Symbol
Ritwik Kumar Ghatak Symbol—what we call prateek in Bangla. The thing is the fruit of proliferating human thinking and meditation. These days, I feel, its behaviour and movements have also had an enormous impact on the creaturely and animal world. So, it is natural that in every human art-form it will occupy a major place. One of the main reasons for this is that this thing called art, on its own, desires such a thing called symbol. It gravitates towards it. Let me explain. How is art born? All art is born from the labour that is generated to cater to all kinds of human wish-fulfilment. The earliest of the art forms about which we have heard are in those well know cave paintings, say, in Altamira, Lacaux orFreyja. At that time the most primitive humans, who lived in Europe during the Palaeolithic Age, would collectively hunt the beast called the Mammoth and with various body-parts would garner food, raiment, source of light and even weaponry. Now, as these primitive humans developed a sense of the magical, the magus-wizard arrived, divined and decreed that if they drew a mammoth and pierce its heart with a spear, they would be successful in hunting down those beasts in the real world. So, art is hardly for art’s sake. It is for the stomach. If we try to hunt the source of primitive music, the story would be similar. There was primitive communism in the earliest phase of human existence—a collective, kaumi and goshti way of living. If you work together—if collective muscles work in unison to pull an object or push it or lift or put it down—the whole exercise becomes that much easier. And from that comes rhythm. The plumbers and coolies who open up the manholes and fit pipes and so on, come up with Hneiyyo Ho—it’s totally the same impulse. And the whole thing gradually turns into an energetic, inspirational effort in unison. That is to say, in order to extract more work from this class of people more words and expressions sneak in. One can trace here the source of our earliest songs and poetry. The creation and evolution of our musical instruments also owe much to human work. Labour and art have a placental connection. So, does art mean all expressions and painting equivalent to labour, then? Not at all. There comes a stage when you do give into some idiosyncratic excess—a mad man’s mind plays with this idea. He is vexed that the thing is not shaping well. May be something should be added, something extra? Thus starts the crazy endeavours of the madman. After completing fully the demands of his primary work, he gets a breathing spell to add some deft touch, a hint of colour here, a note there and some preternatural expression at some point by dint of which the whole thing finds illumination, one might say. The primitive man,at this point, with a gaping mouth, looks at his own art-work and exclaims: bah ! This is how art begins its journey, its shubho-jatra. From now on man would begin to take this thing called symbol into his own hands. So, what is a symbol? So many people over the years have explained it in so many different ways and the whole thing has therefore become so terribly entangled that it is difficult to explain it simply. But let me try and give you an inkling about the initial stages. The collective fund of human memory, right from prehistoric times, gets accumulated in that section of the brain which we call the collective unconscious. This thing called collective unconscious is no one’s inherited paternal booty! The entire human society is its rightful heir. And why human society! As I have said, even in the creaturely world one notices manifestations of the unconscious. Scientists are at it with their experiments and laboratory work. The kernel of this unconscious lies in the extraction of the creative impulse through millions of years of human traversing. At certain special moments, during some singular events this kernel flashes upon the mind and then disappears just as fast—trying to measure this phenomenon in terms of causal logic will yield no result whatsoever. For centuries this has sent thoughtful people, scholars, scientists, spiritual leaders, wanderers and poets thinking. Its manifestation is happening all around us, in all places and often unnoticed and unmarked by us. Let me give an example. Certain artistic paradigms often spring forth and illuminate our brain.Such pictures or paradigms we do not see or sense in our daily encounters and surroundings or have not even encountered in the immediate past. In some form or the other at every location such images take shape and turn real. They will always be part of our existence. For instance, the trinayanimurti— the three-eyed icon—which appears to us both in benevolent and in destructive manifestations. Like, say, in the European imagination. Scandinavian and Icelandic kids, especially, know and live the three-eyed witch and the three-eyed bloodsucking bat/vampire through their sagas and tales. And that particular line of the Aryans which is known as the Indo-Iranian is replete with three-eyed gods and goddesses, especially benevolent ones. But do we encounter such three-eyed images in our daily life so easily? It is now, after intense research, that we have come to know that when the enormous reptiles and prehistoric beasts were becoming extinct and when newer species like Pterodactyl and such animals and birds were coming into being, the ones which were really fearsome were endowed with three eyes. In case you are interested in reading a good book onthis subject, you may like to begin with George Thomson’s The Icelandic Saga. Human beings had just come into existence. Now, humans must have had witnessed such creatures as death itself, in their full majesty, and so in order to propitiate such messengers of death, they would worship these creatures and create rituals around them and so on. Those horrific
The Final Womb: A Script
