Professor Morrie and Revolutionary Literature
Ashim ‘Kaka’ Chatterjee Tuesdays with Morrie disturbed me. This book disturbed me a lot. The story of Professor Morrie Schwartz is distinctive. There is not much of action here. Not too much description of life’s experiences. Colourful characters do not clash with each other in order to create a dramatic situation. What one encounters instead is death—in its full glory—and life arising out of death. Tuesdays with Morrie is a story of an old professor and his not-so-old student. What kind of a man is Professor Morrie? He teaches sociology at Brandies University. Not merely chhatra-dardi or chhatra vatsal—to brand him thus will be saying a lot less about his relationship to his pupils. Students are his life. Naturally his home, the restaurants near his university, the lawns and nooks—all are sites for nurturing a peripatetic world of examined life with his students. His love of books and ideas is infectious. Love of life, even more. He arrives at a class. A hall full of anxious young minds—waiting. But Morrie is silent. For 15 long minutes. First the students are bemused, mild jokes hover around, notes get exchanged, a certain uneasy restlessness pervades. Then there comes a moment of pin-drop silence. Hush. The professor begins. His subject of the day: the influence of silence in human relationships. Why do we get bothered by silence? Wherefore peace in utterance? This is the way the man wins over his students, commands respect and love. He is not as dexterous as his more famous fictional rival in To Sir With Love nor as historically vexed as Coetzee’s Professor Lurie. But Morrie is not against life. Though he cannot manage his steps, he would dance. Not a good singer, he would be immersed in music. Not a particularly skilful swimmer, he would love to go for a dip. His student, who is narrating Morrie’s life, is bringing this world, a cosmos really, into being with utmost care and craft. The university life being over and done with, his students bring Morrie a brief-case, embossed with his name. They embrace—the teacher and his pupils. And part silently. In such a lively man’s life there arrives a terrible tempest. All in a flash. Morrie gets infected with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS)—a motor neurone predicament. We all are familiar with Stephen Hawking and his encounters with this disease. Not much has been discovered yet about this condition and not much preventive or curative stuff is available yet. But death is imminent. Maximum duration of possible survival is 5 years. In Morrie’s case, it is 2. As Morrie comes out of the diagnostic centre, he notices the busy world going on with its daily activities. As the world refreshes, he withers. Gradual, little, incremental changes are making him give up the small pleasures of life. He discovers in the morning that he can’t fix his car’s brakes—driving as an option is gone. Begins to trip as he walks and therefore requires a walking stick—end of independent walking days. In the locker room, in order to change his outfit, he needs manual help—end of privacy. Appears before his students one morning and announces that he might not finish his quota of coursework that particular semester and so they can opt for other courses or may drop out—end of his secret pride. ALS, the writer tells us, in an evocative phrase, is like a burning candle. It will burn out and melt your nerves into a waxen residue. The process starts from your legs and usually travels up. After a while, you cannot stand on your feet. And then sitting too becomes impossible. Finally, if you are still alive, a rubber tube will facilitate your breathing. And all this, when you are fully conscious of the rapid changes taking place in your body. The professor takes a profound decision: that he will utilize fully the rest of his living days. There is no need to feel embarrassed about the inevitable. Why not make his death a case for research? Is it not worth it to travel the boundaries of life and death and think afresh? With this thought in mind, Morrie begins to disseminate himself to others, to everyone. He gives a clarion call for meetings in his apartment in order to discuss the many variations on death threadbare. Not empathy or sentimentality he needs—but interviews, new connections, telephonic conversations— with an urge to examine life through death is what he would rather like to indulge in during the remaining period of his existence. He walks into TV studios. His student and now a well known newspaper columnist Mitch Albom had promised to keep in touch after they parted upon Mitch’s graduation from the university. He could not fulfil his promise. The rat race got him. Mitch responds now—after 16 long years and they start a new research agenda, like the old times: meeting his professor every Tuesday and thrashing out issues of life in their many hues—Society, Rights, Guilt, Death, Fear, Aging, Greed, Marriage, Family, Forgiveness and so forth. By that time Morrie is unable to conduct his everyday activities. Every Tuesday is downhill. But he is unfazed. He requests in a matter of fact fashion to a guest, “Can you please hold on to this bowl—need to take a piss?” Since he has no other option but to rely on others, he has no qualms or feelings of guilt. When asked in a television show about what bothers him about this dependency, pat comes his reply: “Soon someone has to wipe off my arse.” The final Tuesday was reserved for ‘Adieu’—as a subject of discussion. Only a few words. Morrie breathes his last the Saturday next. Discussion on death and human preoccupation with death is timeless really. Yet it is also historicised in specific circumstances. The sons and daughters of Amrita have not been able to transcend death fully. The idea actually is not to transcend death but to encounter it, as part of our material living.
