Introduction

The prominent release in early 2010 of My Name is Khan, the Shahrukh Khan film that potently brings together autism, 9/11 and Indian Muslim identity, has prompted several commentators on Indian cinema to return to an old question: the portrayal of the Indian Muslim as a minority subject within Bollywood (Kesavan, 2007). Earlier an operation to be delicately executed in step with the Nehruvian consensus on secularism – an emblematic film here being Amar Akbar Anthony – the relationship between cinema and Indian Muslim identity (Islam, 2007; Kazmi, 1994) took on an even more complicated turn after 9/11 and 26/11 (the attack on the Indian Parliament on 26 November, 2008). In the episode entitled ‘Hindi Films: Stereotyping Muslims’ of her signature television programme We the People, journalist Barkha Dutt (2010) can now add the ‘ominous terrorist’ to the list of stereotyped Muslim characters that the Indian media circulates, such as ‘the drunk nawab’ or ‘the benevolent chacha’ (uncle). If, according to the anonymous article ‘Indian Muslims’ (2010), the average Indian Muslim viewer appreciated My Name Is Khan as a film about terrorism ‘where the central character that stands out against this does it not in spite of his upbringing and religion but because of it’, this appreciation is all the stronger because of several films prior to its release that attempted to narrativize the implications of the War on Terror for India.

In these films, notably New York, Aamir and Kurbaan, the protagonists were Indian Muslims caught up in the aftermath of terror; but the filmmakers failed to break out of the assumption that for an Indian Muslim to display publicly any relationship or attachment to everyday Islamic tenets was immediately to render him or her susceptible to ‘terrorist’ ideologies. Indeed, for Bollywood, practicing terrorist and practicing Muslim would seem collapsible categories. If, as Arun Venugopal (2010) opines, ‘In Indian movies, the terrorist isn't some veiled abstraction: He's your brother (Fiza, 2000) or house guest (Black and White, 2008) or the woman you couldn't live without (Dil Se, 1998)’, it should be added that in all these ‘terrorist’ films, apart from Dil Se (Kabir, 2003), the terrorist protagonist is Muslim.

With these now-famous words begins one of the most iconic Indian novels written in English, a work that is widely recognized as having changed the course of not just the novel from India but postcolonial writing from South Asia at large. Is it mere coincidence that Midnight's Children, which in 1981 announced to an unsuspecting world a new idiom of fiction altogether – brash, jocular, daring, and deeply clever – should center thus on “the precise instant of India's arrival at independence ”? The response I would offer, and which forms the basic premise of this chapter, is: no. This novel, unfettered as it seems by the need to genuflect to established models of correctness and decorum presented to the Indian novelist by the weight of colonial history, is actually as “handcuffed” to that history as its protagonist. Specifically, it is handcuffed to that pivotal moment when the colonial era ended and the postcolonial moment began – a moment that, for India and Pakistan (and, in a more complicated way, for Bangladesh), brought together the triumph of independence with its dark side, the trauma of Partition. In these opening sentences, Rushdie already signals this duality through the juxtaposition of celebratory and auspicious signifiers (fireworks, crowds, the birth of a child) with hints of inauspiciousness, inexplicability, and coercion (accidents, however bathetic, “occult tyrannies,” handcuffs, and chains). This is a duality that unfolds in its full tragicomic magnificence in the course of the novel.

In this chapter I argue that Rushdie's Midnight's Children is neither the first nor the only Indian novel in English to be thus handcuffed to the history of Partition – though it is certainly the first novel to announce this condition so meta-fictively.

In the fifth century CE, the erstwhile colony of the Roman Empire known as Britain became home to the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, Germanic tribes moving across continental Europe in what has been somewhat romantically characterised as the ‘Age of Migrations’. Pushing the Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants of Britain westward and northward, these tribes rapidly consolidated their hold over the island, which they soon termed engla-lond, ‘land of the Angles’ (and hence ‘England’). The Germanic dialects they brought with them developed into a language that they called englisc, ‘English’. Modern scholarship terms this language ‘Old English’ (in distinction from ‘Middle English’, which developed after the Norman Conquest of 1066), or, sometimes, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, after the two major tribal groups, while ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ refers to England between the Saxon Advent and the Norman Conquest.

Anglo-Saxon England was one of the earliest European cultures to produce a substantial corpus of vernacular prose, alongside a flourishing monastic literacy in Latin and a robust tradition of vernacular poetry in the alliterative Germanic style. Much of this writing has survived in the dialect of Old English that philologists distinguish as ‘late West Saxon’. Both prose and poetry were used for narrative, hagiographic, exegetical and hortatory purposes.

This chapter examines the conjunction of paradise, the interim state and corporal assumption within several anonymous Old English prose texts: the ‘Three Utterances’ and ‘Theban Legend’ homilies, the homilies on Mary's Assumption, and the different versions of the Life of Margaret. Two Latin texts which display similar concerns about the interim condition are also examined here: Transitus W, which is the source for one of the Assumption homilies, and Redaction XI of the Visio Sancti Pauli. In the previous chapter, I pointed to Ælfric's anxieties surrounding this very conjunction; these anonymous texts and their Latin sources and affiliations will now enable us to locate precisely the focus of Ælfric's objections and also to discern the contours of a sensibility different from his. Through this analysis, I aim to place the concept of the interim paradise within the arena of ‘the play of culture’, while considering whether appreciation of such ‘play’ can proceed only after demarcating the boundaries of ‘learned culture and its historians’ as strictly as is suggested in the citation above.

