Michelle's Writing Portfolio

Essay Draft Two

Michelle Shi
May 18, 2007
Draft Two

Symbols of Life

For centuries, India has been a poor country, especially before 1947 when she was a colony of Britain. Because destiny usually draws an individual and society together, most Indians had led a wretched existence during that period of time. However, those victims had got too adaptable to misery --- even ignoring their basic right of pursuing happiness.

Despite the silence of the lowest caste or the numbness of the local authority, a man named Krishnan Varma was brave enough to reveal the dark reality, waking up those ostriches. In his story the Grass-Eaters, Ajit Babu and his wife Swapna represented typical victims of Indian social tragedy resulting from the colonialism, the despotism and the caste system. They lived a refugee's life though Babu was well educated and worked as a school master, which usually ensures a relatively affluent life. The poor couple were unbelievably always in a condition of moving. A stationary home of their own was absolutely a luxury. To create such a couple, and to mirror the dark reality behind those contradictions, Varma used many unique symbols. Those symbols including "home", "grass-eaters", "Babu" and many others can offer a distinctive angle of interpreting this short story.

As in most people's opinion, a good story usually has at least one important clue running through it, and the Grass-Eaters is of no exception. If we give a full read to the story, we will easily find the several repeats of the word "home". They separately refer to different concrete objects and play different roles, but on the whole they share a relatively similar meaning, that is to symbolize the powerless control of one's destiny, especially for the poor in a dark society.

To everyone of us, when it comes to home, we usually associate it with such words as stability, security, privacy, comfort and everlasting memory. However, in the Grass-Eaters, home does not look like this. It is variable since many times they "went to bed in Calcutta and woke up in another place"(57); it is insecure since spending one night at such place can even cost "minus one ear"(56); still, it is not private or comfortable because the places served as homes are often crowded, cold and communal, thus one has to share his/her home with strangers, which really sounds intolerable; what's most important, the homes are easy to get and easy to lose --- the everlasting memory of home fades away along with the progress of accepting a former home being "no longer our home now"(57). "Home" has almost lost its common meanings except love, which we can infer from the dialogue and reaction between Babu and Swapna. All these absence may arouse our curiosity of exploring the reason why Varma creates such a conception of home. Does it symbolize something?

In order to answer it, we' d better build Babu's home from several features of it.

First, Babu's homes are always near a railway. (Though the first home, a footpath near an avenue, is an exception, its location expresses something common with the others.) What kind of a home will it be if its location is near a railway or even over a railway (e.g. the freight wagon)? In poets, essays, pictures and even musics, railway is not once used to create a vagrant life. Moreover, the shape of a rail often evokes a sense of eternity. Watching trains approaching and departing, won't those passing objects immerse you into a thought of life, death, time, space or anything else that has something to do with eternity? In the Grass-Eaters, Babu and Swapna are Hindus. Hinduism is a religion holding a belief in reincarnation. Therefore we may infer that railway conveys the idea of reincarnation by connecting now and future, vicinity and distance. That Babu and Swapna's moving along the railway perhaps symbolizes their process of reincarnation, leading to a better destination.

Second, all of their homes are obtained by occupancy, even the last one with rent is described as "the house I might occupy", too.(58) The use of "occupy" strengthens Babu and Swapna's low social rank. Despite that these homes are communal that anyone has access to living in, Babu and Swapna are long for one. Compared to the fact that thousands of refugees, locals and residents are even not able to have one, getting one place to live in, bad as it may be, is enough to be a most pleasant thing.

Third, their homes are all of basic structure. From the footpath with no complex structure, the freight wagon only with doors and walls, the pipe "with a piece of sack cloth hung at either end"(56) to the home "made of coal tar drums"(58). Each of those "homes" can merely meet the basic needs of human beings while sometimes this is even beyond possibility.

Apart from those common features, a special home to Babu and Swapna cannot be neglected. This home is their eternal home --- their tombs. In the Grass-Eaters, Varma first indicates this in "to do our funeral rites when we died"(57), and later repeats it in the last paragraph to emphasize such a home. It is not difficult to discover that only a tomb can serve as a stable, secure, private, comfort (to one's remains) and everlasting home for Babu and Swapna. The realistic world cannot meet their poor requirements, so they resort to the reincarnation, hoping that the next round of life will be fair to them. Their ecstasy fully shows their value of death, which also hints that to the poor, maybe death is much better than life in this real world.

Perhaps now we are able to piece together the very home Varma intended to show us. It badly lacks stability, security, privacy, comfort and everlasting memory. Moreover, living in such a home is worse than sleeping dead in a tomb. Moving from one home to occupying another is nothing but a continuing process leading to death and reincarnation. The description of this home evokes a sense of despair, which is exactly the feeling Babu and Swapna lock to their mind. They lose the control of their own destinies because life abandons them. The home stands for their fate, wondering and helpless.

