Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
HUMANITIES AND
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Journal of the Inter-University Centre
for Humanities and Social Sciences
Editor
MANAS RAY
STUDIES IN
HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Editor
MANAS RAY
Editorial Board
PETER RONALD DESOUZA
Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla
UMA CHAKRAVARTHI
Anand Niketan, H.No. 4
Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi
G.C. TRIPATHI
National Fellow, IIAS
AKHTAR UL WASEY
Zakir Hussain Institute of Islamic Studies
Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
RAJEEV B HARGAVA
CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road,
New Delhi
SASHEEJ HEGDE
Head, Sociology Department
Central University, Hyderabad
TEJASWINI N IRANJANA
Centre for Study of Culture and Society
Bangalore
PULAPRE BALAKRISHNAN
A-4, Laxmi Apartments
P.O. Chalappuram, Kozikode
HARSH SETH
Seminar, New Delhi
RAVINDRA K. JAIN
Roots and Routes: notes towards a personal anthropology of Rabindranath
Tagore
F. G. ASENJO
The Whole in the Part
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
Machiavelli and the Art of Government: on Michel Foucaults non-reading
of Machiavelli
SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY
Counting and Trembling during the French Revolution: Elements of a
Historical Multiplicity
SASHEEJ HEGDE
Seeking after Traditions: Analytical Forays
ANJALI GERA-ROY
The Dehumanizing Mission of Imperial Reason and Humanizing
Blackness
MOHINDER SINGH
Conceptualization of the Social in the 19th Century North India:
Reflections on the concept of samaj in Hindi
JOYA CHATTERJI
Migration myths and the mechanics of assimilation: Two Community
Histories from Bengal
UDAYA KUMAR
The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech and the Dalit
Present in C. Ayyappans Stories
SUSAN VISVANATHAN
Summer Hill: the Building of Viceregal Lodge
PRACHI DESHPANDE
Pasts in the Plural: A review of Bhalchandra Nemades Hindu: Jaganyaachi
Samruddha Adagal
ANIRBAN DAS
Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?
Language, Politics, Belonging
DEBJANI SENGUPTA
Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India: Bengal and India,
1947-1967
ISSN: 0972-1401
CONTENTS
Editorial
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ARTICLES
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SPECIAL ESSAY
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REVIEW ESSAY
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BOOK REVIEWS
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EDITORIAL
As part of the long celebrations of Rabindranath Tagores 150th anniversary,
we begin this issue of Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences with an essay
reflecting on what it means to grow up in the manifold presences of the
poet. To be accurate, what we have is not an essay as such but the text of a
lecture that the noted anthropologist Ravindra Jain delivered at a
conference of the Indian Anthropology Association in Kolkata last
November. In course of these 150 years, Tagore, I think it is safe to say, has
become part of the habitus of modern India, irrespective of language or
location. Appropriately, Jain calls his enterprise a personal anthropology,
evocatively blending scenes from his own boyhood with those from
Tagores reminiscences. As a lecture-text, the paper is not expected to be
meticulously choreographed, but this in a way works to its advantage: A
bit like a kaleidoscope, it gives a new picture at every turn as one issue is
put aside and another introduced.
Ravindra Jain has raised a number of important questions in his
deliberations, of which I shall discuss just one: that of gender. He could
not be more correct in suggesting that in Tagores novels, the women
characters not only move out of the physical confines of home but do so
without having to stake or jeopardize their femininity. The novels are
truly celebrations of sexual identity. In more ways than one, this coming
out without having to be either denigrated or, for that matter, placed on a
high pedestal perhaps heralds the real beginnings of Indian modernity.
Nonetheless, while this is eminently true, Tagores women also do not
sever their links with the earlier trope of the dutiful, chaste wife and the
loving, all-giving mother that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had imagined
as the ethical, affective fulcrum of the future nation. There is a distinct
sense of the maternal in Tagores female characters. Take, for example,
Charulata in Nastonir. Her affection, warmth, care and patience for Amals
careless ways as well as for her husband Bhupati with whom she otherwise
had very little going not only not diminish but are actually very much part
of her sensitive, writerly, imaginative persona.
True as this is, we may need to remind ourselves that this wife/mother/
nation trope is not as neat as we might think it is even in Bankim; the
fractures within the paradigm are quite apparent in any close reading of
the novels. As an adroit novelist, Bankim does not make his female
characters merely represent the political-ethical positions of the novelist
but portrays them as living beings caught in the currents and crosscurrents
of life. If we consider a novel like Krishnakanter Will (Krishnakantas Will,
1878), we will find how Bankim in his bid to keep the efficacy of the
EDITORIAL
ideal of the pure chaste woman beyond all doubts, disciplines, almost
stifles, himself in depicting the aberrant and extremely complex Rohini.
Her ambiguities are also Bankims ambiguities.
In the course of the novel what is ultimately vindicated is of course
the ethical yardstick that Bankim champions but there are moments when
this seems quite vulnerable, and the tensions between the psychological
and the ethical registers are palpable. I am thinking of that particular point
in the novel when driven by desire, Gabindalal leaves his virtuous,
committed wife, Bhramar, and starts living with the beautiful Rohini, a
widow. Bankim describes a certain day when Rohini looking particularly
gorgeous on that occasion is playing the sitar for the enthralled
Gabindalal. At that moment Bankim addresses the reader directly and
says something to the effect that one has to remain content seeing only till
here, and not try to know the amorous, ugly underside of this beautiful
moment. He seems to be suggesting that to allow the reader knowledge
beyond the merely functional in an erotic, transgressive relationship is a
sin for the novelist, tantamount to being party to titillation. In other words,
it is morally wrong to either describe or read about unethical lovelocks.
This mode of almost elementary self-censoring in an otherwise rich and
complex plot structure as well as modes of enunciation shows the extent
of the novelists own vulnerability to desire. The issue of familial and
personal ethics in the novel escapes being didactic since Rohini is not a
seductress as such but in many respects a tragic character, stalled by the
genuine adversities of life and caught between a keen longing for marriage
and family on the one side and an active interest in men on the other.
As in Bankim, Tagores novels too, much more than being mere
conduits for certain discourses, functioned as a kind of a platter for the
readers to produce a near ceaseless discursive elongation. To return to the
novella, Nastonir, once again, it is fascinating to see how through the
imaginative ambiguity of the word, Tagore makes the formal-political and
the erotic co-constitutive. After locating Bhupati in the big issues of public
life the big events, the big writings, the big language (English) the
story moves to the interiors, to the other drama of life, one that has largely
escaped our editor-husband, engrossed as he is with the larger business
of politics and the language of its official transaction. This is the drama that
has been taking place quietly in the inner quarters of the house, a private
drama of love, desire and emptiness as Bhupatis bride Charulata slowly
blooms into her youth. What should have been a very significant news
does not reach the editor-husband, who has been preoccupied with Indian
governments boundary policies, the swelling ambitions of which, he
thought, were searing away traces of any restraint. Consequently, he remains
oblivious to a territorial geography of another kind: Within the cloisters
EDITORIAL
of the wealthy household, the young wife spends her days and nights
empty, blossoming with no one to appreciate her.
In this world of Charus solitude and deprived passion enters the
word not the word as the vehicle of formal politics but the word of
literary vocation, of imagined transgression. Charulata has a natural
inclination for reading and learning. Living in the same household under
Bhupatis care is his cousin, Amal, a third-year student in college. Charu
gets him to help her with her studies, something Amal will not do without
being profusely rewarded. She grants his demands numerous and
capricious even though they are, and to fulfill some of which she has to
indeed work very hard. She grudges him but only mockingly; at least
someone is making demands on her. The early, rudimentary pedagogy
inaugurates a literary theatre where the word comes flying on the wings
of Eros, inaugurating a space for intimate bonding between the two souls.
A piece of land lying mostly unkempt formally a garden with nothing
much beyond an English hog plum at a corner of Bhupatis estate becomes
the site of enormous investment of imagination for the two. It is no idle
daydreaming but a serious affair of land development which warrants
that a committee be formed between Amal and Charu. The budget,
however, will not permit the scale and quality of things planned. But
compromise is a taboo for Charu. The garden project might have failed to
take off, but cant the impossible be realized through other means? Yes, of
course, and through words only, written words in the realm of which
imagination attains its full life, life at the limits of the possible. The idea of
writing about the garden as it has shaped in their imaginations appeals to
Charu since no one else will get the import of the piece a patch of
simmering privacy in the transactional world of the literary public. She
encourages Amal to take the ever-postponed garden as his first writing
assignment. Amal agrees but demands that she embroider leaves and
creepers on the roof of his mosquito net. That exceeds all limits of
indulgence, thinks Charu. Amal gives a long lecture against keeping the
mosquito net in an unaesthetic state, much like a jail cell. By making an
embroidered mosquito net the centre for discursive investment and a
condition for writing, Tagore once again implicates the act of writing in
the scenario of the erotic. The evocations are deepened as Amal starts
reading out from an essay already written and kept hidden from Charu:
My Notebook, a hymn to the pristine white pages, as yet untouched by
the authors imagination and the ink stain of written words. From this
point, the intoxicant that literature is will start working in their lives, taking
its own course beyond what the two of them can possibly control. It
brings in their midst almost inevitably the anonymous reader, thus jolting
their world of privacy as Amals writings will start getting printed. Initially
EDITORIAL
hurt, Charu will soon follow suit. She draws more applause than Amal
from the critics. Their world of privacy becomes fissured as is the texture
of affect.
***
We believe we know what we are thinking about whole and part when
we employ such categories. Then we subconsciously consider a whole as
a simple collection of parts, each part being either an individual or a subcollection of individuals belonging or contained in the collection. This is
also the case with mathematical wholescalled sets or classesmade up
of clearly distinct elements or subclasses. This is eminently useful in
mathematics as well as in daily life. Yet it is an abstract conception. The
concrete fact is, argues Florencio Asenjo in the article The Whole in the
Part, that wholes are often part of their parts.This is true of the physiology
of a living organism where the whole organism is actively present in its
totality in each of its functioning organs. It is also true of a physical field of
forces, where the whole dynamic structure of the field functions from
within any partial region of the field, the field being replicated inside
each of its portions. Yet we are content to think of a living organism as a
mere collection of organs a set or of a field of forces as divisible when
one of its most essential properties is to have a location in toto in each of
its parts, that is, multiple location.
To make these facts clear in general, this work is divided into four
sections: Parts, Wholes, The Part in the Whole, and then a final
summing up, The Whole in the Part. The first section describes how
some significant fragments, physical or linguistic, spill beyond their
apparent confines in different concrete directions. They are pregnant with
meanings that go beyond their first impressions. Following this is a discussion
dealing with the dictum: the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Often coextensive with its parts, a whole has distinct properties of its own
that we overlook when we see the whole as being merely the sum of its
parts. On the tracks of this line of interpretation, the final section extends
the investigation of the notion that a part influences another by a detour
through the whole to see the whole influencing itself by a detour through
the part as it goes beyond itself.
Saumabrata Chaudhurys essay, Counting and Trembling during the
French Revolution Elements of a Historical Multiplicity has two main
contentions. The first is that sovereignty, in its general structure, has a
numerical logic. The second states that in specific historical conjunctures
and sites, this logic is played out with a special intensity such that we are
confronted not with the simple confirmation or refutation of the logic
EDITORIAL
but with its contestation and division. The French Revolution names one
such conjuncture and site. In four parts, the paper tries to formalize certain
key moments and processes of division during the Revolution and in its
subsequent historiography. For the archive of the revolutionary material
(between 1789 and 1794), the author consults some declarations of the
leading pamphleteer of that time, Abbe Sieyes. For inaugurating the great
tradition of history-writing with the French Revolution as its vital subject
and infinite object Chaudhury reads Jules Michelet. For counterrevolutionary logic and polemic, he goes to Michelets near contemporary
in the 19th century, Joseph de Maistre.
The method of this paper is to excavate certain numerical operations
that run through the sources. It is a veritable archeology of the
mathematical unconscious of historico-political discourse during the
Revolution. The stakes and motivation for this effort lie in the imperative
that we must inquire anew whether the paradigmatic will to a modern,
secular and popular sovereignty that is often imagined to have begun with
the French Revolution (as opposed to the theological and monarchical
sovereignty of the Old Regime) is sustainable as to its axiomatic logic: This
is the logic that declares - whether in the field of mathematics or politics
that the One exists and is that with which we subsequently count the
sovereign(s) whether the one king or the many people. Then the
question to ask is: what are the ontological and political implications of
this prescribed existence? And what happens, what strange trembling is
induced, if one wagers another prescription, an errant one, that the One
is not.?
Pravu Mazumdars essay, Machiavelli and the art of government: on
Michel Foucaults non-reading of Machiavelli, as the titles indicates,
explores Foucaults strange non-reading of Machiavelli but does so that
in a way that throws light on the larger issue of Foucaults method as such.
Even though for Foucault Machiavelli plays a central role in the
genealogical processes leading to the birth of governmentality in Europe
and even though he never denied Machiavelli a position of importance in
conceptualizing his own analytics of power, it was not part of Foucaults
enterprise to give a well-rounded account of Machiavellis works. Instead,
he concentrated on the historical reduction of the philosopher to the one
posthumous text alone i.e., The Prince - by the commentators of the 16th
and 17th centuries. Foucault viewed this historical reduction as a positivity
of discourse that allowed the framing of the discourse of the reason of the
state. As Mazumdar puts it succinctly: His (Foucaults) main interest is in
how this positivity helped to carve out a new discourse that will lay itself
in contrast to the Machiavellian emphasis on sovereign and territory.
If Machiavellis central problem was the security of the Prince and his
EDITORIAL
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EDITORIAL
on. The essay, thoroughly empirical even as it is, makes two significant
theoretical gains. One, along with recognising the migrant communities
in their ethnographic particularities, it views them as operating within the
ambit of legality. And second, instead of chanting hybridity as a mantra
every time one discusses a migrant community, it locates the textured
quality of hybrid subjectivities in the complex reality of community
rights.
C. Ayyappan (1949-2011) is among the most significant Dalit writers
from Kerala. The majority of his stories are told by the unquiet ghosts of
Dalit men and women who took their own lives or were murdered. Udaya
Kumars paper, The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech
and the Dalit present in C. Ayyappans Stories offers an analysis of the
complex figuration of the subject in these stories and argues that Ayyappans
work, through an innovative use of elements from Dalit traditions of
remembrance and narration, advances distinctively new idioms for
presenting a contemporary experience of disinhabitation.
The Dalit issue has traditionally been seen as part of the lower-caste
reform movement, comfortably placed in the larger phenomenon of the
socially disadvantaged. There was no recognition of an autonomous Dalit
social articulation. Only recently as the progressivist narratives of Kerala
modernity are losing in credibility has Ayyappans concern with the
metaphorics of fractured vision given him an unseasonal legibility. The
stripped body writes Udaya Kumar, cowers, making the gesture of
wanting to disappear into itself, to erase itself from the field of visibility.
The twisted, skewed world of the social belies the transparency of daylight
and can only have spectral expression. He is a writer who chooses to
work in the dark room of social time. His art, as the author observes, is
more like nocturnal photography, a spectrography of the night. The
stretch of time between the midnight siren of factories and the early
morning call of the rooster is the time of his stories; this is the time when
the thanatographic lives of the characters flash out in the spectral darkness
of night.
Ayyappans characters are possessed, each character a site of double
existence and as such are at once both over-filled and hollow. The spectral
becomes the sign of a social alchemy that transforms the promises of
inclusion into entrenched disavowals. The authors lonely childhood with
his grandmother in central Kerala as part the Pulaya community sets the
ambience of the stories. The sound of sirens and shrieks of birds is the
soundscape of a world where the execution of untouchable lovers of caste
Hindus or Christians are a normalized practice. If atheism and rationalism
enabled him to acquire the minimal courage for survival in this world of
dark frightening spirits, by the same measure they prevented him from
10
EDITORIAL
engaging with that world, from delving into their midst. As part of his
childhood inheritance one might say, Ayyappan carries a streak of allegiance
to rationalism all through his literary life only to find it being disavowed
every time. The ghostly characters are busy giving rational explanations of
their actions a narrative technique that almost inevitably leads to greater
disorientation, the fulcrum of an excess of unsocial, searing energies.
There is another strand of stories where Dalits are not victims, but
successful, Dalits who have done well in life, managed to marry higher
than their own, have secured well-paid salaried jobs. But even they are
caught in strange behaviour and are busy explaining the rational of such
strangeness. Did the familiar rituals of the farewell function conceal
suppressed upper-caste sarcasm, wonders one such successful Dalit. His
way of getting back was to write a novel to humiliate a fellow Dalit, exposing
his inferior caste status. In one such story, the protagonist clarifies that
when a protest march demanding a hike in salary was in progress, a group
of beggars and lepers and prostitutes onlookers from the street joined
them in support and started shouting the same slogans. In contrast to Joya
Chatterjis article, Udaya Kumars essay explores how assimilation into
middle class life can often turn into a nightmare of anxiety and deception.
Like the last issue of Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, this issue
too includes what can be called a special essay: Susan Visvanathans Summer
Hill: the building of Viceregal Lodge, a fascinating tale of the coming
into being of Simla as the summer capital of the British Raj that blends
freely techniques borrowed from history, sociology and literature.
Visvanathans particular focus is on the process of the construction of
Viceregal Lodge (or, Summer Hill, as it is known). She uses primary and
secondary material to highlight two aspects of the making of this grand
palace: one, electrification of the building and two, the management and
cost of labour. In her account, they also serve as two indexes for analyzing
power and control in British India. The summer capital moved in and out
of the hills every year on the backs of coolies till the railways tracks were
laid up to Simla in 1903. Part of the essay is also about the cartographic
adventure of the empire, the coming in of Simla into the visual register of
the empire sighting Simla in course of mapping the terrain as it itself
opens out to a vast, unspoilt vista.
Along with the sinewy history of labour that the roads and the palaces
contain labour which quite often went unpaid was the other history
of pomp and mirth of the summer capital. The essay in a way is a tribute
paid to the immense labour involved in transforming Simla from a sleepy
sanatorium in the lap of the Himalayas into an imperial habitat This
dear Simla! in the exilic exhortation of Emily Eden. Dalhousie: Balls
here, balls there, balls by the society; amateur plays, concerts, fancy fairs,
EDITORIAL
11
investitures of the Bath and co and co. I quite sigh for the quiet of Calcutta.
In the last quarter of the essay,Visvanathan changes register and moves
to fiction to tell the same story but from a very different perspective,
bringing in the paranoid reveries of Lord and Lady Dufferin over unpaid
labour. Much like Calvinos account in Invisible Cities of Marco Polos
narration of the cities he visited during his expedition, Visvanathans
fictional patch attributes a third, invisible dimension to the palace, one
between the planned and the executed, with the ghostly shadows of the
unpaid workers haunting the Dufferin domestics, like the sea in an
endless ebbing, a threat of return, a lost country. At one point, it seemed
to Lady Dufferin that they were prisoners of their own invention,
prisoners of a grandeur which was so hollow it left them enchanted and
removed from real things. Is this the ultimate story of all empires? Here
is Calvino:Only in Marco Polos accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern,
through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern
so subtle it should escape the termites gnawing.
MANAS RAY
ROOTS
Nature
My initial image of Tagore is as a boy in Jorasanko House, Kolkata, who
writes about his home tutor to come (or rather not to come) on a rainy
day. The following is a paraphrase of what I remember from my own
school days of Rabindranaths writing:
It rained all morning and all day.There was water everywhere; all drains, ponds and
even roads were overflowing with rain water. I sat looking out of the window, almost
certain that the teacher will not come today, praying that the rain would not stop.
The rain did not stop but, alas, nor did the teacher (from coming to teach)!
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RAVINDRA K. JAIN
and culture) minus a territorial fixation. That is the reason why in Tagores
conception diverse peoples and cultures, irrespective of territorial and
geographical boundaries, constitute the domain of a country like India
the Indic civilization rather than a nation. Allow me to quote Partha Chatterjee:
(Tagore) denied the centrality of the state in the life of the nation and instead
pointed to the many institutions and practices in the everyday lives of the people
through which they had evolved a way of living with their differences.The argument
here is (apropos nationalism) that the true history of India lay not in the battles of
kings and the rise and fall of empires but in this everyday world of popular life
whose innate flexibility, untouched by conflicts in the domain of the state, allowed
for the coexistence of all religious beliefs....2
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RAVINDRA K. JAIN
Poet suffused with what I would only call an unbearable softness of being
(a male), something which we moderns nowadays call as being completely
laid back. Two examples will suffice.
It will be difficult for you to fully realize what an immense burden of loneliness I
carry about me, the burden that has specially been imposed upon me by my sudden
and extraordinary fame. I am like an unfortunate country where on an inauspicious
day a coal mine has been discovered with the result that its flowers are neglected, its
fruits cut down and it is laid bare to the pitiless gaze of a host of treasure-seekers. My
market price has been high and my personal value has been obscured. This value I
seek to realize with an aching desire which constantly pursues me. This can be had
only from a womans love and I have been hoping for a long time that I do deserve
it.
I feel today that this precious gift has come to me from you and that you are able to
prize me for what I am and not for what I contain5
Asian Universalism
During his Asian sea voyages, the muse in Tagore haunted him like a
passion and transmuted through the rich mythopoetics of an imagination
of Asia as an abstract entity transcending the imperial and national frontiers
being erected by colonial powers on to the physical and mental maps of
the colonized, thereby serving as a prism to refract the light of universal
humanity. And yet, as Sugata Bose remarks, The swadeshi (own country)
cultural milieu of early twentieth-century India, despite its interest in
rejuvenating indigenous traditions, was not wholly inward-looking; its
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RAVINDRA K. JAIN
19
element, obviously from the West, is put into high relief by the imaging of
the internal/spiritual Indian ethos in a feminine mould. In this context
are recalled the equation between nation, mother and goddess on the
one hand and the sequestering of female sexuality within home (never
outside), on the other hand. My contention is that Tagores life work
upsets the entire configuration of that particular hubris.
WORKS CITED
SECTION I: PARTS
1. Background
Concepts change, some more rapidly than others. Facts, historical events,
discoveries determine the current meaning of concepts, the implicit as
well as the explicit ones. Some are defined in terms of more basic
undefined notions which we call categories or primitive ideas. These
categories also change, some spectacularly so, as the concepts of space and
time, others do so so slowly that seem to be unchanging eternal entities.
Here we want to deal with the basic categories of whole and part which
in our daily life we make use of without thinking about their precise
possible meanings. We do so of course with most categories: we believe
we know what we are thinking about when we employ them until the
facts call for a rectification big or small of prior subconscious interpretations.
But to interpret we do, including when we accept standard semantic
practices. This is true even in mathematics, where defined concepts are a
function of how we set up our primitive ideas, that is, how we determine
the semantic initial domain of interpretation in which such ideas acquire
specific meaning, and in which proofs take residence and acquire a
particular life. The notion that mathematics is incurably abstract is an
exaggeration.
To take parts as individual elements of an expediently simple
collection of individuals that performs the role of whole somewhat
indifferently is the abstract approach with which we feel comfortable when
we do not give to such conception another thought. We want to show
though that there are other ways of thinking which place us closer to
what reality, both physical and psychological, is like in its concreteness.
Not that we want concreteness to be embraced fully once and for all
within a better mental frame, which is impossible, rather to take a few
steps forward in the never-ending task of apprehending reality as it truly
is in its entirety, or better said, in a less incomplete manner.
2. Fragments
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F.G. ASENJO
23
approaches. Indeed, they are even today the triggers of the most creative
inspirations.
Another example of pregnant fragments is the aphorisms. A good
aphorism is not only a valuable condensation of general wisdom, but it is
also capable of an unlimited number of relevant instantiations. Their pithy
content hits us from the start: we recognize their potentiality for valuable
developments. This potentiality makes the aphorism be seen as a brief
treatise that stretches beyond itself. Some authors are especially good at
this kind of genre; they know how to fit the world into a capsule. Excerpts
from a diary or a notebook may fall into this category as well.
Of course, in a deep sense, every writing, no matter how accomplished,
is ultimately a fragment crying for large accounts into which to be
embedded. The Iliad is incomplete without The Odyssey and The Oresteia,
etc. But even any work without a sequel can be seen as part of a larger
whole, a whole which may not exist at the present, and which may never
be brought into actuality. There is an essential incompleteness in any work,
as well as in any act of life, something which far from being a defect, is a
positive, regular introduction to the future.
Now, depending on the strength of the given whole, to segregate one
of its details as a surrogate of the whole and be considered as a whole by
itself may sometimes create an altogether new entity, contrasting and intense
relative to the nature of its origin. Think of how the reproduction of a
segment of a master painting an expressive hand, a grimacing face, a
whimsical particular can became all by itself a veritable new painting,
one with a new overall conception and with a distinctive quality not
necessarily in harmony with the quality and atmosphere of the original.
This is true of music as well, and of literature. A musical fragment
overshadowed by its surrounding developments may turn into a minipiece of its own by itself. The single saying of a character in a play may
grow into an all-encompassing aphorism. In other words, to sever a part
from the whole in which it was inserted can produce the most creative
and unexpected connotations. This is true not only of aesthetic contexts
but also in general. To give an example, the quality of our own life is
fundamentally affected by the temporal context in which we mentally
place our existence. To live in the present or to live in terms of long spans
of time worrying perhaps about how the far-away future will turn out,
or encumbered by the weight of a lingering past produce very different
ways of living our life now precisely because of the different attitudes that
each scale or our conscious way of living generates. Specifically, the scale
in which we live our life leads to very different kinds of understanding, in
fact, to the origination of very different selves with which we find ourselves
existing.
24
F.G. ASENJO
SECTION II:WHOLES
25
26
F.G. ASENJO
5. Lexical Fields
Whenever the concept of field is used wholes have a most significant
role. Fields are intricately related wholes, a field of forces in physics, a
field of meaning in any lexical composition for example. Many
lexicographers reject field analyses because, so they say, field is a mere
metaphor. Yet, it is a matter of direct perception that the semantic whole
of a complete sentence pervades the meaning of each of the sentences
words. The meaning of a sentence is a field, our intuition tells us so
constantly, and as with any field, any change in any of the sentences parts
changes the sentence altogether, which in turn changes the meanings of
all other parts. Fields, being the dynamic semantic form that lexical wholes
take, are real, effective, and universal. Knowing it or not, we use them as
concrete instruments with which we enhance or just grasp the
understanding of a text.
Sentences, of course, can become part of larger wholes, a paragraph
or a sequence of paragraphs. In all cases, here is how linguistics list some
of the essential properties of a lexical field: A principle of totality, a
principle of ordering, a principle of reciprocal determination, a principle
of integrity, a principle of differentiation, a principle of absence of gaps.7
6. Other Examples
What we just said is also eminently true of the arts. The paintings of Paul
Klee, for instance, acquire an entirely new perspective when we notice
the title of the picture after having only looked at its details. An emergent
new work is then displayed to our attention. And so it is with the isolated
notes of a striking musical theme, inexpressive each on its own, but which
we see taking an irreplaceable function when heard as part of the theme,
the emergent new musical reality. Music is, of course, pervaded by fieldtheoretic relationships, tonality if such is the case, dynamic progressions,
timbre, color, all contribute to a red of attractions and rejections which
lead to the pleasure of music listening.
