No Salutes To Modernity: Moushumi Bhowmik, Her Intimate Cosmos
Majhi (click here for the song) [HUG listens to singer, songwriter Moushumi Bhowmik] Prasanta: Moushumi, it is difficult to say why I am here. Long ago I was thinking about your song Daya Karo—and it was not just about one song that I was thinking, but a particular mode of singing, song writing, carrying oneself that had attracted me, like many who connect with your music, I am sure. So, it is difficult to say what I am looking for. May be to know a bit more about your music which is very tentative and yet very seriously certain about many things—a strange, untimely combination of minimalism and conviction. I think it is about this mode of existence that I want to know more— how this mode is played out in your music, how it may have evolved (and still evolving, I’d think?) and your connections and disjunctions with your surroundings, within the context of a changing India from the late eighties to the present time. But instead of rambling on, let me direct myself slightly, a little bit, purely for the sake of structuring things and not for streamlining your thought process. One can start with language of course, the very idea of the vernacular modern—in your case working with Bangla language in the lyric form. As a lay listener, it seems to me that language has changed in the last 30 odd years quite startlingly, say Chandril Bhattacharya’s evolution from a talented JAM/skit performer in college fests to writing astute, witty songs and then turning into a deeply anti-intellectual , best- selling prose writer in the popular domain is a case in point. Of course, I am talking about the popular cultural scene here and not esoteric writing which is, and will continue to remain, abundant and deeply experimental in the language. But in such a context will it sound conservative and alarmist to say that the vernacular modern is disappearing in this melee of accessibility, particularly in music? Moushumi: Yes, it could sound conservative, coming from a certain vantage point. See, space is a strange thing. I mean social space. There is a large space where I do not belong; I am not relevant. But there is a small space—and I do not mean local, provincial space, but some niche where I am utterly relevant. Kids—for instance, make a constituency for my songs, and not just Bengali kids too. That is a small space, but we connect. Right from 1994 when I had cut my first album, people did notice my style of writing songs, my ideas, ideologies, emotions—all that constantly informs my music. In fact, even earlier. If you ask other writers and singers and poets—many of them do form communities of sorts of their own—there is a mutual give and take. So, relevance and irrelevance in a changing India is a complicated thing. It is not a story of crisis. Wide audience? No. Audience? Certainly. To be honest, and I am saying this from no elevated height, much of the music that happens in Kolkata actually escapes my notice. Frankly, I do not know. There is this anxiety to be part of a constant visibility—and that is legitimate for someone who wants to make music her career— this actually escapes me. I can afford that, because of my comfortable growing up, my privileged education and I realize that fully. But that has happened. You know, there is this Tara TV breakfast show called Aaj Shokaler Amontrone. They had invited me and I went to their studio for a live interactive program. It was a good program but you will not believe how many people actually commented on my appearance. I mean, why I was unkempt. It was morning and you dress in a certain way—what comes naturally. You have just woken up and that is the natural condition. Your voice has also woken up. That is its natural condition too. I did not even think about it. But that became an issue! The styling, in a certain way. People expect you to look all made-up on a TV show. I had heard this actually—way earlier—during my first recording with HMV—Babul Rehman of HMV had made similar observations about my appearance. This is not unusual, I realize. There is this obverse reaction too—see how Moushumi has continued to remain plain and grounded—again a judgement around my appearance—within the rules of the game, this too. I see both ends. Yes, Chandril. Such a sharp writer. So smart. Some of his early lyrics used to make me smile. But I prefer singing sitting down—on a chair, may be? There are performances and performances, isn’t it? I have always thought that the audience must be included, not blinded with wit. Staccato wit. If there is a single most critical-political responsibility of the singer—then that I feel is to reject arrogance and aggression in performing and recording. May be one can avoid acting like a messiah or distributing nuggets of wisdom or try bedazzling the audience. So, coming back to your question about the vernacular modern—I have tried to work with language without stunning my small audience. The words and phrases I use are freely available; I merely craft them without much fanfare in a manner suitable for a particular song. I am also perhaps not capable of writing quick-witted songs. To be topical is not my thing. I realize my limitations. Prasanta: We can hardly avoid styling though, even the one who is most oblivious to it, isn’t it? Austerity is a conscious decision to carry oneself in a particular manner, not in any glib sense, but one does present to oneself and to the world a certain way of living—though that might not be always relevant to one’s work? Moushumi: O yes, I realize that I have styled myself consciously. I am not for a moment saying that I have no presence or no sense of presentation. My styling suffuses a kind of aesthetic probably. See, the way
