The Foreigner: An Existential Dilemma

‘THE FOREIGNER’: AN EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA

Arun Joshi has emerged as an impor­tant Indo-English novelist with the publication of his first novel, The Foreigner.¹ In an enthusias­tic review, Kale Morsch refers to The Foreigner as “one of the finest novels to come out of India” and goes on to compliment the author for pre­senting from within, a view that is “tumultuously open and never boring.” However, she recognises the competence of the novelist in realising the theme as the novel is “ruthless, compassionate, shocking and sometimes downright brutal.”² Murali Das Melwani believes that the novel examines the effects of alienation on sensi­tive Indians of mixed heritage, as the protago­nist in The Foreigner is an alien everywhere since he shares three cultures. ³

In The Foreigner, the story is told in a series of flashs with a clever ordering of past events to maximise suspense. Though the narra­tive includes Babu, an Indian student in America, June, a simple and passionate American girl, Mr. Khemka, a Delhi industrialist, the novel is in the main the story of Sindi Oberoi - a rootless young man. The story is narrated from Sindi’s point of view. The division of the novel orders the events, as the first part lights up the begin­ning of relationships, the second growth and decay, and the last, defeat and destruction.

Joshi exhibits the agony of loneliness in uncovering the psychological conflict in the char­acter of Sindi Oberoi in his quest for meaning through a series of relationships. Impressed by the authenticity and insightful peering into agonised psyche, Meenakshi Mukherjee comments that The Foreigner is the first Indo - Anglian novel to deal with a genuine human predicament with­out compromise and without cliches, since Anita Desai’s Voices in the City.⁴

Sindi’s detached view of life and the world, his typical relationships with others make him akin to Albert Camus Meursauh in The Outsider, as the title of the novel, The Foreigner, also sug­gests.⁵ If Meursauh “the stranger” is an Alge­rian Frenchman, Sindi Oberoi “the foreigner” is a Kenya - born Indian. At times there is a similar reproduction of Camus words in The Foreigner.⁶ C. N. Srinath points out that June, Babu, Sheila, Mr. Khemka -- all these come alive in this small world of foreigners. For each of them is a foreigner in a sense.⁷

The prime concern of the novelist is with the gradual evolution of Sindi Oberoi from a negative philosophy of detachment to its posi­tive aspect. In the beginning Sindi depends on his own philosophy of non-involvement for hap­piness, which results in the death of Babu and June. But he slowly learns that real detachment from men and matters comes when one performs one’s duty sincerely without any desire for the result, as laid down in The Gita.

Born of mixed parentage, Sindi is without a sense of belonging to society no matter where he stays in England or in America or in India. His search for self takes him across continents with no tangible results. He believes that posses­sion generates pain as it implies involvement.

Sindi as a student of Engineering at Bos­ton meets June at a foreign students’ gathering. She likes him but he fights hard with himself to escape another affair. Sindi’s sense of detach­ment and rootlessness is evident when June asks him where he was from. Sindi’s reaction to the question provides a clue to his alienation:

Everybody always asked me the same silly question. ‘Where are you from?’ as if it really mattered a great deal where I was from (p.23).

Sindi is the kind of foreigner who feels the pangs of his foreignness in “any circumstance and any country” which reminds one of Ramaswamy of ‘The Serpent and the Rope.’ In both the novels the sensitive intellectuals long for something beyond themselves. In the very be­ginning of their encounter June tells Sindi:

There is something strange about you, you know. Something distant. I’d guess that when people are with you they don’t feel like they’re with a human being. May be it’s an Indian characteristic, but I have a feeling you’d be a foreigner anywhere. (P.33 Italics mine)

Sindi’s alienation from the world is not merely one of geography or nationality but is deeply ingrained in his human psyche.

Sindi is upset at the death of Babu. His sense of alienation becomes acute. He wants to move away from America in search of mental peace. It is unbearable for him to stay there any­more:

The feeling of my nakedness in the hands of existence grew with every passing day and a strong urge possessed me to once again roam the streets of the world. I didn’t know where I would go or what the future held for me, but one thing was certain my search had to continue. (p. 175)

Sindi’s unconcern born of his sense of detachment proves fatal and he fails to meet June before her death. The tragedy upsets Sindi. Now he is able to realise the fallacy of his sense of detachment.