Political Iconography & the Female Political Leader: The Case of Indira Gandhi, Some Initial Questions
Trina Nileena Banerjee ‘The coming generation will feel extremely proud of the name of Indira Gandhi. They will worship her as the personification of Sita, Lakshmi and Durga. Long live Indiraji,’ ~ Virendra Khanna, General Secretary of National Affairs. [i] From a large portion of the visual, historical and literary material emerging around the National Emergency in India (1975-1977), it could be argued that a strong undertone of religiosity and the sense of a mystical, yet terrifying, female power surrounded the popular perception of Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. Sita[ii], Lakshmi[iii] and Durga[iv], of course, stood for the virtues of chastity, purity, service, prosperity and strength – qualities that were seen to be embodied in Indira’s person during the first years of her government. The influence of religious, especially Hindu religious, iconography had always been a strong determinant in the popular representations of national political leadership in India and had managed to survive from the days of the nationalist struggle into the 1970s, as Christopher Pinney has shown in his book Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India.[v] In an essay called ‘Towards the Space of the Beholder’, Pinney writes: Ramakrishna, as also Swami Vivekananda, initially subjected to photographic regimes, were very soon circulated through the technology of chromolithography – a way of disseminating photos of the gods (bhagwan ke photo) which was more phenomenologically adequate to the task of impressing quasi-divine power. The same would soon also be true of the political pantheon as it merged towards the end of the nineteenth century. Tilak, Gandhi, Ambedkar and numerous others were endlessly photographically documented (many of them by the Bombay based photographer V. N. Virkar), but is as coloured lithographs that they sedimented themselves among the wider populace.[vi] An examination of Indira Gandhi’s representations in popular art during the 1960s and 1970s (as recorded in the prints available in Pinney’s book and various popular cartoons) reveals a continuation of this tradition: an odd visual continuum between the portrayal of godhead and that of political leadership. The element of worship, which had continued to feature prominently in the political and electoral popularity of figures of Indira Gandhi’s stature from the time of Independence, appears to be a strong subterranean current in these popular representations. This strand of religiosity was not a figment of imagination or wishful thinking that emerged from sections of Indira’s loyal coterie, but, arguably, significantly coloured the visual and verbal rhetoric of the dominant political propaganda surrounding her greatness, shaping mass-produced images and popular calendar art, and ultimately putting the final seal on the process of her deification during the nineteen months of the Emergency, when Congress President D. K. Barooah famously claimed “India is Indira, Indira is India.’ Pinney writes in his book about the continuities that existed in the 1960s’ and 70s’ between representations of technological/military advance, political leadership and religious figures: There were also, in the 1960s and ’70s, inevitably a vast number of Indira images; she is shown with Jawaharlal Nehru, with Sanjay, against the national flag. One series, strongly inflected with a Soviet socialist realist aesthetic, depicts scenes from the life of contemporary India within decorative interlocking cogs suggestive of a huge mechanized India. Heroic peasants clutching sheaves of wheat and sickles are juxtaposed with vast hydroelectric projects, the Trombay reactor, heavy engineering works and scenes of high-tech laboratories peopled by whitecoated technicians. Wendy O’Flaherty once commented on the Shivling-like contours of the Trombay reactor, suggesting that a postage stamp that bore its image depicted it within a religious frame. Be that as it may, some Hindu deities have always engaged intimately with modernity. Vishvakarma – a traditional deity of artisan castes – has long been worshipped through special pujas in steel and other factories throughout India…[vii] Impulses towards industrial modernity merged with celebrations of (Hindu) religious tradition the labour-power of ‘heroic peasants’; presiding over these images, yoking together ‘progress’ and the visual grammar of Hindu worship, was the benevolent figure of the then current Prime Minister and the concrete embodiment