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 the questions of property and class, which makes the labour invested in land invisible to the scenic representations of nature. Landscape is, after all, as Henri Lefebvre and Denis Cosgrove have pointed out, along with David Harvey, a commodity, as well as an ideology referencing material form. But let me insist that there is a void that cannot be subsumed entirely by the analytic of property, and there is an economy of restraint and excess that relate to the ideas of home and justice especially for the refugees. This is what we shall chiefly discuss here. Let me admit, however, that there is a complex dimension of collective memory and forgetting involved here whose implications are beyond our immediate scope.
In particular, this paper will draw your attention to three key aspects of a theoretical landscape. First, although entirely textual, one of the most striking features in this case is the quality of a heightened sensuality, a bit like sex, intensely tactile, optic, aural, but also with a feeling of watching a tableau passing us by like a float on republic day parades. This could be a refraction of how it looks everyday with the regular stuff that we find masquerading as hyperbolic or elemental inside a text, like a robust sensory encounter but wholly predicated on words. Such words conjure the picturesque – an intense and vivid scenery, shot with desire and warmly imprinted in the body as an archive, which gives out anew the signs of aroma and noise, old and new shapes, sending the warmth of information to our fingertips. In other words, as the examples will make it clear, theoretical landscapes carry out a practical demonstration of the archival experience of a body. It is at once a solitary body that is hypothetically free from the marks of gender, race and nationality, actually plastered on it, and a body that must make sense of the other bodies surrounding it in society without prejudice. The perception of this form of embodiment follows from standing before a breathing geography, inviting anyone that approaches a place with a home in mind, ready for endless anecdotes at every recess.

The second key aspect is that such theoretical landscapes are often digressive and chiefly anecdotal in character, working in some sense against the grain of received historicity. On the one hand, they involve telling us stories as a basic mode of experience, giving rise to unseen community of listeners, who are invited to share the ethos of a place without occupying the same place or even the same language. On the other hand, the gesture of narration brings into play all possible and traditional structures of narrating available to a certain performative context. These narratives may turn out from scientific to fabulous with as little pause as they take in turning from a terse moral deposition to that of telling a politically incorrect joke on the side, even saying completely outlandish things. They include anything that is not attached to a direct claim of historical truth as a necessary condition, for engagement. There seems to be a very different principle of believing in these stories precisely because they stand for what they cannot represent – the incalculable questions before justice: what is living; is life infinite; what is truth. Aware of these philosophical limits of representation, theoretical landscapes pull out from games of truth and enter un-dogmatic games of narration. This does not imply that truth becomes anything hereafter. On the contrary, it means that truth is not everything, like facts, nor a definite property ofeverything, like value, but perhaps more like a middle ground, which holds up us with our ideas but also outlives our intelligence, like a forest of symbols.

The third vital aspect I would like to highlight here is the evocative symbolism of theoretical landscapes, particularly the use of a natural-metaphorical figure like that of trees in the cases below.[1] However strange it seems as an object of knowledge to a social scientist thinking of justice, let us recall there are classics of anthropology entirely devoted to the symbolism of trees, which cover an astonishing range of ground from the Ndembu tribe’s rituals in Africa to Judaic and Christian theology of the middle ages, from the importance of woodlands in Victorian Britain as property and sign of improvement, to the tree as a pictographic metaphor of natural liberty in Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, which spilled into newspaper cartoons of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the political and economic significance of trees in Europe like that of oak and willow should hardly need elaboration, providing the basic inputs for trade across oceans with strong wooden ships and accurate compass, with the evangelist cross and later, cricket bats. But the tree has enjoyed no less felicity of investment in the narrative and symbolic repertoires of south Asia, which would be pointless to catalogue here in-depth. The case of Nammalvar, the ancient Tamil poet, is an appropriate example. “According to historians, Nammalvar was born into a peasant caste (vellala) and lived from approximately AD 880 to 930. Some would date him a century earlier. Although the facts are hazy, the legends are vivid and worth retelling. According to these latter, he lived for only 35 years. He was born in Tirukurukur (in Tamil Nadu), into a princely family in answer to their penance and prayers. When he was born, the overjoyed mother gave him her breast but the child would have nothing of it. He uttered no sound, sat if seated, lay if laid down, seemed both deaf and mute. The distressed parents left the child at the feet of a local Vishnu idol. Once there, he got to his feet, walked to a great tamarind tree, entered a hollow in it and sat like a yogi in a lotus posture, with his eyes shut and turned inward.” It is from here that he would later pour forth more than one thousand hymns to Vishnu, which became the famous Tiruvaymoli, hailed as “the ocean of Tamil Veda in which the Upanishads of the thousand branches flow together.”[2] There are many similar examples where the arboreal metaphor of tree combines with traditional modes of knowledge on the one hand and where it offers an imaginative clue for interpreting nature and language in modern imagination on the other hand. But the crucial question for us is the uncertainty of its status in a discourse on history, politics and justice. I would like to point out in this regard that, in between the famous Bo tree of Buddha and the cosmic tree of knowledge in Indian mythologies, we must not forget the charged subtext of the metaphorical poison-tree of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, which was recast by the poet Samar Sen to represent the roots of middle class radicalism mired in colonial education. As we know, the metaphor of poison-tree was employed once more by Partha Chatterjee to talk about the problem of historical difference in the modes of nationalisms in the south. But then what has the metaphorical use of a tree got to do with substantive issues of politics and, in this case, the question of representing justice? I would like to address that question here, together with another question raised by a recent insightful work on the Pakistani middle class – who says that nationalism was all about producing the citizen subject? This paper tries to offer another category – of home, to reopen the horizon of displacement before the realm of citizen subject. As the examples will bear out, there are three different notions of home that will emerge below, which are convenient to plot in grammatical terms. Briefly, they are as follows: first, the ablative, from where one hails but cannot return; second, the locative, where one finds oneself in the middle of a journey; and third, the accusative, where one would like to arrive in the end.[3] The invocations of landscape in the examples below not only instantiate these different notions of home, but also show how we travel towards them, circulating between the registers of a community locus and individual passage, in ways that confound our usual understanding of citizenship.

