Justice in a Landscape of Trees
Rajarshi Dasgupta Homeward Bound How does a call for justice appear? When is such a call thought justified? Standing at the crossroads of 1947, as colonial rule came to end in south Asia, the Indian Left had coined a slogan: yeh azaadi jhoota hai, this freedom is lie. But the reasons did not seem very clear to them. Sixty years after, writing in support of a nuclear treaty with the US opposed by the Left, the editor of an English daily recalls how the nation was let down at the very moment of independence. Why, we may even like to think of it as a crime, throwing our hard-earned nationhood into question, is that what you call justice? The point is that such moves are always difficult to justify as they pass through the nation state towards a wider field of ethics, coming to it in response to the violence and injustice that underlie our nations. Thanks to a rich body of scholarship on the partition and refugees, today we have come to recognize the enormous carnivorous sacrifice that made India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, possible.But perhaps we have never really understood how displacement has made the very ground of the citizen subject unstable and shifting in south Asia, turning freedom into a violent force of individuation and justice already into an object of loss. It is here that an exercise of moral freedom runs into conflict with juridical propriety, where the everyday subject of experience is unplugged from the abstract citizen. In order to grasp this uncommon thread of moral freedom, we must listen to the narratives of displaced without the rush to formulate them into a rights discourse, which cannot afford to pay that singular attention required of justice in this case. My paper contends that there is a terrain of justice and moral freedom, pressing for critical recognition in the ideas of home in refugee discourses, which cannot be assembled in a talk of pure logic, but enjoys the felicity of a poetic narration. We can observe here certain forms of subjectivation of the displaced, where one need not construct the reality as it is framed in law, but as it ought to be, framed ethically, overriding the law. We shall see how this implies an escape from present – a flight into the past, as well as, a return to the responsibility of future. In this way, such exercise comes to involve a back and forth movement of thought, holding the current state of affairs against an imagined horizon of infinity, in order to judge the truth, as it were, in other times and places. The texts selected here chiefly illustrate the making of this different awareness of time and place, where moral freedom does not mean ensuring entitlements, but the performance of certain critical modes of subjectivity. In a way, this stages a trial of the modern subject on the margins of the global capital that is producing new ways of thinking about oneself today. Perhaps, it is impossible to keep in mind the historical contingencies of our freedom and respond to the query of why that freedom was untrue or inauthentic to some of us. As recent debates in political theory indicate, there is a danger in underestimating the reality of nation state in south Asia, divided on religious grounds, bordering unfriendly governments, territorially binding on people, rent apart with a seal of finality. Yet, there are overlapping surplus of disturbing memories, as there is a daily traffic across the borders of commerce and human relations, and adamant claims to belong elsewhere rather than the permissible place, which practically spells a gnawing disquiet for the region’s law and order. The displacement needed to carve up the nations and citizen subjects seems to have produced a call for justice at the very heart of the question – where should one belong, regardless of our lawful habitations, as a free subject. The examples we will look into here deal with this very theme of belongingness: how the subject of displacement needs to belong and wants to recreate a home, despite its impossibility in the strict sense of the fact. I hope the analysis will give us a clear idea of an impossible homeward bound-ness, performed through narratives that carry the sense of justice in a way that cannot be legally enforced but invested obliquely, ethically and aesthetically, although not without a sense of irony. Here we may see the ideas of home in the shifting invocations of a territory – an ancestral village very often, sometimes a keenly contested terrain of politics and history, as well as, where I will focus, at times, an elemental, enigmatic site of nature. Rather than a culturally particular location, we need to think of morphologies here, in keeping with what geographers treat as a conceptual space, we may call these invocations a theoretical landscape. Of course, there would be proper names to such places in some discourse, for a historian like Dipesh Chakrabarty, talking about this particular revisited village, or a poet like Jibanananda Das, meditating on the flora of that specific district in undivided Bengal. But we are not exactly interested in the physical-geographical locus of stated individuals in this paper. Instead, we think that despite the names of such places in memory one cannot be restricted to a solitary archive only, which holds the census and administrative data about a place. There is a sense here of other kinds of archives that record and relate differently to the sense impressions and ways of representation in the testimonies we are about to judge. The paper suggests that in keeping the interpretive possibility of such landscapes open to universal implication, we take up a difficult and challenging labour of reading. And that is the only way to understand the political aspect of what leading scholars are happy to knock down as aesthetic parley rather than engaging reality. There is no doubt that the morphology of landscapes often involve a glossing over