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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Bend in the River, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Freedom, and Identity
Racism and Diasporic Identity
Postcolonialism and Perpetual Unrest
The City vs. the Bush
Layers of the Past
Summary
Analysis
Though Africa had been Salim’s family’s home for centuries, their lineage traces to the Arabic countries on the Indian Ocean. Salim’s people live on the coast and trade with countries to the east of them from which they originally hailed, though they are no longer fully Indian, Arabian, Persian, or otherwise. They are not “truly African,” nor are they truly West-Indian, though they identify more with the people of Africa. Salim’s family is Muslim but their culture and practice is closer to that of the Hindus.
Salim experiences various forms of social and cultural detachment through his identity. As a diasporic East Indian—neither native to Africa where his family lives, nor connected to the places they hail from—Salim does not belong in any one place. Illustrated also is the lack of definition in his own ethnic and religious history—partially Indian, Arabian, Persian, etc., and also following a Muslim faith that resembles Hindu practice.
Themes
Salim’s family has few connections to their past, understanding their history only implicitly. Salim understands from his grandfather that they were slave traders, remembering a story about him smuggling a boatful of enslaved people as rubber, but unable to place it specifically in time. All that Salim truly knows of his people’s history comes from books written by Europeans.
The effect of Salim’s euro-centric upbringing is evident in his perspectives and desires throughout the novel. He is both detached and skeptical of his own people’s way of life because he has only understood it through the perspective of a foreign body that is itself prejudiced toward his people. Notable also is his family’s long and recent participation in the slave trade, further predisposing him toward his lack of respect for many Africans.
Themes
Through Africa's and the region's many changes, the lifestyle of Salim’s people remains the same. They continue the slave trade even after it has been outlawed by the European powers, though Salim interprets this as due to the difference in the East coast slave trade. Salim’s family lived in a large compound with the two families they had previously enslaved, and over three generations, plenty of racial mixing has taken place. The formerly enslaved families remain because of clout from their intense bond with a prominent family.
Rooted in his family’s passivity is Salim’s fear of staying still, of becoming trapped. Salim’s description of the enslaved people on the eastern coast’s relationship to the families that formerly enslaved them is a prime example of the performance of identity for power. By remaining in pseudo-enslaved condition, the family’s servants might limit their freedom in one way, but feel they gain it in another way through this connection, with prominent families. However, quite literally, this choice traps them into this performance—and thus the families are stuck with one another.
Themes
Salim believes the Arabs lost touch with their identity, due in part to the “swamping” of his ancestral race by the races of the people they enslaved. Their power was only a matter of tradition and habit, hardly backed by any real force. Consequently, Salim becomes disillusioned with the place and culture of his upbringing. By contrast, the Europeans, Salim feels, were capable of assessing their place in the world, and therefore more capable of adapting to the changing world around them.
Another form of social and cultural detachment comes from Salim’s mixed heritage. Since he is neither fully Indian nor fully African, Salim is othered from both ethnic groups and feels detached from both. This manifests in a phobic resentment toward Africans—inherent in the derogatory implication of “swamping”—as he feels they somehow robbed him of the purity of his connection to his past. Again, Salim extols the virtues of the colonial-European mindset above that of his own people, illustrating the scar of colonialism and European exceptionalism. Salim also wishes to adapt as they did, and feels his people incapable of doing so.
Themes
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Salim used to play squash twice a week with his friend Indar who lived nearby on the coast. Indar feels that Africa demands strength and their cultural identity is hardly strong, lacking something even as basic as a flag. Indar is leaving for university in England and Salim envies him but, out of shame and jealousy, plays coy when Indar asks him what he will do next. Salim begins to pity his own family but also still cares for them.
In the compound where they play squash, Salim notes the height of the walls and their lack of flag—taken together, the two illustrate the illusory nature of his people’s power and protection, a construct without a core identity. The strength of a cultural identity comes from its connection with its idea of itself, and Salim feels his people have no idea of themselves within the broader context of the world—no idea of themselves outside of these walls.
Themes
Nazruddin returns to the coast on one of his semi-regular visits when Salim is feeling his most disillusioned. Salim had always admired Nazruddin for his business capability, wealth, and European customs. Salim had even begun to model himself after him, or at least hoped to. Nazruddin remained connected to Salim’s community in order to look for potential husbands for his daughters and saw Salim as a strong prospect.
Nazruddin, though ethnically and culturally similar to Salim, has recreated himself as something more modern or cosmopolitan. Salim wants Nazruddin’s seeming freedom of movement primarily—a worldliness gleaned from his independence and business acumen.
