The Accelerated Grimace and the Ground for our Beseeching
It is an unanticipated coincidence that the collected works of Parthapratim Kanjilal, a major poet writing in Bangla for the past half a century, has been published just as George Steiner has breathed his last. There is no connection that I know of between the two, of course, save perhaps an investment in life’s mysteries. And a comprehensive rejection of life’s mystifications. Both Steiner and Kanjilal, in their own ways, have spent their lifetimes with the ineffable and the unspeakable. At bedrock level, the artist is ill at ease with social conventions. Since he is distracted and maintains an ironic or heroic relationship with all that he sees around, what we now call ‘news cycles’ do not disturb him in their everydayness. Doomed to a vision in an alien world, his dedication lies elsewhere. He begins to seek and extract a pattern, rather. It is his distraction that especially readies him bit by every single bit, towards enacting the role of a scapegoat for society. He is not really one of us. To be in the middle of everything (what in Bangla is best expressed in the phrase ছা-পোষা, culturally speaking) means maintaining a divided allegiance to life’s satisfactions and annoyances. If you are annoyed when your scheme about the right kind of society is challenged by other equally vested imaginations, for instance, you develop scruples and begin devising ‘techniques of trouble’ and anger, without having corresponding investments for what you actually vouch for or profess. These add up to what Steiner would call ‘apocalyptic seminars.’ Such seminars and techniques define diurnal bourgeois existence. By contrast, a leap of spirit marks the utterances of Kanjilal, especially radiant in one of his early collections of poems titled Debi. I use the word utterance advisedly, for here is an anthology which directly addresses the turbulent 1970s and yet transfers the experience of that time/space allegorically by invoking the tremendous energy force of a goddess who can renew faith in living only through a cleansing of whatever is vapid, stale and ignoble in this earth. The incantations in Debi are about a conjuncture of history (shondhi-khon), when temporality turns cruel and the antidote—if any—is equally fatal: “অতিসৌম্যা, অতিরৌদ্রা, প্রচন্ড নায়িকা সন্ধিক্ষণে”. The unleashing of energy is at once benevolent, lethal and unwavering. Kanjilal is the worshipper of distilled wrath, away from ressentiment and bad faith—something that eludes our chicken-hearted projects of ethical progressiveness. Steiner has been arguing for such clarity all along in his work: that beyond all institutions there is a mole in the cellar. And so Kanjilal, an avid reader of Dante also says: “দেবী, মুদ্রা ব্যবহারে আজ সকল সম্পর্কগুলি হয়েছে কুটিল/অস্পষ্ট, একদেশদর্শী, বৃদ্ধ. যাকে পিতা বলে জানি/ তিনি অবান্ধব, অবান্তর, যাকে জেনেছি প্রেমিকা, সেও নয়/ হৃদয়জননী, যে বন্ধু, তার ব্যবহারে থেকে যায় অনভিভাবক/ উদাসীন দৃষ্টিপাত. মানুষের মুদ্রা ব্যবহারে, যশ ব্যবহারে/ এ সকল বিপত্তি হয়েছে/ আজ কোন কবিতার স্তব শুদ্ধ ভাবে শুক্লতার সঙ্গে তুলে আনবো/পুনর্বার হিরণ্ময় হবে তোমার রূপের অমলতা.” The degeneration of relationships, the gradual diminishing of the very scope of our roles in life happens when designs take over our inner restless equilibrium. Fathers turn friendless and meaningless; lovers are no longer situated within our innermost sanctums, friends are no more our guardian-angels—they turn indifferent instead. Clarity and relationalities are the first casualties during difficult and uneven times. Hence, a material invocation of the cleansing deity through poetry. It is hard to be outraged these days. A severe domestication happens each moment. We seem to be specialists in accommodating almost everything. And outrage has been flattened to utter meaninglessness. Denis Donaghue had long ago cautioned us with the following insight: “The most telling consequence of the domestication of outrage is that, far from disturbing the security of ordinary things, it confirms it.” The artist too is no longer the maker of his art but an example of a man whose art exemplifies certain rituals of his doings. Kanjilal’s poetry is a direct assault on such domestication, urging us repeatedly to dive beneath all smallness and despair. For in the netherworld there burns a divine torch, untouched yet by guilt and sin: “এদিকে পৃথিবী মশাল নেভায়/ জ্বেলে নেয় ফের নেভা মশাল/ স্পর্শ করো রূপ, রস, বহন করো তারই স্বাদ/গ্লানির বহু নীচে জ্বলছে বৃশ্চিক অপাপবিদ্ধ.” This is a dare, a dare to consistently work towards reaching that underground fountain of the ineffable, especially in times when everything around us seems like a lazy journalist’s descriptive report: the connivance of the media foreshortens our very living. The entirety of Debi is a riddle where poetry, mutiny and incantation find a natural confluence. Rarely