Falguni Roy [Falguni Roy, poet and visionary— one of the rarest of rare voices from the subcontinent, died at the unripe age of 33 in May, 1981. HUG thanks Abhisek Chakraborty for collecting his work along with allied and contemporary writings in the same tradition—in the February 2014 volume of the magazine Eksho Ashi Degree. Here is a sample. Translation: HUG. A short film about Roy, Ebang Falguni (The Lost Lines Of A Beauty Monster), was made in 2004. It was produced by Subhankar Das and directed by Sharmi Pandey.] ——————————————- [I am having an urge to say a few things about the womb actually the way words tend not to distinguish the scents of foreign or home-grown words within a living language like we do not remember while replacing frames for our glasses that frame is an English word so also in real writing as it gets peopled by and through living creatures the idea of writing itself becomes irrelevant at that point and when non-imagistic art poetry literature come closer to god and spirit they get closer to non-imagistic film as if life is a running film one forgets that the creator is unmoved indifferent the medium itself gets a life of its own and things get vitalized vivified.] Shot One: A raging pyre—around which a bevy of beautiful and ugly looking naked young women—their eyes brimming with tears. Shot Two: A Neem tree—full-moon beams dripping though its leaves. Shot Three: The blazing flames look upward to the sky and the naked young women with brimming eyes look downward to the ground—freeze. Shot Four: In several of the branches of the Neem tree hang a few men by the rope with no hands or legs but in each of their phallic regions there is a television set—beneath their hanging bodies that raging pyre and those naked women with their eyes welling and above those dead bodies through the Neem leaves drip full-moon beams. Shot Five: The naked women together start ululating and at that point from each of their vaginal regions appears an unfertilized foetus—like balls they plop to the ground—the women’s faces contort with pain—they keen. Shot Six: The television sets on the hanging male bodies begin to roll. On one of the sets one sees a man copulating with another and those naked women cackling at each other at the sight. On another set a naked woman pleasures herself, moaning, and a man pierces her bosom with a sharp knife and the woman shrieks. On another TV an elderly woman is copulating with a dog and her old husband with his face hidden on the knees of a little girl is crying inconsolably. Shot Seven: The naked women are picking up the fallen unfertilized foetuses from the ground and their eyes are now drying up and the retinal dots within their eyes begin to burst and as their eyes and face are awash with blood the difference between beauty and ugliness vanish. Shot Eight: A raging pyre—a branch of the Neem tree over the pyre—men hanging by the rope on the branch—television sets on their phallic region and the following words appear on each television set— We want food clothes a place to stay We want women poetry We want alcohol pure and pungent Art our happiness Literature our alcohol Our alcohol the feeling of hunger Shot Nine: The naked women face the pyre and in unison say this—We do not want theory we want bodies we just want bodies and theories about bodies. Their faces awash in blood from their gouged eyes and in their hands the dropped unfertilized foetuses—in their vaginal region bloom abundant flowers—a profusion of flowers their colourful vaginas. Shot Ten: A road—a gate at the end of the road—carved on the gate—Maternity Home – and on the far side, another gate which says—Burning Ghat— A twosome—manush and manushi, on the road Manush revolves around his manushi Manush interrogates his manushi Manushi interrogates her manush Manush replies But no one speaks only makes gestures No one speaks save the eyes Shot Eleven: This picture is getting projected on the television sets in the phallic regions of the hanging dead-bodies with no hand or legs. On one of the TV sets a huge family planning poster beneath which sit those manush-manushi and in their laps 3 babies—they cry. On another TV set excited manush—his greying hair, advancing age, manushi’s greying hair and advancing age too but a quiet, naked kid in front of them and manushi with her hands on the penis of the kid petting him and the excited manush trying to smash and smash a pair of spectacles with a fat looking fountain pen. On another TV manushi’s body is turned into a skeleton—only the eyes are animated burning and tears flowing freely and manush is blind now and his body leprosy stricken—their child, a full grown man with breasts like women long hair like women, and manush walk gingerly and manushi pets his phallus—and both say this— Give love back to us Give love back to us And their womanly-man child stare at the sky, nervous agitated—not one beard on his cheek—like women his eyes nose lips are shaped Shot Twelve: A sole full-moon in the sky— Shot Thirteen: All around the pyre the naked women and in every lap unfertilized foetuses plopped out from the wombs and in every vaginal region multicoloured flowers and every eye tear-filled and everyone chants again— Give love back to us Give love back to us adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Premchand’s Fantasies and the Nation as Allegory
