Allan Sealy's The Trotter-Nama: A Postcolonial Synchronicle

Abstract

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West The history of humanity is a history of migrations in which communities came into contact with one another and ancestral hatreds were internalized and transformed to found larger cross-cultural communities. If cross-cultural issues receive wide critical attention today, it is because they are at the heart of the crisis of the modern construct of nation as a locus of power provoked largely by the end of empires. The postcolonial frame of mind compels the English-speaking writer as well as the reader to come to terms with the fact that &dquo;we came from all over, not just England and went all over not just to England&dquo;.' The striking encounter between the people of Britain and the inhabitants of India, which was not yet a nation state at that time, saw the birth of a new mixed community -the Anglo-Indians. Caught in the crossfire of history and the ambiguous interplay of love and hate, this tiny minority was looked down upon by both parent communities. Yet the Anglo-Indians are modern India's first metamorphic children endowed with a &dquo;stereoscopic vision&dquo;2 as insiders and outsiders to the society in which they were born. Irwin Allan Sealy, an Anglo-Indian by birth and an Indo-Anglian3 in outlook brings us a postcolonial &dquo;whole sight&dquo;4 on the genesis and evolution of his community in his literary extravaganza entitled The Trotter-Nama published in 1988. It won the Best First Book Award of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989. But the success of this seminal book which, like Ondaatje's Running in the Family or Carl Muller's recent trilogy,s bridges the gap between British writing on India and Indian writing in English has been somewhat overshadowed by the