has Kanjilal given us any hint as to what the material manifestations of such a apocalyptic charge are: “ছাত্রদল উঠে আসে, জেনেছে ইতিহাস আহুত আত্মার সমতুল/মিতভাষ অর্ধবাক, স্পষ্ট তত নয়/যা হলে জীবনের নির্ভার কেবল জীবিত থাকা. বাঁচতে দেখা শুধু.” The new generations, students who pass through such terrible times, know that conjunctures are like invoked souls: foggy and almost wordless. One gropes. In such times the real mutiny is to stay afloat, to keep oneself away from all fake and domesticated spectacles and arrive at the simplicity of directness, of love. Indeed, the fatal conjuncture of history, if it has to be unshackled from all falsity and bourgeois liberal piety, must be joined in a war that is shorn of all figures of speech: “উপমাবিহীন কালে যুদ্ধ শুরু করো , সকল মুগ্ধতা দূরে যাক.” Foremost, this war must cleanse another lesser battle that rages within us, way before one takes on what we think of as the enemy. The enemy is within: all kinds of factionalism and squeamishness, played out through useless labour, by our trading of mutual humiliation, abuse and envy—every single day, every passing minute. This internal battle attests to the poverty of our souls. Such poverty must be transcended: “ভুলে যাই, আমার রয়েছে এই দারিদ্রস্বভাব…/ আমার চরিত্র থাকে নিষ্ফল শ্রমে. অপমানে-প্রতিঅপমানে/ ভুলে যাই, ঈর্ষা আক্রোশের এই সর্পবাণ তোমার উজ্বল কিরীট বিচ্যুত শুধু করে/তাতে তুমি বিজিত হবে না/…মধুঋতু মধুবায়ু মধুক্ষর পৃথিবীর ধবননে–উৎসবে/ আরো একজন যাবে.” The
Letter to a Student
Dear Iqra, I have seen you in classes and in the Arts Faculty corridors. Yesterday I read your helpless and yet immensely brave note after being attacked on the North Campus of Delhi University in broad daylight, simply for being a Muslim woman in hijab, as you wrote. It took me back to February 2017 when I was attacked in a similar manner on campus, not very far from where you were attacked yesterday. The legal case for that is still on and I receive calls from the authorities to depose before them from time to time. To be absolutely honest, I am just an ordinary teacher who had been on the road that bisects Ramjas College and Old Law Faculty that fateful day purely by instinct and in solidarity. I was not and am not an activist unlike many of my colleagues at the university who are far more conscious, and politically far more astute and courageous. That February afternoon I was just standing on the footpath at a demonstration and suddenly received a heavy punch on my head out of nowhere. In a split second—and it is impossible to tell whether it was a conscious decision or merely an instinct—I retaliated with a punch. And then I felt a torrent of punches and kicks all over me. I was being choked with my own scarf. I realized much later that I had been dragged quite a distance even as I was beaten. Genuinely helpful and far more daring colleagues and students came to my rescue at that time. You, Iqra, are far braver since you also mobilize and take active part in campus and national politics along with your studies. Besides, as a woman and as a Muslim, you are at a completely different level of social and political vulnerability today than where I was and am, as a privileged teacher working within the metropolitan academic system. Yet I thought I will write this letter to you. For two reasons. One, to tell you that your ordeal actually starts now. See, this your anger, sadness, helplessness and resolve—this confused yet resolute state of mind will be only yours to stay with you. The personal side of it will never go away as you rightly say. Yesterday’s incident will form you, like the many incidents in the past few years that are constantly forming and re-forming our ever malleable selves. The question of solidarity is a tricky one though. The experience of being physically assaulted or psychologically lynched by an irate and irrational mob leaves a lasting impression. It alters our perspective on reality and gives real clarity about people whom we call and think of as friends and fellow beings. Your real test, Iqra, is not as a victim of an assault but actually lies beyond the experiential nature of the trauma that you are now undergoing. It is to transform that experience of pain and resolve into thinking, analyzing and acting much later, many days after yesterday’s incident. The rest of the test will unfold gradually as you will see your immediate ordeal is, in fact, a long and lasting battle of attrition. This battle of attrition will often be exhausting and despairing. It may also be boring. But our steeling of resolve is tested only when we act with and mobilize groups who are not paranoid in the long run. I am not talking about being an even-handed pragmatic humanist who will skirt the issue for his whole life and be a chameleon, of course. But I am talking about staying clear of equal and opposite, paranoid and