STUDIES IN HETEROGENEITY 63 The Trotter Nama addresses itself to an autobiographical question. Sealy (or rather his incarnation as Eugene Trotter) poses the problem, who or what is an Anglo-Indian. Does he/she spring from a communal essence or from a particular location within a multitudinous society? The title itself suggests ambiguity: the story form will be a 'Nama' in the tradition of Babar Nama with a subject which deals with a family bearing an English name. Looking into the past, Sealy/Eugene discovers a plethora of answers. Take the case of Justin Trotter, the patriarch who founds the Trotter line sometime in the eighteenth century. He is probably born a Frenchman who joins the British army where he makes his reputation and fortune. He then shifts to Nakhlau (known, according to Eugene, as Lucknow by the 'vulgar') where he becomes the Nawab's Commander-in-Chief and finally settles down as a moderately sized zamindar who enjoys a large measure of autonomy. Not to be outdone, his son Mik, after spending a childhood playing in feminine company turns to the British army which he leaves for the Maratha army, returning to the former when the British pass strictures against Anglo-Indians serving in the native forces. He then proceeds to spend the rest of his days in the family mansion named Sans Souci (known also as Sangam), cavorting less innocently than earlier with the now-grown childhood friends, when he is not warring. Nor does the delving into the past yield some essential characteriological truth. Justin rules on the model of an Islamic monarch, taking to Muslim clothes, improvising a harem and even propounding a new religion called Din Hawai in imitation of Akbar- All these virtues are of course intermeshed with the solid European qualities of knowing gunpowder, scientific experiments and business. What makes this heterogeneity convincing is that the novel does not seek to make a point of it. Rather, it is taken as an assumption, as the basic medium of the novel's life. The worth of this novel lies in the way that it shows such heterogeneity as a ceaseless, dynamic process of interpenetrations and exchanges. After inventing the shower (a western innovation of privatising the toilet), Justin Trotter takes to wearing pyjamas and kurtas, while the Nawab takes to wearing European clothes, learning the art of exclaiming in French and becoming a devotee of cigars (while Justin predictably takes to the hookah). The above instance tak^n in isolation may be arguably seen as a crude illustration of what I have been saying. It is in fact difficult, if not impossible, to communicate the experience of endless, fertile combinations that the novel produces. Embedded in this presentation is the idea of play: the liberating feeling that almost anything can be fused. This idea generates a form that gathers together an almost totalising sweep of concerns. Thematically the novel considers problems of culture, space, history, character, power . . . structurally it integrates a dazzling range of modes: lexiographic, epistolary, romantic-chivalric