Similar considerations apply to the relations between biological organs,
and that of each organ with the whole functioning living organism.
Physiology is closer to concreteness than an anatomy that deals with totally
circumscribed dead organs. Life is an emergent phenomenon, with each
biological specimen immersed into the species of which it is a part.
Conscious of this state of affairs, Kurt Goldstein accurately defined the
path each organ follows to influence another organ in a living being as a
detour through the whole, a classic and profoundly insightful statement
to describe the way physiology functions.8
Anthropologists also use the notion of whole as a matter of course.
27
28
F.G. ASENJO
29
30
F.G. ASENJO
31
32
F.G. ASENJO
12. Examples
A physical field of forces is a clear instance of how the whole distribution
of attractions and repulsions affects every region of the field and vice
versa. This is true of the electromagnetic field, of the gravitational field,
and of any other physical field of actions. We have already mentioned the
physiology of a given living organism as a biological example of how the
global functioning of the whole influences its local functions, in effect is
actually present in the latter. We also mentioned the constant presence of
the lexical field of a sentence in each and every one of the sentences
parts. I would like here to add the example of the very telling title of a
book by the linguist Fernando Lzaro Carreter: The Dart in the Word.11
He does not explain explicitly what makes the dart in the word which
produces the impact that the word lacks devoid of such content. But
obviously, the extraordinary way in which a word may hit us is unmistakably
a semantic phenomenon, a clear case of the whole in the part.
Other examples from disciplines other than physics, biology, and
linguistics could be added, but what interests us at this point is to answer
this question: what all these previous disquisitions about Gestalt
psychology and physical emergence have to do immediately with the
way we live our daily life? By now we know well that categories undergo
changes and that our explicit thinking of them needs constant readjustment,
great or small; we learn this way. But in our usual behavior we do not put
our categories on trial before we perceive, think, feel, will, and ultimately
act even as we have the old and new categoreal schemes subconsciously
setting the mental scene. Let me give a personal example of how, without
even thinking about it, the whole in the part directly and concretely takes
over our experience, and our actions henceforth.
When I first met Bethsabe, my future wife, I only saw an
uncomplicated fragment of her, as it is the case with most people who
meet somebody unknown for the first time: she was one more acquaintance.
Later on we came to know one another better and fell in love with each
other. By then, her presence had become something entirely different: I
never failed to perceive her whole person in each of her acts; her total
personality and all her potentialities were always present. Little gestures
became every time part of her whole being which, as a consequence,
made me able to see myself through her eyes, kindly.
Something similar can be observed in a good friendship. Jean Renoir,
the French movie director, said: When a friend speaks to me, whatever
he says is interesting. This is true, and the reason is again the presence of
33
the whole person in each of its acts. Of course, when friendships fall out
without remedy the same acts lose their touching value, which only shows
how difficult can be to be truly objective. These are not metaphors that
we are bringing in: we perceive the whole in each part directly and having
the same reality that a color has: we never doubt the existence of, say, a red
dot in a painting.
13. The Perspectives of the Whole
When a part covers the whole it generates for itself a singular perspective
of that whole. The part functions as a point of view from which to
apprehend the whole with its own different ordering and with its own
peculiar sense. In the Mller-Lyer picture we obtain two distinct
perspectives, the vase and the two faces, seen respectively from the two
diverse points of view produced by how our intuition sets an order in the
perception of foreground and background. This allows to look at the
picture anew not as two contrasting wholes, but as a single whole which
offers two opposite perspectives. This view of looking at concrete objects
can be extended from the finite case just referred, to the case of, say, a
sculpture that can be seen from a seemingly infinite number of angles, a
single whole that offers many perspectives as it is observed from all the
possible positions from which it can be viewed as we walked around the
sculpture, each position providing a distinct point of view with a partial
apprehension of the whole. Thus, each angle creates different feelings,
different attractions and thoughts that accompany the minds perception.
Any concrete three-dimensional objet is subject to the same observations.
We must emphasize that the perspectives are real; we can even say
that it is a good approximation to state that a concrete whole is the sum
total of all the perspectives it offer s. Perspectives are not mere
phenomenological constructions; although genetically each belongs
principally to one part, they are instruments of the whole with which it
acts on the reality in which it is placed.
Things get a little bit more complicated when imagination becomes
an additional component of my external perception. As one looks at
the Venus of Milo for example, striking even without her missing arms,
one could try to imagine how the sculpture might have looked complete,
how its perspectivistic impact might have been then. A different added
dimension enters the picture when one allows such a creative subjective
fancy tamper with the concrete aesthetic object as it stands today. The
physical and the subjective merge then to meddle creatively in how the
whole is apprehended.
34
F.G. ASENJO
35
Laughlin, R.B. 2005. A Different Universe, New York, NY: Basic Books.
Geckeler, Horst. 1976. Semntica Estructural y Teora del Campo Lxico, Madrid:
Gredos.
Goldstein, K. 1995. The Organism, New York, NY: Zone Books.
Kluckhohn, K. 1963. Parts and Wholes in Cultural Analysis, a chapter in
Parts and Wholes, edited by Daniel Lerner, New York, NY: The Free
Press of Glencoe.
Asenjo, F.G. 2010. The Primacy of Intuition, Chapter 9 in Psychology of
Intuition, edited by B. Ruelas and V. Briseo, Hauppage, NY: Nova
Science Publishers.
Carreter, F.L. 1997. El Dardo en la Palabra, Barcelona, Spain: Galaxia
Gutenberg.
Gdel, K. 1944. Russells Mathematical Logic, in The Philosophy of Bertrand
Russell, edited by Paul A. Schilpp, New York, NY: Tudor Publishing
Co., p. 139.
Websters Third New International Dictionary, Springfield, MA: G.&C. Merriam
Co., 1961
NOTES
1. Websters Third New International Dictionary, Springfield, MA: G.&C. Merriam Co.,
1961, p. 901.
2. W. Khler, The Task of Gestalt Psychology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1969, p.61. The quotation is from a lecture given by Planck in New York
City in 1909.
3. P.W.Anderson,More is Different, Science, New Series,Vol. 177, No. 4047, Aug.
4, 1972, p. 394.
4. Ibid., p. XIV.
5. R.B. Laughlin, A Different Universe, NewYork, NY: Basic Books, 2005, p. XV, the
underlining in the original.
6. Ibid., p. 393.
7. Cf. Horst Geckeler, Semntica Estructural y Teora del Campo Lxico, Madrid: Gredos,
1976, p. 136.
8. K. Goldstein, The Organism, New York, NY: Zone Books, 1995, p. 247.
9. K. Kluckhohn, Parts and Wholes in Cultural Analysis, a chapter in Parts and
Wholes, ed. By Daniel Lerner, New York, NY:The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963,
p. 114.
10. Cf. F.G. Asenjo, The Primacy of Intuition, Chapter 9 in Psychology of Intuition,
ed. By B. Ruelas and V. Briseo, Hauppage, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010.
11. F.L. Carreter, El Dardo en la Palabra, Barcelona, Spain: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1997.
12. K. Gdel,Russells Mathematical Logic, in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, ed.
By Paul A. Schilpp, New York, NY:Tudor Publishing Co. 1944, p. 139.
38
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
39
40
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
41
42
(7)
(8)
(9)
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
43
44
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
45
The historical discourse on the art of government is thus essentially antiMachiavellian. Foucaults analysis makes it clear, that the interpretation of
the anti-Machiavellian trend prevailing from the sixteenth century till
Frederick the Greats Antimachiavel30 as an expression of moral indignation
merely responds to a surface effect. What actually takes place via the act of
repudiation is the constitution of governmental discourse. In other words:
the moral indignation accompanying the Machiavelli reception of the
classical age is nothing but a strategy of constitution of governmental
discourse. That is why anti-Machiavellianism does not set in immediately
with the (posthumous) publication of Il Principe in 1532, but later on in
the sixteenth century with the emergence of governmental literature. And
it is for the same reason, that exactly at the end of the eighteenth century,
when the discourse on gover nmentality enters a crisis, the antiMachiavellian trend disappears and is substituted by a radically different
assessment of Machiavelli, ranging from the neutral to the positive.
According to Foucault, the reason for a renewed interest in Machiavelli in
the aftermath of the French Revolution is to be seen in the Napoleonic
context, which was created by the revolution and the problem of the
revolution31. This post-revolutionary political context is determined by
the question: How and under which conditions can the sovereignty of a
sovereign within a state be kept intact?32
46
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
47
48
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
the category of population, correlates with the space of the city required
by a population for its statistical processes to surface. Thus Foucaults
genealogy of population issues from the elementary opposition between
the territory and the city, which is certainly one of the essential conditions
for the emergence of governmental power.36
A rudimentary manifestation of this opposition is revealed by the fact
that the city presents a space of fortification in contrast to the openness of
the territory and its diverse zones. Fortification, however, is not to be
reduced to the merely military objective of exclusion of the enemy. Besides
and beyond that, fortification effects the inclusion of the citizen, which
leads to far-reaching consequences. Whereas, for example, the
transportation of goods in the open space of the territory can cause them
to vanish into the distance, the limited space of the city offers them nothing
more than the possibility of circulation. However, not only do goods circulate
within the closed space of the city, but also humans, animals, vehicles and,
above all, diseases. And since besides goods or humans also diseases circulate
within the walls of a city, the space of the city is feared as a potential
source of epidemics.
Circulation of goods, circulation of means of conveyance, circulation
of diseases: the city reveals itself as the characteristic space of circulation,
and the term retains till today its economic, transportational and medical
connotations, as is exemplified by the present-day French expression
circulation, standing alternately for circulation of goods and money,
traffic and blood circulation. With growth in trade volume and the
size of a city population, the phenomenon of circulation becomes an
incontestable fact, consolidating by virtue of its circular dynamics the
individuals affected by it to a milieu, in which the collective effects of a
collection of individuals begin to surface as statistical events and their
series. Foucault draws attention to the fact that in the same period, meaning
the seventeenth century, in which the milieu advances to an increasingly
perceptible social phenomenon, Newtonian physics explains long-distance
effects between bodies by taking recourse to a physical milieu between
them called fluidum or aether as the medium of conveyance of the effects.37
This conceptual concoction of milieu and circulation can be given the title
population, which is to be understood as a milieu functioning
simultaneously as a vehicle and instrument of circulation.38
Whereas sovereign power reacts to problems specific to the territory
to the internal problems of territory through juridical means and to the
external problems of territory through military means the younger
governmental power has to deal with problems specific to the new urban
milieus by means of administrative and scientific techniques. For the
problems assailing governmental power do not result from the bad will of
49
50
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
intensification of the territorial concern of securing the power of the citystate, for the traditional target of sovereign power was to conquer new
territories and guard their integrity: to mark, fortify, protect and enlarge
the territory of the sovereign. Protecting the territory was synonymous to
protecting the sovereign and consisted therefore in the prevention of all
movement that did not issue from the sovereign himself. Foucault
formulates the problem of sovereign power, which can be identified as
Machiavellis problem and consists in the protection of a sovereign territory,
as follows: How (can I) prevent things from getting into motion, how can
I make headway, without letting things getting into motion?42
However, with its essential mistrust of movement, sovereign power
does not only seek to protect itself against external enemies, but, on a
different level, also against the dynamism of the circulation processes,
which emerged with the birth of the city as space of enclosure. Thus
Machiavellis problem, seen in the mirror of the nascent governmental
discourses, is also articulated in the question, how to exercise sovereign
power within the specific territoriality of the city. From the standpoint of
governmental power, Machiavelli treats the city not as an emergent modern
space capable of generating a population and a milieu, but rather as a
territory to be targeted by sovereign power.
Such an observation, incidentally, cannot result from a hermeneutic
histor iography of sense-horizons, but rather from a genealogical
historiography of problem-horizons. The question at the root of Foucaults
genealogy is therefore neither what hermeneutic tradition would have us
ask What does Machiavelli want us to say? nor the act-intentional
question proposed by Skinner43 Was is Machiavelli doing by saying,
what he is saying? , but rather: What is Machiavellis problem? It is only
when a problem-horizon is laid bare, that it becomes possible to connect
certain utterances by Machiavelli with a certain discourse and to disconnect
a specific problem-complex from Machiavellis work as a whole.
As a result of his genealogical reflection Foucault thus outlines
Machiavellis problem:
Machiavellis problem was to know precisely, under what conditions it was possible,
that upon a given territory, gained through conquest or inheritance, the power of
the sovereign is not threatened. () Securing the power of the prince: that was the
problem of Il Principe, and I believe that this was the political problem of sovereignty
associated with the reality of the territorial power of the sovereign.44
51
theory45:
far from thinking that Machiavelli has laid the groundwork for the emergence of
modernity in political thought, I would say that on the contrary he marks the end of
an age, in which the problem consisted in the security of the prince and his territory.46
52
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
1. The analogy with God: The king governs his territory as God governs
nature.
2. The analogy with nature: The king governs a land or a city as life-force
governs an organism, so that the stomach does not (go, P. M.) one
way and the legs go another49. He has to conduct the egoism of the
individuals, incessantly striving towards their own specific well-being,
towards a common welfare.
3. The analogy with the pastor and the father of the family: The king has
been assigned by the history of Gods grace to govern like a Good
Shepherd or a guide of souls. The function of the king is to provide
welfare to the people by following a method, which ultimately allows
them the attainment of celestial bliss.50 The task of the king is thus
similar to that of the pastor or the father of a family. In all his terrestrial
and temporal decisions he must see to it, that the eternal salvation of
the individual is not jeopardised, but rather enabled.51
It is this analectic continuum between divine sovereignty on the one
hand and the practice of the king on the other, which confers on the king
the authority to govern and provides him the models aiding him in his
work. The power of the king is embedded in this continuum, functioning
as a process, in which Gods power is transmitted via the intermediary
stations of nature and the pastor to the lowest rung, represented by the
father of the family. However, the emergence of governmental thinking
leads to a break-up of this continuum between sovereign power and
government. God no longer reigns over the world in a pastoral manner
via the king and the father of the family, but rather on the basis of laws. In
physics and astronomy these laws were formulated by Copernicus, Galilei,
Kepler as the mathematic laws of nature. In the field of natural history they
were articulated as John Rays taxonomical orders of plants and animals. In
Antoine Arnaulds and Pierre Nicoles General Grammar they were
presented as the logical laws of discourse. The world is no longer governed
immediately by God, but by laws.52
The disappearance of Gods immediate pastoral power over the world
at the threshold of the classical age is, as Foucault puts it, compensated by
a dual and antagonistic process of a de-governmentalisation of the cosmos53
and a governmentalisation of the res publica54, the public sphere. The cosmos
on the one hand is no longer conceptualised politically, but rather
scientifically, so far it is now governed by mathematical and taxonomical
laws. On the other hand, the public domain is governed by a new kind of
art, the specific art of the sovereign, regulated no longer by the model of
divine governmentality, but supported instead by the techniques of a
specific craft. In other words: the sovereign is now expected to do something
53
quite different from God with respect to nature or the pastor with respect
to his lambs or the father of the family with respect to his children or the
herdsman with respect to his flock.55 The art of government in this sense
is not merely different from the exercise of sovereign power, rather it is more
than what the pre-governmental prince does. It is a specific practice with
its own laws, belonging to the sphere of neither the sovereign nor the
politics of the pastor56.
The disintegration of the continuum between Gods sovereignty and
the government of the king is the condition of possibility of the emergence
of the art of government and the reason of state and goes back to the two
major transformations mentioned above: (1) God no longer intervenes
immediately in the physical processes of nature in an act, which is a mixture
of grace and government; instead, he holds together the cosmos via the
inherent rationality of natural laws. (2) The political sphere is no longer
analogous to nature, but invested with its own consistency and regularity.
The rationality of the natural and the rationality of the political have fallen
apart into the mathematical and taxonomical rationality of the laws of
nature, articulated in the concept of mathesis universalis; and the political
rationality of the reason of state. From each of these follows an objective logic
of the processes relevant to the cosmic and physical sphere on the one
hand and the political on the other.57
Natural processes thus take place in an ontological sector governed
by a reason common to God and Man and manifested in the principia
naturae, the so called principles of nature.58 In contrast, societies are
politically dominated by a certain type of action guided by rules derived
from a specifically political model and a specifically political type of
rationality, both of which are external appendages to sovereign power.
This extra something is government, a government, which needs to seek
out its own raison.59 Thus, the order of things derives from the principia
naturae on the one hand and from the ratio status or the reason of state on
the other.60
Against the background of this major transformation of pastoral power,
the problematisation of sovereign power can be seen to be constitutive for
the reason of state as the specific rationality regulating the government of
populations. What is implied in this conception of government and its
rationality is a new type of state, existing by and for itself. The new prince
is therefore merely the highest servant of the state, exercising a function
that is at the top of an entire governmental hierarchy. This is the model of
the prince represented for example by Frederick the Great. The opposition
between these two different and incompatible conceptions of the prince
as an imitator of God on the one hand and as a servant of the state on
the other is articulated through identifying Machiavelli as the author of
54
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
Il Principe, deriving the power of the sovereign not from the politics of
governmentality, but rather from that of the pastor.
It makes no difference, whether this identification of Machiavelli is
associated with an acceptance or rejection of the idea of reason of state.
Machiavelli functions here merely as an argument. The supporters of the
idea of the reason of state in the classical age criticise in him a representative
of princely interests and therefore an opponent of the idea of the reason of
state. They say: We() have absolutely nothing to do with Machiavelli.
Machiavelli does not give us, what we are looking for. Machiavelli is, in
other words, nothing other than a Machiavellian, nothing other than
someone, whose calculations are adapted to the interests of the prince,
and we reject him as such.61 The opponents of the reason of state on the
contrary all of them integralistic Catholics like the French Jesuit Claude
Clment, the rival of Richelieu and a supporter of Spain criticise the
supporters of the reason of state for their devotion to the state, which they
see as a new cult to be called statolatry62, which they accuse of godlessness
and lawlessness and which they regard as the emblem of an unabashed
Machiavellianism. They say: Go deeper into your idea of a specific art of
government, as much as you want, you will only find Machiavelli.63 For
these critiques of statolatry, the reason of state, supported by their opponents,
is nothing other than the old sovereign power of the pre-governmental
prince behind the mask of a new rationality.
Thus, in connection with these governmental discourses, Machiavelli
is to be ascribed a rather paradoxical status. On the one hand no art of
government can be found in his theoretical horizon. Foucault explains
this absence by drawing attention to the history of problematisation
discussed above: Machiavellis problem (does) not lie in the preservation
of the state through itself. () What Machiavelli is trying to save and to
preserve, is not the state, it is rather the relation of the prince to the object
of his domination, meaning, that his objective is to save the principality as
a power relation between the prince and his territory.64 Nonetheless, Machiavelli
as the author of Il Principe plays a major role, precisely to the extent that
he is rejected in connection with the controversies around the art of
government and the reason of state. Ultimately, as Foucault observes, he
is at the centre of the debate during this entire period from 1580 to 16501660. But he is by no means at the centre of the debate within a context,
which establishes itself above and beyond him, but rather one that articulates
itself through him It is not he, who defined the art of government,
rather it is through what he said, that whatever constitutes the art of
government can be found.65
55
56
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
57
58
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
59
60
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
61
62
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
analysing neither behaviourial forms, nor ideas, nor societies and their ideologies,
but rather processes of problematisation, in which Being gives itself as whatever can
and must be thought, as well as the practices leading on to their formation. The
archaeological dimension of the analysis is concerned with the forms of
problematisation itself; its genealogical dimension is concerned with the formation
of problematisation processes based on practices and their transformations.
Foucault 1986: 19.
Foucault 1971: 84 f.
Foucault 2004: 386-393.
Foucault 1969.
Foucault 1976.
Henry Kissinger, for instance, categorically rejected the suggestion made by one
of his interviewers to the effect that there might be a Machiavellian influence in
his thinking. See Skinner 1990: 11 f.
See Foucault 2004: 386-393.
See Meinecke 1924. Thomas Lemke claims that Foucaults discussion on the
reason of state is based on Friedrich Meineckes work. (Lemke 1997: 158, footnote
29.) Michel Senellart however rejects this by pointing out, that although Foucault
does mention Meinecke in a footnote in Omnes et singulatim (Foucault
2005: 184), he says nothing about the content of Meineckes work. Senellart
suggests, contrary to Lemkes claim, that Foucault bases his assessment of Meinecke
on the work of Etienne Thuau (Thuau, 1966). (See Senellart 2010: 286, footnote
22)
See above, end of footnote 10.
Foucault 1969.
Foucault 2004: 136 f.
Friedrich II 1740.
Foucault 2004: 137.
Ibid.. See footnote 10 of this essay.
Foucault 2004: 23. See further below, footnote 44.
Ibid.: 27.
With the 16. century we enter the age of governments. Ibid.: 336.
Ibid.: 28 ff.
Diderot and dAlembert draw attention to this connection in their article Milieu
in the Encyclopedia. See Ibid.: 40 and 49, footnote 37.
Ibid.: 40.
See lectures 12 and 13 in Foucault 2004.
Foucault 2004: 101 f.
Ibid.: 28-29.
Ibid.: 100. In his 1979 lectures, Foucault begins his analysis of liberal
governmentality by quoting the British statesman Robert Walpole as saying:
Quieta non movere (What is quiet, should not be moved). (Foucault 2004a,
lecture 1: 13.) With the crisis of governmentality in the late eighteenth century,
identified by Foucault as an essential characteristic of liberalism, the old
Machiavellian mistrust of movement, which can transform any time into an attack
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
63
Introduction: Adunation
Let us begin with a somewhat unfamiliar word used by the greatly
influential logician and pamphleteer of the French Revolution, Emmanuel
Joseph Sieyes, Abbe Sieyes: In 1789, Abbe Sieyes proposed the term
adunation to the Constituent Assembly to convey a kind of statistical
project of nation-building. This was a project meant to construct a system
of common references for revolutionary France in objective and quantitative
terms, a system not dissimilar to the political arithmetic of someone like
William Petty who urged the uniformity of measure, weights and
numbers for the whole of England.1 Yet there was something peculiar
about Sieyes adunative proposal. While data with respect to the
population, the incidence and distribution of births, marriages, death etc.
therein, were being collected in the age of Louis XIV and one could say
there were specific statistical styles prevalent in Germany and England
too in the 17th century Sieyes seemed to be speaking from another place
and level of pre-supposition. So, what is this peculiar locus of enunciation?
To Sieyes, adunation did not mean the collection or aggregation of
data originally dispersed all over the existent provinces of the Old Regime.
Such provinces were too haphazard in their distribution, unequal in size,
population, abundance of natural resources; even their formal unity secured
by the feudal thread running through them, in actuality, betrayed striking
disparities of seignuerial practices and relations. Of course the king was
meant to unify the regime but this symbolic function was increasingly
being weakened by fiscal and administrative crises in the time Sieyes was
campaigning. But even if these disparities and heterogeneities could be
statistically regulated and reduced by a process of ar ithmetical
standardization, or the imposition of standard measures, weights, numbers
on the French provinces, the demand of Sieyes adunative project would
still not be sufficiently met.
66
SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY
67
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the blurred forms of actual historical existence. Lets take two situations of
the new from the first half of 1789 and both connected with the person
of Abbe Sieyes. First, his text from January 1789, What is the third estate?
Then the issue of re-naming the Constituent Assembly as National
Assembly with Sieyes proposal at the centre of the debate
If Sieyes can ask the fundamental question he did in January 1789
What is the third estate? and he can hypothesise the existence of the
third estate itself, it is in the wake of a series of moves made in 1788 from
different quarters to historically and numerically rectify the relation of
the third estate with the two others. This rectification is attempted on the
question of voting in the Estates General. Hitherto the estates voted as
single units or corporations and each the clergy, nobility and the third
estate had one vote. Thus on issues of both feudal and clerical privileges,
whether they related to tax exemptions or such impositions as the tithe
(among other things) it was a foregone conclusion that the clergy and the
nobility would vote on one side and against the third estate which had to
bear the enormity of the fiscal burden at hand.4
Now, in 1788, when the king called a meeting of the Estates General
to be held the following year, the first one after 1614, it was not for reasons
of correctional or egalitarian justice. The finances of Louis XVI were in
doldrums and his minister of the exchequer Jacques Necker knew that it
was impossible to fiscally sustain the nobiliary privileges any further. And
thus he responded with tactical and vigilant approval to the third estates
demand for a doubling of its vote and additionally, counting by heads on
crucial matters in the Estates General. Because that was the only way to
defeat the motions for continuing exemptions and privileges. The demand
of the third estate was of course articulated along the self-evident
justification of its large numbers (over 98% of the total population) and
the material deprivation of its condition. On this point, lets open a short
parenthesis with regard to some protocols and stakes of the historiography
of the French Revolution.
It was in the 1970s that Francois Furet, in several studies including his
most influential work Interpreting the French Revolution, diagnosed a kind of
Jacobin fallacy in the dominant history-writing around the Revolution
which was history writing on the Left.5 The singular source of this
fallacy, according to Furet, was the mid 19th century writer Jules Michelet
and its approximate shape was the following: Led by Michelets magnificent
and ambiguous Jacobin passion, historians of the Left had mistakenly
identified the material state of a part of the population that is the
deprivations of the sans-coulotte with the rational cause of the
revolutionary act of 1789. And in this fallacious schema of reasoning, the
leaders of the revolution provided the ideal mirror of reflection whereupon
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crowd to Versaille, and who bring the king to Paris are indeed counted as
persons and bodies, peoples and sexes, individuals and genera but they
also are most people in the people, meaning, they are the event of a
people in the set called people who can be counted in several ways or
as several sub-sets. The ontological as well as operational enigma that
Michelets singular narration presents us with is indeed, how to count an
event?
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in their doctrine of the multitude,
have powerfully recognized the above problem but preferred a kind of
chaosmic solution attuned to contemporary spinozisms, or should one
say, Deleuzisms.9 To them, the event of a people is a chaosmic singularity,
i.e., a chaosmos of ontological possibilities such as love, poverty, revolution,
subjectivised by the praiseworthy name multitude. What the name
expresses is a splendid if miraculous transmutation and metamorphosis
of number (in their sequential, counted unity) into subject of possibility,
into enactment. Its leap of faith, hope and love, why not, takes it to a
ontological and political region where the field of possibilities is
tendentially maximized and saturated. The contemporary region is global
capitalism but in its own time, the French Revolution in the discourse of
history and political philosophy did claim a similar maximization beyond
its local gestures. However, it seems to me, the local premise of the global
multitudinarian thesis is unable to cross the threshold from numbers to
Number. It would sujbectivise Michelets women too quickly in the
direction of a chaosmic force or potentiality hence the common
identification of Michelets Jacobinism- and its enthusiasm would spring
from the hopes of a maximal actualization of this potential which is already
inscribed in the ontological field of politics. Strangely, this enthusiasm
which, in the revolutionary conjuncture, must be nothing if not enthusiasm
for the new, itself prevents anything unforeseeably new from taking
place. And thus in this hypothetical argument over how to interpret a
certain historical text and its situation the very fecundity of Jules Michelets
source of historiographical passion might be at stake. To retain the passion
of the situation, if not to save its truth, let us take another path, the path
of Number as gesture.