Just as characterization, dialogue and plot work on the surface to move the story along, symbolism works under the surface to tie the story's external action to the theme. Symbolism is often produced through allegory, giving the literal event and its allegorical counterpart a one-to-one correspondence. In the Grass-Eaters, symbolism plays an important role together with its ironic tone. Its wording, especially adjectives, is full of significance. Despite of Varma's intention of creating a symbol of home, he also tried to show the people, the society and the life of that time to readers in a similar way.

Babu and Swapna are representatives of poor people of that time, their style of life standing for the common life style of that class in India. The couple's actions, talks, manners, feelings and thoughts piece together a typical Indian living under that historical background. For example, the "vague smile" of Swapna (57) embodies her vague expectation of future. Specifically, the smile is vague partly because she is not sure why she insists on moving into a stationary home since their economic condition doesn't allow them to balance between eating and housing. On a symbolic level, this could mean that, this class of people are short of sense of security, which leads to their uncertainty of future. Moreover, Varma described the Babu couple as "nightblind"(58). Basically "nightblind" refers to a disease called nyctalopia, which results from lack of certain necessary nutrition. Or we can interpret this "nightblind" as a result of no electricity in their home. Both are brought about by their poor economic condition. However, if we turn it over, we will find it possible to interpret this word in another symbolic way that this "nightblind" may mean being blind to night, standing for the dark reality. Because the only way to live in that realistic world is to be numb of the injustice, the grass-eaters have to practise their ability of being "nightblind" even against their real will.

In India of that time, there are wide gaps between person and person. Babu and Swapna were numb at "looking at the passing scene: a tram burning, a man stabbing another man, a woman dropping her baby in a garbage bin"(59). We may discuss the words in this sentence.[I don't really know if this paragraph is redundant.] Varma uses "look" instead of "see". There's a line in the movie Princeton Girl, Sam said that "You're just looking but not really seeing". As she said, the act of seeing needs more concentration than looking. If one looks at the surroundings rather than seeing it, it in a sense shows his/her loss of interest in what is happening around. When it comes to the Grass-Eaters, we may infer that the act of looking implies Babu and Swapna's indifference to the realistic world. In the fifth paragraph of the story, Varma describes the background as "one cold morning"(56). The "cold" in it denotes the low temperature of the weather. However it also prefigures the unfriendly people, who are irritable and violent as described followed. "Cold" connotes people's numbness and the social environment's unfitness for the poor to live in.

What is the life of that time like? It is "eventful"(59) and "passing"(59). The literal meaning for eventful is "full of interesting or exciting events". But to Babu and Swapna, their life is not an interesting fairy tale. It is full of "exciting" Tragedies. Those tragedies actually don't happen in one time or at one place. They happen throughout Babu and Swapna's life. That Babu and Swapna take them as "passing" ones temporarily torturing them reflects their positive attitude towards the tribulation. Life moves on, and they won't let those barriers to rob of their happiness. Here "eventful" refers to its second literal meaning. Also  "passing" is not used to express the couple's complaint about life. Varma's avoidance to use negative words in describing Babu and Swapna's attitude towards life has created an effect of black humor, which here implies the lowest caste's compromise to life.

Now that we have run through the whole story, we cannot help wondering what does the first obvious symbol, the grass-eaters, tell? It is set as the title of the story, so Varma must have his own reasons. In my view, it does play a key role in the development of the story as well as the establishment of the symbolism in it. Grass-eater is basically a type of animal rather than vegetarian. That Varma used it to define a group of people conveys the idea that those people have been reduced into leading a dog's life rather than of human being's. Later in the novel, Swapna is described as "fang bared, claws out"(56), which just responds to it.

Varma is good at showing the poorest people's life in his society through realistic details, feelings and thoughts. In his description, life of piteous people in India becomes lifelike. This time, in the Grass-Eaters, again, Varma shows the reality to us, though a reality full of misery, by way of symbolism. It is not too difficult for a careful reader to discover that there is a dramatic coincidence in the story. In the dilapidated building lived two Babus. It immediately reminds me of the caste system in India. At that time, Babu refers to a middle-class group of people who have received adequate education. If such a group of people lead a refugee's life, what will the real refugee's life be? It hard for any of us to imagine. We cannot help wondering "Is there any hope in the society?"

Reflecting the dark reality and waking up the ostriches are not enough to Varma. He wants more. Hope is what Varma really wants to call upon through this novel. He wants the poor,Indian or not Indian, to face up to the misery in life, then to conquer it, and to start to fight for their own destiny. For this reason, he chose English, instead of his mother tongue, to compose this novel. This itself obviously shows the author's intention of arousing a worldwide thought.(Although writing in English is not necessary to discussing a general topic of human beings, it is right considered a sufficient condition.) What he depicts perhaps is a regionally limited life, but some elements of the Grass-Eaters are of all human beings, which should be paid enough thoughts to by all of us.

24.5.07 09:27