Stephen Gill’s Literary Sensibility

Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.(Yeats 211).

A reading of the aforesaid lines makes us believe that Yeats reached the nadir of despair in ‘The Second Coming’. Yeats is disturbed by the contemporary sordid and degraded society. Through the portrayal of this spiritual miasma in ‘The Second Coming’, Yeats seems to signify that there exists an ethical void in the modern world. The same mood of inner anguish and despair is also perceptible in the literary works of Stephen Gill, the poet laureate of Ansted University. A note of feverish anxiety runs through all his works. It is worthwhile to say that this deadening sense of pathetic grief is due to his own previous experiences. In the Preface to Shrine , Gill has emotionally written about his tragic encounters with stark reality during thee post-partition days in India:

Every time there was a stir caused by the wind, a car on the street, the bark of a dog, or the mew of a cat, we froze inside our house. Every time there was anything unusual, unseen tragedy was expected. The nights were nightmares and the days did not bring any hope. Often the mornings dawned with more lamentable events. It was not easy to sleep when night after night the ghosts of fear looked straight into our eyes. It turned into an obsession that afflicted me every minute of every hour that whom to trust and to take in confidence. Passers-by and neighbors appeared to be the possible killers. Apparently to me, the dragons of religious terror for minorities roamed around freely (8-9).

This sense of damned insecurity created emotional stir in the man and the result is the invaluable literary output. It is an established fact that certain emotional experiences create a unique type of poetic upsurge in the poet’s heart; poetry blooms when a typical emotion disturbs the sensitive psyche of the creative artist. In Wordsworth’s view too, ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. Satya Dev Choudhary has dwelt in great detail on this poetic creation:

...when a poet through any source, becomes familiar with any object or incident-and also some time becomes emotionally involved with it-- it gets imprinted in his mind. And it, at some occasion with the aid of his imaginative faculty, bursts out spontaneously in multi forms of expression. This very expression is called a fine piece of poetic work-whether in versification or in prose (216).

Satya Dev Choudhary adds: The forceful influence of any object or event on the mind of the poet is transferred into an appropriate expression with the help of his imagination (217).

The partition fury filled the heart of Gill with compassion and pity for the humanity and it resulted in the creation of works like Shrine and Songs Before Shrine, where his mission is to bring peace to the world. About this poetic process Gill had told me in an interview that “Poetry is a spiritual and psychic experience. To give shape to this experience, poets need special knowledge in order to use images, tones, economy of words and other techniques. To weave a rainbow of beauty, poets select and adjust words in different combinations.”

This molding of Gill’s poetic voice out of an emotional experience is somewhat akin to sage Valmiki’s transformation into an epic poet. About Valmiki’s metamorphosis, G.B. Mohan eloquently writes:

The poet transmutes his experience into a rhythmic verbal pattern of sensuous images and dynamic characters and the reader, in his turn, translates the pattern into a relishable experience…The legend about the incident which occasioned the composition of the epic Ramayana is instructive. When the sage Valmiki saw on of the Kraunch pair shot dead by a hunter, he was overcome by sorrow. But his sorrow was transformed into infinite compassion for human suffering. This was an occasion for his creative imagination to start conjuring up forms, images and characters. His heart overflowed with creative compassion which was different from his personal sorrow. The creative experience occasioned by the contemplation of the sorrowful incident issued forth in the epic Ramayana…Unless the poet himself is suffused with rasa, he can not infuse it into his work. It is evident that this rasa of the poet,which is a contemplative creative experience and not a personal emotion,is the root of all poetic process (10).

Mulk Raj Anand has also written thus about Valmiki’s catalysis:

The story is related that Valmiki was out one day gathering sacrifical wood and grass in the forest when he saw a pair of Krauncha birds joyfully twittering as they sat on the branch of a tree. An arrow came that very instant from an invisible hunter and struck the male bird, which instantly fell. The sage was filled with immense grief to reflect that only a moment ago the poor creature was happily singing, and now it lay dead in the dust, while its companion fluttered about it shrieking with anguish. Long did the incident trouble Valmiki’s mind that day,and the poignant tragedy lay heavy on his heart till he burst out in an ecstatic verse of exquiste melody and pathos became lost in the forgetfulness of pure bliss (385).

