The colonial idea of misguided “protection” is nowhere to be found in this postindustrial version of India: “Doesn’t the driver’s family protest? Far from it. They would actually go about bragging. Their boy Balram had taken the fall, gone to Tihar jail for his employer. He was loyal as a dog. He was the perfect servant” (Adiga 2008: 145). In this very short passage is located a graduated sense of dehumanization brought about by the economic and class systems that create Adiga’s bifurcated India—Balram has a family, but is then a “boy,” and then a “dog,” and finally, “the perfect servant”; even pets are considered part of the family.
That having been said, once his previous employer has been murdered, Balram bribes his way into the India of Light, and into a technological “start-up,” moving from an underclass to a kind of technocratic elite, although Balram’s position within that elite can be read as necessarily parodic. Keith Nurse (2004) addresses this shift in terms of a broader masculinity:
What appears to be emerging is a three-tiered society/economy with an entrepreneurial and technological elite at the top; in the middle stratum, a reserve army of service and industrial workers, some of whose incomes place them among the working poor; and a mass of underemployed, unemployed (and in many cases unemployable) people who are defined as the permanent underclass…. The real problem for men is in the middle and lower strata. Many are slipping out of the middle stratum to join the lower ranks. In this sense one can argue that what we are seeing is the masculinization of poverty (27, italics Nurse’s).
Only through illegal means can Balram reverse this masculinization of poverty and re-form it into a form of post-colonial resistance embodied through writing. While Pinky Madam’s most pungent critique is to think of the existing society as a “joke,” Balram’s critique of the society extends both through his criminal acts, and his agentive act of writing, and to the point, writing himself.
In Funny Boy, this discussion of postcolonial masculinity explores an openly queer masculinity, which has not been engaged with in earlier texts in any meaningful way. While The White Tiger “plays” with the subject of queer desire (Balram towards Ashok, for example), Arjie is the first character to act upon his desires—while in the midst of sociopolitical upheaval in Sri Lanka, bordered by the conservative politics of his family and the educational vestiges of English colonialism at the aptly-named “Victoria Academy.” The conflicting discourses of masculinity that Selvadurai presents in the text, e.g., father as “head of household, yet hamstrung hotel owner,” the insistence that Arjie play cricket instead of role-playing “bride-bride,” or “Black Tie,” the school principal who is still thoroughly indoctrinated in the language of colonialism, work together to form what will ultimately become what is, for Arjie, a composite masculinity—his postcolonial subjectivity layered with oppression from the Sinhalese, his own family, and the historical scars of the English and Dutch presences on the island of Sri Lanka.
Gayatri Gopinath (2005) similiarly argues that such a composite, or queer, masculinity carries with it the discourse of empire and/or nationhood:
Throughout Funny Boy, Selvadurai deftly makes apparent the ways in which institutionalized heterosexuality, in the form of marriage, undergirds ethnic and state nationalisms. Thus Arjie’s queer reconfiguration of the wedding has implications far beyond the domestic sphere, in that it suggests other ways of imagining kinship and affiliation that extend further than the horizon of nationalist framings of community. The game itself, brilliantly titled “Bride-Bride,” offers a reconfiguration of the contractual obligations of heterosexuality and gender conformity…. Indeed, the game is predicated on the apparent non-performativity of masculinity, as opposed to the excessive feminine performance of Arjie as bride (171).
While Gopinath’s (2005) claim that Arjie transgresses “far beyond the domestic sphere” is directly relevant to a post-colonial project, what she leaves out of her argument is that such a transgression is directly rooted in an upper middle class sensibility. One could easily counter-claim that without a specific kind of economic privilege, Arjie would never have the opportunity to perform in that way, lacking the time, means, and materials to be so decked out as a bride in his family game. In a very real sense, the “contractual obligations of heterosexuality” are predicated on the economic realities of class dictating whether there can be a domestic sphere in a particular home, i.e., that the caretaking parent has the economic means to leave the workforce and attend to the “domestic sphere.”
Andrew Lesk (2006) more directly frames this argument in terms of the Chelvaratnams’ class position: “Arjie—both within and outside the dominant system as visibly male and homosexually conflicted—enjoins privilege. But can he in any way serve as a template upon which to redraw the emerging nation-state?… At once empowered and disempowered, he is both a boon and a threat to the system that constitutes him as a post-postcolonial citizen…” (Lesk 2006: 34). By that same token, however, the Chelvaratnam family is disempowered at a more systemic level by their Tamil ethnicity—their economic class privilege is what (mostly) protects them through the first five vignette chapters of the novel. The notable early exceptions are that of Radha Aunty (in her eponymous chapter) being beaten on the train back to Colombo, and Arjie’s mother (in her relationship with Daryl Uncle) in “See No Evil, Hear No Evil.”