The proposition for this other movement is the following: Unlike the
counting (and counted) sequential numbers which present themselves in
specific cardinalities at specific crossroads so the cardinal figure of eight
to ten thousand for women going to Versailles Number, as a gesture
torn from the fabric of Being, is a swarm.10 What does this mean? In a
simple way, it means that unlike the single chain or order of numbers,
which can be an ascension, descent, accumulation, subtraction etc, taken
as a swarm, numbers display a simultaneity of orders and by that property,
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And that historians on the Left, with varying degrees of accuracy and
vehemence, have repeated the filled signifiers, not re-commenced the
void strangely unites the so-called revisionist Furet with them, not set
him apart. Now to demonstrate the void in Michelet, with admittedly a
great deal of ellipsis, let us shift back to June 1789 when in the Constituent
Assembly, two proposals were made by Sieyes and Mounier regarding
the composition, status and name of the Assembly. In short, the
demonstration takes as its object the very coming-into-existence of the
Assembly, its constitution. It is difficult not to be transported from crest to
crest in Michelets rhythmic narration of the names of this constitution:
from Sieyes rousing declaration of the third estate to commune to
Mirabeaus flexible people to the final movement from Constitutent
to National Assembly. Yet it is required to modulate this undulating
reception to a more interruptive tone and pitch, a response which every
time breaks the rhythm of history and every time re-commences it. In
concrete terms, it means taking up the problem of June1789 when Sieyes
emphasized that the deputies of the third estate must he known as
acknowledged representatives of the French Nation, as different from
the deputies of the other orders (clergy and nobility)who could only be
presumed to be so. Sieyes was further advanced by other proponents
who desired the eventual and urgent constitution of the Assembly as
General and Indivisible. But how was that possible with the formal
composition of the Assembly still consisting of three separate orders or
corporations? There was only one logical and political way out to produce
a non-corporate form which was constitutively indivisible: To this end, Sieyes
proposed the non-corporate and interruptive name Nation or National
Assembly.
Let us pay close attention to Michelets terms of narration: Michelet
says that the proponents who were precursors to Sieyess proposal on
change of name wanted that nothing should separate the declaration of the
new name (General, then National) from the ontological truth of the
nations indivisibility. This was a desire against the void and yet this desire
brings up the void in history and discourse in a razor-edged way. Now
note the tremendous paradox that Mirabeau, who, according to Michelet,
feared Sieyes radicality, desired precisely another sort of repetitive
adherence in history notwithstanding the Revolution, a desire against the
void and for adherence the cipher and glue of which was the king. In
particular, Mirabeau campaigned for the retention of the kings veto on
the Estates General, the Assembly now, thus, in effect, retaining the
corporate and idolatrous mark of the kings haloed body on another,
drastically altered non-corporate, revolutionary body.
Yet Mirabeau preferred, in the penultimate rounds of discussion before
73
voting, the formula for the Assembly as a forum for the Representatives
of the French People. People was a flexible word whose meaning was
manipulable. But the two proper motions, Mouniers and Sieyes that
were to be voted raised the formal even mathematical stakes of the political
discourse of this per iod. Mouniers motion said that the Assembly
consisted of the Representatives of the major part of the Nation, in the
absence of the minor part. Obviously the major part of the nation could
be construed as the people, the word Mirabeau preferred. Sieyes motion
clearly asked for the enunciation of National Assembly. Mouniers
arithmetical basis was that the people constituted the simple majority
of the total members of France - an overwhelming 98% or so - and so
simply understood, their deputies were representatives of the simple major
part of the Assembly. So arithmetically argued, the nation was a sum of its
simple parts, a class of its constituent classes, an abstract body of empirical
bodies. That was its justice. Michelet calls this Mouniers unjust justness
and I will suggest that Michelet draws out here the unjust justness of a
kind of arithmetical masking of the problem of political and ontological
constitution. To perform this task, Michelets historiographic arrow bends
with devious, almost unjust innocence.
Michelet draws the readers attention to the ironic fact that the
arithmetically simple and negligible part of the national sum, the privileged
classes, owned two-thirds of land in France and thus most of its source of
wealth (in physiocratic terms, at least). This unsurprising knowledge
possesses a political and mathematical surprise: Mouniers simple scale
according to which the parts, corporations, classes are counted next to
each other has already been interrupted and indeed voided by the
surreptitious smuggling in of a inconsistency, which means, the presumed
simple and countable parts of the welcoming national totality are
inconsistently, thus complexly, weighted. This further implies that between
the parts apparently passively subject to this just count (of major and
minor partitions), an inconsistent, unjust void must exist. Now, the void
which is the ontological and mathematical name for inconsistency in the
scale of count must not be confused with the physical image of a passive,
neutral empty space that must lie between discrete, indifferent, countable
parts. In other words, while the empty space is a structural condition of
repetition, the void is the inconsistent, interruptive and in the context we
are studying, definitely violent event of decision. Sieyes motion in the
Assembly was the enunciation of such a decision.
It was a decision, neither an arithmetical nor a political demonstration,
that the people were not a simple if major part nor the nation a sum
of parts; rather the latter was a complex and re-composed articulation of a
decision in response to the structural complexity indicated above and
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77
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79
counted according to some representative scale and (in the pamphlet) staking
a super-numerary national (adunative?) claim. Between July 1789, when
Bastille was stormed and October 1789, when the king was forced back
to Paris, the people were an improvisation, a gestural actuality whose
numerical name we have given swarm and whose complex order had
already breached the historical condition of infancy. This movement
Michelet narrates with a kind of partisan accuracy. In the episode of
October he presents to the reader two trembling bodies, but this time
removed from the popular stage the king and the queen. Strangely, this
pathetic drama of corporate destitution is transmuted by Michelet into an
account of popular and ambiguous eros.
On the one hand it is true that in Michelets scenario, the royal couple
are trembling before the hungry and volatile crowd. On the other, when
the same crowd sees and hears the queens young son, the dauphin, cry
out Mamma, I am hungry they gasp for tenderness at the sight of royal,
innocent, infantile hunger Michelet writes of this instantaneous
communication of incorporeal intensities, this shared affect of hunger
between classes otherwise separated by the abysses of history, Hunger
passes from people to the king!19 This, Michelet writes at this point and
into the next chapter, is the ideal conjuncture of pardon, of popular
clemency. It is the subjective emergence of an unbound and generous
horizon which, indeed includes both the people and king on the same
plane. Here the king is as if liberated from his own court, its artifice, its
false images, automata and lifeless statues, to be restored to his natural
body. Thus from trembling, the king is delivered to the eros of the people
such is the subjective horizon painted with a exuberant brush by
Michelet. When the people, in this period, want to free themselves from
the churchs imposition of the traditional tithes, they seek to unbind
themselves from the infinite debt of religious inheritance.Through a similar
act of forcing a defaulting on inherited debt, only in the reverse direction
of the king, the people would force the king to default on his own
artificial sovereignty to restore him to natural, forgiving, loving life.20 In
other words, the people, in Michelets impassioned plea, in the first year
of the Revolution were full of magnanimity, clemency and forgiveness.
Their will is a will to unconditional forgetting, a lifting of what the ancient
Greeks called stasis (civil strife)21 once and for all will to revolutionary
void to which a new, emancipated society could be sutured. Of course
everything Michelet, and the historians after him will write of the
developments following this idealized conjuncture confronts us again with
our earlier ontological thesis: The will cant will the place of the void, it
cant will the event in its own image as will, the will can only decide, the
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81
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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY
83
WORKS CITED
Badiou, Alain. 2009 Theory of the Subject. trans. Bruno Bosteels. London:
Continuum.
, 2009. Number and Numbers. trans. Robin Mackay Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2006 Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan.
(ed.) Thomas Dutiot and Outi Pasanen . New York: Fordham University
Press.
Desrosieres, Alain. 1998 The Politcs of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical
Reasoning trans. Camille Naish . Cambridge, Massachusetts, London:
Cambridge University Press,
Furet, Francois. 1988 Interpreting the French Revolution. trans. Elborg Forster
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kierhegaard, Soren. 1985. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death.
trans. Alastair Hannay, Penguin Books
Lefebvre, Georges. 2007. The French Revolution: From its origins to 1793
trans. Elizabeth Moss Evanson. London and New York: Routledge.
Loraux, Nicole. 2006. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient
Athens. trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books.
Maistre, Joseph de. 1994. Considerations on France. trans. and ed. Richard
A. Lebrun. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Michelet, Jules 1967. History of the French Revolution. trans. Charles Cocks,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Negr i, Antonio and Hardt, Michael , 2001 Empire. Cambridge,
Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press
Sieyes, E.J. 1899. What is the Third Estate? in Translations and Reprints
from the Original Sources of European History. Vol.6, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Veyne, Paul. 2010. When Our World Become Christian: 312-394. trans. Janet
Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity Press.
NOTES
1. For adunation and the context of statistical history in this period, see Alain
Desrosieres, The Politcs of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning trans.
Camille Naish (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Cambridge University Press,
1998) pp. 16-66.
2. For Baillys statement,The assembled nationa cannot receive order in relation
to the kings power to command the estate in June 1789 along with Sieyes
declaration to the third estate, You are today what you were yesterday, See
Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From its origins to 1793 trans. Elizabeth
Moss Evanson. (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) p. 110.
3. ibid., pp. 121-122.
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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY
4. ibid, p. 98-111. On the question of tithes and their eventual abolition, see, Jules
Michelet. History of the French Revolution tans. Charles Cocks, (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1967) pp.249-50.
5. See Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution trans. Elborg Forster
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
6. We can summarize our impressions of Michelets mobilization of numbers in
the paradoxical formulation that they are historically generated but they have a
natural appearance. This formulation will be substantiated as we proceed but
this much must be said here that the natural being of numbers is their ordinal
character.That is, they present themselves as relations, networked and ontologically
woven rather than simply as cardinal quantities or units.
7. For this thesis and the entire range of philosophical and mathematical inspiration,
see Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2009).
8. See Michelet, op.cit., p. 282.
9. Among their trilogy on the potentia of the multitude Empire, Multitude, CommonWealth let us refer to the first for its inauguration of the debate,Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University
Press, 2001.
10. In Alain Badious view, as swarm, Number displays its infinite extension albeit that
extension is also orderly. While as sequential progression, each number comes
step-by-step Such that we recognize them in their assigned place. But that
counting also involves the structural and ontological complication of the void.
See Alain Badiou, op.cit., p. 30, p.141.
11. In his revisionist evaluation, Furet counter poses the early 20th century sociologist
Augustin Cochin to the Historian from the early 19th Michelet and analyes the
paradoxical similarities between the two. See Furet, op.cit, pp. 164-203.
12. For the narrative material of the above analysis see Michelet, op.cit., pp.108121;for the idea of indiscernible and generic sets, See Alain Badiou, Theory of the
Subject trans. Bruno Bosteels, (London: Continuum, 2009) pp. 271-274.
13. See E.J Sieyes (1899), What is the Third Estate? In Translations and Reprints from the
Original Sources of European History.Vol.6, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
PA (first published 1789).
14. The word enthusiasm that Kant uses in The Conflict of Faculties (1798) for what
the thought of the Revolution evokes occurs in Michelet frequently. For the
latter, enthusiasm is not just a subjective experience, it is equally the objective
milieu of the Revolution.
15. Apart from in the Old Testament contexts,fear and trembling also accompanies
St. Pauls message. But these are not accidental affects in Paul; rather they are the
generic Pauline intensities that announce the event of Christ. Kierkegaard is not
away from this generic logic when he joins the pure decision of faith to the
sense-less, absurd command of God. See Soren Kierhegaard, Fear and Trembling
and The Sickness un to Death trans. Alastair Hannay, contribution by Johhanes De
Silentio, (Penguin Books 1985).
16. Among other sources, See Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question:The Poetics of
Paul Celan, ed.Thomas Dutiot and Outi Pasanen (NewYork: Fordham University
85
Press, 2006).
17. See Furet, op.cit., pp. 128-129.
18. Joseph de Maistres several responses and polemics against the French Revolution
are contained in Joseph de Maistre Considerations on France trans. and ed. Richard
A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
19. See Michelet, op.cit., p.313.
20. On the tithes and defaulting on the heirs of the old regime, see ibid, pp.249-50.
21. For a brilliant historical and theoretical account of the role of stasis in ancient
Greek Society, see Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in
Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort, (New York: Zone Books,
2006).
22. See Paul Veyne When Our World Become Christian: 312-394 trans. Janet Lloyd,
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
23. ibid., p. 158-159.
24. For the following arguments and polemics, see, among others, the essays On
the Violent Destruction of the Human Species and Can the French Republic
Last? by de Maistre. See de Maistre, op.cit., pp 23-40.
25. Several questions of method and ontology are involved in this exploration:There
is the initial question of the productivity as well as hazard of the encounter
between mathematics as knowledge and the serial descriptions of history. Also,
the ontological question of mathematics as a possible science of the Real, or as
the reprise of the event.This much can be proferred here that the algebraic idea
of torsion, which presents the aleatory, non-progammed interruption of the
series, apart from holding metaphoric attractions, also realizes the gesture of
language or discourse in its improvisational capacity to precipitate a limit-signifier:
Torsion is such a signifier whether extracted from mathematics or historical
analysis and in its adherence to these fields, it divides them, hollows them.
Strangely then, the limit-signifier is also always s signifier in the middle, a partitive
gesture of discourse. So torsion doesnt only convey a marginal or great crack,
cut in the fabric and field of being we are concerned with but it also raises
anew the epochal questions of new coherences or restored totalities. The locus
of the French Revolution that we are following and which goes by the canonical
distribution between revolution, counter-revolution is nothing but the
topology of these epochal questions. In its algebraic opening, torsion helps
formalize a certain tendential movement towards topology from algebra.Which
replicates, in our terms, the movement form historical period to the periodising
event. See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, pp. 148-153.
26. See Michelet, op.cit., p.156. 27 For adunation and the context of statistical
history in this period, see Alain Desrosieres, The Politcs of Large Numbers:A History
of Statistical Reasoning trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London:
Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 16-66
26. For Baillys statement,The assembled nationa cannot receive order in relation
to the kings power to command the estate in June 1789 along with Sieyes
declaration to the third estate, You are today what you were yesterday, See
Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From its origins to 1793 trans. Elizabeth
Moss Evanson. (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) p. 110.
86
SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY
26.
26.
26.
26.
26.
26.
26.
26.
26.
26.
87
Paul Celan, ed.Thomas Dutiot and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2006).
See Furet, op.cit., pp. 128-129.
Joseph de Maistres several responses and polemics against the French Revolution
are contained in Joseph de Maistre Considerations on France trans. and ed. Richard
A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See Michelet, op.cit., p.313.
On the tithes and defaulting on the heirs of the old regime, see ibid, pp.249-50.
For a brilliant historical and theoretical account of the role of stasis in ancient
Greek Society, see Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in
Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort, (New York: Zone Books,
2006).
See Paul Veyne When Our World Become Christian: 312-394 trans. Janet Lloyd,
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
ibid,. p. 158-159.
For the following arguments and polemics, see, among others, the essays On
the Violent Destruction of the Human Species and Can the French Republic
Last? by de Maistre. See de Maistre, op.cit., pp 23-40.
Several questions of method and ontology are involved in this exploration:There
is the initial question of the productivity as well as hazard of the encounter
between mathematics as knowledge and the serial descriptions of history. Also,
the ontological question of mathematics as a possible science of the Real, or as
the reprise of the event.This much can be proferred here that the algebraic idea
of torsion, which presents the aleatory, non-progammed interruption of the
series, apart from holding metaphoric attractions, also realizes the gesture of
language or discourse in its improvisational capacity to precipitate a limit-signifier:
Torsion is such a signifier whether extracted from mathematics or historical
analysis and in its adherence to these fields, it divides them, hollows them.
Strangely then, the limit-signifier is also always s signifier in the middle, a partitive
gesture of discourse. So torsion doesnt only convey a marginal or great crack,
cut in the fabric and field of being we are concerned with but it also raises
anew the epochal questions of new coherences or restored totalities. The locus
of the French Revolution that we are following and which goes by the canonical
distribution between revolution, counter-revolution is nothing but the
topology of these epochal questions. In its algebraic opening, torsion helps
formalize a certain tendential movement towards topology from algebra.Which
replicates, in our terms, the movement form historical period to the periodising
event. See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, pp. 148-153.
See Michelet, op.cit.
The social world does not divide at its joints into perspicuous wes with
whom we can empathise, however much we differ with them, and enigmatical
theys with whom we cannot, however much we defend to the death their
right to differ from us.
Clifford Geertz, The Uses of Diversity
The mandate of this paper is fairly explicit and clear: to comment upon
and foreground the academic (read, social scientific) analyses of traditions.
In giving effect to it, however, I have had to modify its focus giving it an
altogether analytical twist - while also striving to avoid an excessive
historical self-consciousness about the problem of the order, say, which
asks of a representation, any modality, whether it is Indian, whether it is
not actually Western or Hindu, and, unto this frame, whether it is not
always or already Brahminical or Sanskritic. There are many reasons for
this avoidance, not least my ignorance, a sense of incredulity about matters
formulated as either traditional or modern; but also to fend away a line of
criticism that would interpret any (or all) concern about traditionality
and traditionalisation as both archaic and abstruse or as lending themselves
to a variety of nativist exceptionalism.
An even more decisive impetus marking out the contours of my
engagement is the contemporaneity configuring the question of tradition;
but as I seek to formulate it this contemporaneity would have to be placed
within a normative analytical grid. What I want to talk about in this
contribution, therefore, is not strictly speaking the character of tradition.
One might imagine at least that one is talking about processes of
transmission to be sure, one is here trading off the etymological sense
of tradition, from the Latin tradere, to give over, the act therefore of handing
down or transmitting something from generation to generation when
one is talking about the character of tradition; but I do not want to talk
about transmission per se. Rather, my concern is with how we social
scientists, the secular liberal intelligentsia, by and large stand relative to
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And what is more: apropos the earlier traditions, one notices on the
Indian side that there is a multiplicity of traditions (ibid.) so that it may
be maintained for the Indian case that not only is there not one tradition
from which to mediate claims, there is no one tradition to mediate.
It is to what that formulation, namely, a juncture of traditions can
yield that I wish to turn the readers attention. The late A. K. Ramanujan,
in a delightful and tantalizing essay, formulates this well:
I think cultures (may be said to) have overall tendencies (for whatever complex
reasons) tendencies to idealise, think in terms of, either the context-free or the
context-sensitive kind of rules. Actual behaviour may be more complex, though the
rules they think with are a crucial factor in guiding their behaviour. In cultures like
Indias, the context-sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation (Ramanujan
1989: 47).
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SASHEEJ HEGDE
One can discern an argument here about the nature of traditions in India,
not just about their remarkable polysemy, but also (as in Saberwal, more
so) their historicity, the possibilities they contain as well as their historic
costs. Yet it seems that they both tend towards a universalistic orientation,
though reflecting in this mode critically. Consequently, we may have to
contend with an implication emanating from these proposals: that even as
they alert is to the contingency suffusing Indian cultural and institutional
forms, the regulative idea concerning these proposals, to the extent that
we can formulate it as universalism (that is, the rendering of traditions
from the standpoint of their universalizability), seems to mark a break
with this very contingency.2 Thus, for Saberwal, it is not enough to accept
mediation from within a tradition; one would also have to consider the
possibility that the standards of a tradition could have something
fundamentally wrong about them.3 Or, again, Ramanujan: that cultures
despite all the complexity and oscillation have a definite bias (1989:
57), and that this bias may yet have to be approached in rendering a
traditions contents as representative of ways of life and thought.
The problem here is as much a logical one of an unauthorized
slippage between two levels of discourse, the prescriptive and the
descriptive as one of a straining within and against significant language
93
(to use a phrase from Wittgenstein) that any reflection on traditions must
accept.4 We need to take this problem seriously, if we are to avoid dissolving
the contingency that one is describing. It is not our contention of course
that the universal horizon ought to be unthought or jettisoned (indeed
the very critique of universalism gains its force, so to say, from universalism);
for the universalism-particularism divide, in terms of its competing
imperatives, can also be an argument between different forms of the
universal perspective.5 Rather, that there is a whole problem of the should
the straining within and against significant language in a word, the
imperative/prescriptive dimension of traditions, that must be grasped (and
which, I might reiterate, most arguments for or about contingency smooth
over).6
The foregoing considerations enable us to approach, and even
reformulate, aspects of the imperative/prescriptive dimension of traditions,
some allusions to which can be had from the contexts specified, but
perhaps most concisely in Veena Das (again, a name being taken here as
emblematic rather than figural). Working through an extant interpretation
of the sociology of India, she calls attention to an aspect of the Brahmanic
construction of tradition:
Texts (including the Dharmashastras which lay out rules of conduct) do not prescribe
behaviour in the sense of laying out areas of obligation as much as describing codes
of conduct considered to be exemplary or desirable.This is why the actual governance
of conduct came under customary law, and even the king was not entitled to alter
the customary law of the people (Das 1995: 37).
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special problem, for this position, as to the relation between the sense
and the reference it determines: it simply is in the nature of a sense to
determine a referent. But ultimately the question would have to be faced,
why this sense of something, and not another? Also, how it is that the
existence of an activity or an idea could constitute grasping any particular
sense?
Wittgenstein, in the remarks cited, is of course trading on the possibility
of an oscillation between two orders of sense between what one might
term a descriptive pole (where, for a given order of entailment relations, it
could be affirmed that they are necessary yet contingent, that is, they
could be false and/or refuted by new experience) and a normative pole
(where everything is what it is and not another, not just happening to be
so but also, what is more, cannot be otherwise). And yet, it is important to
note, not quite obliterating the difference between the two poles. When
Wittgenstein states that interpretations by themselves do not determine
meaning and/or that there need not only be one correct way of being
guided by a rule, he is supposing that the order of reasons can be separated
from what those reasons are about, and hence what we are responding to
when we raise validity claims about a state of affairs. The latter too are
responses, that is, they record the place of the pull of the world in claims of
that kind.12 What all this would require is an order of appraisal which
asks, of any given claim be it of what can be known or what must be
done, or even what should be hoped for, within or about traditions not
only why it must be so, but also the relevant identifying norms that bear
upon it.
In focus, then, is not some ultimate truth about traditions, but rather
the cultivation of an attitude an order of conviction proper to that
question. The tendency to think that something is not quite right about a
tradition, as indeed the thought that there can only be one correct way of
enunciating or applying a tradition, leads us to think that the conventions
proper to a tradition could not possibly guide another tradition, since (as
is claimed) the situations specific to these traditions are so different. It is
precisely in order to dispel us of this fixation that I have sought, in the
foregoing pages, to orchestrate come analytical remarks on the enterprise
of seeking traditions as a whole. In what follows, I propose to give further
body to this evaluation, while going on, in a final sweep, to mediate another
locus for bearing upon the question of traditions today.
III. FURTHER ANALYTIC PROTOCOLS
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as to the hypotheses themselves: what can they amount to and how should
they be understood? Let me take up the latter question first this first of
all since it bears upon a dynamic about how traditions could be extended
(as separate, say, from being universally applied) before gravitating,
without necessarily specifying so, into the former question.
A deep source of interest in the arguments condensed above is the
help they provide in opening up the space of traditions to a normative
reading or rendering. It wasnt that we began with an alternative between
which one had to decide; and yet, everything that I have just discussed
seems to me to lead in only one direction, namely, the analytical construal
of the act of appraising traditions. It is important to be quite clear about
what is in question here. If the warrant for any kind of judgment about
traditions is the carrying out of an elaborate argument for it (or against it),
then this simply cannot be so: one cannot decide about its normativity
tout court, from a mere thought about its contents and contexts. That indeed
was the whole problem in the first place, although, in the course of
deliberating it, we were also concerned to mediate an appraisal that would
emphasize methodical ways of working with traditions; within recognitions,
that is, which properly belong to the formation and application of sociopolitical precepts, whose imperative/prescriptive character is also a
hallmark of traditions conceived as alternative forms of life and ideas. The
basic form of this mediation was of course derived from Wittgenstein, but
then an ambiguity seems to attach itself to the procedure here. It is far
from clear whether, in foregrounding a thought given over to recuperating
traditions, one is seeking after an alternative to it or an alternative for it. We
need some firmer hold on this contrast, before coming to resolve it either
way. Some scholars have, in fact, read this indeterminacy back into the
very heart of the Wittgensteinian corpus; and, to be sure, it can be seen to
underly all proposals for or against traditions. Allow me a staging,
preparatory to a determination.
The question has conventionally been whether, in thinking the ground
of our traditions as well as conceptualizing divergent outlooks, we have to
think in a relativistic way, in a way that argues, for instance, that truthclaims and value-claims are to be relativized to the culture within which
they are made. The aim of relativism, so conceived, is to resolve
disagreement, to take views, outlooks, or beliefs that apparently conflict
and treat them in such a way that they do not conflict: each of them turn
out to be acceptable in its own place (Williams 1985: 156). The problem
however, as Williams himself avers, is to find a way of doing this, in
particular by finding for each belief or outlook something that will be its
own place (ibid.). It is important, for our purposes, to see what Williams
is getting at here. According to him, social practices could never come
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To be sure, the issues are much more complicated than what this
condensation would permit. For one, it seems to be adducing to a level of
nor mativity that goes beyond, if you will, an internal (broadly,
understandings in which traditions are made intelligible by being revealed
to be, or to approximate to being, as they rationally ought to be) and
external (a style of understanding in which one makes traditions intelligible
by representing their coming into being as a particular instance of how
things generally tend to happen) norm in operation and held to underly
the study of traditions generally. Now, of course, one could ask whether
this sort of approach is compatible with the ground being deliberated in
this paper. Here allow me to do little more than set the scene for an
argument that I hope to comprehensively formulate in the near future. I
am afraid the analytical line of appraisal would have to be endured.
To be sure, an analysis given to tracing the history of effects through
which a tradition (or an identity) effectively took shape may be necessary;
only, I remain unconvinced about its sufficiency. As if to implicate a
possibility from within this impasse, the theorist Vivek Dhareshwar has
recently suggested that we make a distinction between Western theories
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These are astute questions, sharply posed and deeply challenging. In what
follows, I will try to lay out the basis of an answer. I shall be persisting
with the analytic mode.
To be sure, there is a large amount of critical writing on the problems
of instituting and managing a tradition and/or ideological inheritance.
One could be asking a range of questions about what we, as a people
handling an ideological inheritance or managing a tradition, should be
aiming at, even whether we should be aiming at anything at all; whether
the normative visions that are informing a society (or a time) is a code for
something else, indeed whether, in the context of multiple visions and
multiple claims to inheritance and transmission, there could be anything
stable; about how are comprehensive norms related to such other modern
values as efficiency, merit, liberty, the rule of law; and so on.These questions
can and have been raised from a variety of standpoints, and are open
to historical, sociological and normative-political modes of elucidation. I
am inclined to the view, however, that much less attention has been devoted
to the more abstract question: What is the character of our - any
collectivity or segment of a populations deeper commitment to treating
a tradition or ideological inheritance as foundational, a commitment which
is held to underlie particular protestations? Note, not What are its
implications? but What does this foundational ascription amount to?
and What it is based on?