Themes
On this particular visit, Nazruddin offers to sell Salim his store in Central Africa at the bend in the river, looking to escape after the economic crash and uprisings toward independence from European rule. Salim sees this as his best opportunity to escape his community’s fate and agrees. Nazruddin advises him that business is more a game of feeling than numbers, and that in Africa “business never dies…it is only interrupted… but you must always know when to get out.”
Nazruddin’s advice appears to imply that there is always opportunity in Africa, but there is another interpretation that ironically foreshadows both of their changing fortunes later on in the novel. Salim would like to think that this undying cycle of opportunity would benefit the individual businessman, but in fact the greater implication of the “interruptions” is that a person cannot be free of these larger economic cycles. In this way, Nazruddin points to the fact that economic freedom is not absolute freedom, also noting that one needs to know when to cut their losses. Unrest is an opportunity, but often leads back into more unrest.
Themes
Despite this being a showing of good faith to Nazruddin, Salim also sees this as a profoundly important way of breaking faith, primarily in his unspoken commitment to Nazruddin’s daughter. Therefore, as Salim travels to the town at the bend in the river, he is both following and breaking from Nazruddin’s path. Salim knew the town was no longer in its heyday, but he did not expect the degree of ruin that met him. Relics of its colonial past cover the place, but for him and the other foreigners hanging on there—a handful of Belgians, Greeks, Italians, and other Indians—life is spartan and frontier-like. While they go weeks without petrol and struggle for food and water, Salim wanders through huge lawns, old estates being reclaimed by the bush, and toppled statues: a ghost town of sorts, stuck between times.
The irony of ruins, and living amongst them, is that one is rebuilding in a place that suggests its own destruction. Salim’s feelings of trepidation, feeling pulled between past, present, and future, come from a fear that perhaps they might be repeating the same mistakes again. What is stopping their creations from befalling the same fate? The space attracting lots of foreigners shows how the town is a place of interchange and meeting—offering opportunity to those who lack it in their home countries. Their spartan lifestyle amongst grand ruins shows the juxtaposition and reciprocal interactions between city and bush.
Themes
In the ruins Salim comes upon on a placard by the docks, reading in Latin “Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi.” The words stick with him, though he doesn’t know what they mean. Of the wayward hangers-on, most are unfriendly and standoffish to Salim, save for a few Indian couples. Shoba and Mahesh, also migrants from the East, become the closest thing Salim has to friends. They also run a shop in town, across from the old hotel, but the difficulties of everyday existence prevent them from opening up to one another initially.
Though it is a while until Salim comes to learn what the placard means, it is relevant that the sight of it sticks with him. He is struck by the words and their antiquity and presentation. Salim cannot understand Latin, which belies the ways in which he lacks education, in turn reflecting one of his deeper insecurities—one that often causes him to defer to or envy characters who are highly educated. Shoba and Mahesh are also East Indian, and their parallels with Salim’s existence and ideology express aspects of diasporic identity. Specifically, in this instance, their initial mutual trepidation around one another can be read as symptomatic of the internal alienations from kin and culture diasporic peoples experience.
Themes
Not long after Salim arrives, his fears about his home come to pass and an uprising against the Arabs lays his family and community low. He hears the news first by word of mouth through Shoba and Mahesh but eventually the news trickles in through more standard sources. Finally, letters come from his family explaining who is scattering and who will remain. Salim is informed that one of their servants is being sent to him while the others are split amongst the family members.
Salim’s conflicting feelings of vindication and sorrow about the fate of his family suggest that it’s impossible to cut oneself off from one’s culture completely—a point that Naipaul argues through the various diasporic characters in the novel. Just because Salim has avoided their fate does not prevent him from being affected by it.
Themes
The boy who arrives is Metty, who Salim had grown up alongside and previously known as “Ali.” He recounts the bloodshed and horror to Salim and spends the first few days inconsolable. Over time, he acclimates to the town and work at the shop. He also quickly assimilates into many of the customs of the locals. They call him Metty after the French word metís, on account of his mixed racial heritage. His engagement with the community makes him increasingly helpful for Salim, who begins using him like a customs clerk, as he has a foot in both worlds. Slowly, the town begins to come to life again, and trade begins to flourish.
Salim attempts to escape his past, but almost immediately his past follows him, in this case in the physical form of Metty. Metty’s similar ethnic makeup to Salim is a source of insecurity for Salim, as without the structures and systems of their home, the only thing keeping him above the boy in the social hierarchy is habit and history. Metty also has the advantage of harboring no preconceptions about his prominence and is able to ingratiate himself quickly with the locals, and thus becomes more a part of the place than Salim. Even without the context of their home on the coast, though, Metty continues to treat Salim with the same performances and respect as they had formerly known, showing how ingrained performances of identity can become in relationships.
Themes