Now I had begun to see the fallacy in it. Detachment consisted of right action and not escape from it. The gods had set a heavy price to teach me just that. (p. 193)

Sindi realizes and regrets his indecision and his negative content of detachment. For about twenty years he has moved whichever way life has led him. He has merely learnt to be detached from the world and not himself:

I saw myself as I had always been. An uprooted young man living in the latter half of the 20th century who had become detached from everything except myself (p. 195)

Sindi feels miserable because he holds him­self indirectly responsible for the death of his beloved June and his friend Babu. In an attempt at self-realisation he now questions his own behaviour:

Wouldn’t Babu still be living if I had not surrendered my body to June that night we went out for a ride? I thought I was acting out of detachment but was it not merely a desire to prove that I still held the key to June’s happiness?.....

Sindi is moved to see Muthu, in his one-room tenement “spend his nights with eleven people, one of them a tuber cular for ten years”. He ultimately believes that right meaning of de­tachment “consisted in getting involved in the world”, so that it may combat hypocrisy and exhibitionnism. Finally Sindi accepts Muthu’s suggestion to take charge of the factory. This sheds light on the “message” of disinterested involvement.

‘--a line of reasoning that led to the inevitable conclusion that for me, detachment consisted in getting involved with the world (p. 226)

For the first few weeks he works strenu­ously late at night, and with the co-operation of all the employees sets the establishment in order. He involves himself with a positive detachment because “the fruit of it was not his concern”. Babu with the self-pity, Mr. Khemka with his meaningless materialistic preoccupation, Sheila, living on the brink of life but never entering it, and Sindi himself afraid of commitment, never confront life in its fulness. ⁸ It is disinterested in­volvement alone which can break through the selfish instincts of self-preservation and bridge the gap between appearance and reality. ⁹

Though Sindi practices detachment in life, he has all along missed the positive content of detachment which leads to meaningful commu­nity. As he realises that detachment is not merely negative, he learns of its positive content in right action and not escape from action.

Arun Joshi’s concept of detachment as expounded through Sindi Oberoi appears to be closer to the one explicated by Aldous Huxley, Huxley believes that the ideal man is the non­attached man and his non-attachment is negative only in name. The practice of non-attachment entails the practice of charity, courage, generos­ity and disinterestedness. Non-attachment im­poses the adoption of an intensely positive atti­tude towards the world. The non-attached man puts an end to pain, not only in himself: but also, to such pain as he may inflict, on others. He thus qualifies to be “blessed” and “good”.

Sindi Oberoi’s transcendence is clear in his detached and yet compassionate commitment to work in order to involve himself meaningfully in the community. He has towards the end found a heaven after the vigorous quest of meaning that has shaped his life and tormented his psyche.

FOOT NOTES

¹ Arun Joshi, Theforeigner (Delhi: Orient Pa­pers 1968). All subsequent references in parantheses are to this edition.
² Quoted in Shyam M. Asnani, “A study of Arun Joshi’s Fiction” The Literary Half - Yearly, 19, No.2 (July 1978).
³ Murli Das Melwani , Themes in Indo-­Anglian Literature (Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1977), p. 2.
⁴ Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Deatchment”, Quest, 60 (January - March 1969), 103.
⁵ G. P. Sharma, Nationalism in Indo-Anglian Literature (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1978), p. 313
⁶ A1bert Camus, The Outsider (Hannondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969), p.42.
⁷ C. N. Srinath, “The Fiction of Arun Joshi”, The Literary Criterion, 12, Nos. 2 - 3 (1976),
119.
⁸ Jasbir Jain, “Foreigners and strangers: Arun Joshi’s Heroes,” The Journal of Indian Writ­ing in English, 5, No. 1 (January 1977), 53. 9. Ibid., p. 54.