of the idea of ‘Mother India’. This essay will attempt to examine, through the case of Indira Gandhi, the complex and perhaps perverse imbrications of authoritarian rule, deification, embodiment and femininity in the Indian political context of the 1960s and 1970s. How a female political leader ‘performs her image’ in the post-colonial public sphere and the extra-rational implications of this performance, which tap on to both deep-seated religious and socio-cultural resources for success, would be the primary themes of exploration in this paper. The essay also emerges from my broader investment in a theoretical and historical exploration of women’s relationship to power in the realpolitik, their differential engagements with political violence (not just as victims but also as agents/perpetrators) and their associations with authoritarian/repressive/right-wing regimes and politico-religious movement. The association of a female political leader with perhaps the single-most repressive period in the political history of post-Independence India leads to an inevitable rethinking of the straightforward liberal feminist notion of female political agency as a positive in itself. I am interested in the relationship of this problematic to performance, especially the performance of gender in the public and political sphere. Popular visual representations – for example, the frequently misogynistic cartoons and caricatures in the mainstream media[viii] – of Indira Gandhi that were current during the period of her governance reveal much about the intimate, complex, and sometimes derisive, relationship existing between the iconic female leader and the postcolonial polity she governed. My specific interest is in the relationship of popular critiques, as well as celebrations, of political conservatism to the figure of the exceptionally powerful female. There is, in addition, the difficulty faced by feminists in reading such a figure, one who did nothing historically for the larger interests of marginalized women’s groups, as well as for ‘sisterhood’. This difficulty is addressed by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan in her essay ‘Gender, Leadership and Nation: The ‘Case’ of Indira Gandhi’[ix] in the book Real
Miracle of the Magpie
Anatole France I LENT, of the year 1429, presented a strange marvel of the Calendar, a conjunction that moved the admiration not only of the common crowd of the Faithful, but eke of Clerks, well learned in Arithmetic. For Astronomy, mother of the Calendar, was Christian in those days. In 1429 Good Friday fell on the Feast of the Annunciation, so that one and the same day combined the commemoration of the two several mysteries which did commence and consummate the redemption of mankind, and in wondrous wise superimposed one on top of the other, Jesus conceived in the Virgin’s womb and Jesus dying on the Cross. This Friday, whereon the mystery of joy came so to coincide exactly with the mystery of sorrow, was named the “Grand Friday,” and was kept holy with solemn Feasts on Mount Anis, in the Church of the Annunciation. For many years, by gift of the Popes of Rome, the sanctuary of Mount Anis had possessed the privilege of the plenary indulgences of a great jubilee, and the late-deceased Bishop of Le Puy, Elie de Le-strange, had gotten Pope Martin to restore this pardon. It was a favour of the sort the Popes scarce ever refused, when asked in due and proper form. The pardon of the Grand Friday drew a great crowd of pilgrims and traders to Le Puy-en-Velay. As early as mid February folk from distant lands set out thither in cold and wind and rain. For the most part they fared on foot, staff in hand. Whenever they could, these pilgrims travelled in companies, to the end they might not be robbed and held to ransom by the armed bands that infested the country parts, and by the barons who exacted toll on the confines of their lands. In as much as the mountain districts were especially dangerous, they tarried in the neighbouring towns, Clermont, Issoire, Brioude, Lyons, Issingeaux, Alais, till they were gathered in a great host, and then went forth on their road in the snow. During Holy Week a strange multitude thronged the hilly streets of Le Puy,–pedlars from Languedoc and Provence and Catalonia, leading their mules laded with leather goods, oil, wool, webs of cloth, or wines of Spain in goat-skins; lords a-horseback and ladies in wains, artisans and traders pacing on their mules, with wife or daughter perched behind, Then came the poor pilgrim folk, limping along, halting and hobbling, stick in hand and bag on