Provincialising London in Vikram Chandra’s Novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Résumé 0

In Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Sanjay Parasher, a nineteenth-century Brahmin reincarnated as a monkey who, like Scheherazade, must tell stories to prolong his life, keeps ‘going to London’—in his dreams and in real life—in search for a political and discursive centre but, ultimately, for his own identity. London, the empire’s centre, becomes an imaginary space that must be conquered by the emerging Indian national consciousness, whose reading of it differs from the imperial power discourse. The chapter ‘In London, a Battle between Immortals’ marks the climax of the protagonist’s journey through his life in colonial India and provides an X-ray of underground London that reveals the hidden, repressed face of power. By solving the detective mystery of this chapter, Sanjay provides a rereading of the urban text—and of the novelistic discourse itself—through a different lens, which dethrones the exemplary value of the metropolis and opens it up to an alternative, ‘other’ discourse. I will show this by analysing the textuality of this chapter from a perspective informed mainly by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s project of ‘provincialising Europe’ and Barthes’ and Derrida’s alternative views of the centre in discourse and the free play of textuality.