So, the personal experiences of a poet create his poetic voice. Eliot has also spoken of the necessity of personal emotions for the true poetic effluence, while discussing the two types of impersonality. In his essay on W.B. Yeats, Eliot writes:

There are two forms of impersonality: that which is natural to the mere skilful craftsman, and which is more and more achieved by the maturing artist. The first is that of what I have called ‘the anthology piece of a lyric by Lovelace or Suckling, or of Champion...The second impersonality is that of the poet, who out of intense and personal experience, is able to express a general truth: retaining all the particularities of his experience to make of it a general symbol (189).

To be short, certain experiences leave the indelible imprint on the psyche of the poet and in his creative works, he universalizes that particular personal emotion. Stephen Gill has done the same thing by universalizing his traumatic partition experiences. The harrowing tale of partition riot is eloquently painted by Gill in the following manner:

During these riots, we did not know if there would be another dawn and when there was, it brought tales of more brutalities. I saw old people running for help and being pelted with bricks and then burnt alive while the patrolling police ignored the clusters of misguided zealots who were in the street in spite of curfews. I perceived death dancing in the eyes of minorities, heard the cries of infants and read about the butchery of the innocent as if that was happening in front of my eyes (Gill,Songs Before Shrine x-xi).

Here, it is pertinent to remark that Gill is not the only creative artist, who has spoken emotionally about the #### of partition violence. There are authors like Khushwant Singh and Manohar Malgonkar, who have written about partition horrors that haunted India and Pakistan. Shyamala A. Narayan and John Mee have called Khushwant Singh’s Train To Pakistan “the best regarded novel in English about partition (220).” William Walsh has written thus about the treatment of partition fury in this novel:

The objectivity, detachment and impartiality of Train to Pakistan make the horrors it describes- a train standing in the station with Sikh corpses from Pakistan, another packed with Muslims massacred in India-with all their madness and ferocity all the more convincing, all the more devastating (99).

In a way, this soul-stirring novel presents a realistic portrait of the bestial horrors, which swept the sub-continent during that chaotic time. The novel, presenting a pathetic tale of a Punjab village called Mano-Majra, leaves an impression of the basic animal like cruelty of the man on the reader’s mind. V.A.Shahane calls Train To Pakistan “ a grim story of individuals and communities caught up in the vortex of the partition of undivided India into two states in 1947 (345).

Manohar Malgonkar’s A Bend in The Ganges, presents the same feverish strife, caused by one of the bloodiest upheavals of the contemporary history. K.R.S.Iyengar in his seminal book Indian Writing in English has written thus about the novel:

A Bend in The Ganges is an attempt to unfold this national tragedy….No doubt it needs Tolstoy, if not Vyasa, to tell the whole unvarnished story of united India breaking up into two, experiencing the terrific convulsions of unimaginable fratricidal strife (432).

Like these two masters of Indian English fiction, Stephen Gill is also in deep anguish on account of the blood dimmed tide of partition. To borrow an expression from Hardy, during those days, ‘ancient pulse of germ and birth/Was shrunken hard and dry.’ What Hardy had said about the close of the 19^th century, is also true a bout India and Pakistan of partition days. The following discussion by Gill about the victims of partition in ‘Author’s Preface’ to Shrine is sure to touch the innermost chords of the reader’s heart:

I cannot forget the climate of New Delhi which emitted a strong offensive smell due to the rotting dead bodies in the houses. It was said that the government had their buses loaded with bodies to be burnt somewhere outside the city. The authorities could not find adequate loaders because of the stench. Even the water became polluted because several dead bodies were thrown into the Yamuna River which was the source of supply for the city residents (11).