angry, reactions. Reaction is not political action. This brings me to a second and related point. Many who are now championing you may not be there for you in the long haul. Not because what they now say is untrue. But because life will go on and they will have to take care of their own matters and their own little ways of living, exactly as you and I would do. Indeed, everyone is with you now, as they were with me in February 2017. But many left me at the slightest opportunity without any verification of truth. Why? Because most people ‘feel empathy’ at the level of sociability. And most also show righteous anger in that same manner. Actually, most people feel secure in performing camaraderie and being safe themselves. Some people who rally around one most vocally and visibly in a time of assault begin to fade into the horizon when another call beckons. That is not the real test of solidarity. Solidarity is a strange word, perhaps coming with an intuitive sense of being with solid and steadfast comrades who are lovingly together for a collective and visionary political utopia. Solidarity burns slow, through long nights of misery and steely resolve. Solidarity is not always politically correct, but politically daring. See, I am rambling Iqra. This is the problem with teachers! But I came to write this note to you not as a teacher really. I felt this urgent, if illogical, need not just to assure you of the solidarities that you must take strength from, but also to strike a small note of caution about solidarities that may become less visible, suddenly or slowly, as life goes on and other things happen. It is perhaps a good lesson that comes out of being assaulted, that no solidarity may be taken permanently for granted. I wish you to keep this at the back of your mind, not to be suspicious of the hundreds who will rally around you now at all, but so that you may continue to find strength in your own resolve and in those who stick around (there will be many) when the field empties of the hordes you may see now. From what I gather in your spirited yet sensitive response yesterday, you possess that courage and conviction. Hold on to it! It was only this that I tried to
The Canon and the Syllabus
Life is short and there are many books to encounter. How does one underline the ones that are worthwhile? More importantly, how do whole societies and traditions take up certain readings as important and dispense with others at any given moment of time? If we keep aside the absolutely subjective element involved in any choice of reading, perhaps guesses can be made as to how certain texts gain authority over a period of time and then lose their power of suasion and magic in another age. Some others come to be called classics and thus turn ‘timeless.’ On the other hand, the formation, approval and implementation of a syllabus in a programme housed within an institutional framework are part of a wholly different story, of a much narrower scope. On the surface, there are more academic reasons for a syllabus to take shape in a particular way. But those academic reasons are always offset by partisan interests that stoke the fancy of the stakeholders, like politics or shifting trends or utilitarian reasons like employability. Reliability is perhaps the foremost criterion that helps inculcate canon consciousness. A set of texts become reliable over a period of time because it is able to provide generations of scholars a testing ground for certain principles of a knowledge base that tallies with the internal logic of an evolving discipline, which may be jurisprudence, theology or literature. This is what David Hume meant in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757) when he argued that in the final analysis the canon consists of “those works that have survived all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance and envy.” Hume marries a collective idea of epistemological reliability with the notion of timelessness. The earliest formations of the canon therefore arise out of a text centered epistemology which the practitioners and the connoisseurs would hermeneutically unseal and bring forth. The guiding principles of the earliest texts were in fact based on interpreting revelation, emic reception of ritual application and deciphering natural philosophy. This scope of encountering the divine utterances (and deciphering the oracle/sutra)simultaneously gave canonical texts the stamp of a mystical authority, and also opened up possibilities of interpretive scope. For instance, the interpreter could argue that behind the apparent narrative of the gods and their actions lies another level of hidden meaning. A redemptive tradition of textual interpretation comes into being. In other situations, the mystery or sublimity of a poetic utterance or the symbolic nature of a painting gives rise to the restive and