Mohan Rakesh, His Diary: Two Letters
6th August, 1967 Kamleshwar’s Letter Priya Rakesh, Just received both your letters. I do not think much can be done as far as monetary compensations go. All your payments were kept pending in ‘Sarika’ since we thought that once things get worked out everything will be settled—but things are still very uncertain. Even Rai sahab seems to be in a strange kind of predicament. He is simply unable to take any decision and every process therefore is getting stalled. This is causing a lot of heartburn all around. I am myself not feeling very secure in such a circumstance. I am trying one more time—have given a sort of press on, but pyare, as of now you have to accept the old rate. What can be done! Chowdhry’s letter has arrived. He is well aware of the situation. Let us wait and watch. Got to hear from Anita about all your latest mischievous acts. I also came to know that in the September issue of Kalpana, Shri Upendranath Ashk had written a letter as one Surendra Chaturvedi. Now, since Ashk always is fair with his own writers and supports them with some token monetary compensation at least, I too have reciprocated and have sent him a money order for the princely sum of Rs. 5/-. My health is still failing me, my friend. But all these medical moments just bore me these days. Have decided to be oblivious to these daily procedures. Let them take their own course. How far is it true that Amritrai has bought Nayi-Kahaniya? When is Manohar Shyam Joshi gobbling up “Saptahik Hindustan,’any idea? I await your arrival. If possible tag Chowdhry and Om ji along. Maza rehega. Do update. Nemiji’s advice is really not sound; that kind of an advice is much more applicable to poets—who, like you, are prone to irritability at right earnest. Right, pyare? Yours, Kamleshwar ——————————— Rakesh Replies: Dear, Ah yes, ‘prone to irritation at right earnest’ indeed. Like me. But what about some resolution after the rage subsides? You will not believe how annoyed I am these days with journals and magazines, publications and cultural centres and with these new fangled universities too. For such a long time I had the impression that the writers’ royalty and other earthly concerns depend on these folks. Aisi ki taisi inki! It is better to give up writing than to await their verdict. Of course such predicaments and dilemmas are bound to remain. May be the Company guys feel insecure but the kind of company you keep pyare, I mean old fogeys like me, are too secure in their smugness and arrogance. Such friends are not at all ready to accept the fact that old rates will still be applicable for writing such exalted stuff! Of course, that hardly means that there will be any hiatus in writing for you or Bharti. But such writings will only be for you two—without any recompense—bina parishramik. But I won’t be cajoled into Company’s terms and verdicts. Nope. Not anymore. Such decision must be mutual, not one sided and arbitrary. If writers have not asserted themselves through the ages, that was their problem. We shall not allow this kind of nonsense anymore. The cheque that I have returned is not coming back to my bank account. That is for sure. You have done well to have stopped all payment. Let that stay pending for the next ten years. Bennett-Coleman & Co. will either pay Rs. 250/- for every bit of my writing as recompense, or nothing. If things happen let it be stormy—dhuandhaar! Will you exert bonds of friendship and upset such an arrangement? If you do so, how can you say, ‘prone to irritability at right earnest like you.’ Love and all that, Rakesh —————————————– adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The Digital Object of Desire
Amlan Das Gupta and Subrata Sinha [School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University] “The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded”. (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades, N 3,1) The paper comes out of the experience of working at the School of Cultural Texts and Records of this university. As such it reflects opinions and insights of our fellow-workers, past and present. We have worked for nearly a decade in building – along with some others – a digital archive of North Indian classical music. In a more tangential way, we are also involved with other deployments of digital technologies in the humanities: archiving, databasing, metadata creation, electronic editing, textual encoding, and so on. Archiving and editing are fairly innocuous activities in themselves: they might be thought of as useful, or at least harmless drudgery, appropriate to those of the academic persuasion. Yet as we immerse ourselves pleasantly in the minutiae of manuscript and typescript, printed book and ephemera, shellac discs and magnetic tape, photographic prints and moving images, we find that our undoubtedly disparate fields of activity are united in the single respect that we are engaged in translating these