk.
BBC News (9 April 2010) ‘Australia halts Sri Lankanand Afghan asylum claims’; online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8610679.stm.
Bhabha, Homi (1992) ‘Freedom’s basis in the inde-terminate’, October 61: 46�57.
Bhabha, Homi (2004) The Location of Culture, NewYork: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi (2009) ‘In the cave of making: thoughtson third space’, in Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner(eds) Communicating in the Third Space, NewYork: Routledge, pp. xi�xii.
Blixen, Karen (2001) [1936] Out of Africa, London:Penguin.
Dehejia, Harsha (1977) Parvatidarpana: An Exposi-tion of Kashmir Saivism through the Images of Sivaand Parvati, Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass.
Gilroy, Paul (1993) Black Atlantic, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.
Lokuge, Chandani (2010) ‘Softly, As I Leave You’,unpublished.
Muecke, Stephen (1997) No Road (Bitumen Allthe Way), Fremantle: Fremantle Arts CentrePress.
Naipaul, V. S. (2004) Magic Seeds, London: Picador.Ondaatje, Michael (2000) Anil’s Ghost, London:
Bloomsbury.Ondaatje, Michael (2007) Divisadero, Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart.Saul, John Ralston (2006) The Collapse of Globalism
and the Reinvention of the World, Camberwell,Vic: Penguin.
Scott, Kim (2005) ‘Australian identity now’, NewLiteratures Review 44: 15�22.
Sparkes, Stanley J. (1988) Sri Lankan Migrants inQueensland in the Nineteenth Century, WavellHeights: Hooper Education Centre.
Stephen, Sarah (2002) ‘Woomera Detention Centre:‘‘an atmosphere of despair’’’, Green Left Weekly;online at http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/25890.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1959) [1912] Gitanjali, Lon-don: Macmillan.
Thomas, Martin (2003) The Artificial Horizon: Ima-gining the Blue Mountains, Carlton, Vic:Melbourne University Press.
Young, Robert J. C. (2009) ‘The void of misgiving’, inKarin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (eds) Communi-cating in the Third Space, New York: Routledge,pp. 81�95.
interventions � 13:3 494.........................
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nor
thea
ster
n U
nive
rsity
] at
03:
00 2
1 N
ovem
ber
2014