Much later in the novel, when Arjie begins a romantic relationship with the Sinhalese boy Shehan Soyza, he finds himself transgressing the same ethnic lines as his mother and aunt, but with rather different results—the physical violence that is inflicted on the boys at Victoria Academy is perversely separated from the specific logic of ethnicity; all the boys are expected to, in Diggy’s words, “take it like a man” (Selvadurai 1994: 207). Greg Mullins (2003) claims that the three characters are more or less synonymous in their apphrehension of gender and ethnic boundaries, yet he problematizes that claim shortly thereafter:
Arjie, his mother Amma, and his aunt Radha are forced into the choices they make because the politics of ethnicity in Sri Lanka bleed over into the “private” realm of sexual desire and affect at the nexus of the family. They are called upon to prioritize their sense of justice, their commitment to family and ethnicity and multiethnic society, and their innermost sexual and affective desires. Compromise and balance are not options although Arjie, as a young man, has considerably more latitude to pursue illicit sex and still maintain family ties than do his mother or aunt (161-162).
What Mullins’ argument glosses over, to an extent, is what Gopinath’s claim places front and center, that is to say, the “contractual obligations of heterosexuality” (Gopinath 2005: 171). Arjie’s freedom to engage in the kind of queer sexual transgressions that ultimately result in the recital of poetic rebellion in “The Best School of All” (cf. Banerjee’s chapter in Cheeky Fictions) is directly predicated on his gendered and classed position as an unmarried young man. Were his position that of a woman, or, more to the point, a married woman, he would not have the kind of discursive authority in Sri Lankan society to engage in such a queer transgression. Arjie functions as the nexus of several raced, classed, and gendered discourses, each in turn permitting the final act of defiance on stage as political theatre. Once that transgression is accomplished, the novel’s only action is to oversee the family’s flight to Canada, and a postcolonialism of a rather different sort.
Each discourse surrounding Arjie conflicts with the other in that each one is vying for an illusory sense of power: the father wishes to have economic power, “Black Tie” wishes to retain the power of the ancien regime, and ultimately, Arjie wants, and takes, the power to determine his own place in the masculine hierarchy: “I have just returned from seeing Shehan. I can still smell his particular odor on my body, which always lingers on me after we make love. I remember the first time I noticed this. I had come home from being with him, and I was so nervous that others would detect it that, after putting my bicycle away at the back, I rushed to the shower” (303). Compared to the frightened Arjie at the beginning of the novel, and even as he prepared to enter the Victoria Academy, this Arjie is relatively at peace with both his sexual orientation and his masculinity. He no longer wishes to erase the signs of his relationship with Shehan; rather, he wants to have the scent remain on him like a “memento” of the encounter (303).
Whether this realization comes part and parcel with the fact that they will (more than likely) never see one another again once Arjie moves to Canada is ultimately irrelevant. Everything that had governed his life to that point is now gone: Ammachi is dead, the house is burned, and his last visit reveals that the contents were looted by the Sinhalese mobs—Arjie quite literally has nothing left to lose, save Shehan, and this final act of renunciation (which Arjie-as-narrator describes as “passionless, unco-ordinated, and tentative”) cements his actualization as the queer subject—a subjectivity that breaks him free from the oppressive discourses of the (post)colonial Sri Lanka, but may also separate him from his family, as the final lines of the novel foreshadow: “When I reached the top of the road, I couldn’t prevent myself from turning back to look at the house one last time. For a moment I saw it, then the rain fell faster and thicker, obscuring it from my sight” (305).
Both Balram and Arjie are outlaws in their respective cultures—one in the legal sense; the other in an ethnocultural sense, defying the boundaries of the domestic sphere, the ethnic sphere, and ultimately the national sphere. By placing these two texts in comparison to one another, different discourses of postcolonial masculinity emerge—not from the traditional concept of masculinity as hegemony, but rather from a masculinity of subversion and contestatory textuality and sexuality.
Works Cited
Adiga, A. (2008). The White Tiger. New York: Free Press.
Appadurai, A. (1990). “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7, 295-310.
Banerjee, M. (2005). “Queer Laughter: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and the Normative as Comic.” In S. Reichl & M. Stein (eds.), Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (158-169). Amsterdam: Rodopi Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology. (G. Chakravorty Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)
Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. (R. Philcox, Trans.) New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1952)
Gopinath, G. (2005) Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lesk, A. (2006) “Ambivalence at the Site of Authority: Desire and Difference in Funny Boy.” Canadian Literature 190, 31-46.
Lyotard, J-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979)
Mullins, A. (2003) “Seeking Asylum: Literary Reflections on Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Human Rights.” MELUS 28(1), 145-171.
Nurse, K. (2004). “Masculinities in Transition: Gender and the Global Problematique.” In R. Rheddock (Ed.), Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities, (3-37). Kingston: University of West Indies Press.
Selvadurai, S. (1994). Funny Boy. New York: Harcourt-Brace.