Otherness in The Holder of the World

Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World is a story about, according to the back cover, "Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, 'a person undreamed of in Puritan society.' Inquisitive, vital, and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal India, with her husband, an English trader. There , she sets her own course, 'translating' herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja." And while it claims to "deconstruct the barriers of time and geography," which in many ways it does, this novel fails in promoting an actual recognition, acceptance, and embrace of the theme of alterity that Jacques Lacan terms "the Other."

In many ways the novel does expose the ridiculous hatred of otherness, and challenge the hegemony associated with this construct, with examples of the relations and beliefs of Americans, Europeans, Indians, and Muslims and Hindus. First on page 13, Mukherjee talks about the difference between Puritan simplicity and Asian gaudiness and the ethnocentrism of Americans about this difference between us and them. On page 21she exposes the American view of Native Americans in the 17th Century: "they are children; they are trusting; they are proud and generous. Even capable of nobility. But at heart they are savage: bestial, unspeakably cruel." When Hannah is living in Fort St. Sebastian, India, she remarks on page 99 that the English separated "oneself from Them primarily by staying clean and upright: starched, dignified, sober, righteous and faithful...but the occasional misstep was not to be confused with the gleeful wallow of the Hindus and, only slightly above them, the Muslims." The Indians "all spoke different languages, they owed fidelity to different masters, they worshiped different gods..." and Mukherjee shows the difficulty in experiencing otherness by the fact that "It had been inconceivable to a Puritan soul like Hannah's," (100) "She had not been raised in a world of savagery, not on the scale of India. The vast inequalities, as well as the injustice and superstitions of India, seemed to her unnatural and unbearable" (237).

People feel comfortable with what is most the same, which is why, as Hannah says, the Hindus were hated more by the English than the Muslims: "Muslims seemed a more knowledgeable people than Hindus; Muslims' aversions and their attractions struck familiar chords with devout Christians. They had a heaven a hell...Their dialectic codes were harsh, but logical. The idea of Hinduism was vaguely frightening...English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism...[And so] Christians and Muslims tended to concentrate the opprobriums against the common Other" (212-220). Another kind of Other not accepted are the "disfigured" two-headed, six-legged humans and animals, the "freaks of nature [who] were given less opportunity to emerge and no comfort to thrive. And, of course, the authorities would not permit it" (173).

Despite this uncomfortableness, Hannah took "sheer pleasure...in the world's variety," showing that otherness is not as bad as it is wonderful. Hannah also is able to grow out of the societal values that have constructed her beliefs and finally accept, sympathize with, and admire her mother, who had followed her heart in the face of adversity and ran off with her (Other) Native American lover. Mukherjee deconstructs the ideals of American history, exposing the violence, hatred, and injustice all around: things that public schools don't typically teach. She also is deconstructing space in the fact that she is considering New England's relationship not only to England in the 17th century, but also India and "Other" countries. She compares the battle between New England and Native Americans with that of England and the Indians: "the story of the Coromandel Coast is the story of Europe, of white nations battling each other in outposts paved with gold. It is the story of North America turned inside out.

But despite these deconstructions and demystifications, she still practices some of the same white arrogance and doesn't fully accept all aspects of otherness. It isn't until Hannah becomes an outcast herself (215) that she can have a "moment's sharp awareness" (222) that brakes down the barriers of Otherness for her. She still portrays a type of white ethnocentrism, only enhanced by the fact the Mukherjee talks about fate and destiny several times throughout the book and what this means for the White Salem Bibi. Even the future Beigh Masters get a little kick out of thinking that the women in the painting are all struck by the white foreignness of the Salem bibi (and in turn all Europeans): "black-robed women with haggard faces tug loose edible tufts of samphire and sea grasses. I was right--they were fascinated by us" (16). So if Hannah did break down any barriers, this doesn't seem to have an affect on her descendant, also evident when she chooses to use the word "should" (meaning the right way) when describing how the painting is like an Indian dessert: "things fried that shouldn't be, hot that should be cold, sweet that should be tart" (19).

Near the end of the story Hannah is able to recognize the thin line of Other that causes the fighting between the Raja and Aurangzeb, so she takes on the task of "righting" (in the way Beigh used "should" earlier) their ways, as "Only a person outside the pale of the two civilizations could do it. Only a Woman, a pregnant woman, a pregnant white woman, had the confidence or audacity to try it. Besides the fact that realistically this would probably put her at every kind of disadvantage in that culture, the war is remembered as a war "fought over a diamond and the demands of an American lady." And Hannah is able to talk to Aurngzeb, try to push her ideals of peace and democracy on him, like "no man, no matter how powerful" (270) could have. This type of ideological way of writing about the American hero is very reminiscent of the message in Binyavanga Wainaina's How to Write about Africa. This is especially obvious on page 268: "The was the moment...when the gods that controlled the universe had conspired to put her Christian-Hindu-Muslim self, her American-English-Indian self, her orphaned, abandoned, widowed, pregnant self, her firangi and bib self, into a single message, delivered to the most powerful man those separate worlds had ever known. She stood."
(I realize that this may not be the main point of the novel, but it is something that interested me, and I want to apologize for you having to read so many quotes, but I really wanted to back up this argument with textual evidence!)

Hannah goes back to New England, as she couldn't change the war due to her own "otherness" and womanhood. Although she seems strong and resourceful at some moments, her lack of accomplishment in the end sort of outweighs that (Like Hester Prynee). Hannah returns to suffer the same stigma's (as Hester Prynne) associated with adultery, single-motherhood, and otherness. So in the end she is punished for her ability to embrace otherness? Some call Hawthorne feminist, despite his constraint of that feminism, because he was radical for that time, but in 1993 why tell the same story?

To the right is a video of Slavoj Zizek speaking about otherness. You can watch the whole thing if you would like, but if you skip to about 4 minutes and 45 seconds, he talks about the animation Shrek and I think this explains the point I am trying to make about The Holder of the World: The displacement in the work actually tells the same old story, the fact that she "re-makes" The Scarlet Letter is reactionary but it prevents us from asking, "Why not tell a different story," and in the end it does denounce the rejection of otherness but it simultaneously practices it.