The Use Of Language In Vassanji’S The Gunny Sack

The Gunny Sack does not ostensibly focus on identity-related problems. It is difficult to ascertain from a swift narrative which is objective and historical how the half-castes, persons with lost identities, really feel. A peep into their mind is denied to the reader. It would have been interesting to know how Huseni had felt in his Indian father's house, particularly at a time when he had developed emotional sympathies for his Black kinsmen and his mother. Similarly, it would have been quite interesting to know the feelings of oppressed Juma, the narrator's father, when he was treated like dirt in Awal's house. It is quite inexplicable as to why he betrays the trust of Mary, a Black native, by handing over her son, a Mau-Mau sympathiser, to the police. It is difficult to say whether he acts merely out of a sense of fear and cowardice, or out of his shady Indianness that views all Blacks as thieves and criminals.

The historical perspective from which the story is narrated precludes any in-depth analysis of cultural tensions and identity-crisis, but it goes to the credit of the novelist that the banality of reportage is relieved by poignant sentiments, pathos and humour. For instance, the predicament of women, the victims of the patriarchal society, has been captured very poignantly when Ji Bai is persuaded by her father to accept marrying a man from Africa. The father takes Ji Bai, a mere lass of thirteen, into his lap, feeds her and pampers her to say "yes". The pathos involved in the situation when Begum announces her intention to marry a White man and Kulsum asks her to kill her are vividly brought out in a scene of intense emotions. The comedy of absurd situations comes to the fore in the fight of Kulsum with the women of her distant relative Awal after the apple given to her by a Pir gets wrongly placed with the other fruit, and then in the scene when Sona's fever does not subside for days: At this point the situation resembled, although somewhat imperfectly, the scenario of many a masala movie from Bombay, as they are called, in which a poor innocent lies dying on spotless white sheets, attached to a blood transfusion device, while somewhere a bearded Musulman is saying 'Allah, Allah' to the click of beads, a Catholic woman (nurse) is crying in front of a crucifix, and a woman in a sari plays a sitar to a Hindu god reposing on his cushion.

In order to strike the note of verisimilitude, Vassanji makes some significant improvisations on the use of English language. He reconstitutes and remoulds it to effectively communicate the diasporic experience of a community in an alien tongue. The language is so appropriated as to bear the burden of the local (African) cultural experiences and that of the remote past (Indian). This is done by the liberal use of words from both Swahili (Kiswahili) and Cutchi Gujarati, a glossary of which is appended at the end of the novel. The meanings of the words like afande (officer of any rank), askari (soldier), mzee (an old man), simba (lion)-from Swahili/Kiswahili- and ulu (fool), duka (shop), hijab (veil), goli (slave), beta (child)-from Indian languages-become obvious in context. Vassanji views a writer as "a preserver of the collective tradition, a folk historian and myth maker. "' It is in this context that sees his use of historical facts in the imaginative discourse of the novel. The personal history of Dhanji Govindji's family tree-the illustration of which appears before the beginning of the novel-is a fiction, but it is very well structured in the real history of a nation during the colonial and postcolonial periods. At last, the preserved memories of the past travel in the form of a collective memory, a family lineage or tradition. There is always a need for containing and recalling these memories for getting acquainted with the origin.

Vassanji with his scholarly grace has reaffirmed this belief in, South Asian Literature in Canada. He expresses: “…Whether the writer stays in his homeland or emigrates …he attempts to understand the past, and from it the present”. This preservation of memories and the traces of the past are expressed by Vassanji in his novel The Gunny Sack.