18 pages • 36 minutes read
Dilip ChitreFather Returning Home
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Literature of the City
Born in 1938, Chitre was part of the generation of poets influenced by the Modernist movement of the first two decades of the century. These Modernists took a harsh and critical look at the conditions of contemporary life. Most pointedly they despaired over the impact of the rise of the city. The city represented the loss of humanity’s bonds with the rural world and its connection to the rhythms and energy of nature. For all its bustling commerce and crowded streets, the city felt isolating, lonely, and oppressive.
At the melancholy core of “Father Returning Home” is Chitre’s critique of the modern wasteland world of the city. Set in sprawling Mumbai (formerly Bombay), then as now India’s second-largest metropolitan center with a population of more than 20 million, the poem captures the loneliness and alienation of the modern city.
Much like London in T. S. Eliot’s monumental Modernist epic The Waste Land (a poem Chitre much admired), Mumbai is an Unreal City that strangles the spirit and denies its zombie-residents even the expectation of joy or a reason for optimism. Chitre uses the commuter ride to define the city. Packed in with the “silent” (Line 2) late-evening commuters, the father cannot even bring himself to look out the windows of the train, his eyes “unseeing” (Line 3). His clothes are soggy with rain, his shoes spattered with mud, his shoulders hunched, his spirit deflated by his workday. His workday has diminished his humanity. He feels irrelevant, like a “word dropped from a long sentence” (Line 9).
Along the commute, the commuters do not share their experiences and do not even try to break through their aloneness. They each ride together but alone, and hanging over the father’s dreary commuter ride home is the unsettling reality that in a few short hours he will be doing the same thing again. Like the Modernists he admired, Chitre argues this is how the modern city impacts its residents. They are left alone, enervated, dispirited, and imprisoned within the routine that slowly destroys them.
Cultural Context: The Impact of Indian Independence
What is curious about Chitre’s poem is why he constructs the frame of a narrator around his story of a city dweller whose spirit has been broken by the grind of work leaving him with only the desperate escape of dreams to give his life any hope. If Chitre’s ambition was to capture the ennui and despair of contemporary urban life, that could have been accomplished without the intrusive frame of the man’s grown son struggling to understand his father’s sadness and desperation.
“Father Returning Home” is a generational study positioned at one of modern India’s most dramatic and difficult historic eras. Chitre was barely ten when India broke free of more than a century of British occupation. Much as the first generation of American writers after the surrender at Yorktown struggled to define the American identity, Chitre and his generation struggled to define who or what it meant now to be Indian. What it means to his father’s generation was much different. Chitre uses the narrating frame to raise the issue of how the new generation of something now called Indians can find common ground with the last generation born British subjects.
The poem reflects this postcolonial generational question as the speaker struggles to cross the generational gap with his father. By projecting himself into scenes of his father’s commute and of his spiritual and emotional loneliness, the grown son moves to bridge the gap between these two generations. Thus, the empathetic portrait of the aging father represents not just a poignant character study, but Chitre’s attempt to bond with his father and thus fuse the generations and create continuity to modern Indian culture.
