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Chapter 8
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
Indar and Salim continue standing by the river, and Salim examines the two opposing pictures of Raymond Indar has given him. Before the party, Indar was quick to brag about his connection to Raymond. But now he had just spent the past few minutes gossiping about his waning influence and lack of real clout. Salim believes Indar is trying to show him the layered nature of the place, both the glamorous exterior of the Domain and what is actually going on underneath it all. In the moonlight, Indar seems gripped by a deep depression, and he begins filling Salim in on his life in the time they had been apart.
The pair are outsiders, both having originally left their homes due to a feeling of “detachment” or “disillusionment.” In this way, both are able to see the true nature of things, but remain affected by them. This in many ways is the source of Indar’s depression, and Salim’s many anxieties about his own future. The experience of the outsider, Naipaul seems to argue, is to be both aware of and helpless to reconcile the world’s many conditions. Those who see the performance for what it is must still participate.
Themes
Indar again remarks on the importance of “trampling on the past,” how most people in the rest of the world are constantly changing, constantly in motion, and are only able to do so by not becoming sentimental. Indar did not find this easy, turning away from his past, and took comfort in the image of the trampled garden, particularly in a moment of crisis in his penultimate year of university in England.
Indar’s “trampling of the past” can be read as a coping mechanism for dealing with past traumas, but also as a necessary delusion when people like Indar and Salim’s place in the world is so often dictated for them precisely because of their past, perceived culture, and ethnicities. The image of a trampled garden can be interpreted as an induced numbness to past prejudices and indignities endured. Though Indar uses the mantra to empower and motivate him, it is also necessarily an acquiescence to a world that dictates who he is based on his cultural background and the color of his skin.
Themes
Indar, like Salim, was unhappy at first to leave his family in East Africa, despite it being the very thing he wished to do, admitting he even tried to wound Salim because of how sad he was. England was totally spellbinding at first, but it quickly made him realize how limited his view and understanding of the world was as a result of his cloistered upbringing. As if confirming his anxieties about his family’s future, Indar realized that his people were complacent, living in absolute acceptance of their reality without ever questioning or meaningfully contributing to it. Indar describes learning to perform intelligence and belonging through various acts of nonchalance and disappointment at one’s circumstances and environments. In this way, Indar was a capable student, but felt he learned nothing valuable his entire time at school, in part due to this impassiveness.
The performances of intelligence that Indar observed have stuck with him, evident in his behavior with Ferdinand at the lecture and then again around the table at Raymond’s house. In essence, Indar learns how to perform privilege—a nonchalance and aloofness that leaves him further alienated from himself and others. Thus, in an effort not to repeat the passivity of his people that Indar feels left him ignorant and unprepared for the world at large, Indar actually ends up becoming even more impassive and complacent, and comes away from university with no real education to speak of.
Themes
Towards the end of his time in university, Indar began to notice how all of his classmates had strong job prospects already lined up. Indar himself felt above it, but inwardly jealous and concerned by his own lack of prospects. Visiting the Appointments committee only told Indar that the priority of the institution was to put “English boys in English jobs.” Indar was shocked and dismayed by his own lack of direction, underscored by the attendants when he looked to them for guidance. A professor suggested that he felt lost and directionless because he was “a man of two worlds,” perhaps indicating his mixed race or diasporic identity, but also suggested that this might make him a good diplomat.
Indar feels acutely how his racial identity limits his prospects and affects how people perceive him. It is this combination of jealousy and pride that motivates Indar to continue to want to succeed on the terms of institutions that have no desire to see him do so, and which gradually pushes him toward a mindset of jettisoning his own identity. Indar is constantly alienated by his desire to belong in places that he does not, which drives him further and further into personal dissociation.
Themes
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On her encouragement, Indar made an appointment at the Indian embassy in London. Indar was unable to find the building despite it being decorated with Indian motifs. Indar was filled with a rage he describes as “colonial,” and was subsequently bounced between offices where he was never taken seriously as a prospect or individual. Images of Gandhi and Nehru filled Indar with feelings of inadequacy and jealousy that turned to an indignance, as he felt everyone had been made subservient in order to exalt them. The final man he met with said they could not hire him precisely because of the “divided loyalties” that the first professor thought might make him a good diplomat, showing him the hypocrisy of it all. Notably, the man who said this appears to be of full Indian heritage, and seems to sneer at Indar’s African blood.
Indar is both excluded from European institutions and also disconnected from the history and culture of his own heritage. It is at the embassy that Indar feels this placelessness, or homelessness of diasporic identity, most acutely. He sees how others perform and exploit their identities for power and protection and yet finds no aspect of his identity whole enough to do the same, which fills him with jealousy and rage. Without a culture that he feels accepted by or able to participate in, Indar chooses to see all cultural participation as a form of subservience, and thus his disdain for sentimentality is rooted in jealousy.
Themes
Indar left the embassy and walked down to the river, feeling that perhaps the people inside were right and that it was time for him to return home. The home Indar pictured, however, was not the one of his reality but rather an idealized image of an African village. Indar realized that he had been seeing London through the same impassive eyes through which he saw his home on the coast. Unlike Africa, which was “all bush,” each aspect of London was designed or planned by people, individuals, a feat of self-determination. This gave Indar an epiphany: that he belongs only to himself and the world will be only what he makes of it. To be a modern man will also require being in a modern place like London. It was then that Indar made the pledge to trample the past and look only forward.
Indar sees modernity as free from, or separated from, natural history, and thus it appears to present him an opportunity to sever himself from his past and create a life for himself entirely of his own design, much like how he views the streets of London. The inherent contradiction, of course, is that Indar’s identity as a “modern man” is still built upon the “garden” of his past, whether or not he tramples upon it. This is similar to the President’s image for Africa being entirely separate from or “post” colonial influence, while still being built upon its ruins. The past always informs the present and can never be fully severed or “trampled.”
Themes
Indar dropped out of University that year. He describes his time immediately after as bohemian: at first attractive but eventually depressing. He fell in with a theater troupe where he occasionally got English roles, but more often than not was type-cast for his Indian heritage. Indar ended up meeting an American who was particularly interested in Africa at lunch at a friend’s house. The man took an interest in Indar, particularly in his knowledge but real neutrality and ambivalence on African matters. He sold Indar on his new “continental interchange” program that enabled African intellectuals to live around Africa and disseminate positive messaging for the continent amongst academic circles, with the hopes of eventually sparking “the true African revolution.” Indar finally felt he understands civilization for what it is: a construct predicated on exploitation. But within this Indar saw a way in which he could exploit himself to get ahead, to “win and win and win.”
The delusion of Indar’s epiphany is immediately evident in his experiences after. He is repeatedly type-cast for his race in a theater troupe, and then hired for his background and mixed heritage for the lucrative potential of the African lecture circuit. In both circumstances, his identity is being exploited for his benefit and the benefit of others. Rather than becoming empowered by the modern world’s promise of self-determination, Indar has, in reality, internalized the western world’s prejudice toward his people by believing it was his home and upbringing being somehow “backward” that set him up for failure in the first place. Indar’s image of modernity and self-determination as being past-less, raceless, and placeless is, in essence, just whiteness. He envies the European freedom of movement allowed by generations of cultural, social, and political dominance but cannot actually enjoy those same privileges. This coalesces with his own painful experience of the diaspora and not belonging, and results in him attempting to embrace his placelessness as a means of empowerment. What Indar is too proud to admit is that he cannot ever fully sever himself from his past and his culture, and thus this self-exploitation continues to wound him deeply, evident in his bouts of deep depression.
Themes
