IndiaStar Review of Books

Are You Experienced?

by William Sutcliffe

(New York: Penguin, 1998 )
235 pp., ISBN 0-14-027265-8

Reviewed by Christopher Rollason

[Editor's intro: "Christopher Rollason graduated in
English from Trinity College, Cambridge, and
obtained his Ph.D. from York University, England,
with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe. A former lecturer
in English at Coimbra University, Portugal, he is
currently an international official,and publishes
regularly on the Internet." -- c.j.s.wallia]

The "gap year" between school and university -- an increasingly common
phenomenon in Britain - seems today to be taking on the role of a rite of
passage into adulthood. For an enterprising 18-year-old looking for
something to spice up tomorrow's CV, what could be more attractive
than the idea of three months in inexpensive, exotic, fascinating India?
William Sutcliffe's new novel traces the subcontinental trajectory of
just such a gap-year backpacker.

The adventures and misadventures are narrated in the first person by
Dave, a Londoner and future student of English at York University.
He arrives at Delhi airport in the company of Liz, who is officially
the girlfriend of James, his best friend who is undertaking his own
gap-year travels in the USA. The relationship between Liz and Dave
is, to say the least, ambiguous, and rapidly deteriorates, to the point
where, for the latter part of the three months, Dave finds himself
having to face the subcontinent alone. His encounters with a host
of human beings, fellow-foreigners and Indians alike, provide the
novel with its structure and form the pretext for all manner of
comic or serio-comic incidents--a modern version of the picaresque.

Sutcliffe views India through eyes which are obviously those of
an outsider-- he is no Kipling--but, still, an informed outsider.
If he has not been to the subcontinent in person, he has certainly
been very well briefed, as is evident from his evoking details such
as the rickshaw-drivers sleeping in their vehicles (p. 215) or the
custom of sending a 'boy' to buy transport tickets (p. 73). Dave traverses
India, with the aid of the celebrated Lonely Planet guide (a device also
used by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi in his Indian Nocturne,
another novel on the foreigners-in-India theme), starting out from a
state of uninitiated naivety from which he never completely emerges.
After a few weeks, he has learnt how to walk past beggars, and begins
to feel a seasoned hand; but his ignorance remains breathtaking, and is
cruelly exposed in his encounter with a Western journalist, from which
it emerges that Dave thinks Congress is the Indian parliament and the
Harijans are the opposition party (pp. 136-137 - he obviously hasn't read
the political crib thoughtfully provided in the guidebook!). The journalist
berates him: "Your kind of travel is all about low horizons dressed up
as open-mindedness. You have no interest in India, and no sensitivity
for the problems this country is trying to face up to," and ends up
shouting: "DON'T FORGET TO PUT YOUR BIG TRIP DOWN
ON THE CV!"

This looks like a serious, cutting stab being made under the narrative's
comic-picaresque surface. To be fair to Dave, however, his bust-up with Liz
proves a blessing in disguise. After being rebuffed by two young woman
travellers from Britain whom he tries to team up with, he is marooned in
Bangalore, falls ill, and eventually meets a Karnataka Christian who
befriends him and invites him to his house. Dave muses: "Although we
hadn'treally managed much of a conversation, and I'd been mostly bored
out of my skull, I felt that the visit marked a significant and positive
watershed. I had actually gone inside an Indian house. Gone inside, sat down
and talked to a real Indian person." Soon after, Ranj, an Anglo-Indian on the
run from an arranged marriage, invites Dave to stay with him in a luxury
hotel in Kovalam, where his companion's erotic adventures prove another
eye-opener: " You can't chat up Indians. " " Why not? " .... " Her brothers
will come and kill you in the middle of the night. " ... " Where do you
think you are? Pakistan or something? This is a civilized country. "
Dave encounters what is known as the "broad-minded" underside of the
Indian bourgeoisie--a phenomenon which may be confirmed from such
authentically Indian works of fiction as Shobha De's 'Starry Nights' or
Vikram Chandra's 'Love and Longing in Bombay' - and discovers that the
modern subcontinental reality is rather more complex than might be supposed
from the usual Western stereotypes.