One way of capturing this difference of viewpoint is by positing a
dichotomy between, yes, the prescriptive and descriptive interests in a
foundational tradition, that is to say, interest in a foundational tradition as
aim as opposed to interest in a foundational tradition as a fact or as a
descriptive claim. This framing is certainly problematic; and in fact, if one
were to formulate from within the evidence presented by historical and
sociological scholarship, it can never obtain. Indeed, as extant modes of
histor ical and sociological prognoses testify (while not themselves
rendered in these terms) prescriptive and descriptive views are hopelessly
mixed up and the terrain of tradition is pushed and pulled in all directions
right, left and centre. Now while a softening of the contrast between
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WORKS CITED
105
Winch, Peter. 1981. Im Anfang War Die Tat. In Irving Block (ed.) Perspectives
on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.159-78.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1965.A Lecture on Ethics. Philosophical Review, No.74:
3-12.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1974. Philosophical Grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
NOTES
1. The tradition in question here related to certain Indian ideas about rules and
laws, which my reconstructive appropriation sought to frame and contemporanize.
The imperative/prescriptive dimension of rules and laws in the Indian traditions
that I ventured to theorize could be extended to a more generalized context of
tradition per se. It is with this presumption that my current paper proceeds.The
first three sections of the paper, therefore, mark an adaptation of the terms
offered in that earlier analysis.
2. Cf. Habermas:What does universalism mean, after all? That one relativizes ones
own way of life with regard to the legitimate claims of other forms of life ... that
one does not insist on universalizing ones own identity, that one does not
simply exclude that which deviates from it ... (1992: 240). Broadly, this is what is
being meant by the rendering of traditions from the standpoint of their universalizability.
3. This is the import of what I take to be Saberwals remarks against relativism, as
well as his recourse to a concept of resilience (see his 1995: esp. pp.20-1).
4. Wittgenstein, of course, was querying our capacity to rationally discourse about
ethics: that ethics is an attempt to say something that cannot be said, a running
up against the limits of language. See his A Lecture on Ethics (1965). Of this
lecture, a recent biography has noted: In what was to be the only popular
lecture he ever gave in his life, Wittgenstein chose to speak on ethics. In it he
reiterated the view of the Tractatus that any attempt to say anything about the
subject-matter of ethics would lead to nonsense, but tried to make clearer the
fact that his own attitude to this was radically different from that of a positivist
anti-metaphysician (Monk 1991: 277). But see the considerations to follow.
5. The scholarship on this question is vast, but for one that bears on aspects of our
problem, see Osborne (1992). Balibar (1995) is another provocative place to
grasp the complexities that attach to this formulation
6. By way of an elaboration, Wittgenstein further contrasted absolute with relative
value, taking the latter to involve a pre-determined standard (as when we say
that this is a good table, and mean by good that the table comes up to a
certain standard of excellence for tables).Thus such judgments, being relative to
a pre-determined standard, are, on Wittgensteins view, simply disguised statements
of fact. As such they do not express what he regards as absolute or ethical value
(1965: 5-6). Rendered thus, I suppose, there can be a way of judging a condition,
without smoothing over what that condition can entail, namely, contingency.
7. Although the construal, on the face of it, sets up a sort of contrast (or, the very
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8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
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least, a dualism) between behaviour prescribed in the sense of laying out areas
of obligation and codes of conduct considered to be exemplary or desirable,
I am glossing the same in terms of an idea of prescription. Besides, the recognition
among philosophers and jurists alike that there are difficulties in treating tradition
as command, that the bulk of traditional rules are not in the form of prescriptions
- which, incidentally, Das forces us to engage (1995: 38, n.9) - seems to be an
attempt to query a specific idea of prescription, and not prescription per se..
Note also that a concept of tradition as stipulative inflects the vocabulary of
prescription in a certain direction.
For a further framing of this economy of power, see the piece from which I
have been extrapolating thus far, namely, Hegde (1998).The decision to avoid a
substantive ground of appraisal here in this current paper is deliberate. It opens
up the space for a more formal ground of appraisal.The rest of my text rehearses
this analytical ground more fully and deliberatively. Social scientists not given
over to reflective philosophical work might find the sections abstruse and tedious.
I can only implore their patience and capacity for deliberation.
See Davidson (1985). He has argued that, as a consequence of the nature of
interpretation, we could not be in a position to judge that others had concepts
of beliefs radically different from our own (1995: 143), that therefore there
could not be others with concepts or beliefs radically different from ours, and
thus the idea of a dualism of scheme and content is incoherent. I shall return
to Wittgenstein presently, and am therefore avoiding a reference here.
To generalize our terms somewhat: the point, note, is not that if there are no
decisive reasons to live in one way rather than in another (among the more or
less disparate forms of life or traditions, if you will - that are known or that can
be conjectured) then we may as well conduct ourselves as the people around us
expect - whether or not they themselves have any good reasons for regarding
their rules of life as right and proper. This would be to take for granted the
relativist arguments that since forms of life (or traditions) differ, none of them
are absolutely right. But this is logically mistaken. Numerous though forms of
life/traditions may be, and however discrepant they may be from one another, it
could still be the case that just one of them was (or is) absolutely right. It is not
self-contradictory to assert as much, and plainly it is a logical possibility. The
question, however, as to how we should discover the one right form of life is
separate, and not a purely logical matter. But the consideration that has to be
borne in mind is that the relativist has given us no proof that it is not to be
found. Note also the arguments that follow.
Whether Wittgensteins position here is a triviality, as Williams (1981 passim)
has tried to suggest, might have to be readdressed in this light. Note also that
our point about the determinacy in question being one of sense and not of
truth is drawn from Winch (1981: 163). It is again, I might add, a moral of
Wittgensteins thought that what we need to learn is not the right view of
language, but rather how hard it is to look. What this must imply for our efforts
to re-inscribe the secular-communal question is perhaps only too obvious.
Our point, note, is not about either denying facts or asserting that all facts are
interpretations; rather, that there are plenty of facts, but then insisting also that
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in the sign of the revolution, only fuels the archaic racial factor in the
society of slavery, Bhabha explains that modernity needs to create a
rhetoric of retroversion for the emergence of racism. (2006 219) Drawing
on Benedict Andersons view of colonial racism as a strange historical
suture in the narrative of the nations modernity, he shows how the
representation of racism as ahistorical outside the progressive myth of
modernity structures its split-consciousness. (2006 222) Through
examining imperial and postcolonial texts, this paper focuses on the nexus
between reason, writing and the imperial text in writing black people
out of history, culture, and humanity and their reinscription into the human
race through the technology of writing.
As the first to theorize the black condition formally, Frantz Fanon
offers a good starting point for focusing the question of blackness and the
limits of the human. Fanons unmasking of the corporeal schema
exchangeable with a racial epidermal schema through which blackness
is inscribed with cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial
defects(1967 112) and so on evokes the history of the construction of the
black people as savages, brutes, illiterates. (1967 117) Although half a
century separates the revolutionary and philosopher from Martinique from
the King of Pop Michael Jackson, who died in 2009 allegedly of an
overdose of prescription painkillers, the shared black experience of
negating corporeal consciousness could account for the global icons
hopeless task of sculpting and bleaching himself into a simulacrum of
a white man, which suggests a profound loathing of blackness. (Gates
2009 Npg) Fanons reported production of a serum for denegrification
in laboratories worldwide that might make it possible for the Negro to
whiten himself appears both prophetic and diabolical in light of Michael
Jacksons fatal attempt to throw off the burden of that corporeal
malediction. (Fanon 1967 111) Similarly, Henry Louis Gates Jrs arrest in
2009 his own home demonstrates that his credentials as the nations most
famous black scholar, did not emancipate him from the burden of
blackness in the year America elected its first black President reinforcing
the continuity of the historico-racial schema in the present. In wanting
to be a man among other men, Fanon was articulating the longings of an
entire group of people whose claim to human status was challenged
through an arbitrary definition of being human in which physiognomy
became linked to mental or spiritual attributes. (1967)
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon equates dehumanization to being
an object among other objects through his being fixed by the glance of
the other or being for others(1967 109). The black mans problem,
according to him, is not of being black but of being black in relation to
the white man because of the ontological impossibility of blackness within
111
the western episteme. The other important point that Fanon makes is the
gap between the wests intellectual understanding/knowledge of the
equality of all beings and ground realities. Citing his own experience of
being fixed as an object of the white gaze, he shows that it was impossible
for the black person to inhabit a physiological space consisting of residual
sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic,
and visual character but to mould itself into the image of the other as
produced by the white self. (1967 111) This remaking of himself as an
object, in Fanons view, is the source of the black persons dehumanization.
Focusing largely on the construction of the Negro as an alterity to the
white in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon engages specifically with the logical
conclusion of Christian Manicheaism in the natives dehumanization and
its turning him into an animal in The Wretched of the Earth. (1968 42) He
examines the zoological terms - the yellow mans reptilian motions, of
the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn,
of gesticulations - employed by the settler to describe the native and
other references to the bestiary to show how their naturalization in the
colonial vocabulary dispossesses the native of his humanity. (1968 42)
Following Kenyan writer Ngugi wa thiongos description of Karen
Blixen as a racist author in his essay Literature and Society and inclusion
of her text among those that define the colonized world for the European
colonizer(1973 16) Out of Africa and Shadows of the Grass, Baroness Karen
Blixens(Isak Dinesen) memoir about her life on a farm in Kenya, has
come to be regarded as a textbook illustration of the reification and
dehumanization of black people that Fanon had located at the base of the
imperial mission. Notwithstanding the justifications provided by white
scholars to exonerate Blixen from racist allegations, the tone and imagery
of her text is unambiguous in tracing a Christian trajectory through which
the black person has been reified through his cosmic location between
the natural, the animal and the human.
The Natives were Africa in flesh and blood. The tall extinct volcano of Longonot
that rises above the Rift Valley, the broad mimosa trees along the rivers, the elephant
and the giraffe, were not more truly Africa than the Natives were small figures in
an immense scenery. All were different expressions of one idea, variations upon the
same theme. (Blixen 26-27 1984)
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115
of writing poetry. His reminder that Phillis appearance before the tribunal
must be contextualized against the vast body of Renaissance and
Enlightenment literature debating on the humanity of Africans, which
could be summarized simply as whether they were human beings
descended along with Europeans from a common ancestor or if they
were, as Hume had put it in 1753, another species of men related more
to apes. If Wheatley could conclusively prove that she had indeed written
the poems that were attributed to her, the Euro-american world was willing
not only to set her free but also to concede the rationality and humanity
of the black race. While Gates Jr engages with the question whether the
humanity of the Africans was essentially related to the possession of reason,
it is not quite clear how the faculty of reason becomes connected, following
Hume, with the capacity to create arts and sciences. Meticulously
establishing the European philosophical tradition represented by Hume
and Kant as racist, he concludes that Phillis was auditioning for the
humanity of the entire African people.1 (2002 Npg)
Writing could be privileged as the instrument of reason and used to
denigrate black people and cultures only through a reversal of the wests
inherent phonocentricism since western thought, in general, has historically
valorized speech as primary and authentic and relegated writing to
secondariness and inauthenticity. The suspicion of writing is traced back
to the oft-quoted passage from Platos Phaedrus in which King Thamus,
warns the god Thoth that writing would affect human beings power to
remember. Platos distinction between false memory, improved by the
technology of writing, and real memory, between the semblance of wisdom
and real wisdom and between seeming to know much and knowing
nothing(Plato Phaedrus 275 a-b) has been debated for centuries as are his
views on the naturalized relationship between speech and understanding,
between the spoken word and meaning. In view of the widely held view
of the spoken word as the repository of knowledge and the devaluation
of writing that has been carried over even in modern linguistic theories
such as those of Saussure and the effects of western logocentricism that
reach down to the present day, it is pertinent to inquire the reasons for the
appropriation of writing as the prime instrument of reason in imperialism.
This movement appears to have begun with the Age of Enlightenment in
the mid-decades of the 17th century to the 18th century with its absolute
faith in the power of Reason to lead humankind into an advanced stage
of progress. Enlightenment regarded Reason as an instrument of
emancipating one from the medieval world-view based on faith and from
immaturity to maturity and writing as the seat of Reason. Imperialisms
strategic appropriation of writing and reason to societies without writing
to justify its rule foregrounds the relationship between writing and power.
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The tradition of western science and philosophy that situates the logos,
the word or act of speech as epistemologically superior and logocentric
linguistics that confirms the phonic sound of the word coupled with the
sense of the word as the ideal location of metaphysical significance presents
speech as a presence. The notion of writing as a sign of a sign runs from
Aristotle (384BC-322BC), spoken words are the symbols of mental
exper ience and wr itten words are the symbols of spoken
words to Rousseau (1712-1778): writing is nothing but the representation
of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the
image than to the object. Denial of Reason and humanity to those without
writing even as it continued to insist on the primacy of speech belongs to
the string of contradictions that underpin imperialist thinking. But
imperialisms deployment of writing in colonized cultures confirms the
relationship between writing and power disclosed by Ong and Levi-Strauss.
Viewing writing as a technology and the written word as frozen, and in
a sense dead, Ong was the first to call attention to the political effects of
writing. In his critique of writing, Levi-Strauss held that the real reason
for writing was not scientific or philosophical advancement but to facilitate
subjugation or to increase social oppression as illustrated by the incident
of the Nambikwara Chief who had instantly recognized that writing gives
some individuals power over others. It was Levi-Strauss who pointed to
the historical coincidence between the invention of writing and social
and economic stratification. While Derrida has effectively deconstructed
the Nambikwara episode to reveal the presence of classificatory structures
that were used by non-literate societies in the absence of writing, the role
of writing in subjugating colonized subjects and knowledges cannot be
denied.
Whether writing contributed to scientific advancement or not, the
complicity of the new scientific disciplines in using pseudo-sciences to
promote a form of scientific racism has been well established. The scientific
racism of 18th century pseudosciences intersects with Enlightenment
thought in its denial of Reason and humanity to the black people. This
racism is articulated either in the monogenism of European naturalists
and scientists such as Johann Blumenbach, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte
de Buffon or the polygenism of Carl Linnaeus (17071778) and Georges
Cuvier (17691832). As Gates Jr demonstrates, the most revered names in
European philosophy including Voltaire, Kant (17241804), Hegel(1770
1831) and Schopenhauer (17881860) subscribed to the climatology or
environmentalism of the polygenists. However, it was the valorization of
Reason in the rationalism of Descartes, one of the key figures in 18th
century scientific revolution that Reason came to be regarded as the
measure of humanity and writing as the visible sign of Reason. Gates Jr
117
The imperial logic that served as the perfect justification for the control of
the colonized people was obviously not without its contradictions. Black
people were not deemed to be human because they could not write and,
thus, reason. But they could not write because they were forbidden by
law to write. The relationship between political and economic alienation
with racial alienation is foregrounded through a 1740 Southern California
statute quoted by Gates Jr that made it impossible for black slaves to
acquire, leave alone, master literacy.
Despite Phillis Wheatleys having successfully proved the black persons
capacity to create arts and sciences, black creativity still required rituals of
authentication from the white world against a historical backdrop in which
the ghosts of Hume and Kant could not be easily exorcized.2 More than
two hundred years later, the first black recipient of the Nobel Prize for
Literature, Wole Soyinka pointed out that the greatest figures in western
thought Hegel, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire - an endless list were unabashed theorists of racial superiority and denigrators of the
African history and being. (1986 Npg) In his acceptance speech, Soyinka
broke the polite silence with respect to race in the western world by
addressing the histor ical discourse of slavery and colonization and
implicating the white world in the most heinous of crimes against
humanity. His recall of the symbolic significance of each act of defiance
Sharpville, 1930s burning of passes, the 1919 protest against the Native
Pass Law and other acts of racial terror as an acknowledgment of improved
knowledge and respect for the potential of what is feared imbued the
black writers standing before the Swedish academy with a symbolic
significance. (1986 Npg) He unambiguously positioned himself as a
representative figure whose winning the award was connected in a similar
way to the rights of the black person as Wheatleys and his winning the
highest Euro-american literary honour as a historic victory for the entire
black world. The first black Nobel Laureates address to the white other
rather than the black self carried strong overtones of speaking back with
the triumphal moment of black creativity turning into an inquisition: In
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your anxiety to prove that this moment is not possible, you had killed,
maimed, silenced, tortured, exiled, debased and dehumanized hundreds
of thousands encased in this very skin, crowned with such hair, proudly
content with their very being?(1986 Npg)
Citing the Hola Camp to illustrate black white relations, he expressed
astonishment at the fact that the white overseers clearly did not experience
the reality of the victims as human beings. Animals perhaps, a noxious
form of vegetable life maybe, but certainly not human. (1986 Npg) It
was Soyinka who demonstrated how sub-human denigration of black
people became the altruistic remedy for the civilizing mission and
established their connection with imperial greed. (Soyinka 1986 Npg)His
allusions to the naturalization of race thinking among the whites who
had no conceptual space in their heads which could be filled - except
very rarely and exceptionally - by the black as also human drummed
the historical significance of the black man receiving the award across the
world. (1986 Npg) However, it was his shocking revelation of the
persistence of such attitudes voiced by Eddie Roux, the Afrikaaner political
rebel and scientist, at the turn of the 20th century that epitomized the
Afrikanner attitude in the present:
The African was on a different plane, hardly human, part of the scene as were dogs
and trees and, more remotely, cows. I had no special feelings about him, not interest
nor hate nor love. He just did not come into my social picture. So completely had I
accepted the traditional attitudes of the time. (Roux in Soyinka 1986 Npg)
Quick to point out the contradiction between a minds racial tabula rasa,
if you like - in the first decade of this century and the time, in short, when
the Nobel series of prizes was inaugurated, Soyinka viewed his
recognition as an antidote to the dehumanizing label implicit in the Native
Pass Laws. He consciously used the space provided him by the Swedish
academy as an opportunity to voice the hurt and anger of the black people
at their dehumanizing treatment even in the present summing up an entire
history of race relations and race thinking that persists even in the 21st
century in his brief address. He deftly transformed the paternalistic
celebration of the black spirit into a searing reminder of the long history
of oppression to prevent it from becoming a troublesome event of no
enduring significance. (1986 Npg)
Soyinkas Nobel lecture is remarkable in its reiteration imperial
metaphors through the imagery of nature and nurture, metaphors of the
jungle and of inherent infantilism of the African, which are then turned
against the imperial construction. It is interesting that Soyinka should
have turned the wests own environmentalism and its jealously guarded
sovereignty of Nature and the Cosmos by viewing the explosion of black
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the six men on Sweet Home, who survived to tell the tale, is made to
understand the difference between treated like a human being and
dehumanized when, bit on mouth, he imagines the rooster Mister smile
at his bondage. Chinua Achebe admitted that his motivation behind writing
Things Fall Apart was to tell the world that the African past was not one
long night of savagery from which the white man, acting on Gods behalf,
delivered them. As writing was the prime instrument of imperialism
through which blackness was figured as an absence, the act of writing
becomes the means with which the black writer reinscribes the black
person into human race. Through using writing, the prime culprit in the
denigration of blackness, in emancipating the black race, black writers
turn the masters tools against himself.
Yet Black people, as we know, have not been liberated from racism
by our writings, Gates Jrs words have a prophetic ring in light of his
own recent experience(1985 12)
Gates Jr points out that in the the recording of an authentic black
voice through which the African would become the European, the slave
become the ex-slave, brute animal become the human being or that
through writing themselves out of slavery black writers(Gates Jr 1987 1213) fell into a trap through accepting the premises of the western discourse.
In other words, there is a certain irony in black writers writing themselves
and the black race out of slavery into humanity in that they themselves
become complicit in the destruction of their oral cultures through the act
of writing. If the written word is death, as Ong maintained, Chantal Zubus,
in an essay on Chinua Achebe, brought out the implications of the
incorporation of African traditional oral material that she called ethnotext for the demise of orality(20) through the linguistic concept of
glottophobia, which means the swallowing of languages that dont go
into print by those that do resulting in the extinction of the former. In
their deployment of writing to celebrate speech, African writers become
implicated in the violence that was writing and repeat the Levi-Straussian
gesture of resorting to writing in order to establish the authenticity of
speech and innocence of oral societies. Although the Kenyan writer Ngugi
wa thiongo has proposed orature as a term for defining Africas creativity
that remained unwritten, the majority of black writers, including thiongo,
have adopted writing as a panacea for recovering the African self.
This ambivalence of writing is, however, implicit in the Greek term
pharmakon [poison; cure] that Derrida deconstructs to show the nature of
writing. Derridas reading of Phaedrus shows that the failure of Platos
text to accomplish what its arguments explicitly require: the priority of
speech, logos and presence over writing. Writing serves as both poison
and cure, as it is a threat to the living presence of authentic (spoken)
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ANJALI GERA-ROY
It has been argued recently that the genealogy of the modern concepts of
society and community in India can be traced back to the nineteenth
century colonial, reformist and nationalist discourses. (Kaviraj, 2002;
Prakash, 2002) As the studies on the colonial governmental rationality in
India tell us, Indian society was identified in the colonial discourse
with a definite and clear intention as an object of reform and restructuring.
(Scott, 1995; Prakash, 2002) In the colonial discourse of Indian society, the
practical-refor mist intentions and epistemological perspectives got
combined as society was perceived as an object of knowledge and an
object of transformation simultaneously. This conceptualization took place
clearly under the influence of utilitarian-liberal worldview dominant at
that time, particularly from the early 19th century onwards. (Scott, 1995,
204-205; Cf. Stokes, 1989) The restructuring of the domain of the social
under the regime of liberal governmentality and the emergence of concept
of society in liberal political philosophy as a high order abstraction that
provided a grounding for the new political rationality was happening
simultaneously in the countries of Europe as well. But as David Scott and
Gyan Prakash have argued, the imperatives of colonial governmentality
were different from the liberal governmentality in the Europe.
The colonial project, Prakash argues, was enmeshed in the basic
contradiction between colonial despotism and possibility of a society as a
domain of freedom. Colonial regimes inability to constitute a civil
society in India manifested in its application of the rule of colonial
difference according to which the state-society relationship in India were
viewed very differently than in the case of European state where liberal
political philosophy provided the model for such relationship. The state
in the liberal framework relates to citizens in the civil society and civil
society is constituted by free and equal individuals. In case of colonial
India on the contrary, Indian society was perceived and constructed by
colonial discursive and institutional practices as consisting of religious
communities, castes, and tribes. (Prakash, 2002, 28-34) These entities are
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MOHINDER SINGH
supposed to act on the basis of collective, and not individual, interests and
affiliations as they were supposed to invoke frequently collective bonds
and rights based on imagined ties of kinship, religion, culture, past and
sentiments. Such assumptions about the nature of society in India played
important role not only in the formation of Orientalist, missionary, and
utilitarian discourses but also in the new legal system and the governmental
technologies of counting and classification of population.
The conceptualization of the domain of the social by the Indians
beginning with the refor mers should be understood against the
background of such discursive and institutional practices. That they should
be understood and explained against this background doesnt mean that
Indian conceptualization of the social was simply a replica of the colonial
construction of Indian society. On the contrary, the colonial conceptions
based on colonial assumptions were fiercely contested by the reformers
and later by the nationalists. The conceptual structure of the Indian
discourse about society and the social should be understood by analyzing
the specificities of this conceptualization in all its historical details.
At the same time, it must be recognized that the process of
conceptualization of the social in different regions of India in the
nineteenth century is related but at the same time there are crucial
differences because of the differing nature of political and social
transformations they undergo during this period. (Kaviraj, 2002, 97-142)
Some of the differences also appear because of the different dynamics of
the vernacular modernity in each of the linguistic region of India,
depending on the level of penetration of the colonial administrative and
educational institutions. Related to the spread of new educational regime
is the colonial linguistic practices, directed mainly from the Fort William
College. These practices focused on defining languages discretely by
producing literary histories, standardized grammars, dictionaries and
glossaries, and gradually led to the standardization of modern vernaculars.
(Kaviraj, 2009, 312-349)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, these standardized modern
vernaculars became the media of communication in the newly emerging
vernacular public spheres. (Kaviraj, 2009, 312-349) Gradually, they also
became instruments for the formation of the regional linguistic identities
under the leadership of regional cultural elites, a process that went parallel
with the formation of a sense of national identity.(Kaviraj, 2009, 328-335)
The formation of regional linguistic identities took place at a much larger
geographical scale than was possible hitherto. The extension of the
geographical scale was linked to the extension of the scale of social and
political action made possible by administrative instruments such as
language based census and the language policy on the one hand, and by
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MOHINDER SINGH
from the reformist critique. (Dalmia, 1997, 356; Zavos, 2001, 109-123)
The Dharma Sabha understood Hinduism as a clearly definable entity
that could be governed by rules and regulations authoritatively defined
and interpreted by the Sabha itself. The Kashi Dharma Sabha was in a
privileged position to carry out such a task as Banaras pundits enjoyed
this privileged position since ancient times among the Hindus.
The movement for the official recognition of Hindi language with
Devanagari script started around the same time i.e. during the decades of
1860s and 70s. Bhartendu Harishchandra, along with Raja Shivprasad
Sitarehind, was actively involved in this movement. As the movement slowly
gained momentum, it emphasized the separation of Hindi from Urdu
and its distinct identity. From the very beginning the movement for Hindi
language linked the identity of Hindi with the Hindu religious community
and presented Hindi as the language of the Hindus of North India and
Urdu as the language of the Muslims. In the course of time, particularly
among the urban educated populations, the identification of Hindi with
Hindus and of Urdu with Muslims was consolidated through literary and
political discourses. Most remarkably, despite their mutual quarrels on
the reform question, when it came to the promotion of Hindi, the Arya
Samaj and the Sanatan Dharma supporters formed a united front. Thus at
the moment of the birth of modern politics in the Hindi-Urdu speaking
regions of North India, the construction of a new social imaginary took
place in these separatist discourses in the first phase of the nationalist
movement wherein linguistic, social, and political issues get intertwined
with each other.
In first phase of its development, the literary and political discourse in
Hindi was deeply influenced by the ideas of Bhartendu Harishchandra.
Many of the prominent literary figures of this period, who were active in
politics also, actively promoted his ideas. In the rest of the article, I analyze
the works of some of the most prominent Hindi intellectuals of this period
such as Bhartendu Harishchandra, Balkrishna Bhatt, Radhacharan
Goswami, Pratap Narain Mishra, Chaudhary Badri Narayan Upadhyay
Premghan, with a view to understand the conceptualization of the social.
Most of these figures were editors of important Hindi newspapers and
magazines of that period such as: Harishchandra Magazine, Kavivachan
Sudha, Hindi Pradeep, Brahman, Anand- Kadambini, Bharat-Mitra, etc.
Some of them were active in politics, being delegates for some sessions of
the Indian National Congress or otherwise taking deep interest in politics
and influencing public opinion.