‘The weariness, the fever and the fret’ caused by the naked fury of the partition violence made him sing in full-throated ease the sickening agonies of the refugees, as is clear from the following lines:

A smoke of uncertainty

surrounds them like fear

and the albatross of loneliness

sits upon them

like a paperweight,

They need every moment

someone to share

the stale banquet of the past:

a ghost

for them that is still real.(Gill, Shrine 76-77)

As is common with any literary genius, Gill has universalized his personal anguish; because of his first hand experience of the human predicament during the partition riots, he has a typical emotional bond with the suffering humanity. For example, the poet has deep sympathies for the people of Somalia, overshadowed by ‘the tribal smoke of animosity’. In the poem ‘Somali Victim of 1992 Tribal Warfare’, Gill is crying for ‘the man-made lake of starvation’:

Around him lay

emaciated rag-clothed kids.

Some have swollen bellies

and some sores on their heads,

hand or feet.

They carry scabies.

Rashes, fever, malaria are common;

medicine is scarce.(Gill, Shrine 74)

In the same poem, the following lines exhibit the curse of starvation in Africa:

On the shoulder of a mother

he sees a dozing child,

ribs staring through flesh.

eyes hardly open,

are covered with flies.

They have eaten

The leaf of the thorn tree;

now the tree has nothing

but thorns.(Gill, Shrine 74)

The tragic predicament of the kids during the period of rampant anarchy would have made Wordsworth cry for their lot. Wordsworth had addressed the child as ‘thou best philosopher’, ‘thou Eye among the blind’, ‘mighty prophet’ and ‘Seer blest’. That mighty prophet of Wordsworth has ‘ribs staring through flesh’ in Gill’s poetry. Gill’s treatment of the starving children fills the reader’s heart with ‘leaden-eyed despairs’ and gloomy anguish. On account of his humanitarian outlook and moral bent of mind, Gill has presented the poor fate of the common folk in several poems. For example, the following expression from ‘A Familiar Scene’ is sure to wring tears from the eyes of the readers:

Here is a mother

who moves the corpses

to find her son;

here is the cry of an old man

buried in the cries of the wounded.

Who are these innocents

whom the storm of cruelty

has extinguished

as if they were candles.(Gill, Shrine 69)

Due to experiencing the holocaust of violence during the partition days, his heart is full of pity for the wounded civilization. In fact, the pain experienced during those days is responsible for his creative urge. In the Preface to Songs Before Shrine, he confesses:

It is the pain of these wounds of life in India that I carry with me no matter where I go….that pain is still alive in the caves of my arteries and comes to life as specters particularly when it is night. The more I try to escape those specters, the more they torment me. That is also my well from where I have and even now I draw the waters of my inspiration. I find that well inexhaustible and its waters more satisfying with every visit to it. These visits are like that of a child to its mother. I carry the luggage of my discomforting experiences wherever I go (xvi).

In his poem ‘A Portrait of Today’, the realism of Gill is evident, when he depicts the terrible phenomenon:

A harvest of artillery

clouds the journey of peace,

engulfing the roof of human security.(Gill, Shrine 91)

An offshoot of the partition violence is the religious obscurantism, which finds a high emotional treatment in Gill’s poetry. In the Preface to Songs Before Shrine, he has declared:

Religious mania produces a fire that would continue burning innocent people….That fire has not solved any problem. When used for political ends, this fire causes untold devastation. It causes untold devastation also when innocent citizens, including infants and normal housewives become fodder to satisfy the hunger of the maniacs…(xix).

The feverish strife caused by this religious fanaticism has been condemned by Gill in the harshest possible words. For example, mark the following expression from ‘Religious Fanaticism’:

It leads

the adders of dread

destruction

disdain

and distaste.(Gill, Shrine 63)

As a result of this obnoxious religious intolerance, ‘the time is out of joint’ and Gill’s denunciation of the beast called man sometimes assumes Swiftian tones. In the manner of the great 18^th century satirist, the poet anatomizes the ugly social scene in ‘A Familiar Scene’:

Bodies rotting in ditches

or dumped with the garbage.