Sutcliffe's narrative plays with those stereotypes, taking them up and
exposing them for the half-baked half-truths they are. The two most obvious
cliches are, of course, "India, land of poverty" and "Mother India, fount of
spirituality" -- ideas of the subcontinent which are not actually untrue, but
which fail to take account of a whole range of other phenomena. If there is
nothing to India but beggars and gurus, then what room is there for
literature, the press, music or cinema, or for archaeology, retailing,
banking or information technology? Early on, Dave expresses the absurd
opinion that India is "a country that's too poor to have museums"
(p. 33 --once again, he hasn't read the Lonely Planet guide properly,
nor can he ever have got beyond the first few lines of Kipling's Kim), and
there is no sign that he ever visits a museum to disabuse himself of this
particular misconception. In Kerala, our naive visitor discovers to his
amazement that not all Indians are mired in penury: "Most of the people
in the bar were rich Indians, which I had always thought was a contradiction
in terms." The spiritual stereotype is mercilessly pilloried, in the glib New Age
guruspeak parroted by the Western travellers ("Go where the feeling takes
you" - p. 70; "my karma is completely different (...) I've learned so much
about myself ... about healing ... and stuff' -- p. 108). Dave discovers that
Liz, after abandoning him, has entered an ashram and become a devotee of a
guru whose interpretation of Tantric yoga is, alas, all too literal. Both
stereotypes-- poverty and spirituality-- converge hilariously in the
experiences of Fee and Caz, two English woman travellers fresh from a
"girls' public school," who start out as budding Mother Teresas, washing
lepers in Udaipur and wallowing in their own virtue ('You just feel like a
good person' -- p. 109), but end up with a double nervous breakdown from
their own misadventures with the predatory guru.

The reader may ask how far, in reality, Sutcliffe himself has managed to
escape the superficial view of the subcontinent which he sets out to
satirize. The book does certainly reveal a decent knowledge of India,
whether acquired at first or second hand. There are moments where the
author's grasp on the country might be doubted -- as when, in his Bangalore
acquaintance's house, Dave says: "I could hear him shouting things in Hindi"
(p. 170), or, later, on a train: 'We shared our compartment with a family
who were carrying even more food than Ranj ... No one in the family spoke a
word of English, and Ranj couldn't communicate with them either due to
some problem with dialects' (p. 180). It is more likely that a family in
Bangalore would speak in Kannada, rather than Hindi (although the latter
would not be impossible in a 'cosmopolitan' metropolis that attracts hi-tech
professionals from the whole country). It is, more seriously, a gross
solecism to call India's great regional languages "dialects" simply because
they are not Hindi (one might as reasonably label Russian a "dialect"
because it is not English). However, this is a first-person narrative, and
the ignorance may be reasonably attributed to Dave and not the author.

Meanwhile, if Dave has indeed made some effort to get to grips with the
country towards the end of his stay, he has still missed a remarkable
amount. He has managed to spend time in Bangalore without realizing
that the city is the heart of India's booming software industry; he has
found out nothing about the world's biggest cinema industry; nor does
he seem to have once opened a copy of "The Times of India," or any
other example of the country's thriving and eloquent English-language press.

Once the three months are up, Dave dutifully returns home to England. It is
not the reviewer's function to give away the novel's ending: suffice it to
say that Dave sincerely believes that he has emerged from his rite of
passage richer in experience and maturity -- "I would be able to begin again
as the new me ... Dave the traveller" (p. 235). The dispassionate reader
may conclude that, yes, the traveller has learned a few things along the
way, but he has done little more than scratch the surface: his initiation
into adulthood may indeed have started in India, but it has a long way to go
yet. Sutcliffe's tone throughout is largely comic and satiric, but the sharp
observation and acid caricatures also suggest that he is making a serious
point about East-West communication, seen as difficult and impeded by
stereotypes, but nonetheless not impossible. There is no question here of
the far more complex explorations of India's relationship with the wider
world to be found in such writers as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai or Vikram
Chandra: in particular, there is nothing in Sutcliffe's novel to compare
with the percipient irony of the episode in Chandra's novel Red Earth and
Pouring Rain where an Indian studying in the US brings his American
girlfriend home on vacation, only to find the relationship dissolve under
the twin stresses of monsoon rains and intercultural incomprehension. '
Are You Experienced? is not in the same league as the works of those
Indo-Anglian writers, but, then again, it is clearly not intended to be.
Sutcliffe does, however, convincingly present the problem of communication
between cultures, in a lighter, faster, and, of course, far more
Western-oriented fashion.

In conclusion, I will confess that I found this novel extremely readable and
enjoyable (I finished in off in a single longish train journey). The writing
is generally observant and witty, and the dialogue flows extremely well: my
only reservation on this score concerns the rather high incidence of taboo
words in the young people's conversations - testifying to a poverty of
vocabulary which is, however, clearly the characters' problem rather than
the author's, and could no doubt be defended on realist grounds as
symptomatic of a generation. At all events, Sutcliffe's satire of that
generation is certainly memorable, and his comic exploration of cultural
difference has a hard enough edge to it to make this novel a potentially
useful, interesting and pleasurable experience for those readers, be they
Western or Indian, who are curious and open-minded enough to follow
Dave as he criss-crosses the vast subcontinent and, on the way, perhaps
even begin, alongside the naive young backpacker, to question Kipling's
dictum that "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet."