Compare and Contrast the Ways in Which Writers Present the Nature of Cultural Exchange

Where cultural exchange does undermine a culture’s perceived superiority, both Farrell and Nagra depict the ensuing disorder as moral codes lose their power to control and regulate behaviour. The character of Lucy in ‘The Siege of Krishnapur’ aptly demonstrates this. Introduced as the ‘fallen woman’ from Victorian literature, she is increasingly accepted as the threat from the sepoys becomes more pronounced. Indeed, in a scene heavily weighted with symbolism, Lucy is attacked by cockroaches which ‘poured in a dark river down the back of her dress between her shoulderblades and down the front between her breasts’. Fleury and Harry are subsequently forced to scrape thousands of insects from her naked body, using the ‘sacred boards’ of a bible. This suggests how the trappings of moralistic Victorian culture, when forced into isolation, become both increasingly irrelevant yet still a matter for frenzied protection, creating moral confusion. Furthermore, as the siege continues, the inner conflict between Victorian culture and morality becomes increasingly apparent. The Padre initially praises the Great Exhibition and consequently the pursuit of advancement as reconcilable with religion, and yet becomes increasingly angry at science’s attempts to undercut religion, and the siege ends with him attempting to strangle the Collector, screaming that the Crystal Palace was ‘A cathedral of Beelzebub!’  Cultural exchange thus exposes many of the frailties of conventional morality. Whilst this eventually leads the residency in to hysteria, Nagra seems to show the effect cultural exchange has on morality as both a source of progression and of entrapment. In ‘Bibi and the Streetcar Wife!’ Bibi bewails her daughter-in-law ‘With legs/of KFC microphoning her mouth’ and ‘beef-burgering her backside on our 5Ks’. The fast food products are linked with an abandonment of not only the culture of their home village, as the careful preparation of family recipes is replaced by buying a ready-made Western capitalist product, but with an abandonment of its associated values, as the deference expected to be paid to the mother-in-law is abandoned as she ‘microphones’ her mouth, the new-found freedom of the ‘Streetcar wife’s’ life that her money affords her literally elevating her voice over Bibi’s. Thus Bibi is forced to confront the power of British culture to change value systems. Her final cry to her son: ‘Why will she not lie down/For us, to part herself, to part herself, to drive out babies’ uses enjambment to place emphasis on ‘For us’ and thereby show the selfishness of her longing for a moral order in which the husband and his family are supreme. In this way, the reader’s perception that a woman should be viewed as more than simply a provider of grandchildren, and their natural sympathy for the bewilderment and anguish of Bibi, are brought in to conflict in a manner which itself demonstrates the struggle of immigrants to reconcile old moral orders with Western traditions and perceptions.