Bodies washing up

onto the beaches

like bundles of clothes

or lying discarded in open mass graves

heaped together

in grotesque piles.(Gill, Shrine 68)

The frenzy of religious violence has forced the poet to believe that this world is not a fit place to live. ‘The plague of intolerance’ has choked the beauty of the world. In the poem ‘Supplication to God’, the poet is reporting the debasement of the earth to Him. The man, having ‘higher level of intelligence’ has devastated the grace of the universe. The poet poetically paints this scenario:

How sweet melodies are repressed

by the strings of overmastering terror.

The pleasing orchard of grace

inhales the toxin of gunpowder.(Gill, Songs Before Shrine 7)

The condemnation of religious fanaticism by Gill in his works is somewhat similar to Amrinder’s Lajo and Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja. While Lajo deals with the turbulent periods of 1984 after Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s murder; Lajja artistically presents the catastrophic India after the demolition of Babri Mosque at Ayodhya. Comparing these two novels, Tapiti Lahiri writes:

A close perusal of the novels testifies to the fact that both Amrinder and Taslima are of the opinion that fundamentalism is a disease, a social evil….The political life of the nation can be made strong and healthy and peace can be maintained throughout, if the secular outlook is cultivated in the true sense….we find that the two writers have gone deep into the malaise from which our whole sub-continent has been suffering, particularly from the day it was partitioned principally on the basis of different religions (100). What Tapiti Lahiri had said about these two novels is also true about Gill’s poetry, he is internally broken due to this social disease pervading the world in general and the sub-continent in particular.

Due to this depiction of abysmal sense of chaos in the universe, Gill’s poetry abounds in certain symbols and images which convey his emotional anger at the unrestrained ferocity of ‘cold blooded forces/covered with the skin of fanaticism’. The image of the reptiles is very frequent in his verse. In the poem ‘Humanity’, reptiles have assumed human shape:

Reptiles roam in human form

on the barren mountain

of pride

carrying the flag of their empire

of evil.(Gill, Songs Before Shrine 57).

Similarly in ‘Reptiles’, venomous snakes of racial discord have crowded his artistic soul. Because of ‘the toxin of hate’ and ‘ulcers of anarchy’, spread by these snakes of racial disharmony, the poet’s mind and fancy have the numberless images of these reptiles. In ‘the mist of fancy’, these reptiles have left an indelible impression:

The serpents of racism

form images here in the mist of fancy,

spreading the toxin of hate

to feed the ulcers of anarchy.(Gill, Songs Before Shrine 59).

In one of his haiku poems too, the image of a serpent is repeated:

Is it rampant reign of humankind

or the serpent within

that vomits the lava of hostility? (Gill, Flashes 30).

In the poem ‘To Humanists’, while bewailing the loss of humanity even in the midst of poets and writers, the poet again uses the image of serpent:

I saw her breathing her last

in the gathering of poets

and writers

who

in a frenzy to swallow the sputum

of their selfish serpent

ignore exiled artists.(Gill, Shrine 88).

Another important image in his poetry is the image of war. Through this artistic image, Gill has denounced the horrors of the war in the harshest possible terms. In the poem ‘The Gulf Crisis on TV’, he realistically projects the images of ‘the Patriots intercepting the Scuds’, ‘the showers of bullets’ and ‘the bomb piercing through homes’. Similarly in ‘Hounds of War’, the poet is sorry because the specter of war has devastated the harmony and peace in the world:

When

the hounds of war

ravage the bridge of harmony

the melodies of the dove

die under the leaves

of slumbering dreams.(Gill, Shrine 56).

In the same vein, the poem ‘Convictions’ has a number of war images like ‘language of weapons’, ‘the daggers of hunger’, ‘ditches of gold’, ‘bombs’, ‘spectres of misery’ and ‘lips of the sword’ etc. Through these realistic images and symbols, Gill is able to construct a universe of ‘famished walking skeletons’, ‘forlorn infants’, ‘mute messages of the eyes’, ‘atrocities never told’ and ‘souls of the wounded’. In a way, he is a social realist, who has presented a true picture of the ‘gloomy pages of life’. Due to his social concern, the poet in the poem ‘Year After Year’ is disturbed by the fact that the common humanity suffers from ‘heavy taxes’, ‘higher unemployment’, ‘soaring prices’, ‘increase in terrorism’, ‘shortage of physicians’, ‘violence on the street’ and ‘questions about cancer and the aids treatments’ etc. The shattered dreams of the common folk are artistically presented by Gill:

Beyond

The bushes of promise

no castle of vision

nothing shines from the hills.

