Hello and welcome to the Discourse. Bye Bye Blackbird is the third novel by Anita Desai that was published in 1971. It is a Diasporic novel based on the themes of alienation, identity crisis, loneliness, nostalgia, and racism faced by immigrants. The novel offers a psychological analysis of the immigrants who suffer mixed feelings of love and hate towards the country of their adoption. In 'Bye, Bye Blackbird' the author Anita Desai deals with the East-West encounters. 'Blackbird' used in the title is a metaphor used for the immigrant, to whom London says goodbye. Desai highlights the physical and psychological problems of Indian immigrants and explores the adjustment difficulties that they face in England. The author gives beautiful descriptions of busy London and the quiet retired life in the countryside, which is totally opposite to one another. The characters are not so real, but their inner conflicts and crises remain the same that every immigrant undergoes.
Characters of Bye Bye Blackbird:
Dev is a Bengali Indian immigrant who comes to England to earn a degree and go back home. He stays with his Bengali friend Adit and his wife Sarah but is highly critical of Adit’s life, which he views as a cowardly submission to his inferior status in post-imperial Britain. Dev himself shows little initiative in pursuing his degree and feels disoriented in a culture so different from his native Bengal. He also experiences several instances of racist behavior and attitudes, which harden his feelings of alienation. Adit is an educated Bengali man, with a UK degree, who found no favorable job prospects in India and returned to England to further his career. He takes a minor position with a travel company and marries Sarah, an English woman. The arrival of Dev, with his sensitivity to racism, and their visit to the countryside, where he encounters the silent prejudice of his in-laws, have a profound effect on him. Sarah is a young English woman with a good job. She fell in love with Adit and married him. Although she has an interest in Indian culture, and although she loves Adit, they have difficulties negotiating the cultural divide. Sammar is a Punjabi Indian immigrant and a friend of Adit. He is a doctor by profession and Bella is Sammar’s sweet loving wife. Jasbir-Mala is another Indian Punjabi immigrant couple in the same circle. Jasbir is an anesthetist and Mala is his good solid supportive wife. Miss Moffat is the landlady who owns the flat that Adit rents, and where Sarah comes to live with him. She has a well-developed interest in Indian culture, especially literature. Julia and Christine are friends and colleagues Sarah who ridicule her for marrying an Indian.
Summary of Bye Bye Blackbird:
The novel begins as Dev arrives in London. He is a young Bengali student trying to join the prestigious London School of Economics. He stays with Adit Sen and his English wife Sarah at Clapham, a beautiful town in southwest London. Adit Sen leads a settled life as an immigrant in England. He has a good job and with his considerably lucrative income, can live a decent and comfortable life. He is attracted to the rich economic status of England and its material prosperity. Adit tries to help Dev in adjusting to the British way of living. He introduces him to the little India settled within London and takes him to meet with his other Indian friends including Jasbir-Mala, and Sammar-Bella. Dev notices that Jasbir and his wife Mala, along with Samar and his wife Bela are relatively comfortable with their life in England. They migrated from India to Calpham and began living here. They enjoy their weekends and visit clubs and Coffee Houses. They do their chosen jobs and while they face the same racially discriminatory environment, their sensitivities and the local conditions create no distaste or trouble in their rehabilitation in England. On the other hand, Dev, Adit, and Sarah find it difficult to live in peace.
Adit completed his studies in England and then returned to India searching for a job. But in four months, he could find only "a ruddy clerking job" at the salary of two hundred and fifty rupees and a possible rise to five hundred after thirty years. This frustrated him and he returned back to England. After returning to England he worked in different capacities in a post office, in the sorting office. Then he joined a camping equipment business. He also worked as a teacher and finally, accepted a little job at Blue Skies. Meanwhile, he met a beautiful young English woman Sarah who is interested in Indian culture and people and fell in love and married her.
Dev finds it difficult to adjust in England as he feels alienated by both Indian immigrants and the Englishmen. Dev came to England to obtain a degree from the London School of Economics and work as a teacher in India after having obtained a foreign degree. But his dreams are shattered by seeing the immigrant's loss of self-respect in England. He is called "wog" by a schoolboy. He becomes a victim of insult and abuse at the hands of English people. Indian immigrants are even not allowed to use a lavatory of English. He can't bear the fact when he knows that the London docks have three kinds of lavatories i.e. Ladies, Gents, and Asiatic. He wants to return to India because he can never bear to be unwanted. Once a peddler refused to tell Dev the price of a Russian icon because he considered Dev too poor an Indian to purchase it. That peddler thinks that India is known for its poverty. Their typical and narrow-mindedness towards Indian immigrants is very sharp. Wherever he goes, he becomes a victim of racial discrimination and apartheid and is constantly regarded as a second-grade citizen, an intruder. He feels alienated in England. He longs for his home. He is fed up with the silence and emptiness of the houses and streets of London. Dev cannot adjust to the Western culture where everyone is a stranger and lives in hiding. He feels alienated and longs for his own home, India. One day, Sarah’s friend Christine visits their home. Dev feels insulted by the "blatant expression" on the face of Sarah's friend Christine when she sees him in Sarah's kitchen. Dev feels he is being racially discriminated against and wishes to return to India. He loses his temper when the immigrants are insulted by the white people and when white boys call him a ‘wog’. He sees that Punjabis, Bangladeshis, and Sikhs live separately in England. They try to adjust and stay in England. He comes to realize that he is not adopted and welcomed by the English community. He finds it difficult to bear the London climate. He comments that Adit and his wife Sarah should be masochists to live in such a climate.