These figures played a historical role in the shaping of modern Hindi
literary as well as political discourse in this region. Their historical role
acquires an added importance as they were also instrumental in developing
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MOHINDER SINGH
didnt have any basis in religion but had only non-religious justifications;
such practices were not essential to religion. The second argument was
that those social practices should be accepted which were prohibited by
contemporary society but which were not contrary to the scriptures, but
later, accretion. His examples for such practices included nothing but the
main agendas of the nineteenth century social reform movements:
promotion of widow remarriage, child marriage as socially harmful,
criticism of Kulin polygamy, promotion of womens education etc. Like
other social reformers of the nineteenth century, in this argument also,
the rationalist-utilitarian justification of social reform was often combined
with the invocation of the authority of the scriptures. (Harishchandra,
2008 (VI), pp. 66-72.)
Now such arguments for this kind of separation from Harishchandra
were interesting also because he consistently defended the claims of
Sanatan Dharma against the social reformers of nineteenth century while
at the same time underscoring the need for reforming many of the social
practices of the Hindus. (Cf. Dalmia, 1997, 25) The strategy here was to
promote the social reform agenda by separating the domain of the social
from that of the religious. Harishchandra publicly defended some Hindu
religious practices such as idol worship sharply critiqued and censured
by the Arya Samaj movement.
In an essay titled Vaishnavta aur Bharatvarsh (Vaishnavism and India)
where Harishchandra sought to present Vaishnavism as the only real
religion of the Hindus1, he ended up, towards the end of the essay,
redefining the role of religion itself in interesting ways. As a matter of fact,
Bhartendu argued, on the one hand, that religion should be understood
as a private concern of the believer, on the hand, he conceived of
communities (samaj) basically in terms of religious communities.
Interestingly, religion here emerges as an important source of public
identity for the people. He argued that religious worship was a matter of
heart (hriday ki ratnavastu) and hence should not be made a matter of
propaganda. On the other hand, he urged all the sects among the Hindus,
Vaishnav, Shaiv, Sikhs, Brahmasamajis, Aryasamajis to be united under the
true and natural religion of the Hindus, (Vaishnavism) so that the
united Hindu religious community could compete for secular and worldly
things like jobs, political power, and other economic resources. And the
competition of the Hindu religious community, and this was a communal
argument in the strict sense of the word, was supposed to be with other
religious communities, Muslims and Christians. (Harishchandra, 2010 (V)
p. 288)
Reconfiguring the role of religion in relation to the domains of the
social, the economic, and the political is one of the important recurring
129
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MOHINDER SINGH
negative impact on the social and political life of the nation. He wrote,
exasperated, that religion (dharma) was present in everyday activities of
sleeping, waking up, sitting, standing, eating, drinking etc. (Bhatt, 1996,
pp. 93-97) The social issues such as improvement of the condition of
women among Hindus could not be undertaken unless they addressed
this deeper problem of the dominance of the religious. In an essay titled
Hamare Dharam sambandhi kharch (Our Religion Related Expenses)
Bhatt argued against spending too much money on religious rituals. He
said that there was a need to save money from such useless expenses and
for using this money for economic and political purposes. (Bhatt, 1996,
pp. 93-97) Similar arguments about the importance of learning natural
science, economics and politics from Europe are given in the essay Naye
tarah ka junoon (A New Obsession). (Bhatt, 70-72)
Throughout his work, Bhatt places a heavy emphasis on the critique
of orthodoxy, dogmatism, and prevalence of old customs among the
Hindus. According to Bhatt, the persistent resistance to change, which he
calls Hamari Parivartan Vimukhta (Our Dislike of Change) (Bhatt, 1996,
9-10) is one of the causes responsible for the decline of the Hindu
community in social, economic, and political fields. These elements prevail
more in those regions of India, where there is predominance of the Sanatan
Dharma. Bhatt squarely holds sanatanis attitude towards the new winds
of change blowing in the wake of the movement for reforms, responsible
for the backward condition of the Hindus in sanatani dominated regions.
Although he doesnt subscribe to any of the reformist movement, Bhatt
would like the sanatanis themselves to take up the reformist task for the
removing the social evils prevailing among the Hindus. One of the
locations of the prevalence of all social evils is the institution of the of the
family. It is in the domain of the family that the individuality and freedom
of the young people is crushed.
Child marriage and the joint family are the two social evils that stand
out in Bhatts works as the greatest enemies of individuality and freedom.
Critique of the practice of child marriage keeps recurring in his articles.
So much so that he often chides himself for repeating the same things too
much. He promotes the spirit of freedom (swacchhandata) among young
people and thus praises the institution of family in European countries
that promotes freedom and independence among the young people.
Educated and independent young people who are not crushed by the
unnecessary burdens of the family life at too early a stage are important
for the progress of the nation (jati) as they can contribute much more to
it.Whereas the institution of joint family among the Indians and the practice
of child marriage tend to burden young men (not women so much!) too
131
early in life with too many household responsibilities and also disturb
the progress of their education: samajik bandhan jakarate hain (social
ties immobilize). (Bhatt, 1996, 65-66)
In a short autobiographical write-up, Radhacharan Goswami, the
editor of the paper Bhartendu, introduces himself as a kattar Hindu
(orthodox Hindu) and a vaishnav. (Goswami, 1998, 24) In Bharatvarsh
mein dharma-charcha (Discourse of Religion in India) May, 1886, He
writes that: when we think of the question of the progress of nation,
religion is of no use whatsoever, particularly for national progress. There
came and flourished many religions in the history of India from Jainism
to Islam to Theosophical society, but they havent contributed to the
progress of the nation. They have merely created temples and mosques.
What India needed at present, according to Goswami, was not religion,
but wealth, force, education, art, commerce, etc. He further argued that
any serious thinking about progress of the nation has to exclude religion
as an element. (Goswami, 1998, 74-75) Although Goswami places the
imperative of deshonnati (progress of the nation) high among the important
questions of the times, he doesnt undervalue the importance of the need
for social reform among the Hindus.
In order to effectively combine the two imperatives in his approach,
he follows a strategy which is somewhat akin to the one argued by
Bhartendu in his speech in Balia mentioned above. It is a two pronged
strategy: the social issues are separable from the religious issues and that
social customs should be changed according to the needs of the times.
About the separability of the social and the religious, he even says, albeit
unconvincingly, that the issues of vaishnav religion and widow remarriage
are very different (Vaishnav dharm aur vidhwa vivah alag alag vishay
hain), implying that they are unconnected. (Goswami, 1998, 105)
Goswami was a passionate supporter of widow remarriage and wrote a
great deal on this question. He criticises the Hindu community for being
too resistant to change. He says that times are changing, but the Hindus
are not. (Goswami, 1998, 84) Criticizing Bharat Dharma Mahamandal for
not taking up the question of the widows plight, he gives fifteen arguments
for the remarriage of the widows. Among these arguments, he combines
the textual evidence in support of his position from the scriptures along
with rationalist and utilitarian arguments. He argues that society has to
change according to the needs of the times and for that customs and
traditions governing the community should be changed by reinterpreting
and reworking the scriptures. (Goswami, 1998, 84-85)
Conceptualization of the Social: II. The Social and the Political
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MOHINDER SINGH
In the last decades of the nineteenth century political opinion was turning
more and more against the interference of the colonial state in social and
religious affairs. After the formation of the Indian National Congress in
1885 and of the National Social Conference in 1887, a debate started in
the reformist and nationalist circles on the question of the colonial states
legitimacy to carry out social reform legislations. As most of the leaders
did accept the need for carrying out social reforms, the question had two
dimensions: a) which was the appropriate agency to carry out such reforms;
and b) whether the social question should precede the political question
of gaining representation and finally Independence from the colonial
rule. The views of Pratap Narain Mishra and Chaudhary Badrinarayan
Upadhyay Premghan, who took active interest in the political activities
of Indian national Congress, can be taken as representative of the antireformist position, the position of most Hindi intellectuals of this period.
Pratap Narayan Mishra was in favour of strict separation of the social
and the political questions. One of his arguments for separation was that
the task of reforming the community (samaj) was much more sensitive
and needed delicate work and much more sophisticated skills than the
political work of reforming the government institutions. Thus the task of
social refor m needed people who could gain the respect of the
communities they were going to reform. Secondly and more importantly,
Mishra argued that although the Social Conference had similar kind of
influence as the Congress, its nature (swabhava) was very different. (Mishra,
2001, 144-147) Why? Because, unlike the Congress, it was not possible
for the Social Conference to unite the people of different religious
communities like Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. In the matters of social
questions, the legitimate method would be for the Hindus to reform
their community and for the Muslims theirs. According to this argument,
while the social question separated Hindus and Muslims as religious
communities, the political question united them.(Mishra, 1986, 273-276)
Thus arguing for an institutional separation of the social and political
questions, Mishra further wrote: Smaran rahe ki samaj ka jitna sambandh
Brahmamin aur Maulviyon se hai utna government se kadapi nahin hai.
(Samaj is related more directly to Brahmins and Maulvis than to the
Government). (Mishra, 1986, 223-226) The appropriate agencies for
carrying out social reform, according to Mishra, were the religious
communities themselves and within the religious communities, the
authority of Brahmins and Maulvis had to be recognized. The colonial
state had once already established the authority of the Brahmins and the
Maulvis in the legal sphere by assigning them the authoritative role of
interpreting the scriptures for assisting the judges in personal law cases
and it is obvious that Mishra, along with many other contemporary Hindi
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MOHINDER SINGH
reform agendas in order to save both the dharma and the jati (nationality).
It is an important part of the thinking of these intellectuals that for them
social reform in itself is not important but must be subjugated to the
imperative of deshonnati, (progress of the nation) and the defence of the
Hindu community. But at the same time, the old authorities among the
Hindus, the traditional Brahmins and priests, are people with old mentality
(purani soch) and backward looking. They cant be any longer trusted
with the leadership of the community in such testing times. Old leadership
according to Premghan is neither forward looking nor responsible. Such
people are giving bad name to the entire community. Premghan also
argues that the old structures of authority among the Hindus have crumbled
anyway and it is not possible to revive them. (Premghan, 1950, 214)
At the same time, the newly educated people and the enlightened
(naveen jyoti dhari) are more attracted to the superficial attractions of the
Western civilization. They want to change India in the image of Europe.
They should, according to Premghan, instead clean up the old garden of
the Hindu samaj. (Premghan, 1950, 214) The ideal situation for Premghan
consists in replacing the old leadership with a responsible conservative
leadership of the newly educated. Such people have indeed come forward
in the form of Sanatan Dharma Sabhas but they are still not realizing the
enormity of the challenge facing them. They should, according to
Premghan, take up upon themselves the task of eliminating the social
evils from among the Hindus. Otherwise the nexus between the social
reformers and the government will carry out the same tasks.
The problem with the approach of the social reform organizations is
that they always seek out the help of the government even in matters
which are clearly internal affairs of the Hindus. (Premghan, 1950, 217)
But Premghan wants to drive home this point for the sanatanis that such
tasks of removing social evils such as child marriage cant be ignored any
longer if the community and its dharma is to be saved. He exhorts: Apna
prabandh aap keejiye apne bhoole bhaiyon ko samjhaiyeapne upper
unke sudhar ka bojha uthaiye, unke liye kuchh apne samay, sahas, aur
artha ka vyay keejiye; sharir ko kashta deejiye, purane andhkar ko chhod
tuk naye unjele mein aaiye, sansar ki dasha aur pravah ke anusar anusaran
karma aaranbha keejiye (Manage your affairs on your own persuade
your mistaken brothers take responsibility of reforming them upon
yourselves. Use some of your time, courage, and money to accomplish
this; there will be bodily hard work, but do come out of the old darkness
and enter the new light; start behaving according to the situation and the
movement of the world.) (Premghan, 1950, 222)
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MOHINDER SINGH
The main concepts used for referring to the domain of the social in the
late nineteenth century Hindi vernacular discourse are: dharma, samaj,
jati, desh, unnati, kaal/samay, public and niji (private) or gharelu/parivarik
(domestic), ihlaukik (this-worldly) etc.. This set of conceptual terms are
better understood in relation to each other and also as used together for
describing the social world as it is being simultaneously transformed by
this very discourse. This conceptual configuration is different from Daya
Krishnas conceptual apparatus in terms of both temporal and spatial
dimensions. As indicated earlier, an acute awareness of the critical nature
of the times is one of the key features of this discourse, as indicated in
frequent usage of phrases like vartaman samay (present time), hamara
samay (our time). Other terms that indicate time dimension are: unnati/
taraqqi (progress), itihas (history, as used here, this meaning too is different
from the ancient meaning of the term itihas), ateet (past) etc.
The concept of progress, expressed with terms unnati, pragati, and
taraqqi, with the notion of this-worldly expectations linked to the concept,
had acquired great importance during this period, and thus becomes
indispensable for understanding other social and political concepts in this
discourse. Another theme that often appears in this discourse and which
again recognizes the specific quality of the present is the theme of newness,
expressed with terms like naya/nutan (new), nai roshni wale (literally,
people of the new light, the enlightened, referring normally to the english
educated). Metaphors like sun of knowledge rising in the West, morning
of the new light, also indicate the time dimension of the new conceptual
framework.
137
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MOHINDER SINGH
139
NOTES
1 . The phrase translated by Vasudha Dalmia, (Dalmia, 1997, Chapter 6)
WORKS CITED:
140
MOHINDER SINGH
142
JOYA CHATTERJI
143
144
JOYA CHATTERJI
145
his story.The ancient Sylhet of Roots and Tales is a hub of trade and exchange;
Choudhurys Sylheti ancestors in a long - distant past were already itinerant
sea - faring cosmopolitans.
In 1209 and 1300, according to Choudhury, two earthquakes changed
the landscape around Sri Khetro, lifting the gulf out of the deep and
severing its connection with the sea16. At that time, the land around the
town was still partly submerged and remained largely uninhabited. But
in 1313 it was conquered by Gour Gobindo, a cruel Hindu king who
had no mercy for anyone17. At this juncture in its early history, so we are
told, there were only thirteen Muslim families in the area, descendants of
seafaring merchants and Islamic missionaries, and they lived together in a
village by the River Surma, a waterway which connected the hills of
Assam to the Bengal delta. In 1340, the wife of one of these Muslim
pioneers, Borhanuddin, gave birth to a baby son, and to celebrate, the
proud father slaughtered a cow. On hearing of this, Raja Gour Gobindo
ordered that the baby be beheaded and the arms of the mother be cut off.
After the death of mother and child, Borhanuddin sought the protection
of neighbouring Muslim rulers in Bengal, and travelled to Delhi to raise
an army to challenge and defeat the cruel king.
It was in Delhi, Choudhury relates, in the presence of the great sufi
mystic Nizamuddin Auliya, that a fateful meeting took place between
brave Borhanuddin and the leading Muslim saint Shah Jalal, who had
travelled to Delhi from Yemen with 313 followers. On hear ing
Borhanuddins story, Shah Jalal decided to volunteer himself along with
his followers18 to fight Gour Gobindo. Together with an army of 360
saints, Shah Jalal marched eastwards into Bengal and defeated Gour
Gobindo in a battle replete with miracles in which the saints deployed
supernatural powers and witchcraft to bewitch and destroy the enemy.
And then Sylhet revealed its sacred destiny. Before he set out on his
mission in Al - Hind, Shah Jalal had been given a clod of Arabian earth by
his spiritual mentors who instructed him to settle wherever he found
similar soil. Miraculously, the marshy soil of Sri Khetro exactly matched
this sacred lump of earth from dry and distant Arabia. So Shah Jalal settled
permanently in Shil - hotto, and the 360 saints spread all over Sylhet to
propagate Islam. They also set to work reclaiming the land, building simple
structures as their mosques, fishing in the waters and farming the land:
Most of the saints got married, and many of them had a farm and a family. They
worked all day long, growing crops or vegetables, looking after their cattle and
catching fish. When the work was done they swam in the open clean water, then
they sat and had some food. At the end of the day, they could go to their own straw
built mosque and pray to their hearts content. Many of the saints were married to
the new converts, had families, ran farms by themselves but the saintliness of the
146
JOYA CHATTERJI
working saints was never washed away or wasted. Their faith was always with them
and passed on to their descendants.19
147
148
JOYA CHATTERJI
149
literati which has fallen on hard times, while Choudhurys angle of vision
is that of a working - class community making its way up in the world.
These different perspectives helped to shape strategies for assimilation, as
will be seen below, were subtly but significantly different.
Migration myths: tales of loss and exile
Having established their singular origins in an idealised homeland, the
next task for both authors is to explain why their subjects left their
homeland behind. Both struggle to produce a seamless narrative of
migration, even though this often strains the historical evidence and their
own accounts. In both works, this distinctive narrative is repeated throughout
the text at regular intervals, so that it assumes a normative power - appearing
to elevate and encapsulate a truth about the community which is truer
than mere fact.
In the case of Choudhurys Roots and Tales, the central theme of this
narrative is that all Bangladeshi settlers in Britain are sea - farers or their
descendents:
Most Bangladeshi settles are the descendent flesh and blood of those who were lost
in the seas and survived to tell their tale, so it is our duty to keep our history alive
and remind everyone of who we are and why we are here38.
This assertion is repeated three times on the very first page of the
introduction. It is then rehearsed no less than fifty times in the book. So
how did Sylhetis - whose homeland was so far away from the waters
margin - come to be seafarers? According to Choudhury, the explanation
is the River Surma, the only waterway which connected Assam to Bengal
and the sea, passes through Sylhet. In consequence, Sylhet had a long
tradition - beginning with the early settler saints - of mercantile boats,
carrying goods from Assam to Bengal and beyond. Although Sylhets
farmers were prosperous, its spare young men (younger brothers and
cadet sons) traditionally worked as boatmen. When the region came under
British rule, things changed, particularly in the 19th century when the
British introduced steam ships and steamer stations linking Calcutta to
upper Assam. Aware that the new water way arrangement (had) hit the
boatmen hard, Choudhury argues, the (British) steamer companies
perhaps realised the need to compensate the boatmen by recruiting them
mainly as engine room crew.. This is the story of the Sylheti boatmen
and how they became the steamers crew.39 Here again we see evidence
that Choudhury would like to take a benign view of British rule in Sylhet,
even though he has to admit that these Sylheti lascars began to be ill
treated and ill fed40. They were exploited by British navigation companies
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JOYA CHATTERJI
who paid them a sixth of what British crews received, he tells us, but even
more by the Indian sarongs and bariwalas (or gaffers) who took a large
part of their wages in return for finding them jobs on ships and housing
them at ports while they waited for work. Out of frustration, they decided
to desert their ships and go wherever they would find a chance, whether
in Rangoon or Singapore or London41. But it was only during the First
World War, when, according to Choudhury, over one thousand
Bangladeshis were brought to Britain to replace British seamen, that a
few began to settle in London42. And it was during the Second World War
that the Bangladeshi population began to increase in the U.K. When the
war ended in 1945, and with Indias independence and partition in 1947,
more and more Sylheti seamen found themselves unemployed, and sought
work in Britain to support their families. The present Bangladeshi
community in Britain, Choudhury insists again and again, are all
descendents and kin of these first seafaring settlers, and almost all can
claim to be related to persons who fought and died in the two world
wars.
This account, while superficially plausible, does not bear historical
scrutiny. A few Sylheti lascars did indeed jump ship in London, and some
of them, in all probability, did eventually settle in Britain. In their turn,
they assisted others to do the same43. But it is very unlikely indeed that all
of todays Bangladeshi settlers are their descendents. If this assertion had
merit, the migrations from Sylhet to Britain would have peaked in the
1940s and 1950s, since after independence and partition in 1947, very few
Sylheti lascars (by Choudhurys own account, supported by other
authorities44) were able to find work on British ships. Instead, the numbers
of Bengali migrants in Britain remained tiny in this period: by the early
1950s, there were perhaps no more than 300 Sylhetis in London; their
numbers had grown only to about 5000 in the whole of Britain by 196245.
It was only after this date that their numbers began to grow rapidly, a
consequence not only of new British restrictions on immigration46, but
also of the dangers and uncertainties of life in Bangladesh during and
after the civil war of 1971. By 1986, when the British government published
its first White Paper on Bangladeshis in Britain, it estimated that there
were about 200,000 in the country47. By 2001, as the last census suggests,
that population had grown by another 100,000 in the next 15 years.
The point to be stressed here is that contrary to Choudhurys account,
the vast majority of Bangaldeshis now settled in Britain were never lascars
on British ships, and were born long after the Second World War and the
end of empire.The great majority of Bangladeshis who migrated to Britain
did so in the two decades after Bangladesh achieved independence from
Pakistan in 1971.
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JOYA CHATTERJI
East Pakistan after 1947 did so in fits and starts over more than two decades
between 1947 and 1970, attracted by the better opportunities for
employment in East Pakistan.
As we read on, then, it becomes clear why Ilias describes his
community as Bihari, even though he himself admits, its members do
not all come from Bihar, and despite the fact, as he would be the first to
acknowledge, that Bihari has become a derogatory term in present - day
Bangladesh. To call them Urdu - speakers (arguably a more accurate
appellation) would draw unwelcome attention to the question of language
which sets his community apart from a national culture into which he
seeks their assimilation. But more importantly, by calling them Bihari he
fixes in the readers consciousness an association between this migrant
group and the carnage in Bihar in 1946. The Bihar riots have long been
held up as the moment when Pakistan was born, when the sheer brutality
of the attacks demonstrated the impossibility of any reconciliation or
rapprochement between Indias Hindus and Muslims. They hold as large
a place in the collective memory of Partition in the east as do the Calcutta
Killings of 1946. Used in particular contexts, the very word Bihar conveys
all the horrors of the deadly ethnic riot56. By calling his community
Biharis, Ilias seeks to recall these outrages in order to evoke the sympathy
of fellow Muslims and hosts in Bangladesh, sympathy which his
community patently deserves, despite their later mistakes (more of which
below). The word Bihari in Ilias book thus carries a powerful moral
charge and is deployed with a clear purpose.
But at another level, the myth of their enforced exile from Bihar also
works to provide a single, straightforward common history for the Bihari
community in Bangladesh today. Present - day Biharis are represented as
linear descendents of those who fled the carnage. In turn, they are
descended from the saintly pioneers who brought Islam to caste - ridden
India, and all are legatees of the great revolutionaries who resisted imperial
incursions. Thus, they are the standard bearers of a sacred mission with a
long history and heirs of a great culture. This history seeks to unify the
community, sanitise and simplify its complex and multi - stranded
chronicles by providing a single and intelligible root cause for its presence
in Bangladesh. In this sense, it has much in common with the foundation
myths of so many migrant groups, which typically see their migration as
being the consequence of a single catastrophic event, even though historians
might agree that they migrated gradually over a period of many decades,
and sometimes over centuries57.
Both these accounts, then, simplify a complex history of migration.
Choudhury ignores the fact that the great majority of Sylhetis migrated to
Britain during and after the upheavals of the liberation war in Bangladesh,
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JOYA CHATTERJI
proof of Britishness58.
The very first page of Choudhurys Roots and Tales makes plain his
intention to insert the Bangladeshi settlers into this narrative of British
patriotic sacrifice, and calls to be quoted in full:
Many people have misconceptions about the Bangladeshi settlers because they either
have wrong information or lack of the same. Many do not know that the Bangladeshis
were asked to come and fight for Britain in the two world wars. We fought both
wars for them. We were in the warships and troop carriers when they were facing
enemies.We were in British cargo - ships to bring in the vital supplies. Bangladeshis
worked on the deck, went down to the bottom of the ships, and ran the engines for
them.We were part of the British war power.
The ships were attacked and sunk on the high seas. Many of our men were killed,
not all of their dead bodies floated to the surface of the water. The dead bodies
were eaten by sharks or simply decomposed.
Many dead bodies went down with their ships leaving no trace, no grave or headstone
is there to be seen, so our dead Bangladeshi seamen have been forgotten for all time.
Most Bangladeshi settlers are the descendent flesh and blood of those who were
lost in the seas or survived to tell their tale, so it is our duty to keep our history alive
and remind everyone of who we are and why we are here59.
This is a remarkable passage for many reasons. On the one hand, it makes
very explicit the authors intention to inform many people about his
communitys sacrifices on their behalf, and it is clear that his intended
audience is the host society,the British. But what is particularly interesting
is how he maintains the boundary between us and them (we fought
both the wars for them etc.), even as he weaves the history of the settlers
into the tapestry of British history.
As soon as it is recognised that Choudhurys work is not only a book
about the past, but also a polemical tract staking claims in the present and
for the future, many peculiarities of its language and structure become
intelligible. It explains the authors decision to write the book in English
rather than Bangla. It explains, for example, why the author insists
repeatedly - despite compelling evidence to the contrary - that all
Bangladeshis are descended from lascar seamen; it explains why his brief
account of his communitys origins stresses its primeval connection with
the sea; why his Sylhet is literally born out of the ocean and why his
community (just as its British hosts) is presented as a sea - faring peoples.
It explains why so much of the book is about the period of British rule
over Sylhet, and why its account of British rule is so uncritical. It explains
why it seeks to downplay the fierce conflicts between Sylhetis and
155
156
JOYA CHATTERJI
157
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JOYA CHATTERJI
successive Pakistani regimes; and this was the reason for the dreadful
reprisals against the Bihari community after the war ended.
These are profoundly moving passages. Like many interested
historians of vanquished peoples, Ilias labours under the burden of having
to explain why events turned out as they did, and this leads him to reflect
with great seriousness on the past. In common with others in this
predicament, he laments the short - sightedness of his people, but also
shifts the blame to their former leaders, now deposed76. Again and again,
he shows and regrets how the Biharis were betrayed by their leaders.
Iliass Biharis were misled first by the speeches of the creator of Pakistan77,
and then by the Muslim League leadership and their religion - based
politics78. After partition, they were let down by the Pakistani state, which
encouraged them to cling to their refugee status as Mohajers and to their
Urdu language79. In the late 1950s, they were betrayed by corrupt Bihari
representatives who were too busy making money to give a proper lead
to the community; and in the sixties, they were exploited by Governor
Monem Khan who had very close contact with notorious (criminals),
and who used them to create a wedge between locals and non - locals80.
In the late 1960s, when the campaign for the autonomy of East Pakistan
gained ground, they were misled by West Pakistani - based Urdu
newspapers and their false propaganda against the Bengal leader, Mujibur
Rahman81. In the months before the outbreak of the civil war, they were
betrayed again by the media when it falsely alleged that the Mohajer
Convention had called for the partition of East Bengal82, and after the war
began, they were led astray by a false prophet - Warasat Khan, the leader
of the Mohajer Party - who dragged orphaned Bihari boys into the war
on the side of Pakistan83. In the aftermath of the war, when Biharis were
hunted down and killed in their thousands by the so - called Bengali
Sixteenth Divisions, they were betrayed by the Red Cross which
encouraged and organised bewildered people to register themselves for
repatriation to Pakistan84. Terrified victims of grisly reprisals, as they
huddled in their make - shift camps after the war, they were exploited by
the Indian soldiers who, instead of protecting them, took all their money
on the false promise of getting them out of Bangladesh85.