The future seems crumbling

in a fog of sands.(Gill, Shrine 90).

At the very outset of this research paper, I had tried to exhibit the indelible impression of partition horrors on Stephen gill’s psyche. On account of the #### of violence prevalent in the subcontinent, Gill began to flutter his wings to escape the prison of suffocation. He was in search of an El dorado of peace. At that time Ethiopia appeared ‘an oasis of no fear’ to Gill. About his Ethiopian experiences, Gill has written thus in the Preface to Songs Before Shrine:

I received a good income and the climate of Ethiopia was hospitable. I was able to save enough for my further studies and other expenses even after sending money regularly to my mother before she died. Life was comfortable, but Ethiopia was not a country for writers. (xiii-xiv).

But Gill considered that ‘Ethiopia was not a country for the writers.’ So, he came to Canada for doctoral study in English Literature. Even in Canada, he took some time to acclimatize himself to new atmosphere. In a nostalgic mood, he recounts his experiences:

Even in Canada, nights kept bringing fear with them and sleep kept bringing dreams of soldiers, bulls and the house where I spent my boyhood in New Delhi. I kept dreaming that I was not able to walk forward….Whenever I was in a reflective mood, I condemned myself for deserting my mother when she needed me most…. I kept dreaming of the house where we lived in New Delhi after coming from Pakistan….I continued drinking heavily and also seriously learning the better use of the English language, particularly Canadian English….It took time for me to cross all these stages to become a meaningful writer in a competitive field and country (Gill, Songs Before Shrine xiv).

So, in the beginning of his career at Canada, he must have faced certain tormenting challenges due to his Asian background. R.K.Singh has raised this issue about Gill in his essay ‘Cross Cultural Communication’, where he says:

As an immigrant writer he, however tells of the difficulties in making his voice heard. Like many others, (and as his protagonist in Immigrant), Gill suffers in a marginalized existence...(117).

His novel Immigrant depicts the tangling problems which a newcomer to Canada encounters. In a way, the novel is presenting before the readers the psychological strife which Gill faced while settling in Canada. R.K.Singh has aptly pointed out in this connection that “As he portrays a new Canadian’s plight-language barriers, ethnic prejudices, cultural discrepancies and a longing for the motherland- he seems to offer a factual record of his own experiences in Canada” (117).

In an interview given to Jaydeep Sarangi, Gill had himself confessed:

Every piece of my writing is my child and every child inherits some traits of his or her father. Like any writer, I need material for the construction of my house. The closest place to collect that material is from the field of my own life….It is true that Reghu Nath goes to a University as his Creator goes, and he is from India as his creator is. It is true that Immigrant has my blood-it expresses my philosophy on several aspects (164-183).

To be very precise, through the character of Reghu Nath in the novel, Gill has elaborated the emotional theme of racial prejudice. Here, it will be proper to remark that there are a number of novelists who have portrayed these themes of racial antagonism, East West encounter and alienation in a foreign country. E.M.Forster’s A Passage To India, Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown and Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope are some other important novels, which also talk about this racial prejudice.

In Immigrant, the novelist has exhibited the strained relationship between East and West by explicating ‘the hopes and the fears and the struggle of a newcomer from Indian setting in Canada.’ The novel also portrays ‘an insight into the views immigrants hold of white people and vice versa.’

