Sheila James' Outcaste

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Goose Lane, 2024)

Early in Outcaste, a child sitting on the floor of a Toronto apartment is scissoring around the edges of a photograph, snipping off little bits in a spiral, until an adult halts her progress. This is just how Sheila James structures her story—circling and, sometimes subtly, directing readers’ focus.

In the novel’s preface, a young woman in southern India stretches out on a tree limb, with her sari hitched above her knees—a rifle in her hand, a target in sight. So, readers know that James will direct their gaze through the scope. (And that her female characters have agency, and are as likely to subvert as to satisfy traditional expectations.)

Nonetheless, even with a clear shot in that 1952 scene, on the other side of the Telangana People’s Struggle (1946-1951), readers await news of its trajectory. And meanwhile, James explores still more ways of structuring stories. One character, for instance, keeps notebooks filled with observations of life in the valley of Korampally. Decades later, he still organizes his thoughts in lists. In fact, the novel’s opening chapter itemizes 17 items in his possession when he was hospitalized in Toronto’s Queen Street Mental Health Centre in the wake of the Air India bombing on June 23, 1985. The numeral 18 is suspended, like that pending gunshot.

That eighteenth item, however, is not an error, but a salient element reserved. It first appears only as an absence, then as an innocuous detail, and, finally, James reveals its true significance. She threads her story deftly, affording readers the opportunity to observe before the details resonate in the context of story.

She urges, rather than demands, readers’ attention. Consider how the grandfather, who returns to Korampally fifty years after his first attendance there, recalls that he had “wanted to write down in his notebook all he observed” after he attended a political event years ago, “but the ride was too bumpy to steady his pen.” It’s a subtle echo of his granddaughter’s experience many years later, after her own arrival: “I, Anya Peter, intend to write my memoir of my first trip to India, if only I could find a pen.”

The timeline moves through the 1940s to 1997 and, among other things, captures how perspectives on India’s caste system have changed, particularly since the 1960s. Here is how one character in Outcaste describes the shift towards recognizing the contributions made by groups previously disparaged and undervalued. He begins with the peepal tree’s leaves which are, he says, “the British. The stems, the Nizam. The branches, the landlords. The trunk, the workers, everyone that actually does something: selling, cooking, building, sewing.” But underneath, “sustaining everything, are the roots, the fundamental part of the organism. Most of the roots are hidden in the darkness, underground, away from light and heat and air and rain.” Most of James’ characters represent that group, the roots: “That is us. The labourers, the peasants, the Madigas.” And even after some of them relocate to Canada, caste-related prejudice persists.

Although this expansive timeline depicts evolving cultural attitudes, readers also recognise that, for some characters, only a single day in history matters: the day Air India Flight 182 was downed by a bomb which killed all 329 people on board. In one single household’s grief, in the west end of Toronto, time and space simultaneously are expanded and compressed. When a letter arrives in conjunction with the patriarch’s emergence from hospitalization, the surviving Canadian family members travel to India, in response to a call that both accentuates and fills the gaps in their personal histories.

For it’s not only what’s been left behind—in the past—that matters, but also the accumulated weight of secrets shouldered in the present. That’s how the “Peter family harboured little lies, unacknowledged, that travelled with them like stowaways.” And this travelling metaphor resonates with the actual travel in James’ novel.  Details matter—as to whether these lies were omissions or mistakes or “lies of convenience, of embarrassment and of shame”—but underneath it all, at the base of that tree, readers recognize a broader truth that not all the characters comprehend, that this family “was not in the habit of telling.”

Not telling about the secret of caste (when it could be concealed), but also maintaining other intimate secrets. With a new name, in a new place, one might become “unidentifiable, untraceable,” and they might “not be reviled.” But even far away from India, when one family member gives their last name, a shopkeeper grimaces and calls the family “scavengers.” Readers will anticipate this layer of James’s story, evident from the novel’s title. But in the context of one family’s experience, multi-faceted and complex characters navigate this inheritance, both in the land of their birth and on the other side of the Earth, where personal and historical devastation intersect.
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The Air India disaster figures in several works of Canadian literature, including poetry (like Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s Children of Air India: Un/Authorized Exhibits and Interjections) and prose (like Farzana Doctor’s All Inclusive). Reflections of a character in Padma Viswanathan’s novel The Ever After of Ashwin Rao capture some of the enduring concerns: 

​When I think on the Air India disaster, I hear the chain of history rattle. Its links are loops. Loops have holes. Was the bombing a Canadian or an Indian tragedy? Why pose this false division? Canada was colonized when India was, and their fates were ever linked. There is no expiation. The declaration of any single truth is itself an act of violence.

There are links and loops and holes in Sheila James’s Outcaste, in the forms of expected and unexpected family ties, and secrets maintained for many years. The story of one woman who climbs into a tree is the story of one man who walks out of an institution; the story of one family is also the story of a second family; the story of a valley is the story of a community and a resistance group and a caste system and a nation and another nation.
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In one sense, the photograph at the heart of James’s novel is the perfect size to fill a link in a chain, to stop up the hole created by a secret. In another sense, James is more concerned with breaking the chain. The fact that readers can highlight either perspective when reading Outcaste is where the novel’s power ultimately resides. Readers can pluck the petals off a bloom, one by one, moving around the nexus of a flower, to find the centre.

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.