This theme of betrayal is repeated so often, and at such regular intervals
in the book, that it demands reflection on its deeper discursive intent.
Arguably, it takes forward two crucially important strategic purposes. On
the one hand, it clearly seeks to drive a distinction between the innocence
of the general Bihari community and the culpability of the bad apples
among their leadership. By this device, Ilias suggests that it is right for the
soft - hearted Bangladeshi nation to forgive these poor misguided people,
in their own way as much victims of the old Pakistani order as the Bengalis
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JOYA CHATTERJI
(Ilias then quotes the full text of the poem Mohenjodaro, first in Urdu
and then in English translation).
The Urdu - speaking writers expressed their solidarity with the Language Movement.
Anjuman Tarraq - e - Urdu (Organisation for the Development of Urdu) in East
Pakistan severed its tie with the All Pakistan Anjuman for its support to the
government on language policy.The progressive Urdu students formed Anjuman
- e - Adab, a literary organisation in Dhaka University (,) to support the contemporary
progressive Bengali writers for their cultural struggle.92
161
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JOYA CHATTERJI
inclusive, one that celebrates the pluralism and syncretism of South Asias
faiths and cultures. There is a subtle suggestion that this progressive vision
of Bangladesh has as yet to be to be realised, and Ilias hints at the prospect
of Urdu - speaking Bangladeshis joining with like - minded Bengalis in
its construction and achievement. Just as Choudhury seeks to fashion
Britain, so too Ilias constructs the community of Urdu speaking
Bangladeshis while also seeking to join with progressive elements in
the host country to reconstruct Bangladesh itself.
The myth of return and the context and politics of assimilation
The final set of questions raised by these texts has to do with their timing.
Why were they written and published when they were? What was it
about that moment of their production that made them appropriate,
relevant or even possible? And if we can uncover these conditions of
production, might we be able to speculate on the conditions in which
migrant groups in times past wrote histories or genealogies of their
communities?
The first set of answers seem to lie in generational changes within the
community. The coming of age of a generation of children who have
grown up in the diaspora (in the case of Choudhury) or in camps (in the
case of Ilias) is a compelling fact and a concern that clearly animates both
works. Choudhury refers directly in his introduction to these changes as
one of his motives in writing his book:
Now in 1993, most work - mates, room - mates and close friends of my earlier times
have passed away. Their sons and grandsons became the family head, living in this
country with their own wives and children.The new generation in our community
need to know more about us. What we were, what we are and where we come
from. It is their roots, their identity, which are unknown to many of them. That
identity is vital, no matter where they live.Without it, they will be lost99.
Ilias is less explicit about his intention to write for the young, but he too
refers repeatedly to the rise of a new generation of young people who
have grown up in camps, and who understand little about the causes of
their situation. Ilias seems keen not only to educate, but also to guide the
young towards a brighter future, which he believes, can only come if they
embrace an Urdu - speaking Bangladeshi identity.
However a deeper imperative behind their writing appears to come
from a recognition that the myth of return is no longer sustainable.
Choudhury writes poignantly of the gradual fading of the dream of going
back home:
After spending ten or fifteen years here, some Bangladeshis often decided to go
163
home to resettle. They sold their propertieswhatever they owned, then went to
Bangladesh with a lump sum of money quite confident of a happy life.
As the dealing really started, obstacles began to emerge. He realised that, without
his conscious knowledge, he himself had picked up a lot of habits from the host
country and was used to another pattern of life.
He found himself inexperienced in many day to day matters. He needed a guide at
every step and gradually began to discover himself as a foreigner in his own home
land. Still (he kept hoping) to get over it
As time passed on, either money or health went down, if not both. Otherwise, if he
was unlucky, he might get involved with a court caseThe people stayed on until
their patience ran out.
Eventually the spirit to resettle in the home land began to fade away. The first
generation of Bangladeshi settlers might have had several tries to settle in the homeland
and failed. Some are still alive (Now) they grow a beard, dress up in white and
attend the nearest mosque and spend hours praying.Although the father and son
(may live) under the same roof, sharing the same food, with love, affection and care,
yet in their minds they are living in different worlds100.
With the long, slow and painful death of this dream, Choudhury and
many of his contemporaries had to reconcile themselves to the fact that
not only are their children not keen to return, but they themselves have
been so changed by their years abroad that they can no longer slip back
easily into life at home. Perhaps (as suggested by the references to court
cases and conflicts) they also have to recognise that home too has changed
forever. It seems that the very purpose of writing this history is to come to
terms with this loss, finally accepting that the Bangladeshi settlers are
really here in Britain to stay.
For Ilias, too, the book signals a recognition that the dream of
repatriation to Pakistan is just that - a dream. In a chapter titled The
Long March he describes, at some length and in much painful detail the
process of disillusionment by the step - motherly attitudes of the Pakistan
government101. The Red Cross had raised false hopes among Bihari
displacees that they would be repatriated to Pakistan if they signed
declarations of intention, but immediately after the Delhi Agreement of
1973, the Pakistan government made it clear that it had no intention of
accepting these stranded peoples. So too did its citizens: Pakistanis in
Sindh raised the slogan Bihari na khappan (Biharis are not wanted),
taking advantage of the known views of (Bhuttos ruling) Peoples Party
regarding Biharis.102. Despite the efforts of Naseem Khan and the SPGRC,
and the Saudi - sponsored organisation Rabita, the Government of Pakistan
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JOYA CHATTERJI
had stuck to its guns that Biharis will have to live in Bangladesh103. Ilias
urges his community to face the harsh fact that there is no place for them
anywhere else than in Bangladesh - they have been abandoned by Pakistan
and forgotten by the international community. They have no choice, he
suggests, but to come to terms with this fact and seek finally to settle and
assimilate in Bangladesh.
So both our authors reach the same conclusion at roughly the same
time - four decades after Partition and two decades after the birth of
Bangladesh. The natural cycle of generations - as has been suggested
above - helps to explain why this should be the case. But it would be
unwise to ignore the changing political context in both host countries,
which encouraged the migrant community to take bold steps towards
assimilation. The post - war decades in Britain had seen ever - harsher
rhetoric against non - white immigration (Enoch Powells rivers of blood
speech was only one example of a wider trend) and deepening racial
conflict. In 1978, Margaret Thatcher had promised in a television interview
that if elected, her party would finally see an end to immigration; in the
1980s, Asians in Thatchers Britain had experienced a further entrenchment
of institutionalised racism, particularly in the form of immigration laws
and the British Nationality Act (of 1981),104 These were also decades of
escalating racist violence105: in a poignant passage Choudhury lists the
names of victims of racist attacks killed during this period106. But in the
early 1990s when Choudhury wrote his book, the Poll Tax riots and the
defenestration of Margaret Thatcher from the leadership of the Tory party
seemed to presage moves away from the harsh attitudes towards
disadvantaged social groups in general, and immigrants in particular, which
had characterised the previous decades. New Labour was in the process
of being born, and a new alliance of the centre - left - with the support of
many sections of British society including the trades unions, the church,
the liberal intelligentsia and the media - was gaining ground.
In 1988, the publication of Rushdies Satanic Verses prompted
widespread violence among outraged Muslims in Britains inner cities.
But of no less significance (Choudhury makes no mention at all of
Rushdies book) was the publication two years earlier by the British
Government of the first policy document on Bangladeshis in Britain.
This did not merely reveal official concern about the continuing
backwardness of the Bangladeshi population, but also showed beyond a
doubt that their children were underachieving at school, faring far worse
than Indian and Pakistani children. It is significant that Choudhurys book
ends with a long discussion of the White Paper. He argues that it shocked
the community - hitherto complacent about the education of its children
- into action, and shows how British Bengalis began to enter local politics
165
to seek to redress these issues. (Again, this bears out Brubakers insight
that assimilation for secular purposes continues to be salient for many
migrant groups107). Instead of focussing their energies solely on Bangladeshi
politics - as they had done in the past - they increasingly began to see the
good reasons to seek to influence, or even to enter, local councils. Local
politics appear to have become a vital arena for interaction between new
spokesmen for the community and particular British people: constituency
MPs, of course, but also local councillors, school head teachers, social
workers and representatives of church groups. These interactions can be
seen to have created a new space perhaps what Brah calls a diaspora
space108 in which assimilation could begin to be negotiated by certain
Bangladeshis and certain individual Britons. It is highly significant that
Caroline Adams path - breaking study of the community, Across Thirteen
Rivers and Seven Seas, came out of her interaction with Bangladeshis as a
social worker in the East End109, and that this book explains the Bengali
presence in Britain in precisely the same terms as Choudhurys does,
recalling the sacrifice of Bengali lascars in the World Wars. It is also
significant that Choudhurys book was published by the Sylheti Social
History Group in London - a small group of British liberals and left leaning Bangladeshi community leaders such as Tassaduq Ahmed - who
also is the author of the foreword to Adams book. The fact that the preface
to Roots and Tales was written, in a neat symmetry, by a leading Christian
theologian, underlines the enabling role played by such individuals, and
by civil society - based and religious groups in the processes of Bengali
assimilation.
But the most interesting feature of the last chapter of Choudhurys
book which discusses the 1986 White Paper is its suggestion that
assimilation (at least with the secular purpose of raising educational
standards of the community, and improving their access to healthcare and
housing) is a national duty for all British Bangladeshis. The community
must encourage educational achievement, he suggests, because its failure
in this regard lets the nation down. The fact that both Indian and Pakistani
children had outstripped Bengalis at school is stressed again and again. It
is as if Choudhury is seeking to play upon Bangladeshi anxieties about
their overweening neighbours in South Asia to provoke them into taking
steps to improve themselves in Britain. Thus we see the playing out of an
apparent paradox - long - distance Bangladeshi nationalism being deployed
to drive forward Bengali assimilation into British politics and British
culture.
Iliass Biharis must also be placed within the political context in which
it was published. In 2003, months before Biharis came out, Bangladeshs
Supreme Court ruled in the case of Abid Khan and others vs The
166
JOYA CHATTERJI
167
168
JOYA CHATTERJI
Adams, Caroline. 1987. Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers. Life Stories
of Pioneer Settlers in Britain. p. 54, 64. London: THAP Books.
Anderson, Benedict. 1998. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism,
South Asia and the World, London: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Claire, Alexander. 2010. Diaspora and Hybridity, in P. Hill Collins & J.
169
170
JOYA CHATTERJI
The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York
City, Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press., cited in Brubaker, The Return
of Assimilation, p. 532.
Lachenicht, Susanne. 2007. Huguenot Immigrants and the Formation of
National Identities, 1548 - 1787, Historical Journal, Vol. 50:2.
Leach, Kenneth. 2001. Caroline Adams: youth worker devoted to the
welfare of Londons Bangladeshi community, The Guardian,
(Obituaries), 23 June.
Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Markovits, Claude. 2006. et al (eds.), Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures
in South Asia, 1750 - 1950, London: Anthem Press.
Quddus, Md Ruhul. 6 October 2007, Recognising citizenship right in
The Independent (Dhaka)
Rose, S. O. 2002. Race, Empire and British Wartime Identity, 1939 45, Historical Research, Vol. 74, No. 184.
Roy, Tirthankar and Douglas Haynes. 1999. Conceiving Mobility:
Migration of Handloom Weavers in Precolonial and Colonial India,
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 36 (1).
Tololyan, Khachig. 2003. Elites and Institutions in the Armenian
Transnation, International Migration Review, Vol. 37, 3.
Torpey, John. 2000. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship
& the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turack, Daniel. 1972. The Passport in International Law, Lexington:
Lexington Books
Salter, Joseph. 2010. The Asiatic in England: Sketches of Sixteen YearsWork
among Orientals, London: New Press
Joseph, Salter. 1895. The East in the West: Work among the Asiatics and
Africans in London. Michigan: University of Michigan Library.
Salter, Mark. 2003. Rights of Passage: The Passport in International
Relations. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Schiller, Nina Glick and Georges Eugene Fouron. 2001. Georges woke
up Laughing. Long - distance Nationalism and the Search for Home,
Chapel Hill
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 2003.The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma,
Mourning and Recovery (translated by Jefferson Chase), London:
Picador.
Uddin, Sufia M. 2006.Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, ethnicity, and
language in an Islamic nation, p. 75. Chapel Hill: Duke University
Press
Visram, Rosina. 1986. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes. Indians in Britain 1700
- 1947, London: Pluto Pr.
171
172
JOYA CHATTERJI
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
173
Biharis, p. 18.
Biharis, p. 17.
Biharis, p. 17 - 19.
Biharis, P. 18.
Roots and Tales, p. 21.
Biharis, p. 17.
Biharis, p. 25.
Ibid.
Routes and Tales, p. ix.
Roots and Tales, p. 31.
Roots and Tales , p. 33.
Roots and Tales, p. 43.
Roots and Tales, p. 50
Joseph Salter, The Asiatic in England. Sketches of SixteenYears of Work among Orientals,
London, 1873; Joseph Salter, The East in the West. Work among the Asiatics and
Africans in London, London, 1895; see also RosinaVisram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes.
Indians in Britain 1700 - 1947, London, 1986.
G. Balachandran,Circulation through Seafaring: Indian Seamen, 1890 - 1945, in
Markovits et al (eds.), Mobile People.
Caroline Adams,Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers. Life Stories of Pioneer Settlers in
Britain, London, 1987, p. 54, 64.
In 1962, the Conservative Government Enacted the Commonwealth Immigration
Act, which restricted the entry to Britain of migrants from the Commonwealth
by instituting a new voucher system. This led to a spurt in migration from
Commonwealth countries, as many migrants from countries such as Pakistan
rushed to bring close relatives over to Britain before the Act came into force.
Bangladeshis in Britain, Vols 1 and 2, UK House of Commons Home Affairs
Committee, HMSO, 1986.
The community was divided by its attitudes towards Pakistan before 1971; since
then supporters of different regimes and parties have frequently clashed.
It is always difficult to verify the numbers of those killed in riots, but 50,000 is
clearly a very exaggerated figure. Lord Wavell, then the Viceroy of India, guessed
that between 5000 and 10000 people lost their lives.Wavell to Pethick Lawrenece,
22 December 1946, in N. Mansergh and E. R. Lumby (eds.) The Transfer of Power,
Vol IX, London, 1980, p. 140. See the discussion of numbers killed and displaced
by the violence in Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora. Extending
the Subcontinent, London, New York and Delhi, 2007, pp. 2 - 3.
Biharis, p. 26.
Biharis, pp. x, xi.
Biharis, p. xiii.
Biharis, p. ix.
Biharis, p. ix.
See Haraprasad Chattopadhyay, Internal Migration in India.A Case Study of Bengal,
Calcutta, 1987.
Daniel Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Berkeley, 2001. Interestingly, the 1946
Bihar killings feature in Horowitzs book as an exemplar of this type of violence.
174
JOYA CHATTERJI
57. See, for instance, the account of the foundation myths of mobile weaving
communities in Tirthankar Roy and Douglas Haynes, Conceiving Mobility:
Migration of Handloom Weavers in Precolonial and Colonial India, Indian Economic
and Social History Review, 1999; and Dipesh Chakrabarty,Remembered Villages:
Representation of Hindu - Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of Partition,
Economic and Political Weekly, 1996.
58. Chris Waters and other historians of British national identity have argued after
the war, British national culture was reconstructed to include the working classes
in the nation, and the war was the crucible in which this new identity was
forged. See C.Waters, Dark Strangers in our Midst: Discourses on Race and
Nation in Britain, 1947 - 63, Journal of British Studies,Vol. 36, 2, 1997.Also see C.
Waters,J.B. Priestly in Susan Pederson and Peter Mandler (eds.) After the Victorians.
Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, London, 1994; S. O. Rose,
Race, Empire and British Wartime Identity, 1939 - 45, Historical Research,Vol. 74,
184 (2002); R.Weight, Patriots. National Identity in Britain, 1940 - 2000, London,
2003. Joanna Lumleys recent campaign in support of the Gurkhas claim to
settle in Britain also rested on their support for Britain on the battlefield.
59. Roots and Tales, p. 1x.
60. Roots and Tales, pp. 90, 118 - 20.
61. Roots and Tales, p. 196.
62. Roots and Tales, p. 177.
63. Roots and Tales, p. 179.
64. Brubaker, The Return of Assimilation, p. 543 - 44.
65. Roots and Tales, p. 195.
66. Roots and Tales, p. 192.
67. Roots and Tales, p. 195.
68. On long - distance nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison.
Politics Culture and the Nation, London, 1998, and Nina Glick Schiller and Georges
Eugene Fouron, Georges woke up Laughing. Long - distance Nationalism and the
Search for Home, Chapel Hill, 2001.
69. Biharis, pp. 19 - 20
70. Biharis, p. 66.
71. Biharis, p. 60
72. Biharis, pp. 67 - 68
73. Biharis, p. 61.
74. Biharis, p. 88.
75. Biharis, p. 85.
76. Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, pp. 3 - 13.
77. Biharis, p. xi.
78. Biharis, p. 66.
79. Biharis, p. 68.
80. Biharis, p. 92.
81. Biharis, p. 93.
82. Biharis, p. 95.
83. Biharis, p. 114.
84. Biharis, p. 132.
175
176
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
JOYA CHATTERJI
Dusk is my favourite time; next to that, the night. When dawn breaks, it is as
if you have lost something.A sort of homesickness. Sometimes, you are sitting on
a low branch of a tree, your pals lift you up without warning, and you feel a
quivering rush of fear inside. I feel like that when the night ends. Days feel
like an unrelenting spell of anxiety. From twilight, consolation begins.
C. AYYAPPAN, in an interview1
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UDAYA KUMAR
instance, were not read as Dalit writers but as writers who focused on the
experiences of certain disadvantaged sections in society. The past decade,
however, has seen the emergence of distinctively new idioms of Dalit
politics in Kerala, and this has also generated a new cultural politics that
questions the foundational narratives of Keralas modernity.3 The new
visibility of Ayyappans texts has an intimate relation to this moment.
Nonetheless, something unseasonal marks Ayyappans art, and this
prevents him from being the toast of the times. The bodies and selves
staged in Ayyappans literary apparatus are forged in what may be designated
as the darkroom of social time. Darkness here should not be seen as the
constraint necessary for working on photographic plates inscribed by light,
to render them legible and restore them to the day, as in the work of
memory in literary modernism. Ayyappans art is more like nocturnal
photography, or if we were to attempt greater precision a spectrography
of the night. It works precisely by impeding a daytime reading of what is
recognized as Dalit experience, and issues of masculinity and memory
figure centrally in the strange temporality of this interruption.
Spectres haunt Ayyappans stories: dead people appear before the
protagonists of these stories to accompany them and speak to them,
blurring the boundaries between the present and the past, the everyday
and the exceptional. The time of the ghosts begins at midnight, marked
by the siren from a distant factory; they disappear with the break of dawn,
when the first roosters crow.4 Ghosts are not mere visitors to the world of
the protagonists; they are the principal narrators in many of Ayyappans
stories. Links between death and story telling offer a familiar theme in
many literary traditions: story telling may ward off death, or rather postpone
it night by night, as in the Arabian Nights. But death also authorizes the
narratability of life, functioning as the sign under which lives acquire
completeness. This is one of the senses in which biographies are
thanatographies; and, wrapped within the folds of every autobiography,
lies the autothanatographic sign, the self-authorizing signature of death
and completion. How should we rethink this for mal, structural
dependence of all autobiography on an imagined death, in the case of
Dalit writing, where if we are to infer from scholarly studies on the
topic autobiography seems to have the status not of just one genre
among many, but of something of the order of a paradigm?
Ayyappans spectral narratives often adopt the first person, testamentary
form, frequently and powerfully, invoking the autobiographical as the
enabling instance of articulation for their Dalit characters. However, death
in the formal sense of a conclusion to temporal unravelling is insufficient
to enable the acquisition of posthumous powers of narration. It is a certain
179
180
UDAYA KUMAR
181
182
UDAYA KUMAR
183
evident to any observer. He would like to visit his sister in hospital, but
what really is the point of visiting an insane person who cannot even
recognize the visitor?
This story, like that told in Ekalochanam, may be identified as
belonging to a second set of narratives in Ayyappans work. Unlike the
narratives of ghostly spirits who live through their acts of possession over
the living, these stories are told by the living. At an apparent level the
stories in this second group are not about victims but about Dalit men
who seem to have succeeded in life, obtained jobs, and married into
families with higher material and cultural capital. Their estrangement from
their original families and the community, and the accompanying sense
of guilt and awkwardness, are the avenues through which these stories
explore the Dalit question. Krishnan Kutty, the narrator of Bhranthu, is
as we saw a study in this fragile pathos of sincerity and betrayal.
Sarvajnanaya Kathakrthum Oru Pavam Kathapathravum begins by
rehearsing the other side of these affects: after the farewell party on the
day of his retirement, the protagonist becomes increasingly suspicious of
the behaviour of his colleagues: did the familiar rituals of the farewell
function conceal suppressed upper caste sarcasm?15 His way of getting
back is to repeat the same gesture, and to write a novel to humiliate one
of his own Dalit acquaintances by highlighting his inferior caste status.
Yes, I will write a novel. And dig up and expose your history. I want to
know from where you got your fair skin and light eyes. You know why?
For no reason. Just like that.16 Thus concludes the explanatory note of
this successful Dalit subject.
One of Ayyappans stor ies has An Explanatory Note (Oru
Visadikaranakkurippu) for its title.17 In this brief text, the narrator, a
government employee who participated in a public protest march
demanding a rise in wages explains why all the protesters fled in fear
without any apparent provocation. The note clarifies that when the march
was in progress a group of beggars and lepers and prostitutes onlookers
from the street joined them in support and started shouting the same
slogans. The presence of these real subalterns is felt as an unbearable
physical threat by the protesters, and eventually they flee from their
presence. Ayyappans stories of the living, using the form of the explanatory
note, effectively rehearse a deep disorientation in their protagonists
occupancy of the social domain. Deception, betrayal, and dissimulation
plague instances of success, turning the inhabitation of normalized middle
class life into nightmares of anxiety. Assimilation is accompanied by a
cycle of disavowal and humiliation.
These stories allow us to see the intervention that Ayyappans work
makes in our conception of humiliation, an experience and an emotion
184
UDAYA KUMAR
185
186
UDAYA KUMAR
inhabit the world.26 At the same time, it is this very same rationalism that
prevented him from engaging with this frightening domain of spirits,
from which his best stories were to develop later. Rationalism extracted a
price for letting him into the world of the day; a disavowal of the night, of
the energies and spirits, was that price.27
Ayyappan refers to this disavowed world as a domain of Dalit atmiyata;
but the word is not his own, it comes from his interlocutor in an interview,
but Ayyappan does not challenge it.28 Atmiyata has as its meaning both
the spiritual domain and the nexus of beliefs and practices oriented towards
the self. Ayyappans own comments move in the direction of a sort of
religion that mobilizes the energies of generations of ancestors rather
than a single God or multiple Gods. This, as we saw from his stories, is
irretrievably tied to the lives of spirits, to spectral existence. It is in this
sense that we may read atmiyata; it is the domain of the atmakkal, dead
spirits, demanding an articulation of the self in relation to ghostly experience
of inheritance and tradition.
Two frames for thinking the divine are invoked in Ayyappans stories.
One of them belongs to the supraterrestrial level, where after ones death,
one encounters all the dead, and somewhere in that densely populated
other world, one also encounters a single God, the master and manager.
Here God appears as an old man, a sort of grandfather figure, chewing his
paan and spitting the betel juice at length on to the courtyard.29 The
ghosts of Ayyapans protagonists defy this God, spit on him. It is as if God
in this form is no match for the defiant and disruptive agency they acquired
by taking their own lives.
However, there is a second theology, based on the communitys
practices. This centres on Periyapurathu Devis shrine.30 Even though the
shrine is called a Devi shrine, there are two sister Goddesses who reside
there. The elder sisters fierce glance destroys in eight days anyone on
whom it falls. The younger sister, out of care for humanity, has pulled
down the idol of her elder sibling to prevent her from looking at passers
by. Nonetheless, whenever she hears footsteps she would ask her younger
sister, who goes there? The younger sister would answer these questions,
but once in a while, when she runs out of patience, she would tell off her
elder sibling, and ask her to get up and find out herself. The elder Goddess
would raise her head from where she lies and the look will fall on someone,
destroying him, making him die in eight days. If one goes to this shrine at
midnight one is sure to incur the wrath of the sisters and meet ones
death.
Always, in Ayyappan, such fiercely enchanted worlds find a parallel in
the everyday. The protagonist who wants to die goes to the shrine at
187
188
UDAYA KUMAR
189
litany of rage and lament with its unflinching grip on time, is to conjure
with Poykayil Yohannans redemptive trope the letter that Ayyappan
insistently brings before contemporary Kerala. It is in this sense that his
fiction joins the work of history in the deepest sense.
WORKS CITED
190
UDAYA KUMAR
NOTES
1. C.Ayyappan,Abhimukham, Interview with Dilip Raj, in C.Ayyappante Kathakal
(New Delhi: Penguin Books in association with Malayala Manorama, 2008), p.
176. The italicized word is in English in the original. All translations from the
Malayalam are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
2. For an account of modernist poetry in Kerala, see E.V. Ramakrishnan, Making It
New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry (Shimla: Indian Institute
of Advanced Study, 1995).
3. Writings by K. K. Kochu, K. K. Baburaj and Sunny Kapikad, to name but a few
prominent Dalit thinkers, may be seen as belonging to this moment. For a
selection of English translations of Dalit literary and political writing from Kerala,
see K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu, eds., No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing
from South India, Dossier 1:Tamil and Malayalam (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011). See,
for an account of the land struggles central to this moment, K. T. Rammohan,
Caste and Landlessness in Kerala: Lessons from Chengara, Economic and Political
Weekly, 43: 37 (13 September 2008), pp. 14-16, and M. S. Sreerekha,Illegal Land,
Illegal People:The Chengara Land Struggle in Kerala, Economic and PoliticalWeekly
47: 30 (28 July 2012), pp. 21-4.
4. For a discussion of the acoustic world in which Ayyappans stories took shape,
see C. Ayyappan, Abhimukham, pp. 167-8.
5. See Dilip M. Menon,The Moral Community of Theyyattam: Popular Culture
in Late Colonial Malabar, Studies in History, 9: 2 (1993), pp. 187-217.
6. Ayyappan, in an interview, recalled that it was his later encounter with the work
of the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola that gave him confidence in his own
exploration of ghosts and their trajectories. C. Ayyappan, Abhimukham, pp.
180-1. See Amos Tutuola, The Palm-wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-WineTapster in
the Deads Town (London: Faber, 1952).
7. Kavalbhutam, C. Ayyappante Kathakal, p. 7. For an English translation, see C.
Ayyappan, Guardian Spirit, tr. Udaya Kumar, in K. Satyanarayana and Susie
Tharu, No Alphabet in Sight, pp. 355-63.
8. Prethabhashanam, in C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 71-7. For an English translation,
see C. Ayyappan, Ghost-Speech, tr. Udaya Kumar, in K. Satyanarayana and
Susie Tharu, No Alphabet in Sight, pp. 350-5.
