Unpinnable India.

Unpinnable India.

I know “unpinnable” is not even a ‘proper’ word, but you get the drift.
“Unpinnable” – that which cannot be pinned (or rather pinned down in this case)

Reading / consuming the text does not in any way enable one to know India, as revealed in the text in multiple instances - "no one is India" (p.89). India cannot be defined. And I found myself noticing several other instances where this similar notion of the “unpinnable” is evoked:

"while the true India slid by unnoticed" (p.66) – How then do you notice the “true” India when nothing and “no one is India" (p.89)? Is it just impressions that you glean from texts?

“he desired to remember his wife and could not... He had known that she would pass from his hands and eyes, but had thought she could live in his mind, not realizing that the very fact that we have loved the dead increases their unreality, and that the more passionately we invoke them the further they recede" (p.74-5)

"The mere fact of examination caused it to diminish" (p.101)

"But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else" (p.101)

"Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing" (p.156)

"She was only recommending the universal brotherhood he sometimes dreamed of, but as soon as it was put into prose it became untrue" (p.156)

I was wondering if this might in anyway relate back to the inability of words / poetry to capture the essence of a place / emotion / experience. I find Aziz’s frustration with his poetry congruent to this idea.

But at the same time, there are all these labels and racial stereotypes tossed about in the text. How do these smaller issues fit into the big picture?

“It matters so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides” (p. 126)

Somehow this makes it all seem so insignificant, Aziz often refers to the skies and his Moslem religion as something more than all of this, which seems to me to be a search for something more significant / a Truth beyond the material.


Perhaps, this text is really just a passage to India. Not a story about India, just a passage leading up to what India might be, and in passing by we glean an impression of what India is like.

Angel.