The Vanishing Trees

There is an intriguing anecdote about a tamarind tree in the ancestral village of the historian Tapan Roychowdhury. The incident took place around the time when Fajlul Haque was leading the Krishak Proja Party which headed the first provincial government with the Muslim League after the Congress had refused alliance. The Raychowdhurys were the jamidar of mouja Kirtipasha, close to the elite and nobility of Bengal. Two of the author’s uncles, principally talented in spinning tall tales, were living in London, from where they sent the telegram: “Stop felling tamarind tree. Letter follows.” The entire village was taken aback. The resolve to fell the tree was made only a few days back – the first chop had barely landed. How did the boys divine this information? The market was agog, mulling over the riddle. The people eagerly gathered at the chandimandop; when the letter arrived and read aloud. It said the brothers had retired to their respective lodgings in Gower Street at late night, when they had the same dream about the same fellow at roughly the same time. The subject of their dream was an old friend, Chhontu Pal, a good for nothing fellow who died a week back. Again, the brothers did not know this – Chhontu had told them he has taken up residence in the tamarind tree. However absurd, it obliquely echoed with receiving divine instruction in dreams – swapnadesh, and the folklore that the aristocracy in phantom society, chiefly, the departed brahmans can become attached to certain trees they frequent in this life. Although Chhontu was an addict and no brahman, the tree was spared. Slowly, it became a holy shrine worshipped in the entire district. “Blessed be the country”, Roychowdhury quips, “which has such a tree.” [4]

The first line of the novel Khoabnama by Akhtarujjaman Ilias says: “Oi jaigata bhalo kore kheyal kora dorkar” (It is necessary to take good note of that place). This line is the key to the entire novel – space is the central problematic of the story.[5] The task of the novel is to flesh out the life-world and the history of an erased location, to produce a different idea of people and geography that pushes against the impersonal narrative of nation and the abstract locality in our conception. The writing thus resembles archaeology – new layouts emerge like anthills under anonymous, sedimented surface of events. Written in 1996, Khoabnama unfolds a space that also belongs to dreams – certainly for the father of Tomij. The old man walks in his sleep on the banks of Katlahar bil, to the north of which stands an old Pakur tree. The old man hopes to catch a glimpse of Munshi Barkatullah, follower of Majnu Shah, the leader of sanyasi-fakir rebellion of the eighteenth century, who is believed to possess the tree. Because he is insane, the father of Tomij has a delirious sense of time; his past and present collapse. He makes it a sacred duty to guard the Pakur tree, the birikkho, which is in danger of losing its place that dwindles with every flood and new habitation. Ilias expressed similar concerns in another equally famous novel, Chilekothar Sepai, written in 1986. There we hear about the ancestral land of Boiragir Vitey and the two hundred year old banyan tree spreading over more than three bighas of land – creating a maze at the centre of which is a hollowed trunk, where Majnu Shah used to counsel with Bhavani Pathok, a rebel leader figuring in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Anandamath. But unlike the printed text of Anandamath, which erased the Muslim fakirs from the account, and rewrote the unrest as against the Muslims, Akhtarujjaman’s stories are oral and vie for other kinds of evidence. The banyan tree and the Pakur tree are resources of such evidence – they are seen as local murubbi – the wise counsellors of an enchanted place. Yet, when the father of Tomij finds the Pakur tree gone one day, the village headman doubts if it was ever there.