libertine tradition. But the basic idea remains the same: to consider form and excavate meaning, dwell in analysis and expand the ambit of the art object by means of imagination. Whatever is concealed in form and meaning (connotation, subtext or undertone in later times) is what the scholar or the connoisseur tries to seek out. But once you have a space for interpretation, the esoteric baseline of the canon opens up and becomes subject to divergent ways of analysis and imaginative interpretation. What started as rarified and mystical becomes evolving and dynamic. Reliability still remains a fundamental baseline but an argumentative tradition begins to emerge out of the enigmatic,as multiple interpretations of a text or a problem begins to blossom. Ineke Sluiter, the great Dutch scholar of the classics, used to say that obscurity is a disguise in blessing. The very act of writing a commentary or engaging in various textual practices tacitly acknowledges the fact that the text is not clear and therefore requires certain exegetical endeavours to unlock it. In fact, it would be impossible to think in analytical terms unless the text or the art object is obscure enough. There could be various reasons for obscurity to emerge in the most complicated movements and styles of literary and artistic production, say, in the classical world, the romantic movement or in the whole of modernism. Obscurity may also be a way to avoid obscenity or dogma and also a method for matching a hard subject matter with a certain style of expression (the epigram, the riddle and the parable are the earliest of such forms, leading eventually to figura and allegoresis). Obscurity may also be a stimulus for the readers and the students to delve deeper and make some serious effort to appreciate the nuances of various situations and problems that an art-object or a problem throws up. This will also keep the less motivated students outside of the purview. The canon is one way of initiation into degrees of difficulty, by which the would-be-specialist is thrown in at the deep end of the pool right at the onset. Besides, veiled messages in a text are also a way of protecting the author and the interlocutors in times of social turmoil. Most importantly, obscurity gives elbow room for a slow and gradual interpretation, rather than quickly trying to diagnose and move on with a text. One the other hand, textual particles of literature also sometimes emerge as sudden erruption of thought and then do not go anywhere. These we call fragments or trace. The romantic and certain forms of modernist art are fundamentally about such fragmentary erruptions. Freed from classical constraints, such works present the partial whole—“either a remnant of something once complete and now broken or decayed, or the beginning of something that remains unaccomplished.”If we care to expand confines of the idea, we shall realize that letters, excerpts, gnomic statements, speeches, epigrams and mythologies—all would lose crucial vitality without their fragmentary nature. Fragments let us retrieve and recast the whole if we so wish. The exercise would be somewhat like cracking a jigsaw puzzle. But the more daring prospect is to leave the trace as is and place oneself by the side of the composer and encounter a similar emotion of the partial whole every time one reads or listens to the fragment. Engaging with the fragmentary is also revelatory in a deeply secular sense. Canon formation is always relational in nature. This
Jaaware’s Destitute
Prasanta Chakravarty In his book Practicing Caste, on Touching and Not Touching Aniket Jaaware takes caste as an instance in order to transport us elsewhere.We are not yet born, he says. So, he wants us to travel with him to the island of Hokkaido, and especially to Fukushima, and take a little pause with the ainu, an outcaste group which lies at the bottom of the traditional Japanese society. We could also go to Yemen and learn the language of the al-akhdam, who harbor negrito features on their cultured bodies. Jaaware wants us to see that there are other worlds too, with similar sets of primary and primal distinctions based on questions of pure being. In this our primary condition we are everywhere the same, making segments and boundaries of living all the time and trying to obliterate our common creaturely state. This is the condition of living. In our variegated living, humans shall continue to live as one in bringing others close or keeping them at bay depending on some inexplicable and unknown equations that they will invent (or have invented already) from within their chosen sect. Caste is an instance. Destitution is the state of being. Aniket Jaaware was wracking his brain and soul about the destitute, immersing himself as one more creature in the throes of destitution. He wanted to deliberately forget (his term is