On the Peripheries of Empire
While driving to Berkeley the other day I hear Sandip Roy on satellite radio doing a short piece on Indian summers. Predictably, he’d never heard of the term while growing up in Kolkata, where for him (if anything) the term might have meant the need to escape the relentless Indian heat and humidity, rather than the nice lingering autumn warmth it might have meant in England or New England. The phrase gets an added dimension from the fact that the “Indian” in “Indian summer” actually refers to Native American “Indians” (as Roy would know) — not the first time India’s been imaginatively displaced (and, in fact, I grew up with the sure folk knowledge that the phrase referred to the original India).
It’s a wonderfully evocative piece, and it sends me into reveries about my own confusions based on the distant mother country and culture, and from growing up on the outer peripheries of the linguistic empire. I grew up in coastal Australia, a part of the world, that, like much of the coastal California I now live in, had only two real seasons, and — a little less like California — had virtually no deciduous trees or plants. As a child I spent a lot of time theorizing with other kids about “spring” and “autumn”. Did the trees all really lose their leaves in the autumn? Did leaves really turn bright colours in the autumn? Why?! And why did plants have to wait until spring to start growing again (you couldn’t stop plants growing at pretty much any time of the year where I grew up)? What did forests look like in winter without all those leaves?!
And (like Roy), I wondered what the attraction of an extra bit of summer was. Summer was always a time of sun-softened tarmac footpaths (sidewalks) and scorching sand and blinding glare to me; I used to try to walk down the streets in the cool shade of shop awnings as much as I could. I couldn’t wait for summer to merge slowly into winter (winter being a time when we thought it was really cold when you could see your own breath in the air!). Did they get relief from oppressive summer heat with southerly busters in London during an Indian summer like we did in our summers?
And the fake snow in the shopfront windows in our Southern Hemisphere December summers … Christmas always meant sticky heat for us, a time when my family sensibly had cold ham or turkey for Christmas dinner (sometimes as a picnic). We wondered whether they really got real snow at Christmas in all those other places or did they spray it on there, too? And why did some people think it was funny when our little baby Jesuses were visited by Magi following the Southern Cross? In any case, our Santa arrived by surfboat… in a haze of heat, blue skies, and hot golden-yellow sand. And, in those days before air conditioning became widespread, pools of Christmas sweat.