Meanwhile, Sarah is also facing difficulties after her marriage. She married Adit because she loved him and she is romantically in love with India and Indian culture. She dislikes English people’s love for privacy and reserve. However, after marrying Adit, she is caught in a tragic situation. She is the only daughter of a middle-class English couple in Hampshire. She is highly sensitive and loves the innocence and freedom of the countryside. After marrying Adit, Sarah feels alienated in her own country. Adit notices Sarah suffering from loneliness. The only fault she has done is she has married an Indian. Unlike Adit and Dev who have willingly uprooted themselves from their native soil, Sarah gets herself alienated from her society through her marriage. She is ill-treated by her own colleagues in the school. She dislikes questions about her personal life and feels that discussing her Indian husband would have forced her to parade like an impostor, to make life claims, an identity that she did not feel to be her own. Sarah is even insulted by the schoolchildren. They take delight in calling her "Hurry, hurry, Mrs. Scurry!" Even her friends Julia and Christine didn’t approve of her marriage to an Indian and would often ridicule her. Thus, Sarah not only feels alienated, but she finds herself completely lonely as she finds none to share her insecurities and worries. She is alienated and walks on the loneliest path. She loses her identity and wonders if she is English or Indian. Adit and Sarah have a quite opposite attraction to their respective motherland. Sarah loves India. She shows interest in reading stories about India and Indian life. This is one of the reasons for her marriage to an Indian, Adit Sen. Adit finds Sarah to be quite manageable, yet he dislikes her attitude. She takes no care to prepare food for Adit. She does not prevent her cat from sniffing it in. She finds the Indian way of cooking difficult. Sarah is not able to relate to Adit and his friends in their conversation, jokes, and laughter. Remaining a foreigner in their world, she finds difficulty in wearing the Indian saris and jewelry. He compels Sarah to wear them because it has been sent by his mother. This is an instance of husband-wife alienation. Sarah feels as if she is sandwiched between the two races. Sarah continues to visit her old parents in the countryside.
Even Adit does not escape from the feeling of alienation and nostalgia. Adit’s nostalgia is caused by his visit from his in-laws. He feels awkward and discriminated in front of his in-laws. It is also intensified by the unexpected outbreak of the Indo-Pak war. Gradually his nostalgia takes a dreadful turn. It makes him ill and suffocating in English surroundings. He gets visions as one who is a psychic case. He is lost in the memory of India. He carves for the Indian twilight. Like a child, he wants to see an Indian sunset with rose, orange, pink, and lemon colors in the sky. He becomes so homesick that he visualizes the Indian rivers. He also desires to see the bullock carts, a monkey-wallah, and a marriage procession in India. Once upon a time, he had a great fascination for England but the same feeling is now suffocating him. At Christine Longford’s wedding, the symptoms of his nervous breakdown come forward. It can be seen… “Struck with fear for his health, for his mental balance, he stood frozen on the pavement”. A question torments him “Who is he and where is he?” He wants to no longer be seen under the label ‘Wog’, ‘Asiatic’, ‘Indian Immigrant’ etc. He carves for his identity. He feels alienation. He feels that he is losing his real identity.
In such a situation, Sarah informs that she is pregnant. When Sarah decides to visit Hampshire to meet her parents, Adit plans to travel to the countryside along with Sarah, Dev, Jasbir, Mala, and Samar. Samar fails to convince his wife Bella to travel with them. After a day of boisterous frolic, Jasbir, Mala, and Samar return back, leaving Adit, Sarah, and Dev amidst the placid surroundings where they are to spend the rest of the week. Nothing overtly dramatic takes place during the following six days though both Adit and Dev appear completely changed people by the time they return home, much to the bafflement of Sarah. Adit meets his in-laws in Hampshire and feels a bit awkward and outplaced. Dev, spending nearly a week amidst the serene and exquisite countryside, is struck by the simplicity of the local peasantry which makes him realize that there is more to England than its arrogance. He also slowly realizes that he can not live off his father's money and his friends' generosity for long and starts a job hunt the bitter experiences that come along help him mature, dilute his sardonicism, and infuse a bit of tenderness and compassion into his callous self.
Adit, who had planned the tour with much warmth, ends up feeling out of place at his rather cold in-laws'. He finds himself unable to come to terms with the incompatibility he felt with them even though not with his own wife. Back in London, a nasty quarrel between his Bengali friend Samar and his English wife Bella makes him ponder, after an unsuccessful attempt at laughing the episode off, - "Why does everything have to come to this -that we're Indians and you're English and we're living in your country and therefore we've all got to behave in a special way, different from normal people. He feels fed up with life in England. Ultimately he decides to return to India with his wife.
This creates a conundrum for Sarah. She doesn’t like her alienated life in London and loves her husband. When Adit declares his decision to go back to India, Sarah as a sincere and loving wife accepts his decision. But she has to face the problems before her, “There was the baby. There was the voyage. The uprooting.” She has visited India before, with her husband, she enjoys cooking and eating Indian food, but she is deeply English. Her identity crisis comes to a head when she, carrying her first baby, follows her husband’s decision to move back to India. As she is about to leave for India, a friend asks about the baby and Sarah says, ‘You mean boy or girl? I don’t mind either. Or do you mean who it will look like, Adit or me? I hope it will look like Adit, brown as brown, with black hair and black, black eyes.’ However, she is worried about what cultural identity her child will adopt. She thinks in favor of Adit and decides to bid her own soil and society for good. She is in search of her real self and real life.
Dev, on the other hand, gets a job in London and decides to stay there as he occupies the flat left by Adit and Sarah.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of Indian English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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