oublierring, from French oublier and English err) not just the hitherto deliberated upon history and sociology of caste studies but more importantly, the language of certainty and sociability which is also the language of our present ethical conundrum about destitution. The real problem to him was the condition of intellectual destitution—that we do not know where to go with our creaturely sense of fallenness, humiliation and abandonment. To bring rumination down to touching and not touching, therefore, is to break down a seemingly insurmountable problem into the basics and try addressing it afresh. And therefore, Hokkaido and Yemen. These are not geographical places to him, but insignia for a huge inchoate and unknown future, the elsewhere where the destitute of the world can say: just us, instead of getting into the infinite spiral of identity and victimhood. Only internalizing such a realization can perhaps open up the realm of freedom. There is Nothing Called Society There are several intimate cuts among ourselves; we will interact with some people and not with other animals and abject bodies. This is how groups, clans and segments work. Samaj is not society—there are divisions and hierarchies. These are real striations. Consequently, there are only forms of sociability (love or hate at first sight) in our living interactions. Beings interacting in sociability are deeply and phenomenologically bound to each other, though such bindings are invented through interactions. Sometimes these differential bonds turn ephemeral and transcendental and leave certain traces when some member(s) decide to quit a loyal sect or group—through exile, voluntary or otherwise, and through death. In ordinary circumstances we have sociable encounters with our alterity—with those who are from other segments but live within the communal space. Jaaware calls this the state of pathologically nonchalant non-sociability. Even civility seems to be too abstract for any exchanges to happen among individuals here. Others with whom we interact are rather obstacles to be overtaken or circumvented. The destitute are produced in this manner as obstacles. The destitute are not adversaries or competitors. They are simply not like us. Our parks and clubs, washrooms and corridors, gymnasiums and bazaars—all are made into kosher territories so that certain creatures can be hounded and pulverized. Being-in-the-world means that such a form of sociability has to be reinvented in and through every single encounter. This manner of interaction is customary. The fragility of this customary mode of sociability directly leads to violent and demanding impositions and maniacal postulations against the destitute enemy, the unknown person(s) whom we know as the interactive other. Jaaware gives the example of a performance artist who goes up to strangers and does ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ things: “touching them, jumping up and down in joy in front of them, picking a speck of dirt from their cheek (grandma’s spit), carrying a portable toilet and sitting on it in public with pants down, standing half-naked with just a jacket on in front of a painting, grabbing and eating food from someone else’s plate at a party, lying down in an art gallery and holding people’s legs and not letting go, posing nude beside a sculpture of a nude, standing half naked beside a clothes rack, asking people to dress her.” This is a control experiment in order to explore the way sociability actually takes place. By starkly deflating its operation we realize the power and ubiquity of sociable interaction. The artist is asking people to invent sociability by improvising or formulating human interactive methods right at the moment of her performance. This is exactly what one could see unfold after Aniket Jaaware’s death. Or the obverse of it rather. It was spring time and his material body had just been cremated a few days ago, along with his famous ear-stud! A really good discussion on his book was arranged at the Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi. And academics like me heard his video-recorded voice waft across the hall – and the hall indeed was choc-a-bloc. There was hope for something grand and gone for the audience. And therefore collegial sociability was everywhere. That is the only mode in which each makes peace with the other just before and after such discussion sessions: in the foyer or the rotunda or at the car park outside. These modes of temporary communality we carry to the hall itself (perch ourselves at the right spots, greet other fellow beings with a certain collegial air, preface questions later with polite humility, and so on).You keep on performing something ‘social’ – yourself as an academic, a journalist or as an intellectual – while being constantly individuated. This was the ‘silence’ part of the ‘social