cultural entities into computer readable data. The Humanities in the Age of their Digital Operability Let us start by alluding to a controversial blogpost made earlier this year in the New York Times by the well-known literary scholar Stanley Fish. Fish is in general taking issue with the claims of the “digital humanities”, but his quarrel appears to be with the new umanista, not those who can just about access articles on JSTOR. Many of us find ourselves silently accepting our place within the expansive empire of DH. We did not arrive nor were we converted: we simply acquiesced. As a label DH appears to have largely supplanted “humanities computing” and taken over much of the “new media”. But then, are there digital humanists and digital humanists? Do we recognize ourselves in the Twitter happy digital “insurgents” that Stanley Fish describes in his “tri(blo)gy” on the digital humanities? Fish takes a half-playful dig at humanities’ digital turn (NY Times, 26.12.2011-01.02.2012), noting incidentally that English departments are turning out to be the new battle grounds. [There are] two visions of the digital humanities project — the perfection of traditional criticism and the inauguration of something entirely new — correspond to the two attitudes digital humanists typically strike: (1) we’re doing what you’ve always been doing, only we have tools that will enable you to do it better; let us in, and (2) we are the heralds and bearers of a new truth and it is the disruptive challenge of that new truth that accounts for your recoiling from us. It is the double claim always made by an insurgent movement. We are a beleaguered minority and we are also the saving remnant. Fish’s digital humanist, thus, must be the maker rather than the user: almost none of us engaged in the academic practice of the humanities and the social sciences can escape the fact that the disciplines increasingly exist in the condition of digital operability. But one guesses from the way that the argument progresses, the digital humanist is more digital than humanist. The argument is about the sophistication of the tools that allow us to process and visualize. Fish’s conclusion, however, is fairly definite: But whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play. Nothing ludic in what I do or try to do. I have a lot to answer for. (NYTimes, Jan 23) Fish is pointedly disregarding here the possibility that the deployment of digital tools might result in the perception of new problems for purely human consideration: that the near-limitless powers of aggregation and consolidation that computers provide might in fact locate another – or many – of such singularities that he bases his critical practice on. Making and Using Perhaps we should say that the true digital humanists are those who are makers as well as users: at any rate, not just users. The tools themselves are also in general made available for others: digital humanists (by and large) are nothing if not generous. but the nature of the tool is that it is suited to particular ends. Knives are knives and hammers, hammers: one rarely suffices to perform the task of the other. and if one finds that one really needs a stapler, then neither is of much use. Let us give an example from music archiving. As part of our efforts, we have the unexceptionable task of converting analogue sound to a digital signal and then storing it in a manner which facilitates cognition and access. We use commercial software packages which convert the digital signal into the appropriate storage format as demanded by internationally approved archival standards. Most of the functions of the (highly expensive) software packages (such as Adobe Audition or Sound Forge) are of little use to us as archivists of course: but in case a particularly noisy recording needs to be cleared up for some non-archival purpose, one can use a number of very broad based functions that anticipate most of the needs that one may have. There are also collaborative free-source softwares that we might have used if we were just digitizing an analogue recording for our personal use. Instead of spending large sums of money buying an Adobe package, we could just download Audacity:
Democracy as Oil
Mazen Labban [Review of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.” The review first appeared in Antipodefoundation.org] As Something Animal “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” Wittgenstein (1958: p.223) remarks towards the end of the Philosophical Investigations. Lions have a “form of life” different from that of human beings, a form of life inaccessible to human beings, which makes their hypothetical language similarly inaccessible. What then is “form of life”? Wittgenstein himself does not elaborate, but students of Wittgenstein seem to agree that forms of life are constituted of patterns that give meaning to our experience of the world. Our form of life is the “groundless ground” upon which our activities rest and where the justification of what we do ends and must therefore be accepted as given (Wittgenstein 1958: §217 – see also p.226). Forms of life cannot be explained; neither can they explain anything: they are formal conditions lacking empirical content not causal laws and, unlike empirical regularities, they are not discoverable by experiment since any such attempt presupposes