9. See, for instance,Bhutabali,Oru Kashanam Jeevitam,NeramVelukkukayanu,
and Ekalochanam in C.Ayyappante Kathakal.
10. Kavalbhutam, p. 16.
11. Ibid.
12. Arundhatidarasananyayam, C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 17-28.
13. Ekalochanam, C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 153-66.
14. Bhrantu, C. Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 34-9. For an English translation, see C.
Ayyappan, Madness, tr. Jobin Thomas, in K. Satyanaraya and Susie Tharu, eds.,
No Alphabet in Sight, pp. 363-7.
15. Sarvajnanaya Kathakrthum Oru Pavam Kathapathravum, C.Ayyappante Kathakal,
pp. 128-39.
16. Ibid., p. 139.
191
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN1
general sanitary improvements, public offices and clerks quarters.The precise addition
will be duly reported after the necessary plans and estimates have been submitted,
but we may here notice that on the estates which we have acquired during the current
and past years there are various houses (occupied for the most part by the Viceroys
staff) for which rents are paid, so that a considerable portion of the outlay incurred is
even now remunerative.
Nothing has yet been definitely settled in respect to the financial arrangement
which will have to be entered into with the Muncipality, nor as to the precise share
to be borne by that body in the execution of the several works, but these points will
receive our attention during the ensuing season at Simla, and as desired by Her
Majestys government, we shall take care that every project is fully scrutinized in
detail in view to ensuing the utmost economy.
Signed Lytton, H.W.Norman, A. Hobhouse, C.Bayley, J.Arbuthnot,
A.Clarke, John Strachey
It is stated (see No 34. Public Works date March 15 1877) that while
Peterhoff was being expanded and renovated, steps were afoot to procure
more land,
As to permanent arrangements, it is under consideration to build a viceregal residence
on the Observatory or Bentinck Hill between the present Observatory House
and Squires Hill. But whatever precise site is ultimately selected it will be necessary
to acquire the other estates on Bentinck Hill.
195
196
SUSAN VISVANATHAN1
cotton for lining nothing. There is a sort of country cloth made here, wretched
stuff, in fact, though the colours are beautiful but I ingeniously devised tearing up
whole pieces of red and white into narrow strips, and then sewing them together, and
the effect for the dining room is lovely when supported with the scarlet border painted
all around the cornice, the doors, windows etc. and now everybody is adopting the
fashion. (Eden 1978:127,128)
In yet another note, dated April 22nd, she writes,
I am quite well again now, thank you, and have begun riding and walking
again, and the climate, the place, and the whole thing is quite delightful, and our
poor despised house, that everybody abused, has turned out the wonder of Simla.
We brought carpets, chandeliers and wall shades from Calcutta, and I have got a
native painter into the house and cut out patterns in paper, which he then paints in
borders all round the doors and windows, and it makes up for the want of cornices.
Altogether it is very like a cheerful middlesized English country house, and extremely
enjoyable. I do not mean to think of the future (this worlds future) for six months. It
was very well to keep oneself alive in the plains by thinking of the mountains or to
dream of some odd chance that would take one home there is no saying the
inventions to go home that I had invented but now I do not mean to be imaginative
for six months. (ibid 128,129)
The relief at being in Simla was patent. When she had arrived after
the interminable journey, she exclaimed,
Well, it really is worth all the trouble - such a beautiful place and our house,
that everybody has been abusing, only wanting all the good furniture and carpets we
have bought - to be quite perfection. Views only too lovely; deep valleys on the
drawing room side to the west, and the snowy range on the dining room side where
my room also is. Our sitting rooms are small, but that is all the better in this climate,
and the two principal rooms are very fine. The climate! No wonder I could not live
down below! We never were allowed a scrap of air to breathe now I come back to the
air again, I remember all about it. It is a cool sort of stuff, refreshing, sweet, and
apparently pleasant to the lungs. We have fires in every room, and the windows
open, red rhododendron trees in bloom in every direction, and beautiful walks like
English shrubberies cut on all sides of the hills. God! I see this to be the best part of
India (ibid 125).
In the website of Exhibitions at Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta
which chronicles the achievements of Emily Eden, drawing from her
letters and paintings, it is established that, Emily Edens paintings are
preserved at the Victoria Memorial at Calcutta. J. Dickinson published
her paintings. Emily Eden was the author of two novels, The Semi Detached
House (1859) and The Semi-Attached Couple. According to the website,
on October 21st 1837, Lord Auckland accompanied rather reluctantly by
his sister, set out from Calcutta on board the Megna a flat or long barge
towed by a steamer. They alighted at Benares and went on foot to Simla.
197
198
SUSAN VISVANATHAN1
199
heat. ( ibid 46) The number of houses increased from 30 houses in 1830
to 290 in 1866. The number of occupied houses in Simla in 1881 was
1,141. (ibid 20)
The details of planning and building were closely documented by
administrators in their dealing with bureaucrats and engineers.
A Letter from Maj General W.A. Crommelin to W. Smith says that the
The Resolution of the Government of India in the Public Works Department
dated 3rd November 1876 a copy of which is enclosed, will make you acquainted
with the general scope of the duties which will devolve upon you, and of the works
which will have to be carried out in connection with the superintendence of the new
Circle of Public Works which may be styled the Simla Imperial Circle.
The Circle was to be under the direct orders of the Government of
India, and Mr W. Smith was expected to correspond directly with the
Secretary to the Government of India in the Public Works Department.
The works to be engaged could be summarized as follows, according
to Maj. W.A. Crommelin,
Additions to Peterhoff to render it a more convenient temporary
Viceregal residence, until a permanent structure can be provided.
The construction of a permanent Vice Regal residence on the
Observatory or Bentinck Hill
Water supply for the whole settlement.
Quarters for public offices and clerks.
Certain major works for the improvement of the drainage and
conservancy of the settlement.
Peterhoff, Inverarm have been acquired. Negotiations are on foot for
Landsdowne House, Squires Hall, Morvin
You will understand from the Resolution that a sum of 2 lakhs has
been authorized to meet immediate requirements, and that the accounts
are to be dealt with by the Examiner of Military Works Accounts who is
located at Simla. It is desirable that you should arrange with the Examiner
for the subdivision of the above and subsequent grants under certain main
heads of outlay such as:
Purchase of house
Improvement to property
Original Works
Repairs
Establishment
Tools and Plant.
In the carrying out of the tasks with regard to the formation of the
new circle the duties of the Executive Engineer of the Provincial division
were not to be interfered with. The specific interest was to transfer to your
charge the house which have been purchased already for the Government of India
200
SUSAN VISVANATHAN1
and which are at present under the charge of the Provincial Executive Engineer, but
this will not be done until your arrangement are fully matured.
In a document at the National Archives, New Delhi, referred to as
No 35 Public Works
Fort William, March 15 1877, it is recorded that Lytton writes to Marquis
of Salisbury,
Referring to our Despatch No 34 P.W of this date, on the subject of the proposed
improvements at Simla we have the honour to inform your Lordship that we have
selected Captain H. H. Cole to prepare the designs for the new Government House
and the other public buildings and offices.
Captain Cole, after inspecting the sites has gone home on leave, and will be in
London, at the time when this Despatch reaches your Lordship; he proposes to
prepare certain of the designs during his stay in England, and we request that, if
your Lordship sees no objection, he may be allowed to employ a draftsman to aid
him in the manual part of this work, and to leave him more free, than he would be
without this aid, to employ his own time in the most useful way.We enclose for your
Lordships information, copy of a report by Captain Cole on several points of detail
relating to the Vice Regal residence, with the remark that, the suggestions of this
officer are generally approved by us.
Captain Cole has also requested permission to purchase some books on
architectural subjects. ( Signed Lytton et al.)
The British Government of India had decreed that,
Simla shall be for the greater part of the year, the Head quarters of
the Supreme Government. It is indispensable that the present make-shift
and unbecoming arrangements should cease.
Till then, houses were rented for accommodation, but these were
expensive.
Summer residence for the Vice Roy was to be built at a cost of over 13
lakhs of rupees. 13 lakhs and 20,000 rupees was asked for.Peterhoff where
the Viceroy stayed previously was unhygienic and too small.Three members
of the Viceroys family fell ill there due to typhoid. When Native Chiefs
visited Simla in the summer, it was believed the Viceroy would require a
space in which to interact with them. They had been put up in tents,
which inhospitality to local chiefs was thought to be unbecoming of the
British in India.
Accusation of extravagance came from the home office. Lytton was
forced to write,
We presume that you refer to the appointment of a Superintending engineer.
Our object in making this appointment was to have an executive officer of experience
who, besides conducting our own work, would be associated with the Municipality,
201
and advise that body on the important actions which they are about to undertake:
we shall take care that the appointment does not last longer than is absolutely
necessary. (Signed Lytton, P.P Haines, R.C Bayley, A.J Arbuthnot, A.Clarke,
E.B. Johnson, B.B Johnson, W. Stokes.)
Lord Dufferin, who was to be in time a resident in Simla, wrote to
the Home Government:
The total cost of the new house (excluding the furniture and mural decoration)
and its accessories completed as sanctioned by us was estimated at Rs 6,05,131,
and on the strength of this estimate work was commenced; but unexpected difficulties
were met with in securing the foundation which have entailed an additional
expenditure of Rs 54,798 owing to increased depth and massiveness; and of Rs
12,306 in retaining walls for securing the approaches to the house.
The cost of furniture and murals was thought to be Rs 2,00,000. The
letter was signed Dufferin, Roberts, Ilbert, Hope, Colvin, Chesney.
(See Reply to the Governor General London 23rd December 1886)
There was stiff resistance from Viscount Cross, that he had not been
informed in time.
Dufferin in his letter of March 15, 1887 records his regret that formal
sanction was overlooked while pursuing the matter of congenial
accommodation for the Viceroy.
Electrification of Vice-Regal Lodge
The correspondence of August 26 1887 (in the National Archives, Delhi)
from Simla communicates the anxiety of the planners about whether to
use gas, candles or electricity while lighting the building. Installation of
electric light was seen to be more economical with regard to maintenance.
Lord Dufferin wrote to Viscount Cross,
We have decided that the most satisfactory arrangement is that the
house should be lighted by a full installation of electric light; and it appears
to us that besides the advantage of coolness and cleanliness, the
employment of electricity may be considered to a great extent as an
insurance against accidents by fire, which would be more likely to occur
if the house was lighted by gas, kerosene or candles.
Since no provision for expenditure on this was claimed earlier it is
now requested. The sum of one lakh and a half would, it was thought,
cover the entire cost including freight, carriage in India, erection of all
machinery, lamps and appliances connected with the installation. Dufferin
requested the participation of the electrical engineer of Buckingham Palace,
Mr Massey to supervise the contract with manufacturers.
In another document, titled No 50 Public Works Simla Sept 2 1887 and
available in the National Archives, Delhi, and addressed to Viscount Cross,
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN1
who was Majestys Secretary of State for India, we receive the following
information:
My Lord,
In the 7th paragraph of your Lordships Despatch No 61 P.W of the 23rd
December last, a request was made that copies of the designs and estimates of the
New Vice regal Lodge in Simla should be forwarded, for the information of Her
Majestys Government. We regret the delay which has occurred in complying with
this request, it has been mainly due to certain alterations in the design which have
suggested themselves as the work went on, and which have rendered it necessary
from time to time to amend the estimate and to alter the plans.
In paragraph 5 of our dispatch No 45 P.W of the 27th September 1886 we
stated that the estimated cost of the building was 6,87,051. The estimates which
we now forward show the manner in which that total was reached in juxtaposition
with each of the items which go to make up that sum, the corresponding items, as
they now stand, have been shown. The total of the present estimate which is
comparable with that mentioned in our dispatch of September last is 8,69,676
The excess of 1, 82,625 on the entire estate may be divided as follows
Excess on works
1,22, 287
On establishment
53,032
On tools and plants
7,306
1,82,625
Passing over the first of these items for the present we should explain that the excess
on Establishment is almost entirely due to the fact that the building has taken a
longer time in construction than was anticipated. It was at first thought that it
would be completed by the beginning of the current season, but it is now certain that
it cannot be ready for occupation by His Excellency the Viceroy before next year. To
a certain extent the extra work, to which we will presently refer, have tended to
increase the establishment charged.
The excess to the cost of the Lodge itself is to a great extent, due to a strike
among the cartmen which has entailed increased expenditure in the delivery of stone.
It is essentially due also to a variety of petty causes which led to excess either of
quantity or rates on some of the sub-heads.
Lord and Lady Dufferins New House.
In Raja Bhasins lucid account, Simla: The summer capital of British India, we
find an entry by Lady Dufferin in her journal entry dated 15th July 1887.
D took Hermie and me all over the house in the afternoon.We climbed
up the most terrible places, and stood on single planks over yawning
chasms. The workpeople are very amusing to look at specially the young
203
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN1
more together here at Simla for it recalled many happy memoriesFew of the
friends of those days were left, and a different generation had sprung up. (Bhasin
1992:46)
Transport of Valuables and People
The road to Simla was a hard one, and Raja Bhasins book describes
the nature of the transport used. Transporting all that the British needed
for their comfort is a matter for cultural analyses. However, as late as 1904,
Sir Frederick Treves describes the scene on the Hindustan Tibet road,
It was on this road that I met the man with the planks . They are the
hill men of the poorer sort who carry planks of sawn wood into Simla
The men are ill-clad and the sun and rain have tanned them and their
rags to the colour of brown earth. They bear the planks across their bent
backs, and the burden is grievous. They come from a place some days
journey towards the snows.They plod along from the dawn to the twilight.
They seem crushed by the weight of the beam and their gait is more the
gait of a stumbling beast than the walk of a man. They move slowly. Their
long black hair is white with dust as it hangs by each side of their bowed
down faces. The sweat among the wrinkles on their brows is hardened
into lamentable clay. They walk in single file, and when the path is narrow,
they need must move sideways. In one day I met no less than fifty creeping
wretches in this inhuman procession. Each dull eye is fixed upon the
scuffled road or upon the plank on the stooping back that crawls in front.
To the beams are strapped their sorry possessions a cooking pot, sticks
for a fire, a water gourd, and a sheeps skin to cover them from the frost at
night. If there were but a transverse beam to the plank, each one of these
bent men might be carrying his own cross to a far-off crucifixion. (Ibid
34,35)
Ferdnand Braudel in his classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip writes that mountains are often described as half
wild, their residents are hardy, the villages always semi-deserted, for people
have to leave to find work. Men carrying loads described so vividly in the
preceding paragraph, appear even today. In the 19th century, one of the
most significant problems was of course the question of labour, begar
being the appropriate title for the kind of appropriation of work from the
surrounding hills. How were goods and materials transported? Pamela
Kanwar has some interesting motifs in her book on Simla.
The British had created many hill stations, the largest number in the
foothills of the Himalayas. ( Kanwar 2005: 35)
In 1864, 484 persons were transported from Calcutta to Simla for six
205
months. Four lakh rupees incurred in the transportation was not thought
to be a great sum. John Lawrence believed that one day of work would
equal five days in the plains. The town expanded with the years as Viceroys
and Governments continued to visit Simla every year. A Railway line was
constructed in 1869 (ibid 39). There was a cart road from Kalka to Simla
through Dharmapur and Solan. The Ambala Kalka link was extended in
1891; twelve years later the first passenger train arrived at Simla on 9
November 1903. (ibid 40).
Simla transformed itself from being a sanatorium and holiday town
into becoming an official town. While there were questions about
extravagance, by 1880, Pamela Kanwar argues that the British saw Simla
as a certainty in terms of seven months of real bureaucratic time. (ibid 45).
The town grew according to the needs of the people living in it, or what
she calls the exigency of time and of Vice regal direction. Lower bazaar
was seen to be untidy and ugly. It was a residence for Indian clerks, camp
followers, shop-keepers, carpenters, cloth merchants, cooks, bakers, artisans,
domestic servants, coolies and porters (ibid 57). In contrast to Lower Bazaar,
was the Mall, which was a public area for the British, and this was cleared
of sweepers and coolies every evening from four to seven. (ibid 63). Along
with the maintenance of roads, sewage networks, water supply and the
maintenance of forest cover of rhodendron and oak, was the sustained
conservation measures for the water sources( ibid 65). This would be reread by Kanwar in terms of the fluctuations of population in the summer
months and winter months (ibid 132)
Raja Bhasin cites Rudyard Kipling writing to his Aunt Edie, a letter
from Lahore, dated 14th August 1883,
Privilege leave, as I may have told you before, gives you the pleasant
duty of enjoying yourself in a cool climate for thirty days and being paid 20
pounds for that duty. The month was a round of picnics, dances, theatricals, and so
on and I flirted with the bottled up energy of a year on my lips. ..Simla
is built around the sides of a mountain 8444 feet high, and the roads are just
ledges.
Yvonne Fitzroy who accompanied Lord and Lady Reading as a
member of their retinue, was not a camp follower in the uncritical sense.
She writes,
Simla must be the meanest of Imperial capitals. Seen from a distance between
April and June, before the rains have worked their annual miracle, it clings to a
mangy hill side, a forest of tin roofs, rickety wood and discoloured plaster. The gothic
crime of the Secretariat dominates the centre, the Victorian ardour of Viceregal Lodge
its western limit. The forests of pine and deodar have been very largely destroyed,
and the houses crowd as thick as the trees they have supplanted. The northern hills
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN1
are bare and brown, and the ultimate snowline contributes the Himalayan touch
with which we exiles dazzle the envious hearts of Pimlico. (Fitzroy 1926: 90)
Later, her impressions are even more complex,
At a discreet distance Viceregal Lodge possessed a cathedral like silhouette,
rather impressive, but on near approach it revealed all the eccentricities of a Scottish
haydropathic. It sat on a peak, the views it commanded became, in due course,
superb; it was built of grey stone, quite porous, an idiosyncrasy of which we reaped
the full benefit during the monsoon.Within, I do believe it was really far uglier than
it looked.You could have found fault with it to eternity and then not have reached
with the limit of its crimes; on the other hand it was so large, so gilded, so perfectly
complacent, than in the end you grew near to accepting it at its own valuation! (ibid
191)
She complained that,
Simla, in particular is little more than a vast boarding-house every bit as
depressing, and its houses owe nothing to humanity in its building, and little in the
living. (ibid 191)
She called it the dislocation of English life in England (ibid 192)
Writing from the vantage point of the 1920s, Yvonne Fitzroy says,
I never heard a scandal worth remembering, and a few worth believing; tongues
were busier in malice than in wit, and its record of wickedness would be found
tedious by the average flapper. Which is not to deny there was scandal in plenty,
what else would you expect of a community with hardly any interest in life but the
social.(193)
There were odd sorts of dances and balls, memberships in eccentric
clubs of those who dared to consort with the unworthy publicly, such as
Knights of the Order of Black Hearts. She continues,
The summit of achievement was, I think reached only last year in the great
Chinese ball given by Their excellencies to cheer the monsoon-laden minds of Simla.
As a spectacle I have never seen its equal in either hemisphere , and even the
monsoon abetted by dropping a grey veil over the exterior eccentricities of Lord
Dufferins Scottish stronghold. Within the entire house was transformed, lit only by
countless lanterns with a dias of imperial yellow, and two huge red lacquered pailows
or gateways. The walls were adorned with panels on which Chinese dragons raged
and curled, and the costumes were limited to those of China, Japan and Burma.
Indian guests were present, such as the Maharajah of Patiala. The Indian servants
were reviled for being slow and cunning.
Preparations for any and every party were always incredibly complicated by the
Indian servants, who though they sometimes by force of numbers achieved miracles,
207
are never to be hurried, and above all things, reverence the brain saving device of
habit.They are engaging enough even if of a mentality that defeats the understanding,
but for their proper appreciation you should lead a life of leisure. (ibid 195)
Yvonne Fitzroy was on the staff of Lord and Lady Readings retinue,
and she described her time in service as that of a hurrying life, the living
of which was so like running backwards on a moving staircase; you were
always at the top, however desperately you tried to get to the bottom!
Barbara Croisette in The Great Hill Stations of Asia writes of the
Viceregal Lodge that ,
At the time it was built, however, it quickly became symbolic of Simlas
hierarchical professional and social system. A summons to a viceroys reception or
dinner was something to die for. Once in possession of the engraved invitation card
and starchly outfitted in formal evening clothes and medals if he could muster a
few an ambitious officer or colonial administrator of middling ranks would travel
the three or four miles from Simla town to the viceroys baronial hall in both hope
and trepidation, aware that a casual remark or the wrong answer to a viceregal quest
from him or his wife could ruin a career. Commenting on the serious social climbing
that went on at such formal events, the journalist William Howard Russel described
the Simla scene as ball after ball, each followed by a little backbiting. (Croisette
1999:56)
Since the fear of proximity and mixture always existed, the caste, class
and race systems were jam packed with taboos. Croisette writes
At the top were the Brahmins and maharajas, who also bought property at
Simla until the British began to fear they were amassing too much of it and tried to
stall the process with red tape. Indian rulers paid formal calls on the viceroy or a
lower official befitting the rulers perceived place vis--vis the imperial hierarchy.
Gifts were exchanged. Indian professionals and rich merchants from several higher
Hindu castes bought homes and became influential in the affairs of the town as their
numbers grew, although most local business were relegated to the Lower Bazar
which still tumbles down the cliff side below the Mall. (ibid)
Yvonne Fitzroy writes, that there was much mutual entertainment,
and that they would each represent their communities. We in India, may
not be the flower of our kind, but by us will our kind be judged( Fitzroy
1926: 214).This mutual entertainment was clearly in terms of the acceptance
of colonialism by the upper castes, from whom too the National
Movement found its propagators. Madame Blavatsky was a guest in Simla
of the founder of the Indian National Congress, and there is a record of
this in the Theosophical Society archives.
In the last section, I present a short story written by me during an
Asia Pacific Writers workshop, hosted by IIAS Simla and IIT Delhi in
October 2008. I was invited there as an instructor at a creative writing
workshop. I wrote the story while Robin Hemley, another instructor,
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209
the soup.
Think of another place in the Lodge to cook then.
If you dont pay the workers they will die and haunt me.The children
can hear them weeping. Its true that they have nothing to eat.
Well discuss this tomorrow. For the moment, my dear Lady, can we
now think of what you will cook for the Council.
Its too early to discuss with the staff. And not if you look at me like
that, with hollow eyes, with smoke billowing out of your ears.
The children were sleeping of course, while the argument over what
was to be made for the Council continued. Their voices were raised and
the children woke up. It was a strange space of complete annihilation.
Lady Dufferin walked out, and the mountain seemed to be as shadow in
the glow of the autumn sun. It seemed to darken in the haze of the
oncoming heat. She walked for miles, full of that odd and wary sense of
loss of being which followed every quarrel. Sometimes she thought that
life was an abyss, when all she had to do was appear in a space of tranquility
which was consumed by all.
The labourer sometimes appeared as a coffin carrier to Lord Dufferin.
Curiously, he recognized him in the oddest circumstances as heralding
death. Fear would rise like the sea in an endless ebbing, a threat of return,
a lost country. The labourer spoke to him in a dream from which he never
quite awake. Thats how he once realized that in the language of dreams,
nothing need to be said.
Lady Dufferin woke up sometimes in her room knowing that the
house was haunted. It didnt frighten her. The labourer was Duff s visitor.
Hers were different. She would open her eyes, and Duff was
somnambulently standing over her bed.
What did he say, darling?
The same thing as yesterday.
Not being paid? Dont you have any other conversations?
No.
She would wake him up, as he stood blinking at her. They would
kneel and she would pray, in her clear soft voice. She was used to him, his
eccentricities never bothered her, every one laughed at him his rude
speech as they called it, his monosyllables to hide his accent, his constant
excuses and apologies to those who were more powerful than him.
You must not be afraid of him. See him as Jacobs angel, wrestle with
him, Im sure the ladder to heaven will be yours.
Im sick to death. If only we could go on furlough.
But the wiring is still being done. The electrification is what you have
always wanted. Do not give up now.
The air was cold and swirled around them. It was a world which was
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN1
familiar to them, and yet they felt sealed inside in glass, as if it would
break and destroy them. They had traveled so far, by sea and by road.
They had met one another as shadows in the odd circumstances of their
marriage. Deposited by history, charmed by fate. The large canvas of their
dreams in the sharing of power. She the constant chatelaine, and he the
keeper of keys. It was curious that while she was the quiet one, afraid of
company, afraid of people, she would take guests around this great stone
castle. It was a place where people loved to gather, to eat, to drink, to talk,
to dance, and it was only by invitation. There was no occasion when any
one could come uninvited. No moment thus went unsupervised. It seemed
to her that they were prisoners of their own invention, prisoners of a
grandeur which was so hollow it left them enchanted and removed from
real things.
She had her ghosts too. They spoke to her in her head. Some of them
were cruel, mocking her for her simple faith. She knew that her language
was different from theirs and yet she had learnt to speak it. Sometimes
she forgot her own language, she thought now in images. Pictures floated
in her mind, always within the frame of the baywindow, where she sat for
long hours. Peterhoff floated in the images of the past; how uncomfortable
it had been, the khansamas always cross. Here it was the same. However
hard she tired, she could never get away from the peeling ceiling.
Everything was perfect, till the new coat of paint began to detach itself
and fall into the food. They had not noticed it at first, imagined that it was
crystallized salt, but then suddenly one evening, her son had crunched on
mortar. And on days of unutterable crises such as those, she would appear,
the lovely Lady Samantha. She was the perfect embodiment of lazy
afternoons in Simla. She was the gentlest of people, with grey blue eyes,
and the streaked gold brown hair. She lived in a turret in one of the older
building near Lower Bazaar. The turret was rented to her by a writer who
made it clear that he wanted no favours, only her friendship. Samantha
Sutton, with her wealth, and misplaced title, and her Cockney accent,
over which she had a veneer of languor and affectation. She drove Lady
Dufferin mad who was forced very often to include her in their parties
because everyone liked her. But now back to the immediate question,
What time was lunch?
WORKS CITED
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sorting out the strands of emotion and speech patterns in each motif. The
novelist himself offers this weaving metaphor to the reader early on in the
novel, where we read that the somewhat obsessive and insomniac
Khanderao has a habit of undoing knots and winding up balls of twine.
Yet another chapter neatly intertwines Khanderaos growing intellectual
awareness with his continued, if diminishing, presence in the familys
daily farm work, culminating in one where he finally quits the village for
higher studies in Aurangabad and Pune.
It is into this trajectory that Nemade builds his critique of disciplinary
knowledge about the past. As noted above, he rejects a nationalist or
religious foundation, or an Indo-Aryan, Sanskritic origin for the term in
favour of an older geographic and material association the subcontinent
east of the river Sindhu, and everybody in it. D.D. Kosambis arguments
about material life as a living lens, and a combined method spanning
archaeology and textual criticism in approaching the past certainly inform
this critique it is no accident that Khanderao is a keen student of
archaeology. But even as he carefully cleans bits of pottery that are elusive
traces of the past, Khanderao also remembers a spooky childhood tale,
reflecting beautifully on both the possibilities and limits of such material
remains:
[Hoping to find the coins he had heard clattering earlier, Dhanji thrust
his hand into the pot] To his shock, he could feel nothing. He moved his
hand about, but that heavy, clanging pot was empty. He thrust his hand in
further, to his elbow, arm and shoulder, but still nothing. He couldnt
even feel the bottom of the tiny pot. Dhanji broke out into a sweat. He
then threw one of his own coins into the pot, and it clattered tann, tann,
far down as if into a deep well, kept falling for a long while. As if for years
on end. Throwing the rest of the coins down, listening to their sweet
echoes, Dhanji realized that this hollow was from quite another world.