Paresh Chandra I This essay comes after, and is an attempt to rethink, parts of a longer study of Premchand’s novels that I had completed (after a manner) almost a year ago. In that study, I had suggested that the processes at work in these novels produced certain ideological constellations (in the pejorative-bourgeois-lying sense of the term). If I were to stay with those conclusions – whose validity I continue to be convinced of – then even the most avowedly nationalist-myopic films of the 1950s and 1960s, which bear an immediate and palpable relationship withfantasies of Indian statehood, were only fulfilling Premchandian possibilities. I feel the need not so much to qualify those conclusions as to complete them by stripping them of their seeming finality. The way I see it, in order to be completed the argument must be restated against its grain. This essay is a preface to this restatement. The questions that concern this essay have as much if not more to do with literary history as with Premchand; in particular, the question of periodization. For instance: Is Premchand a kind of vanishing moment between two bourgeois fantasy formations – the one that preceded the independent Indian state (Bhartendu Yug reformist novels, the Indian Ideology), and the one that declared and strengthened its hegemony (a significant portion of 1950s/60s Hindi cinema)? II Premchand as realist. A key quality common to various realist styles associated with the 19th century novel inEurope (the kind of realism we are concerned with) is the injunction that space and time must both be specified. If such preoccupation with specificity is an important marker of realism, the short story’s claim may be stronger than the novel’s. In “The Storyteller”, Walter Benjamin emphasizes the specificity of experience from which stories germinate – experience that leads to wisdom which can be communicated to the community through the story; it is sign of community, it consolidates community. The Premchand short story, in its conjoining of realism and particularization, presents a paradox: What gets symbolized, and communicated to the reader, is the impossibility of ever being able to symbolize the singularity of experience. “Kafan” and “Poos ki raat”. At first glance, both stories seem to explore how human beings respond to extreme physical duress. “Poos ki raat,” with its freezing peasant protagonist clutching his dog for warmth, reminds one of Jack London’s “Making a Fire” stories; London too was fascinated by extreme physical conditions that reduce a human being to a condition where s/he is capable only of animal responses. Such conditions force a suspension of the self’s fashioned-regularity, the normal self, constituted of ethical/social habits and responses. The immediate is so overpowering that thought of the future and of the other is momentarily suspended (“species-being” really seems like an idea only philosophers could cook up). In “Poos ki Raat” Halku sleeps in his fields to protect his crop. Come the moment, however, he, refuses to wake up from the hard-fought for stupor of sleep even as his crops are destroyed. The story begins with Halku giving up his only chance of buying a blanket just so he can pay a debt. He is constructed in a few strokes – a hard-working peasant who is unable to escape his poverty (exactly what Ghisu and Madhav refuse to become in “Kafan”) – and because he is so constructed, his inefficiency is not enough to deduce indolence. Having been given access to Halku’s consciousness, to his experiences, the reader is able to explain his (in)action, and since you can explain, you do not condemn. In “Kafan”, it is the clause of “responsibility” toward the other that is bracketed in the face of hunger; in the background Premchand paints for Ghisu and Madhav’s tale he achieves an effect similar to the one in the previous story. For characters in the story the only available truth is that Halku, Madhav and Ghisu shirk their duties, perhaps their most important duties; Halku in order to sleep, and the other two to eat and drink. Those who judge them (Halku’s wife at the end of “Poos ki Raat” and the benevolent landlord in “Kafan”) are never entirely dismissed by the narrative; they could not understand and they cannot be blamed for not being able to understand. The rhythm of the everyday differs from the one which these individuals inhabit; it is incomprehensible to those who are outside it; the reader has momentary access through the story. His moment of empathy is the product of an aesthetic intervention. The story, acting like Henri Lefebvre’s little window that opens onto the street[ii], allows the reader to be insider enough to experience this rhythm, and outsider enough to comprehend it. If realism begins with the particular, then to explore the particular is to explore it in terms of its internal logic. The explanations that Premchand’s realist representations achieve are objective insofar as they accept the objectivity of every subject-position – the implication being that these explanations are historical, not moral. An individual’s actions are not wrong; they are always right when understood as responses to specific conditions. If Kant’s Copernican Revolution was a result of turning the gaze inward, and exploring the subjective constitution of the object, Premchand’s historical gaze is interested in the objective constitution of the subject. It circumvents the deification (and reification) of ethics and the “ethical self” (that can make the world better by bettering itself) which, though it may not have been the Kantian enterprise, is certainly one of the many bourgeois ideologies that fed off it. The first lesson of Premchand’s realism is quasi-structuralist in nature – the self is not responsible; the first cause is external. In a short story called “Nasha,” we witness a friendship between a young clerk and a zamindar. The clerk, also the narrator, is very critical of zamindars, likening them to violent beasts (“hinsak pashu”) and parasites (“khoon choosne waale jonk”). But after spending a few weeks with his zamindar friend at his familial abode, he becomes so used to its comforts that he quite forgets himself, and while returning to his older town life, pushes a man who is standing too close to
‘Event, Metaphor, Memory’ Or A Tale of Two Disciplines