the form of life that would render the process of discovery intelligible. For the same reason, we cannot imagine other forms of life because any such contemplation would be made from within our form of life. Does that mean we are bound by our form of life as we are by natural laws? The vagueness of the notion opens it to such interpretation, but there are varying, and often conflicting, interpretations ranging from biological determinism to cultural relativism, some emphasizing the formal aspect of forms of life (patterns, regularities, etc.), others its lived dimension: life, activity, either in the biological sense (natural history of the species) or the cultural sense (diversity, institutions). Although the anthropological sense is prevalent in the current use of the term—interchanged often with expressions such as way of life, mode of life and lifestyle—the naturalistic interpretation which construes the human form of life as something typical of the species, of our biological constitution and natural propensities, persists. It permeates even interpretations that are not self-consciously biological or deterministic, and finds support in remarks by Wittgenstein about “the natural history of human beings” (1958: §25; §415). A form of life is, “as it were”, “something animal” (Wittgenstein 1969: §358-359). What does it mean, then, to speak of “forms of collective life” and “forms of democratic politics” created or made possible by abundant fossil fuels? How can forms of political life be created from the production and consumption of large amounts of hydrocarbons? Can such formulation provide the basis for a materialist theory of politics, or democracy more specifically, that gives the material processes and objects with which our everyday life is entwined a constitutive part in our social and political practices? What happens to the materialist conception of politics—and to political practice—when the physiochemical properties of matter become constitutive of political agency? This is what Tim Mitchell pursues in Carbon Democracy: a “socio-technical understanding” of democracy as a form of political life grounded in forms of carbon energy and, on this basis, to outline ways to overcome “obstacles to our shaping of collective futures” deriving from carbon democracy. Democratic politics and fossil fuels, Mitchell argues, are not simply related: democracy is “a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the processes of producing and using carbon energy” (p. 5). Mitchell recounts how the transition to an energy regime dependent on fossil fuels with the coal-fired industrialization of Europe laid the path towards “ways of living based on very high levels of energy consumption” in the industrialized countries. The transition, however, was never confined to the industrialized west: “the switch in one part of the world to modes of life that consumed energy at a geometric rate of growth required changes in ways of living in many other places” (p. 16), ranging from the dispossession of agricultural workers in places like India and Egypt and their subjugation to slavery and slave-like colonial systems, to the institution of forms of government intended to facilitate the control of oil reserves and flows of financial capital across the world. Carbon democracy is a planetary form of life whose development presupposes and depends on the production of different forms of political and economic life over time and space. At a deeper level, however, carbon democracy could also be read as a segment of the natural history of the human species. Like any form of life, democracy is “carbon-based” (p. 5). Carbon Democracy is about “democracy as oil”. Yet, “forms of energy” do not determine “modes of politics”, Mitchell warns towards the end of a meticulous argument to the contrary: “energy is a field of technical uncertainty rather than determinism” (p. 238). Mitchell construes this uncertainty, and the controversies that it produces, as the basis for political possibilities that begin by acknowledging that politics is neither determined by nature, as the Malthusians maintain, nor is politics free from natural constraints by the limitless potential of scientific progress, as the technologists maintain. Political possibilities begin by acknowledging that we find ourselves in the midst of socio-technical controversies, “disputes about the kind of technologies we want to live with, [that are] also disputes about the forms of social life, of socio-technical life, we would like to live” (p. 239). Participation of ordinary citizens in the construction of knowledge and in debates about nature, expertise and technology, is “the place where opportunities for democratization occur” (p. 241). For Mitchell, the antidote to the political and environmental ills of carbon democracy is the democratization of the debate about carbon, carbon democracy in another form. Carbon Democracy, the “socio-technical understanding of carbon democracy”, cannot imagine forms of political life beyond the limits of the form of political life it produces. The argument of Carbon Democracy is laid out in eight eloquent chapters, extensively researched and rich in empirical detail, and chockfull of stories that stand on their own as a fine specimen of historical sleuthing. A substantial part of the material is familiar to