'Blackie' by Abhimanyu Acharya

(Translated from Gujarati by Viraj Desai)

Abstract

In the current issue of Sanglap, we are publishing a Gujarati short story titled “Blackie” by Abhimanyu Acharya. The story seems to be an addition to what we popularly call cross-over literature. Cross-over texts of diasporic encounters, conflict zones, and hybrid experiences in the context of India are largely written in English, with a few exceptions. The story is significant because it is suggestive of both the sensibility and temperament of people from Gujarati business communities supporting a young migrant from their community to settle and establish in the West and the cross-over experiences of the migrant struggling to get permanent residence. The story involves various borders of class, migration, or human-animal. The entry point to the story is, however, its sense of humour mixed with pain familiar in Rohinton Mistry’s short stories foregrounding an inaccomodable man disconcerted and misfit to the new cultural environment. The alienation of the narrator in this story comes from his gradual becoming of a servant, dependent on his master when he gets supported by a relatively established and wealthy Gujarati Mehta uncle, a close acquaintance of his family. This kind of patron-client relationship between a wealthy provider and a dependent echoes the feudal aura of Indian society, which continues in Canada in another form. We have heard in the story that working under a white man might be even worse with provisions for racism. The story is titled “Blackie,” and we get to know from Mehta uncle that such words are prohibited from being used in that country dominated by liberal values, apparently anti-racist in nature, though such words we know are used randomly in India – their homeland. The Gujarati word ‘kalio’ is used to suggest the public use of such words in India. So, Mehta uncle’s pet dog cannot be called by his adored name Blackie in public. He has a proper Christian name – Jack. The delayed impact of colonialism and its dependency complex continues in new shapes and forms in the postcolonial diasporic experience. The trajectory of belonging is interspersed with signs of unbelonging. The story foregrounds the indeterminacy and fluid experiences that probe us to think beyond the easy binaries of colonial ideology. We witness how ambivalence is created through various inequalities of power – the narrator’s dependence on Mehta uncle, the dog’s dependence on the narrator when under economic pressure he unwillingly accepts to be its caregiver, or Mehta’s aspirations and associations with the West in terms of naming the dog or marrying a Western woman. ‘Blackie’ is the name that cannot be used in public. Yet racial divide and hierarchies born out of coloniality continue creating manifold forms of marginalisation, which the translation captures effectively. After all, the title of the story in the original Gujarati is “Blackie” as well. Blackness and whiteness are translated. Power differences endear as well as exploit the ‘other’. At the end of the story, where the dog is removed from Mehta by a conspiracy of the narrator to free himself from the ignominy and shame of serving a dog out of economic compulsion, acts as a reckoning and the reminder. The image of the gaze of the dog at the moment of its being taken away from Mehta and Mehta’s painful look flashes in the narrator’s memory long after the event when he gets permanent residence and becomes independent in Canada. Stories live beyond the determinacies of power in the horizon of care and compassion unachievable in the present and loaded with a sense of responsibility that is to come. (By Dr Samrat Sengupta, Translation Editor)