back, panting up the stiff climb. Last were the flocks of oxen and sheep being driven to the slaughterhouses. Now, leant against the wall of the Bishop’s palace, stood Florent Guillaume, looking as long and dry and black as an espalier vine in winter, and devoured pilgrims and cattle with his eyes. “Look,” he called to Marguerite the lace-maker, “look at yonder fine heads of bestial.” And Marguerite, squatted beside her bobbins, called back: “Yea, fine beasts, and fat withal!” Both the twain were very bare and scant of the goods of this world, and even then were feeling bitterly the pinch of hunger. And folk said it came of their own fault. At that very moment Pierre Grandmange the tripe-seller was saying as much, where he stood in his tripe-shop, pointing a finger at them. “‘T would be sinful,” he was crying, “to give alms to such good-for-nothing varlets.” The tripe-seller would fain have been very charitable, but he feared to lose his soul by giving to evil-livers, and all the fat citizens of Le Puy had the selfsame scruples. To say truth, we must needs allow that, in the heyday of her hot youth, Marguerite the lace-maker had not matched St. Lucy in purity, St. Agatha in constancy, and St. Catherine in staidness. As for Florent Guillaume, he had been the best scrivener in the city. For years he had not had his equal for engrossing the Hours of Our Lady of Le Puy. But he had been over fond of merrymakings and junketings. Now his hand had lost its cunning, and his eye its clearness; he could no more trace the letters on the parchment with the needful steadiness of touch. Even so, he might have won his livelihood by teaching apprentices in his shop at the sign of the Image of Our Lady, under the choir buttresses of The Annunciation, for he was a fellow of good counsel and experience. But having had the ill fortune to borrow of Maitre Jacquet Coquedouille the sum of six livres ten sous, and having paid him back at divers terms eighty livres two sous, he had found himself at the last to owe yet six livres two sous to the account of his creditor, which account was approved correct by the judges, for Jacquet Coquedouille was a sound arithmetician. This was the reason why the scrivenry of Florent Guillaume, under the choir buttresses of The Annunciation, was sold, on Saturday the fifth day of March, being the Feast of St. Theophilus, to the profit of Maitre Jacquet Coquedouille. Since that time the poor penman had never a place to call his own. But by the good help of Jean Magne the bell-ringer and with the protection of Our Lady, whose Hours he had aforetime written, Florent Guillaume found a perch o’ nights in the steeple of the Cathedral. The scrivener and the lace-maker had much ado to live. Marguerite only kept body and soul together by chance and charity, for she had long lost her good looks and she hated the lace-making. They helped each other. Folks said so by way of reproach; they had been better advised to account it to them for righteousness. Florent Guillaume was a learned clerk. Well knowing every word of the history of the beautiful Black Virgin of Le Puy and the ordering of the ceremonies of the great pardon, he had conceived the notion he might serve as guide to the pilgrims, deeming he would surely light on someone compassionate
Corporeal Punishment, English & Homosocial Tactility
Niladri R. Chatterjee There is a story I had once heard somewhere about a Western woman visiting Calcutta. This was her second visit. The first visit was in the 1970s when she was a teenager. The next was in the 21st century when she was in her late thirties. After going around the city for a few days, on her second visit, she asked her Bengali friends, “Aren’t there any gays in Calcutta anymore?” The friends were puzzled and asked her to explain her question. She said, “Well, the last time I was here, I often saw men walking down the street holding hands. Surely they were gay. Why don’t I see such gay couples around anymore?” There are several ways in which one can read the story. But its most accessible reading would be as an example of cultural incomprehension. Because in her native culture two men holding hands could univocally mean that they were in a homosexual relationship, she had assumed that manual tactility between men in all societies can mean only one thing. She was the native of a society where English was the most commonly spoken language. The story has stayed with me all these years because somewhere in that story I detected a relationship between language/ culture and the body which I thought intriguing. Looking at myself I find that my