The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Between Cultures
Anne Montagnes
Mumshaib: A Novel in Stories. Goose Lane
Editions, $14.95
Jennifer Mitton
Fadimatu. Goose Lane Editions $14.95
Reviewed by Dieter Riemenschneider
Putting aside Anne Montagne's tightly constructed
and beautifully written book on
fifty-year old Torontonian Lucy, her mother
Agnes and her grandmother Amy, one wonders
who really is (or deserves to be referred
to as) the mumsahib in a story which easily
shuttles back and forth through the 20th
century and between Canada and India.
The Shorter OED using the more common
spelling memsahib, explains: "[£, mem =
Ma'am + Sahib] used by the natives of India
in addressing European women." And at the
end of the novel "Mumsahib..." is
explained as "... [a]n older person. An honoured
older person. Generative." But then,
are these meanings really verified in and
through the novel, or is mumsahib perhaps
an ironical gesture meant to subvert 'a truth
to be told'?
The three Canadian women's involvement
with India begins with Amy and Jacob
Byer's work as Baptist missionaries in late
19th century India. Preaching and teaching
the gospel, Amy, the morally superior
mumsahib, tries to convert Indian heathens
to Christianity, a synonym for European
civilization. Yet as her proselytizing efforts
can hardly be called successful, her mumsahib
status is subtly undercut and even
more so after the premature death of her
husband and her re-marriage to the part-
Indian (and this socially 'not quite acceptable')
medical doctor Ben Mohur.
Their only daughter, Agnes, after having
been brought up in Canada, returns to
India to spend, as she says later, the most
happy years of her life with her parents in
Patna. Here mother and daughter enjoy
their mumsahib status to the full and as
only white European women were wont to
do who were implicated in the colonizer's
system and its social establishment. A carefree
life, the supervision and control of an
army of servants and an almost complete
mental erasure of'the world of the natives'
from Agnes's experience. But it is her role
as mumsahib that also engenders her subsequent
failure as a woman, a wife and a
mother in Canada where she returns with
her parents at the beginning of the 1920s,
where she marries under difficult economic
circumstances and where her children are
born. Lucy, the eldest, never experiences a
loving mother but a person whose concerns
circle around crossword puzzles, smoking,
complaining about Canada and nostalgically
remembering the one romantic affair
of her life in India.
For Lucy, India initially manifests itself
through vague memories of a handsome
but increasingly senile grandfather and,
more importantly, the atmosphere of the
family homes in Grafton and Toronto with
their museum-like array of Indian carpets
and curtains, furniture and jewellry, bronze
and brass figures of Hindu deities, vases,
bowls and all sorts of knick-kanckery. It is