The presence of Indian films in Africa continues to fascinate me, hence my interest in this aside in The Naked Gods (1970) by Nigerian author Chukwuemeka Ike.
The novel — a bawdy political satire — concerns a power struggle at the University of Songhai, set up under British and American patronage but now about to appoint its first local vice-chancellor. The foreign powers want to retain control over the institution, which will shape the country’s elite, and each has its preferred candidate. The question is how they can pull the levers of power to ensure that their man gets in.
One of influential figures in this game of deans is His Royal Highness Ezeonuku III of Onuku, a chief with insatiable appetites and a roving eye. Here he is dreaming of an encounter with Miss Murti, a young Indian woman working as a secretary-typist in the prime minister’s office:
“That night she had worn a typical Indian sari, in which pale blue was the dominant colour. Her characteristic Indian short blouse had exposed a margin of delicate flesh, spotless like her face, and she had none of the folds of superfluous flesh you see on the wives of many Indian merchants. Her graceful movements had reminded HRH of the dancing beauties who are part of every Indian film, and of the accounts which Songhaians who had fought in India gave of Indian girls.”
What I find interesting here is that the cinematic image is contextualised by other images of India: the direct experience of encountering Indian women in the community, where it is wives rather than daughters who are seen, and the tales of soldiers who presumably fought in the colonial army during WWII.
In Ike’s novel Miss Murti turns out to bridge the two worlds. When HRH makes enquiries to see if she already has a protector, he is told she had come to Capital City on holiday, to stay with an Indian family. When a civil war broke out in her home state, she decided to take a job in Songhai until the fighting subsided.
And this is the last we hear of Miss Murti. Her appearance in the narrative seems to serve no other purpose than to counterpoint the arrival of the less appetising Mrs Ikin, predatory wife of one of the potential VCs. And yet the detail makes her stand out, more so than many of the novel’s other characters. I wonder if a real person lay behind this cameo.
Reading this passage also prompted me to look at the experience of African soldiers in India, Ceylon and Burma during WWII. It seems to be a rich area of research, and one that is new to me. It raises questions about whether contact with Indian nationalists influenced African independence movements, and how witnessing Indian poverty changed perceptions of the relatively wealthy Indian merchant class in Africa.
As for women, David Killingray has this to say in Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War:
“The British and Indian authorities planned encampments for African troops away from centres of population. This was done more to reduce the likelihood of communal unrest, particularly over women, than from fear that African soldiers might be politically ‘infected’ by African nationalists.”
So it seems that attractive young Indian women were distant objects of desire, whether in the cinema, in the community or in the memory.
text © Ian Mundell 2015
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