On ‘Mudradosh’: Jibanananda Das and the Paradox of Subjectivity
Nazmul Sultan [Nazmul Sultan is a PhD student in Political Theory at the University of Chicago. He is also one of the editors of Itihashjan, a journal of politics and philosophy in Bengali.] 1. Mudradosh[i] evades the order of thought. Stealthily escaping the world of conscious authority, it recurs again and again, restlessly and relentlessly. At the first blush, the prime constituent of mudradosh appears to be the act of self-circling repetition. Mudradosh is that over which the subject has no real authority, for it does not rely on the sovereign decision of the subject. It is indeed a habit—a habit of both thought and action. And yet we understand little by reducing mudradosh to the category of habit. In some sense, everything is a form of habit. The all too well-known Humean argument that knowledge itself is a product of the custom and habit that govern our thought and action does not help much in understanding the singularity of mudradosh. For Hume, the source of knowledge is not any transcendental foundation of reason, but rather the fundamentally habitual nature of human thought and action that generates epistemic beliefs. Although Hume recognizes the centrality of the self in conceiving passions and emotions, these sensibilities remained grounded in the impressions that result from encounter with external objects and events. The self, as it were, is the medium that arranges the impression-produced beliefs in certain orders. In contrast, mudradosh refers to the repetitive failure of the subject itself. Mudradosh is distinguished from the generality of habit by virtue of its peculiar constitution—the coming together of “mudra” and “dosh” (fault). It is not quite easy to define mudra, a highly polysemous word. In ancient Indian philosophy, mudra denoted the gesture which is both symbolic and ritualistic. It is a physical act above all, one that designates gestures of yoga, dance, and so on. Given the embodiment of an authorized symbol on its body, coin itself is called mudra in several Indian languages. When a particular mudra is not reproduced in the authentic form, the resultant imperfect action is categorized as mudradosh. For example, the constitutive limit of a dancer may lead her to perform a mudra that deviates from the standard norm. Mudradosh is thus different from mannerism in the sense that it is not simply a whimsical particularity of an action. It entails the failure to meet the requirements of a ritualized norm. Yet mudradosh is not a transgression per se—for the failure is involuntary and is often tolerated. In other words, mudradosh is neither fully accepted nor is it fully signified with the status of a taboo. Between permissibility and revocation, mudradosh exists as an ambivalent subjective failure which has no traceable cause. The execution of an action that fits with the norm does not solicit any special attention. In the case of transgressing the boundary and committing a taboo, the action is readily identified as illegitimate and accordingly penalized. The one who commits mudradosh stands in between these two extremities. Mudradosh does get identified as a deviation from the norm, but the level of transgression is not so extreme as to delegitimize the action or to banish the accused. In the jungle of norm and ritual-constituted habits, mudradosh hangs like an insignificant shrub. The one who breaks the taboo gets no time for redemption, mediation, and dwelling with her deed—there is no scope for transcending the taboo from within (it can only be done from the outside). The one who is accused of mudradosh is allowed to dwell with her failure. Her way is therefore laid with tensions and contradictions amid the lingering pressure of repetitive failure. Jibanananda Das—one of the most influential modern Bengali poets, one whose immense popularity unfortunately did not quite translate into an appreciation of his philosophical genius—problematized mudradosh in a way that knots it with the paradox of subjectivity. As long as the beings are one with the world, they are not yet subjects. And when they discern the non-identity and autonomy, they are not presented with the sovereign power over themselves, let alone over the world. The poem that catapulted Jibanananda onto the chaotic plane of modernist Bangla literature, Bodh (1929), is nothing less than an exploration of this paradox of subjectivity. Mudradosh is one of the central problems of Bodh, even as this word is used only once in the course of the poem. The poem begins with the torment of the self that has been split into two parts. The split-part that narrates the poem wants to recuperate the state of oneness with the world. Jibanananda calls the “subject” who wants to identify with the world as sahaj lok (unified and spontaneous folks). The concept of sahaja—a basic tenet of the Vaishnava tradition—describes the realization of the self in the truth of unity. This is a state where the lover and the loved—i.e., the subject and the object—dissolves into the truth of oneness. As Ananda Coomaraswamy observed,“It [sahaja] is a release from the ego and from becoming: it is the realisation of self and of entity—when ‘nothing of ourself is left in us.’”[ii] Jibanananda deconstructs this idea of the sahaja, artfully collapsing the philosophical and the sociological by way of drawing a passage between sahaj lok (spontaneous and unified folks) and sakal lok (everyman). Neutralizing the drive of becoming, the sahaj lok spontaneously identifies itself with the nature. The narrator of the poem is disturbed, intrigued, and alarmed by the emergence of a cognizance that is forcing the self to become separated from itself and from the naturalized world. The observer I—the self that seeks to align with the sahaja—narrates its futile struggle to return to the world of oneness. Recounting that it too has performed everything that spontaneously unified folks do, it wonders why it is still not able to ward off the alienating cognizance. Introducing non-identity in the self, the very notion of “cognizance” forces the subject to move toward the negative and the incomplete. The narrator