This book is about what I term the ‘interim paradise’, reflected in the mirrors of Anglo-Saxon literature. Its subject is the rarely noted conjunction of two much-discussed concepts: paradise, and the soul's condition in the interim period between death and Judgement Day. It also involves a methodological conjunction: the use of the techniques of literary analysis and source-study to trace the history of an idea in Anglo-Saxon England, and to understand, through that history, some of the processes of production and consumption of literature in this period.

Today, the interim period between death and Judgement Day is most commonly associated with the concept of purgatory, even as the word paradise evokes either the Garden of Eden, or a heavenly state of bliss after death.

Ælfric's attacks on the apocryphal stories about Mary's Assumption and Paul's vision of the third heaven exemplify his self-proclaimed and polemical brand of orthodoxy, which Anglo-Saxon scholars have often discussed. It has nevertheless gone largely unnoticed that both dwollican bec which Ælfric rejects describe the afterlife in terms of a paradise quite distinct from the heavenly kingdom of Augustinian exegesis.

Three separate terms for the soul's post-mortem destination are seen in these supplications for the soul's safety after death. An antiphon from the funeral mass refers to the soul's journey to the sinus Abrahae, while the terms locus refrigerii and paradisus appear in two Anglo-Latin prayers preserved in the Royal Prayerbook (London, British Library, Royal 2. A. xx) and the Book of Cerne (Cambridge University Library, Ll. 1. 10) respectively. This chapter charts the shifting fortunes of the definitions sinus Abrahae, locus refrigerii and paradisus in the larger literary groups represented by these texts – the early medieval funeral liturgy, and Anglo-Latin prayers from the eighth and ninth centuries. By analysing the contrasting use of these terms within private prayer and public worship, I explore further that monastic ambivalence towards the concept of the interim paradise, which we have already discerned in the writings of Bede and Ælfric.

Four prayerbooks, codicologically similar and with several textual links, were compiled for private devotion in Southumbrian monasteries between the latter half of the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth.

In the second chapter, I discussed Ælfric's response to the Vision of Dryhthelm in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica. I now return to the Vision of Dryhthelm and another Anglo-Latin vision of the otherworld which preceded the Historia Ecclesiastica by just fourteen years – that experienced by a monk of the Monastery of Wenlock, and recounted by Boniface in a letter written to Abbess Eadburg in 716 or 717 AD. Both visions describe a remarkably similar otherworld, in which two regions of punishment mirror two pleasant regions. This four-part otherworld is a more schematised and visually charged presentation of the same hierarchies between an interim paradise and heaven on the one hand, and two infernal regions on the other, which inform the ‘Three Utterances’ homilies from at least a century later.

In this chapter, I investigate how and why these visions incorporate the concept of an interim paradise into their four-part otherworld, and the reciprocal impact of the literary form of the vision on the interim paradise. This close interaction of theological and literary interests is achieved through several stages of reappropriation, or the transmission and transformation of ideas, which I recover through analysis of the framework, structure and imagery of both visionary otherworlds.

This picture of blossoming trees that spring up wherever Andreas's blood falls on the paved streets and rocky ground of Mermedonia seems to confirm the view that ‘in Old English literature, heaven is often confused with paradise’. The image brings to mind not only the regenerative powers of nature, but nature at its most ideal: the Garden of Eden. At the same time, the immediate context suggests that it offers us a glimpse of the postmortem reward that awaits the martyr. Is this reward the kingdom of heaven, or does the imagery of nature suggest, instead, the flowering, fragrance-filled meadow of the interim paradise?

In this chapter, I analyse the apparent confusion between images of paradise and those of heaven in Old English poetry as a response to two, contradictory pressures: the typological equation of paradise and heaven and the belief in an interim paradise, separate from heaven. In the previous chapter, we noted that the synonymy of paradise and heaven was part of the ‘learned self-fashioning’ of certain authors throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and seemed to have been encouraged particularly within the intellectual climate of the Benedictine Reform. However, we have also seen that the very same authors who advocate this synonymy often resort to evasion and compromise to accommodate the idea of the interim paradise.

This description of paradise occurs in an anonymous prose text preserved in two manuscripts, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 198, and London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, and is placed in the second half of the eleventh century by its first editor, F. Kluge, who also pointed out, albeit rather non-committally, that the text focused on the phoenix. N. F. Blake called it the ‘Prose Phoenix’ and printed it as an appendix to his edition of The Phoenix, along with a similar text in Old Norse, but did not address adequately the question of the interrelationships of these texts. Indeed, not only this question but the text itself has been all but ignored by recent scholars, despite its potential interest for investigations into the transmission of Old English verse and prose.

Compelling as these issues are, they are raised here insofar as they shed light on the present investigation. Drawing on recent theories of the composition and transmission of Old English, I argue that the ‘Prose Phoenix’ represents the reabsorption of the Latinate poetic tradition into a late Anglo-Saxon, vernacular prose text.