The characters of the autobiographical novel Bishadbriksha initially refuse to be part of the refugee exodusof 1947. The account takes it as a time whose damage is still distant in coming to the periphery. The author, Mihir Sengupta, talks of a location where the displacement is prolonged over the next decade. He describes the everyday life of a Hindu family in the quiet backwaters of East Pakistan, as if the partition had not taken place, not where they lived anyway. This idea of ‘where they lived’, where the author continues to live in his thoughts, and which does not leave him insofar he must have a sense of his roots, even if he now lives in West Bengal, is a chronic motif. Mihir repeatedly refers to this place, a local landscape, a sleepy hamlet in the district of Barishal, with two recurrent features: the pichharar khal or the flowing canal running at the back of their ancestral home; and the two raintrees, that gave the novel its name – bishadbriksha. Both of these give a centre of gravity to the landscape, with a cluster of Muslim peasants and low caste Hindus, stringed around the Hindu upper-caste household, to which the author belongs. The novel painstakingly remembers the steady decline of this family: the moral degeneration of patriarchs; the collapse of emotional ties; the waning of merry rituals; the auction of extravagant furniture, the flight of women, and finally, the poverty which forced the author to a life of manual labour. But this remembrance is underlined with an interesting affect. The author’s emotion in relation to this unfolding tale of loss is decisively that of becoming a free man – free from the fake aristocracy of worthless fathers, from the dubious respectability of feudal vestige, and free from the pretension of coexistence in a divided society. Now alienated, the writer finds serendipity; he encounters marginal people, especially women, and chance relations teach him new values, creating a different worth of the self. This liberated self likes to recall the funny episodes, the comedy of the bhadralok, the incredible tales and family follies, and the vulgar argot of everyday life. These reveal a complex practice with history, which I leave behind, to fasten your attention to an aspect of the author’s agency. As a subject of partition, Mihir Sengupta abandons the impulse to blame, both the alien regime and the communal hatred intrinsic to this or that denomination. If anything, he takes upon himself the responsibility, for the transition from a community life, with memorable moments, love and pleasure, to other emergent configurations. As we know, Mihir Sengupta migrated to West Bengal, and is now settled in a suburb of Calcutta, after his retirement. But there is a deeper sense in which the rain-trees keep shadowing him.  Although it is impossible to retrieve the life whose destruction he patiently recounts, he keeps mourning the absent matribhumi, through its catalogue of sky, river, vegetation and soil, which gather in the tree, waiting for a melancholic meditation, naming the novel, Bishadbriksha.

We need not see these instances as revealing a fundamental opposition between collective life and individualistic existence, as one is often led to believe. It is of course tempting to distinguish these modes of thinking in terms of an underlying antagonism between sociologically discrete subject positions, like the tension between an apparently traditional peasant mindset and that of a modern urban person. In terms familiar to political theory, such difference might be translated into an opposition between a community and an individual as the competitive locus of thinking about rights. However, what I would like to underscore here in the following examples is the complicated enmeshing of community and individual in the experience of displacement and aspiration for belonging. Let me introduce you to those troubling instances where it is increasingly difficult to sustain any singular subject position, or any pure mode of understanding in self-articulation. As we shall see, the invocations of a theoretical landscape in these cases dwell deliberately in a language that participates in idioms outside the rational self, dovetailing existential elocution with a framing that is mystical and bordering on insanity. This is where the aesthetic dimension takes on added valency, for it carries the duty to insert moral parameters into the dominant mode of reasoning, in short, the task of creating a new consciousness that imagines outside the present and beyond the foreseeable future. That is to say, a consciousness in touch with a horizon ever receding, undoing the sovereign weight of utility with a question undoubtedly more fundamental – what is that principle of relationship one seeks to establish in belonging.

Aesthetics of Infinity 

The excerpts below are taken from an autobiographical fragment, about the life and times of the intellectual Ahmad Chaffa in the late twentieth century Dhaka. A different landscape surfaces here, cramped with urban housing, small, rented flats coming up in purana Dhaka, snatches of academic life in the Curzon Hall and Jagannath Hall andthe staff quarters of Dhaka University, and newspaper offices bristling on the Tipu Sultan Road. Trees are everywhere, a mystic obsession with Chaffa.

An idea has been taking shape in my mind since many days. Allahtayla has activated a part of his secret power in the life of the trees. This is why some day humans have to approach the tree for shelter. If man does not bow down to trees, his very life-force conspires against his life. Imagine how intelligent Allah is. The simple life that flows through trees has a definite resonance with the heartbeat of man … A man can create a relationship with trees the way a man creates a relationship with a woman. But what kind of man? The one who believes with his heart and soul that trees also have a living persona, like any other animal … a house where I was tenant previously had an open courtyard. The owner had planted a guava and lemon tree there. A spray of madhobilota was happily growing on the iron-gate. When I came to this house, I thought I should leave a sign of my living here by planting one or two trees. I usually plant a tree or two where I go. There is no noble design behind this. The innocent desire to live in the memories of men drives me to do this time and again.[6]

This was then in some ways a methodical madness, which sustained parallel worlds for internally displaced postcolonial intellectuals like Ahmed Chaffa. As a counter-part to his urban existence as a man of letters and radical persuasion, here was an entirely different world he would happily be sharing with the children, with a parrot he carried, when he wandered like a fakir on the streets of Dhaka, walking through its avenues blooming with flowers that delighted him and trees he loved talking to. But he was also afraid of turning mad like Sarodababu, a Hindu schoolteacher in Chattogram.