This wondrous realization made him shiver, and thrusting his face into
the pot, craning his neck and straining his eyes, he gazed on the depths of
endless years. Forever. The end.
The next day the farmers broke down Dhanjis door to find that he
had got his head stuck in the pot and suffocated to death. (77-9)
Rather than simply echo Kosambi on the indispensability of
archaeology for recovering ancient history, Nemade re-examines the link
between material traces and language. Khanderao is eager to recover
popular consciousness through material remains, an approach his guide
Dr. Sankhalia dismisses as being unsuited to scientific archaeological
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protocols. But this is a bugbear with the young scholar. In his fevered
dream Khanderao puts forward two ver y different couplets as
interpretations of one of the symbols of the Harappan script. Any one
symbol, he argues, can serve as the starting point for an original reading of
the script, and there may be multiple, real interpretations. On hearing
one such interpretation, his friend Yasin says I dont care if this couplet
is from Harappa, its brilliant! Yasin is content with the moral core of
Khanderaos reading, and doesnt care about whether it can be perfectly
historicized. Yet all the senior scholars are upset and demand proof, even
as they get their own categories all muddled up.
Here, the script and its images and scratches, is at once a literal material
trace from the Harappan past. Any one of the symbols is a good enough
starting point for a very original reading of this civilization. By
underscoring the malleability of these readings, Nemade undercuts the
stability of both archaeological finds as well as textual sources. Proof is
itself as slippery a concept as the categories it is embedded in. Instead, he
appears to suggest, the past is transmitted as memory. These memories
flow through multiple modes and practices of everyday life; Khanderaos
recollections, accordingly, are mediated through a large variety of oral
poetry, formulaic conversations and the rehearsing of family lore, festival
competitions, idle gossip and political talk.
When an old matriarch at the door of the city of Harappa asks
Khanderao for the password, he answers anekvachani bhutakali (lit. third
person plural past tense). Hindu pasts, then, are necessarily in the plural;
it is only on acknowledging this can one enter Harappa. Khanderao,
however, wrestles with this plurality throughout as he contrasts his own
memories, received from different sources, with his intellectual apparatus,
and seeks to stamp his own understanding of the past against the mocking,
contrapuntal voices in his head. His agony over his career choices is at
once a dilemma about whether he should live this memory-as-knowledge,
or whether he should reclaim it intellectually as a scholar at far remove.
Although somewhat predictable and weaker in comparison to the rest of
the novel, the actual descriptions of university life and professorial intrigue,
detailing the sorry state of formal education, elaborate this epistemological
point.
Modern Marathi public culture is replete with contested narratives
of the past that bear a very thorny relationship with documentary evidence
and its authority, but which are powerful carriers of social and political
claims and regional pride and consciousness. This is true of both nationalist
or elite narratives of Maratha and Indian nationalist history as well as Dalit
narratives of protest and identity.The exact authority of the textual archive,
of mining documents for proof, and by extension the status of individual
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or collective memories that depart from the textual archive, have been,
and continue to be, politically charged debates in Marathi cultural
discourse.
Nemade decenters the familiar, iconic motifs of regional historical
memory Khanderaos genealogical memories foreground the material
drudgery of a Kunbi life and identity, aggressively distancing it from the
narratives of high Maratha warrior families, their Rajput lineages and
their twice-born claims. Maratha history itself is fragmented in the
memories the novel excavates, into a Holkar anecdote, a Pendhari raid,
an inam grant, a seventh-generation ancestor, a dysfunctional Deshmukh
family. Any notion of a Hindu religious community, much less a political
one, is similarly fragmented into smaller devotional groups and practices
that overlap with a range of Muslim pirs and shrines. Much as Maratha
history and its popularly perceived glories are denied coherence in the
narrative, so also is the category Hindu, which remains disorderly and
contradictory.This is one of the meanings of the novels subtitle, jaganyaachii
samruddha adagal the bountiful clutter generated by the daily business of
living that defies any effort at tidiness.
The particular importance of language in this argument merits a closer
look. Khanderao is contemptuous of any civilization that rejects the
centrality of labour in favour of a social order based on language. This
applies as much to Sanskrit as it does to English. But language in this
sense is implied as ritual and recitation, on a fetishizing of pronunciation
and literary skill; throughout the novel, this alienated sense of language
is undercut with the more everyday task it performs as an archive of
memory. Multiple registers of Marathi mingle with each other, even as
Khandeshi, local to Morgao and its environs, dominates. Nemade has a
keen ability to seamlessly integrate descriptions of mood and environment
with the sketching of characters and lively dialogue. Rarely resorting to
physical descriptions of people, he brings characters to life through a
spectrum of speech patterns - Sanskritized bombastic speech, everyday
rural familial vocabulary, college slang, urbanized pretensions of PuneBombay migrants, political sugar-baron-speak, or words and accents
particular to caste and context, including a spectacular array of swearwords. Dakhni, Marwari, Gujarati, Hindi mix easily and frequently into
Marathi speech.
This technique yields one of the finest passages in the book, which
captures the sheer diversity of the people packed together in the unreserved
train compartment simply through snatches of conversation. Interspersed
with this focused use of language is a light vein of humorous wordplay.
English words are inflected with their everyday Marathi pronunciation,
and bilingual puns that play on the quite different, and hilarious, Marathi
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PRACHI DESHPANDE
agrarian civilization has swayed for ten thousand years to the rhythm of this age-old
female dance. (202-3)
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community. And yet, Khanderaos family lands do not remain static and
subsistence-level over the generations; they grow and prosper. His father
manages to strike a harmony between his simple Varkari devotion and his
chemically fertilized cash crops through the green revolution and presides
benevolently over cooperative societies and political party workers. It is
this empire that his prodigal son is recalled to take over, not a long-held,
tiny patch of land. The question of return to rural society, prompted by
the dramatic urbanization across Maharashtra (and across India) in the
post-independence period is an urgent question with diverse political,
economic and environmental causes and consequences for all of us. Indeed,
Nemade chronicles this phenomenon with great poignancy, keeping this
very urbanized, newly educated, young (male) reader experiencing it, in
mind. Yet, besides the ideal of localized self-sufficiency, this critique must
also acknowledge and engage the historical tendency of expansionism
within agriculture, and its links with urban areas.
Nemade is an extraordinarily gifted wordsmith, with the ability to
bend and mould his language to suit a dizzying variety of situations.
Certainly, linguistically, Hindu is deshivaad in action par excellence, Nemades
master text to demonstrate how it can be done. Although a challenge for
translators not entirely an undesirable feature - this is Marathi writing at
its best, whetting the readers appetite for the remaining three novels in
the quartet. It is impossible to do full justice to the richness of the novel
and its ideas in this single review. Hindu deserves to be read and discussed
widely.
BOOK REVIEW
Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging
Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull, 2007, 121 pp, Rs 395
Anirban Das
The short and stout volume of conversations between Judith Butler and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak deals with a very old object of inquiry in the
social sciences the nation-state. Coming from two of the leading radical
thinkers of our time, it is not surprising to find in the book a call for a
disjuncture of the hyphen to think the nation and the state separately.
What might be little unsettling for the reader with a somewhat Marxist
progressivist background is the clear preference of both the authors for
the latter, that is, state. For Butler, the need is to think of an access to the
state without the call for an access to homogeneous nationhood. For Spivak,
a possible search would be for a reinvention of the state as an abstract
structure of redistribution, welfare and constitutionality with a persistent
effort to keep away nationalisms and fascisms. I will try to make a sense of
these counter-intuitive moves with reference to certain other coordinates
of theorizing on the matter.
Judith Butler begins the discussion with a focus on the forms of
exclusion perpetrated by the nation-state. In this context, she refers to
Hannah Arendts essay The Decline of the Nation-state and the End of
the Rights of Man in the volume on The Origins of Totalitarianism (New
York, 1958) and launches a sustained critique of Georgio Agambens notion
of bare life. Statelessness is at the heart of her argument. The stateless, the
one excluded from the state, is thereby not outside the grids of power
that constitute the state, Butler asserts. S/he is also excluded by the processes
that found the specific form of state, one should not forget.These processes,
in the prevailing context of the political, has the specific articulation of
the nation and the state at its core As such, they are produced as the stateless at the same time that they
are jettisoned from juridical modes of belonging (16)
This, for Butler, is unlike Agambens notion of bare life which sets
up a simple exclusionary logic between life and politics. Such a move
evidently ignores the implication of power processes in the making up of
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the category life. It reduces the connection between life and politics to
the domain of citizenship alone and disregards the processes of biopower
active in the modern nation-state. What is regarded as simple, bare life is
also defined and produced through the procedures of classification,
enumeration and normalization even when that life remains excluded
from the observable structures of power. This exclusion can occur through
complex forms of governmentality and not, pace Agamben, reducible to
acts of sovereignty, Butler instructs. Containment and expulsion occur
simultaneously and through the same grid of mechanisms of power.
Operative here is power without entitlement or obligation, power that
renounces its hold, yet power nonetheless. For Butler, destitution of the
stateless is not explained by sovereignty or bare life as key ter ms.
Statelessness is saturated with power. To bring in the act of sovereignty as
the causative element in this predicament is to simplify the complexity of
the multivalent tactics of power. This act of simplification would make
one reiterate the only available heuristic (of sovereignty) endlessly to
explain highly differentiated states of dispossession and will keep her/
him blind to the possibility of multiple forms of resistance, agency and
counter-mobilization.
One could very well question Butlers reading of Agamben (a reading
to which Spivak has also shown her sympathy). It can be argued that,
what is important in Agambens intervention is his focus on the moment
of sovereignty in modern forms of power and not his efforts to mark
empirical instances of such moments. The empir ic instances (of
sovereignty) are important not since they elude governmental techniques
but because they bring out the sovereign acts that inhere in the
governmental. Agamben (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford
University Press, 1998) defines his figure of the political, which he calls
homo sacer (the sacred man), as someone who can be killed but not
sacrificed. Homo sacer can be killed by anyone without incurring the
punishment, even the judgment, for homicide. His killing is not a homicide.
He is beyond the law of the human. He cannot be sacrificed in the name of
god. He is beyond the law of the divine. Beyond both human and divine laws,
homo sacer is always and already vulnerable to death. This vulnerability to
death is the Power that is the subject matter of politics. This is bare life,
the ultimate subject and object of the political. The inverse of this logic,
the reverse of the same coin, is the man in the modern democratic society,
whose life is invulnerable on principle.The invulnerability of life in modern
society is the exact opposite, hence guided by the same economy of death,
only in the reverse, of the absolute vulnerability of the homo sacer. It is
possible to continue with the concerns of Butler and Spivak without
denouncing the notion of bare life in this sense. But their concerns here
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225
do not directly engage with this moment of sovereign power. For the
moment, they are more interested in the dynamics of the governmental
nation state trying to open up an analytics of power that would include sovereignty as one of
its features but would also be able to talk about the kinds of mobilizations and
containments of populations that are not conceptualizable as the acts of a sovereign,
and which proceed through different operations of state power. (emphasis added,
102).
Butler points to the fact that Hannah Arendt had been acutely aware of
the force of the performative speech - speech that founds or enstates a
new possibility for social and political life (27). The act of declaration,
the performative exercise of the announcement, is seen here as a founding
gesture of articulating the nation-state. She speaks of the call to freedom
that founds freedom, of the right to rights that can only be exercised
beyond and before the domain of rights. This originary freedom, as also
this originary right, can only exist in its exercise (48). And as with all
performatives, with all repetitious moves, the act of repetition bears within
it the chances of displacement. Or rather, displacement inheres in
repetition. A statement of belonging always moves within a possibility of
loss. Butler, and later on Spivak, refers to the incident that gives this book
its name - in spring, 2006, street demonstrations were being organized for
illegal residents in the United States of America. In these demonstrations
in the Los Angeles area, the US national anthem was sung in Spanish
(along with the Mexican anthem). How to mark this phenomenon? Was
this a simple call for inverting the prevailing laws that prevented the
national anthem being sung by the foreign tongue? For Butler, this signaled
a different act. When the stateless (the illegal immigrant) sings the national
anthem, tries to move into the (nation-)state, the sheer act of the one
marked as stateless owning up to the state is not a simple reversal but a
displacement of the very logic of the (nation-)state. The logical structure
of the nation-state being grounded on a lack (of those who are thereby
rendered stateless), the entry of that constitutive outside displaces the
very structure which was built upon this definitional lack.The performance
(declaration or the call) enacts the action, stages the state they do not
possess, and in the process, displaces the hyphen between the state and
the nation. To think of the incident in this light, one has to be able to
think the state and the nation separately. Disjointing the state from the
nation is the prerequisite to think access to the state without access to
homogeneous nationhood. Butler is perfectly aware (and says that in so
many words) that this displacement is not necessary to the act. It may well
be an act of resurgent nationalism. But there is a contingency, a
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She pits the abstract structures of welfare against the managerial state on
the free market model. The forms of state and the critical regionalism she
speaks of are to be thought of thus in the mode of to come yet emerging
from the very complexities of the present networks of capital, nation-state
and different discursive modalities.
In response to questions, Spivak clarifies the notion of critical
regionalism against Jurgen Habermass attempts to articulate a democracy
beyond the nation-state in Europe and against Paul Gilroys cosmopolitan
multicultural idea. Critical regionalism works in the atmosphere of erosion
of nationalisms. Elements of this regionalism may be discernible in shared
sensibilities among todays nations: Spivak talks about old links predating Bandung between pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism, about
the newly emergent (post-Soviet) Caucasus and the trans-Caucasus, about
the New Latin America, and about certain links in South Asia operative
below and beyond the hostilities between the nation-states. Arising
Butler acutely points out as a critique of the area studies map (118),
critical regionalism tries to retain abstract structures of something like a
state and allows for constitutional redress against the mere vigilance and
data-basing of human rights, or public interest litigation in the interest of
a public that cannot act for itself (94). For Spivak, Habermas occupies a
different variety of performative contradiction. His notion of a European
democracy is based on the supposedly special capacity of Europe to
ar ticulate democratic pr inciples and presupposes a notion of
cosmopolitheia continuous with the Kantian architectonics of reason.
Again, the stated reference here is to Derridas critique of Kant in Rogues
(Stanford University Press, 2005) in terms of a democracy to come (as
opposed to a future presence of universal Europeanism). What Spivak speaks
of here is also different from a cosmopolitan multiculturalism in that it
deals with the notion of a practical access to the abstract structures of the
state and not with the question of coexistence of cultures.
To speak of the state thus is not to speak of ethical universalism, not
to speak of the state to represent an ethical universal. Instead, as Spivak
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ANIRBAN DAS
points out near the end of the discussion, what remains important is that
you cannot adjudicate an ethical state. Ethics interrupts the abstractions of the
state structure. Those structures are legal. They cannot adjudicate justice but they
serve justice and we must protect them. (100-101).
The practical act of accessing the abstractions of the state is also, at the
same instant, a philosophical act. Philosophical speculation and practical
politics is a very dangerous binary, the authors seem to agree. This enables
one to think of ethics and politics in their separate specificities, not as
opposed terms, and to access both in their intimate embrace of the ethicopolitical. The book ends, in the words of Judith Butler on the promise of
the unrealizable (120).
It would be good to have some editorial comments regarding the
context of this exchange and about the identities of the unnamed
interlocutors who pose important questions. Apart from this major editorial
inadequacy, I end with an allusion to the fact that this review has focused
on a single trajectory of argument and has not touched upon a number of
related issues in this immensely readable and significant intervention.
BOOK REVIEW
The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India: Bengal and India, 1947-1967
Joya Chatterji
UK, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in
Indian History and Society), 2007, 366 pp, Hardcover, $ 45, Rs. 895
Debjani Sengupta
All those who work in the area of Partition Studies have waited in anticipaion
for JoyaChatterjis book on the Partition of Bengal (1947) titled The Spoils
of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967 (CUP, 2007). The book is a
welcome intervention in the area, dealing with the behind the scenes
political machinations, migration and other fall-outs of the vivisection of
the country with a special focus on Bengal. Chatterjis study is important
in many counts, not least because there is a serious dearth of engagement
on the topic even after 60 odd years of Indias independence. In the subcontinent, and particularly in India, Partition Studies have been to a large
extent Punjab-centric.The Partition of Bengal in 1947 has been a neglected
area in Indian historiography and we still await a comprehensive look at
the effects of the Partition combining West Bengal, the North-East and
Bangladesh. The 1947 division meant massive population migration across
the borders of the newly independent nation states of India and Pakistan.
Fifteen million people crossed the newly defined boundaries; in West
Bengal alone an estimated 30 lakhs of refugees entered by 1960. For over
a million people, it was death in various violent encounters involving
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. For an estimated 80 thousand women, in
India and Pakistan, it meant abduction and sexual assault.
Although ordinary people suffered these traumas of displacement,
murder and mayhem, the dominant hegemonic structures of public
memory of the Partition, issued by the state and the majoritarian
nationalistic discourses, have paid very little attention to these voices.
However, in the last two decades, some shifts in Partition Studies can be
discerned. In the late nineties, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin commented
on the abundance of political histories of the events equaled by a paucity
of social histories of it. 1 They also noted an absence of feminist
historiography of the Partition. Around the same time, Urvashi Butalia
began to retrieve through interviews and oral narratives the stories of the
smaller, invisible players of the events: the women and the children and
the scheduled castes. Butalias contention was that we couldnt begin to
understand what Partition is about unless we look at how people
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BOOK REVIEW
231
Bengal since they were deemed to be essential for bringing tea from
Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri down to the docks in Calcutta. (p.44) The
Congress plan to bid for a few well-chosen Muslim majority thanas ran
into troubled waters when even within the Congress a powerful dissident
caucus claimed a compact and even smaller state. Chatterji looks at the
various plans for partitioning Bengal and draws an important conclusion:
although these plans were ranged on a broad spectrum, they had some
interesting commonalities and she concludes that this common ground
and the geographical base of the movement that demanded the partition
of Bengal were substantially one and the same. (p.52) The political core
of the new state was to be the areas of south-central West Bengal while
the areas in the north would be the periphery. This analysis of the
formation of the new state goes a long way to help us understand the way
these areas have figured in the present day politics of West Bengal. This
continuance of unequal relationship between these areas contributed to
many of the political turbulences of West Bengal in the decades after
Partition. In drawing a new broken line between the past and its present
day shadows, Chattejis analysis once again reminds us that the long shadows
of the Partition still hover over our lives and politics.
Part II titled the Bengal Diaspora is the section that draws our attention
with the immediate fallout of the Partition: the migration of refugees who
suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the borders or in the
wrong state. Chatterjis look at the historical causes of Partition related
migration shatters many a-historical and commonly held myths. It is a
mistaken belief that communal violence was the only reason why people
moved after the Partition in 1947. That reason may have been largely true
in Punjab but in Bengal the causes were various and complex ranging
from the first wave of upper class and upper caste migrations and then the
later migrations by the agriculturists and artisans who went as late as
1950.Chatterjis study also points to the fact that refugee migrations had
begun as early as 1946 in the wake of the Calcutta and Noakhali carnages
and till date no study has assessed clearly the total number of migrations
that had resulted through that year due to the larger and smaller communal
conflagrations. Calcutta for instance remained on a boil with incidents of
confrontations between Hindus and Muslims and newspapers were
reporting cases of arson and stabbing through the months leading up to
the Independence. An important aspect of Chatterjis study is the way in
which she looks at the migration patter ns of the Hindu peasants,
sharecroppers and agricultural labourers and the population distribution
of refugees district wise in West Bengal. She builds on Nakatanis study of
the refugee migration in Nadia district to weave an elaborate and
concentrated argument about patterns of migrations, employments and
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BOOK REVIEW
233
urban life.The refugees extended Calcuttas limits, filled its slums and
took up livelihoods far removed from their own. Sociologist BenoyGhosh
wrote in 1967: The New Suburbia has expanded in the last twenty-five
or thirty years. The old boundaries of the city suburbs has expanded to
accommodate wave after wave of population abandoned land, fertile
land, rice field, marshy lands, ponds, lakes, jungle and gardens all took in
the rising tidal waves of population.8 Contemporary literature, films and
theatre seemed to grasp these new changes in the city much more sensitively
than city planners did, so that the theme of an overall moral crisis generated
by a violent uprooting and the compulsions of survival appeared often in
contemporary literature.9In the poems of Samar Sen, Bishnu Dey, Sankho
Ghosh and Buddhadev Bose, in the stories by Ritwik Ghatak, Subodh
Ghosh, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Manik Bandopadhyay, Ashapurna
Devi, in the novels by Sabitr i Ray, Shaktipada Rajguru, Sunil
Gangopadhyay and Kamal kumar Majumdar we see the relentless portrayal
of a city in decline, of people struggling to survive, of colonies and their
inhabitants and, then, the union and rise of refugees as a political force in
the city in the 50s and 60s.
Another aspect of the refugee experience that Chatterji takes up but
cursorily is the settlements outside the state where the migrants were
dispersed to diverse geographical areas such as to the Andamans, the
Sunderbans and to Dandakaranya in the years after the partition and the
large scale desertions of the refugees from these camps who flooded back
into West Bengal. This aspect of the Bengali diaspora, and the early
confrontations between the refugees and the authorities often resulting
in the loss of life (the Dhubulia camp incident comes to mind) had an
impact, often elliptical, often direct, on West Bengals post partition politics.
Although Chatterji discusses the Dandakaranya rehabilitation project in
some detail, other settlements in Bihar, Orissa, Assam and the Andamans
are barely touched upon. While discussing the Dandakaranya rehabilitation
project, Chatterji overlooks an important eyewitness account that blew
the lid off from one of the biggest and most prominent rehabilitation
projects undertaken in Independent India. Saibal Kumar Gupta, Chairman
of the Dandakaranya Development Authority between 1963-64 wrote a
series of articles in The Economic Weekly (January 1965). These as well as his
memoir are important historical sources that have not been used in the
discussion.10The hugely diverse rehabilitation projects outside the state
and their corresponding histories of failure may have been outside the
ambit and scope of this analysis, but it remains one of the absences in the
book that leaves a reader disappointed.
Chatterjis analysis makes an important contribution to Partition
Studies with the section titled Staying on: partition and West Bengals
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Muslim minorities. Needless to say, the section takes a close look at the
plight of the Muslims who stayed on and asserts once again what we have
always known as true but never articulated: every community and every
individual within the community had experienced Partition in their own
ways: so instead of just one Partition, there have been many partitions
across the broad spectrums of caste, class and gender. Bengals Muslim
communitys experiences, varied and complex, have however never
featured in any detail in our historiography except in scattered ways.
Chatterji draws our attention to this hidden history and enriches our
understanding of how cartographic politics had made a certain sections of
people aliens or citizens. Territoriality has meant that the clustering and
ghettoisation of Muslims in areas where they were pushed onto, resulting
in a sharp fall in the number of Muslims in the towns and cities of West
Bengal.Yet these clusters of Muslim population, through an irony of history,
became an important player in the electoral politics of the newly
independent state resulting in the emergence of a distinctively Muslim
politics. (p. 197) In the new state, the processes by which Muslims ended
up in clusters and ghettos had heightened perceptions that Muslims were
a community apart, which needed to maintain a political identity of its
own. So in spite of the pressure to assimilate the exigencies of partition
actually did exactly the opposite. Paradoxically, the process of ghettoisation
had given Muslims not only a greater sense of grievance and a greater
sense of solidarity, but also a measure of political influence they might
not otherwise have had. (p. 201)
Part III of the book is devoted to the political reconstruction and
change visible in post partition West Bengal headed by successive Congress
governments till 1967. The two decades after the partition were marked
by rising unemployment, labour and student unrests and high food prices
that often made daily life extremely volatile in the state. The constant
negotiations between the new migrants to the state and the rehabilitation
ministry also created a situation that only made matters worse. The result
was that refugee participation made the Communist Party of India and its
off shoot the Communist Party (Marxist) major political players in the
state and helped them create large inroads in West Bengal politics at the
expense of the Congress. This may partially explain why the smouldering
communal discord in the aftermath of the partition did not tilt the balance
in the Hindu Mahasabhas favour. The parties in the left forged significant
alliances with new constituencies like the displaced Hindu migrants of
the state who were vastly alienated from the Congress. The burgeoning
urban middle classes were also disillusioned with the Congress at the
Centre and in Bengal. This section takes a close look at the rise of the
Communists in the state who came to power not due to a militancy of the
BOOK REVIEW
235
working classes and the labouring poor but more to their pragmatic and
flexible support for interest groups not known for their appetite for
Marxism and for causes which did not conform to any text book version
of the creed. (p. 261) This section also charts out the different currents
and eddies that resulted in Bengals waning influence in national politics,
the machinations and policies of the major political players that resulted
in electoral advances or annihilation. In all this the growing refugee
population and their strident demands for relief and rehabilitation became
a key factor.The Mahasabhas handling of the refugee crisis when compared
with those of the left-winged parties brings out the tectonic shifts in
Bengals political geology. The fissures that resulted from these alliances
and considerations also created fertile ground for the periphery to become
mainstream.
The Spoils of Partition overturns many commonly held beliefs about
the Partition of Bengal. The goals for which partition was sought by the
Hindu bhadaralok were conservative with a belief in maintaining Hindu
domination in economy and politics. All these aspirations came to naught,
as were the false assumptions by the architects of the partition that West
Bengals fiscal and financial health would remain unaffected. Partition
proved to be a profoundly destabilizing event not only for the key players
but also for those millions on the march. The impact and the afterlife of
the Partition would take many such efforts, as Chatterjis, to assess. In
history writing, the relationship of memory and archive is r ichly
problematic and the methods through which we access our pasts can never
be simple and linear. All we hope is to discover newer sources that will
enable us to arrive at a nuanced account of the past. This study by Joya
Chatterji is a laudable effort in that direction.
NOTES
1. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries:Women in Indias Partition,
New Delhi, 1998, pp. 6-9
2. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, New
Delhi, 1998, p. 18. See also Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani, Tales of Two Cities,
Delhi, 2008 for personal accounts of the trauma that transformed the
subcontinent.
3. Kathinka Kerkoff Sinha, Tyranny of Partition: Hindus in Bangladesh and Muslims in
India, New Delhi, 2006. See also Sarah Ansari,The movement of Indian Muslims
to West Pakistan after 1947: partition-related migration and its consequences for
the Pakistani province of Sind and Papiya Ghosh,Partitions Biharis both in Tai
Yong Tang and Gyanesh Kudaisya, eds, Partition and Post-Colonial South Asia: A
Reader,Vol. 1, London, 2008, pp. 241-258 and 144-169.
4. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics and the Raj, Bengal 1872-1937, Calcutta
236
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
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