The protagonist of the novel, Reghu Nath, encountered this reality of the racial discord when the receptionists, in the beginning of the second chapter “made no attempt to carry on a conversation… whereas he was anxious to discuss many things with them” (9). He came to Canada having a rosy picture of the West. The hopes and aspirations of an Indian, who is about to settle in Canada, are realistically portrayed through the character of Reghu Nath:

He had heard that people in States and Canada were honest and very hard working, as compared to easterners. They abandoned their cars, or sold them to the poor of Asian and African countries at nominal price. He was certain that if he were nice to his Professors one of them would reward him with his car…. Still tossing in bed, he visualized the University, where he would be studying …He saw Professors and students of both sexes outside classes at social functions, mixing freely and casually. It would be an ideal place, entirely different from those of India where segregation of the sexes was a norm (10).

Reghu had never been able to express his feelings of love to girls in India due to his shyness. In his fantasy, Reghu visualized that many girls in the West were ready to welcome him “with open arms (11).

However, the dreams of Reghu are dashed as he finds numberless problems in acclimatizing himself to an alien culture. For example, he was asked to telephone the head of the department for an appointment before leaving the University. As he was not aware of the telephone manners, he hesitatingly dialed the number and the call was answered by a lady Professor in ‘unintelligible English.’ He thought “his student life would be tragic if everyone spoke as she did” (12).The future looked disastrous to him because of this language barrier, created by his ignorance of ‘the accent or colloquial expression of English speaking countries.’

Then entering the registration hall, Reghu Nath felt uncomfortable because he found that everyone except himself was in an informal dress. The novelist paints the predicament of Reghu thus:

He had come in his business suit, as was the custom of his own country’s intelligentsia, who appeared in public well-groomed. He seemed to be the centre of attraction because of his clothes, obviously not tailored in a North American style, and also because he was wearing them in stuffy suffocating weather (13-14).

In D.Parmeswari’s view, “Reghu… experiences a cultural shock, the one that he could least digest (137).” The traumatic experiences of Reghu Nath in Canada are somewhat similar to disturbed emotions of V.S.Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival, a hauntingly brilliant novel about the theme of exile. In the aforesaid novel of Naipaul, the nervousness of the speaker is evident in the following expression:

After all my time in England, I still had that nervousness in a new place, that rawness of response, still felt myself to be in the other man’s country, felt my strangeness, my solitude. And every excursion into a new part of the country-what for others might have been an adventure- was for me like a tearing at an old scab (13).

Here, it is pertinent to say that the writers of Indian Diaspora represent in their writings the psychological problems of dislocation and displacement faced by the immigrants in alien lands. According to Abdul Shamim A.Khan, “The Diasporas also face cultural dilemmas, when there cultural practices are mocked at and there is a threat to their cultural identity (64).” Ranu Uniyal has also analyzed the theme of Diaspora in the following manner:

Writers from the Indian Diaspora reflect the yearning and the anxiety of many men and women who continue to feel marginalized and disadvantaged in the developed societies. Subject to racial bias, treated as objects of ridicule because of their dress code, food habits, colour, language and the spoken English, writers tend to expose injustice and inequity through their works (48).

Stephen Gill’s Reghu Nath also finds himself marginalized and disadvantaged in the new social order. The hydra headed monster of Diaspora leaves Reghu’s soul wounded. The forlorn lands are just presenting before him the image of ‘leaden-eyed despairs.’ In a way, he has fallen ‘upon the thorns of life’; and ‘a heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed’ his spirits. Gill presents the tormenting experiences of Reghu Nath thus:

Within a week, Reghu found himself surrounded with many different problems. Financially, his position was not sound; educationally he did not know where he was headed; psychologically he was not adjusted to his new environment. at the University, He found himself in a mess…(15)

Similarly, when he held the hand of a compatriot, he quickly found out that it was a sign of perversion in the West. Reghu Nath’s awkward position is artistically described by Gill in the following expression:

After this incident, Reghu began to observe others. He never saw a man holding hands with other men. He also observed men seldom shook hands, a very common practice in his country. This affected his own habit of shaking hand warmly and frequently (20).