Brinda Bose Event I: At the Social Sciences Building, DU, on an April afternoon Shahid Amin has about a year to go for his retirement from the History department at Delhi University, a base from which he has long been a (hi)story-teller to reckon with. To mark this momentous ‘event’ with a fitting scholarly ‘event’ – ironically putting cart before (retiring) horse, mocking history perhaps – his department colleagues, led by Sunil Kumar, organized a singularly uplifting session on a memorable Wednesday afternoon ‘at home’ – in a packed lecture hall in the Social Sciences building on campus, brimming as much with teachers and scholars and friends and students of history and the university at large as with a precious intellectual sparkle otherwise fast fading at DU in these our dismal times. Partha Chatterjee (Columbia University/CSSS, Kolkata), Neeladri Bhattacharya (JNU) Sunil Kumar (DU) – Amin’s fellow-redoubtable-social-scientists of a particular generation, the likes of which we may not see again soon given the direction which India’s public universities have now been set upon – spoke (seriously and playfully, both) of and to Amin’s oeuvre of work (and play) through his significant intellectual career. The event was chaired by Ravi Kant, social and cultural historian of Sarai-CSDS and ex-student of the department, who was introduced by Sunil Kumar and frequently referred to by Amin with a generosity of spirit that clearly sets the History department apart, still, from the quagmire the rest of DU has willingly sunk into. Indeed, this springfest of nostalgia, laughter, camaraderie and effortless yet cutting-edge scholarship that a quartet of historians displayed on this April afternoon for a scintillating three hours was showcasing the best that DU still – surprisingly enough – has to offer, a space where sharpest scholarship fences with a laconic wit (the latter inspired, as each recalled, by a long history of much partaking together, including post-sundowners, through many a waxing and waning moon). I doubt whether anyone in that overflowing room was left unmoved and uninspired by such a display of a joyous shared-and-interrogated scholarship, if for different reasons. I would think that the increasingly-demoralized host department received a fervent shot in the arm: a reminder that a department that has the gumption to make a point by bringing these incisive fearless historians to gather and speak in an ordinary large room on campus to a gratifyingly-huge university audience, despite the administration’s relentlessly-fascist warfare on intellectual thought, is not moribund yet. (It discarded an option to have these academic ‘stars’ ‘perform’ for Delhi’s gluttonous glutinous culturati at the IIC, one heard). For the shamefully-miniscule number of us who were there from the English department, teachers or students – and I cannot speak for all of the few there either, of course – it was a doleful reminder that there was once a time when we had aspired to be, along with the History department, bravely the ‘last departments standing’ in the very warfare referred to above. But English retreated, while History has – even if momentarily – resurrected itself. Why should we be surprised? In the history of DU, English has been consistently an erudite but tame department, priding itself on goode olde Englishe ‘good form’, that self-righteous ‘stiff upper lip and all that’, as Bertie Wooster might have said, in the face of grievous alarm. And prided itself for being that most apathetic thing, ‘non-political’. (Is literature ‘ethical’ and apolitical? What a laugh. Of course we are going to write ourselves out of any history of reckoning, then.) While History, as history has it, has been fragmented but always fomenting. And such intellectual effervescence as this event is its proof and reward. Event II: De-touring via the Arts Faculty, this ‘cruellest month’ The English department, in contrast, has wilted and withdrawn, folded over into its own sense of ethically-outraged hurt. When one of its most academically-acute faculty members, Rochelle Pinto, in a brave but grim gesture of protest handed in her resignation a few days ago, the department collectively greeted it with what has become its most potently ineffectual message: a shifty silence. A teacher so popular and revered, a colleague so precious and dedicated, has not deserved even a collective formal request from her own departmental fraternity to reconsider her decision. (And consider this, instead, from a few minutes away and the same imaginative training: an English faculty member’s resignation at Hindu College some weeks ago was received with such an outpouring of shock and concern that it resulted in the combined forces of the college’s teaching and non-teaching staff lining up to convince her, Suroopa Mukherjee, to withdraw it. A retired administrative officer of the college came in to campus especially to explain to her what she would lose financially upon resigning, the one argument that he knew best.) But the most respected scholars in our department, so many of whom the world outside Delhi looks up to, appear paralyzed at a moment when leadership is needed most. The non-teaching staff, of course, is possibly merely miffed at having one less teacher to be habitually rude to. We are all coiled in our own cocoons, some agonizing, some uncaring, some deliberately distanced. And those who sit pretty with the administration smile harshly into crevices and corners like April’s sunlight, and have the last crafty laugh. Metaphor I And so life in the English department carries on desultorily: students creep in and out of classes warily; there are hardly decent numbers of listening heads at talks and workshops any more (that once not so very long ago overflowed just as much as the History lecture hall at the Amin event); meetings are hijacked by self-important new recruits who are clearly empowered by the vice-regal lodge to pass judgment on meticulously worked-out departmental activities and procedures (and no doubt, to pass on vital statistics about who resisted what diktat at what moment of which discussion). Classrooms are the only havens to disappear into to forget what we were