reduced use of English is inversely proportional to the increase in my sense of security. When I was younger I spoke in English far more than I do now. I was also aware of the reason for this. I felt English was a language which was protecting me from visceral emotional self-exposure. I felt English was a mask which would de-emotionalize even an emotional statement that I may make. I felt protected by the language. This protection also brought in its wake a certain emotional frigidity and unavailability that I acquired which can be used to explain that when I was younger I was far lonelier than I am now, when I do not speak English as much as I used to. This paper is an attempt at exploring how and why the male body in Bengal functions in a certain way when the owner of that body speaks in his native tongue and in quite another way when he speaks in English. I have often noticed that there is a marked difference between the way men in Bengal who speak English think of their bodies and the way those who do not speak English think or do not think of theirs. The holding of hands becomes the touchstone method of telling apart those who do not speak English from those who do. I have repeatedly observed that those men who are obviously employed in blue collar professions, or are even daily wage earners, and therefore almost certainly not in possession of English, show a far greater level of tactility among themselves than those who are white collar workers and are not entirely unlettered in English. Men or boys who do not speak English embrace each other a lot more, even kiss each other on the cheek far more frequently than those who can speak English. In fact, in my own English-speaking circle of friends I have noticed a particular horror of physical contact among male friends, and an inversely proportional lack of corporeal self-consciousness among those who do not speak English. Is it a mere coincidence? Would it be entirely erroneous to speculate whether the English language in any way straitjackets the male body and prohibits same-sex tactility beyond the ‘firm’ handshake? Is the firmness of the handshake an indicator and a performance of hegemonic masculinity? Is the handshake the only kind of same-sex tactility that has been sanctioned and approved as a physical gesture that carries no risk of endangering the heteronormativity of a patriarchal society? English was formally introduced as the preferred language of instruction, business and government in Bengal in the later part of the 18th century, Calcutta having been settled by the East India Company towards the end of the 17th century. Lord Macaulay’s notorious Minute on Indian Education was written in 1835. As Gauri Vishwathan says, English education was introduced to solve the conflict between the proselytising goal of the missionaries and the policy of religious neutrality adopted by the British Government (Vishwanathan 38). So, as I say elsewhere, English and Christianity were being discreetly conflated by smuggling in Christianity under the cover of English literature (Chatterjee 38-9). Foucault tells us that in the 19th century in the West in general and in England in particular the human body, and especially the male body was being pathologized, sexualized, classified and medicojuridically disciplined, with active support from Christianity. There are two famous instances of homosocial tactility in the Bible and both carry negative valence. Judas identifies Christ for the Roman police by kissing him. Thomas doubts the reality of Christ’s resurrection by inserting a finger into one of the wounds received by Christ on the cross. There is only one instance of homosocial tactility in the Bible with positive valence. This is that of St. John the Beloved – not to be confused with St. John the Baptist – who was in the habit of rest his head on Christ’s shoulder. There are statues in Germany dating from 1300 where this instance of homosocial tactility in the Bible is iconised. The fact that these statues are not very well known points to the marginalisation of positive homosocial tactility in the Bible. The only way in which the story of John the Beloved resting his head on Christ’s chest has travelled into English literature is through its homosexualization by Christopher Marlowe when he declared that John the Beloved had a homosexual relationship with Christ. So, that apparently asexual and positive instance of Biblical homosocial tactility was appropriated by Marlowe and therefore reinserted into the criminalising Christian discourse on homosexuality. Therefore all the three instances of