Besides, Reghu had come to the west harbouring romantic illusions about the place. He had seen an American movie. The dashing hero of that movie had left an indelible imprint on his psyche. In that movie, the hero told a girl in the first encounter, “I love you.” The words of the hero produced the magical effect on the girl; the hero used the same words on several other girls and every time he had the success in winning the hearts of the girls. Gill describes Reghu’s imaginary romantic illusions thus:

He thought it was the way of real life in the west, particularly in America. Reghu had had some love experiences in India, but he was never able to express his feelings to girls. Perhaps it was his shyness or his male ego which stood in his way….In any case, he was now in the West where he was free to practice what he had heard and read (10-11).

To be very precise, Reghu Nath had the fantasy of many western girls, welcoming him with open arms. But, these romantic and illusory ideas are dashed to the earth, the moment he reaches the West. The young women puzzled him because they exhibited interest on the first date, but delayed subsequent ones. They were not ready for intimacy too early. Their only interest in becoming friendly with the men was to enjoy life by dinning out and riding in cabs. They never shared the expenses and disliked to be touched on the first date. In a way, the girls were not there with open arms. The approach of these girls is presented realistically in the novel thus:

Surprisingly, nearly all the girls showed a few characteristics. For instance, they expected to be treated as special, almost as China dolls, and disliked being touched on the first date….If he made any move towards intimacy, it was always the same story, “I do not know you yet” or “We have to understand each other before going further (22).

Thus, the novel presents the shattering of Reghu’s romantic and imaginative illusions about the much hyped west. The Western culture, civilization and ethos are considered rational, empirical and scientific by the Indians and Reghu Nath is no exception. Talking about Gramscian concept of hegemony, Rajnath too points out in his article ‘Edward Said and Post Colonial Theory’:

Indian were so brain washed by educational ,cultural and religious activities of the West that they began to reckon themselves as inferior and as such developed a propensity for everything Western...(78).

Reghu Nath too had the visions of a glorious West. But his dreams are evaporated, when he reaches Canada. He finds that racial antagonism cannot be easily eliminated from the minds of both the Westerners and Asians. W.F.Westcott has written thus about the conflict of the novel:

Gill’s novel traces Nath’s trails and tribulations as he suffers cultural shock, demanding professors, difficult women, Canadian bureaucracy and haunting memories of his native India. Many times, Gill draws on his personal knowledge of Asian life to illustrate Nath’s difficulty adapting to a totally foreign racial clime (116).

Thus, by the above discussion, it is apparent that Gill’s work portrays the human misery and anxiety prevalent in the world. Initially Gill found that religious fundamentalism was the root cause of suffering for the people of India and Pakistan. In the Preface to Songs Before Shrine, Gill writes about this fire of religious fanaticism:

Religious mania produces a fire that would continue burning innocent people….it causes untold devastation also when innocent citizens, including infants and normal housewives, become fodder to satisfy the hunger of the maniacs for their personal reasons. This happened when India was divided. That fire forced me to leave India (xix).

Leaving the subcontinent, he came to Europe. This change of atmosphere could not erase the deep-rooted melancholy from his heart. Here, he found the psychological problems of racial antagonism and biased approach of the natives towards the immigrants. The novel Immigrant clearly brings out the problems of Indian Diaspora. In Europe too, ‘the turbid ebb and flow of human misery’ perturbed him.

Now, the question is--- is there a silver lining in the dark clouds of Gill’s anxiety over the world issues? Does he provide any remedy for the ills of the society? If we go through his works closely, his prescription for the contemporary society is apparently indicated. In his novel Immigrant, he asks for the integration and assimilation of immigrant culture with the ethos and civilization of the majority community in the West. D.Parmeswari has brilliantly analyzed Gill’s remedy for the racial antagonism:

“The remedial strategy, which Stephen Gill recommends to a fellow immigrant is integration with the white community, an ideology advocated by another marginalized poet Countee Cullen….”(140). R.K.Singh has also suggested the presence of the same remedy in Immigrant. “The novel voices the need for openness, for dialogue, for expression of differences and cultural pluralism to minimize misunderstandings, conflicts, exclusiveness and manipulations “(118).