Sarodababu used to go mad for a period every year. His madness would begin with the advance of winter. … In the beginning when the signs of madness surfaced, Sarodababu used to tell me that he understood the language of trees. But the problem is that the language of trees and the language of human beings are not the same. When he converses with trees in their language, he still remembers the language of humans. That is when things start becoming confused, that is, he is forced to become insane … He used to often tell me he would teach me the technique of talking to trees. Trees do not respond to everyone’s call; not everybody will understand their language. The power to understand this language does not come without a particular kind of purity of mind. Sarodababu used to think I have the capacity to talk to trees, though it did not mature.[7]

The question for us is this – how do we think of these relationships when we think of the abstract figure of citizen subject in a language of secular liberalism, civil society and democratic institutions. I hope it is sufficiently clear by now that the question of relationship is absolutely central to the affect of belonging and longing for a home of the displaced. Whether or not one is mourning the ablative home from a locative perspective, one is always looking at an accusative moral horizon, across the future. But in the process one also loses the language and sensibility that is needed to interpret these relationships as the principal ground for conducting life in a way that embodies justice. It demands a manner of reasoning that must seek its passage again through the embodied experience of the world, not for housing and emplacing a population, but for a home for the uprooted traveller, a place premised on relationships. Let me conclude this with a passage written by the painter Paritosh Sen, reminiscing about his ancestral land in Bangladesh.

Our village in Bangladesh was dotted with numerous ponds, lakes and canals. The rivers were not far either. During the monsoon, each home became an island. We had to row our little dinghy to visit our neighbours and to buy provisions from the market-place …

Whenever my mind travels back to my boyhood days in the village, an abstract picture painted somewhat in the manner of Mark Rothko, appears before my eyes. Slabs of all possible shades and tints of green, ranging from the silken blackish-green of the neem leaves as the morning light filters through them thus, making them gleam like the green crystals of a chandelier. Or, fading into the turquoise green of the floating water hyacinths in the evening. It felt as if the whole village had just had a dip in a pool of green light. Indeed, at times the sun itself appeared green.

On the north-eastern bank of the large pond situated at the far end of our home, where we did all our bathing and washing, stood a giant Arjuna tree (Terminalia Arjuna), rising nearly one hundred feet and dominating the entire landscape. It was so huge, so dense, that it seemed like a small forest. Its thousand branches spread like outstretched arms in all directions. Its majestic height dwarfed every other tree in the village. Its powerful build, magnificent proportions and statuesque three-dimensionality were reminiscent of the monolithic ninth century Jaina figure at Saravanabelagola in Mysore.

Did anybody in our village have any idea of the age of this Arjuna tree? … It had such an air of eternity about it and it seemed to proclaim, “I was, I am, and I shall ever be.” The Arjuna tree was a world in itself, as living and eventful as the human world, if not more so. It gave shelter to countless birds, reptiles and insects of every description. They seemed to be so happy living there that they would not exchange it for any other place in the world.[8]

It is in this sense of home that freedom was betrayed in 1947.

What is that mode of thinking that the figure of the tree presents to us? Let me clarify that the distinction I have tried to point out should not be confused with the standard oppositions between individual and community, between peasants and urban middle class, or between pre-modern and modern sensibility. I believe we are looking very much at a modern phenomena, arising out of the postcolonial experience of displacement, which produces a form of subjectivation fundamentally concerned with a critique of the subject of bourgeois liberal humanism. How does the tree constitute thinking against the grain of such a subject? I would like you to imagine for a moment we have attained the ‘purity of mind’ Chaffa talks about. Let us pretend to experience like him that trees are like animals with living persona, talking to each other in a language we understand well; while we observe another set of creatures, making frantic sound and gestures we vaguely recognize as human beings. This coming closer to the tree is about taking lessons in different techniques, of surviving, watching, witnessing, knowing the soil, branching and spreading out, being in touch with the simple life inside, like the heartbeat. I think we may recognize this in terms of a completely new orientation to life and politics, where one learns to think of oneself as part of an entirely new kind of complex that is manifold and one patiently works everyday like an ethos to realize that freedom is an ethical practice of living with the other. What kind of man is that? To recall Chaffa, one who can create a relation with a tree like one creates a relationship with a woman, of that kind where power must give way to love.

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