Anil becoming Anil
Although Anil Tissera is the main character of the plot and gives the novel its title, and although we learn about various events from her past in numerous flashbacks, we know only little about her youth, i.e. the time before she left Sri Lanka. We are told, however, about an interesting incident that happened when she was thirteen years old. “Her name had not always been Anil” (67). Apparently, Anil had been given two names she did not like, and with the pragmatism of a little girl she came up with the idea of buying her brother’s second name, which he did not use. After a lot of dispute about the issue Anil eventually succeeded and from then on bore the name she had wanted so badly.
There are several aspects inherent in this name change that are useful for the discussion of Anil’s identity. First, the name Anil takes is not just any name, but the name of her brother and her grandfather. As Victoria Cook observes, the renaming therefore is on the one hand “a liberating and self-creating action” and thus an act of independence, but on the other hand also an affirmation of “her identification with her ancestry” (2004, 4). Furthermore, there is quite a high price that Anil has to pay for her new name. “She gave her brother one hundred saved rupees, a pen set he had been eyeing for some time, a tin of fifty Gold Leaf cigarettes she had found, and a sexual favour he had demanded in the last hours of the impasse” (68). Not only does Anil have to give her brother money and material goods as a payment, but she also has to do him “a sexual favour”, and whatever that exactly means, it is certainly something that Anil was reluctant to do and that put her into a humiliating position. So while taking the new name was an overall good experience for her and when she later “recalled her childhood, it was [...] the joy of getting it [i.e. the name] that she remembered most” (68), Anil had to undergo a procedure that involved debasement and disempowerment in the very process of becoming powerful, liberated and independent.
Of course, this “sexual favour” is only mentioned briefly and it is in no other scene referred to, so it could be argued that I am over-interpreting the incident since it does not affect Anil’s future life, at least as far as we know about it. But I think this consideration only strengthens my point because it shows that at that stage she was still under the domination of a male superior, even if it was just her one-year-older brother. She did not tell his desire to her parents nor simply refuse to fulfil it, but instead accepted it and the debasement that came with it.
‘Naming’ is a frequent action in postcolonial discourse and a prominent field of inquiry in postcolonial literary theory, for it is often noted that, to cite one example, “[t]he very process by which one culture subordinates another begins in the act of naming and leaving unnamed” (Spurr 1993, 4). What can be made of this in respect of Anil’s renaming? In my view, this concept is applicable, but not in the usual way. Here, it is not one side naming the other, but Anil renaming herself. The structures of power that we encounter in this case are therefore slightly different. There is no superior powerful side acting upon the powerless other side. Instead, Anil acts upon herself, and while on the one hand she is powerful through the new name, she subordinates herself on the other hand by complying with her brother’s desire in order to get this new name.