Thus, it is Gill’s fervent belief that by promoting the openness of heart, ideals of hybridism and multiculturalism may be developed. The stress on hybrid multicultural and plural world culture may eliminate the vultures of hatred, destruction and confusion. In his emphasis on the mingling of the cultures, Gill comes close to the Britain based Guanese writer David Dabydeen. In the view of Dabydeen , London of 1990s “is culturally diverse, but there is little cross-fertilization of cultures taking place (qtd. in Rai 16).” Dabydeen adds:

Very little happens by way of cultural exchange, people cross back to their cells having had a brief encounter with cultural diversity (qtd.in Rai 16). Dabydeen has used the image of beehive, while discussing the issue of cultural diversity. In this connection, G.Rai writes:

Dabydeen, while talking about the cultural diversity of a city like London, uses the image of a ‘beehive’. A number of different cultural groups are present in one place with little communication between them taking place. Each is confined to its own cell. Britons do not spend long enough in the West Indian cells nor do they invite West Indians to their cells either (15-16).

Like Dabydeen, Gill also believes that cultural exchange among the people of various ethnicities and nationalities may eradicate ‘the fabric of a crippling chaos.’ In a way, through this process, ‘the rage of serpent’ and ‘the lava of hostility’ will give way to ‘lily of peace.’ This stress on the mingling of the cultures is hinted in the following haiku from Flashes:

Nations that extend love

beyond their boundaries

bloom boundlessly.(30).

If this process of hybridity is able to survive in the world, the doves of peace will hover the world. This dove can be visible only when the ethnocentric and jingoistic prejudices are aborted by the people. In the poem, ‘My Dove’, Gill rightly says:

Underneath her flight

there are only humans

no nations.(Gill, Shrine 160).

Dove is a recurrent and all pervading image in Gill’s poetry. In the just-mentioned poem, the poet declares:

She radiates

hues of undepictable truth

that sanctify

the temple of her surroundings.

The leaf that she carries

is from the evergreen tree

of never ending hope.

The song of her silence

greets the emergence

for a cheerful tomorrow.(Gill, Shrine 160).

In another poem ‘To a Dove’, Gill has emotionally painted the dove thus:

Floating with the free winds

which leave traces of love

on our lips and cheeks,

you accompany the angels

with your milk-like feathers.(Gill, Shrine 143).

Gill’s dove wants to fly above ‘the mud of politics.’ Its desire is that ‘the dance of the hounds’ should be stopped. Thus, the dove represents a cheerful tomorrow, which will dawn when there are no human boundaries in the world.

Thus, through the above discussion, it is obvious that Gill’s heart is ever crying, as “in the selfish sea of politics/ harmony tosses on wild waves/endangering boat of justice.”(Gill, Flashes 31). He is fed up with religious fury and racial antagonism haunting the nations. He prescribes the remedy of multiculturalism; he asks for the shattering of jingoistic and ethnocentric boundaries to create a new world order, marked by the serene flights of the dove. Due to this treatment of emotional theme of human predicament in the debased world, Gill has been highly admired by the scholars. For example, Lino Leitao praises him thus: “The message in the poetry of Stephen Gill is harmony (287).” To promote world peace, Gill has advocated world federalism. Hamadan Darwesh has summarized Gill’s views about world federalism in the following manner:

…the fountain of inspiration for Stephen Gill is world federalism. He believes in forming a democratic one world government to eliminate wars and waste. World federalism has fertilized the thinking of Stephen Gill strongly…Another fountain of inspiration for Stephen Gill is democracy. He believes in democratic set ups to give equality to everyone before the law.” (241).

Finally, it may be forcefully asserted that Gill’s emotional cries, arising out of religious fanaticism and racial prejudices, are sufficient to give him a permanent place in the history of Indo Canadian literature. His name will always be written in golden letters in any history of Indian Diaspora Writers.

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Stephen Gill’s Literary Sensibility has been taken from the forthcoming book, titled Discovering Stephen Gill: A Collection

of Articles and Papers. Editor: Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal

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