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
This Beautiful Parable of the May-Be Land
Prasanta Chakravarty आँखों देखी—The film begins with flying and ends in flying. A man takes a leap off a cliff and piercing wind brushes against his face and lo, he is a bird! Elevated and detached, this man is soaring, gliding, winging his way to a liberating flight. By releasing his body. By unlocking his senses. We are invited to take that leap along with him, where the achingly lyrical and the sharply intellectual jostle and beckon us. A leap into a world of childlike whimsicality. But also into hardboiled and sensory matter of factness. That leap takes place at many levels. Most notably we are invited to partake in a sensual, romantic and amoral crossover. And if I may venture, this dare recovers a crucial, lost and esoteric world view, through a beautiful parable moored right in our present, right amidst ourselves in the by-lanes of old and crusty Delhi. Crucial because it brings to attention our own lyrical modernity at a time when this word, modern, has become turgid or is being constantly, sometimes viciously, being bombarded from various quarters—philosophically, socially, formally. Likewise, the term romantic seems to have lost its sheen and shine. The film goes to the root of the modern sensibility—revealing that rambling, travelling, whimsical, restless, obstinate spirit of freedom amidst what seems mundane and routine. This parable of the everyday also powerfully takes head on the tired metaphors of our banal certainties—surpassing ethics, varieties of political opportunism, and the bankruptcy and orthodoxy of those who dabble in social justice, ossified metaphysical and moral certitude, utilitarian celebrations of consumption. Naturally, every world-view has its own finitude and limitation and this one is no exception. But there are reasons to hold up this richly subtle film at a time when mediocrity and smartness are more or less the mainstays of ‘new’ cinema. लड़का गौ है —The Boy is a Simpleton This is Bauji’s fable, the story of his twin flock: one makes the home—his garrulous, loving, conservative wife, his two highly sensitive children—young adults really—and his younger brother’s family. The hearth is one— एक घर एक चूल्हा. Then there is Bauji’s workplace, a world peopled by small-time travel agents and customers. And also his neighbourly acquaintances—the masterji and the pandit, the kirana grocer and the mohalla loafer— a few of whom will eventually become part of his select sect of believers in the senses (eye is a metaphor) and in the maddening unbelief that such a position must spawn and uphold. This, at a more social level. But the narrative is about another subterranean story—the discovering of a sensory, sceptical and experiential germ within Bauji’s own self, and trying to live life and choose death by responding faithfully to such stimuli. The eye becomes the metaphor here. The family discovers that their daughter is in love and the father (Bauji) discovers, with his own eyes, that the lover boy is a lovely chap, a simpleton— लड़का गौ है, he confides to his wife—the young suitor is more of a lamb actually and not a threat to their daughter at all. That’s it. This is an extraordinary revelation. A joyous realization. And a decision is taken. Bauji will henceforth trust none: laws-dicta-dogma-statute-hearsay-news-science-debate-polemics-lecture-hectoring-bullying-suasion-emotional atyachar. Nothing. Save his senses and the experience that passes through such sense perception. And he will spread whimsical happiness, needlessly. Thereafter the narrative is a ride through this singular commitment to verification; a paean to lived, sensuous experience. Leading to one’s यथार्थ through अनुभूति. Truth, यथार्थ, is therefore piecemeal, infinite and subjective. But such a steadfast belief in experiential verification leads neither to systematic suspicion nor to any highlighting of the ego. Far from it. It leads rather to a quirky, endearing but contrarian world; a world that celebrates throbbing, giving relationships. Bauji declares that one has to first unlearn habits in order to enter this new world— सब कुछ सच्चा होगा, सब कुछ अच्छा होगा—henceforth, everything will be true and everything will be good. कलाकंद था—It was a Kalakand This is what one may call claritas— साफ़ नजरिया, as a song in the film puts it; there is new buoyancy in his gait, a new conviction in his dealings. The local panditji offers him some prashad and the sceptical Bauji comes to the conclusion that it is nothing but sweetmeat – कलाकंद था, it was kalakand a minute ago—but after he gobbles up the sweet, now it is plain matter. Matter is vibrant. As Leon Kass has said elsewhere: “…we do not become the something that we eat; rather the edible gets assimilated to what we are…the edible object is thoroughly transformed by and reformed into the eater.” 1 A journey in radical material romanticism begins by celebrating life as food—the kalakand inaugurates a new sunshine (आज लागि लागि नयी धूप) whose magic is matchless (जादू है अनूप). Bauji stops worshipping altogether. And as one bystander says, by taking this step: ‘पंडितजी को टेंशन दे दिया’ | This sense of unease in the priest arises from the latter’s realization that Bauji is actually hinting that all knowledge comes from our fallible senses. God, spiritual power and such things do not have much sway once you are in this zone. We can never penetrate the secrets of appearances—that is a realization. One must therefore revel in the senses, in our touched-and felt known environment. One must ingest and imbibe every bit of the sensual, fully. And through this immersion in the senses you drink life, deeply—to the lees. And it then follows that all judgement depends on sense perceptions—dynamic, active senses. Long ago Pierre Gassendi characterized such a sensual sceptic as a “…hunter who does not pursue wild animal sluggishly like an onlooker but hunts with keen senses and tracks it down zealously.”2. Bauji is a now a happy hunter. Such a realization is a direct challenge to the whole enterprise of phenomenology. And it turns sensual consumption on its head and encourages dissipation. (No wonder this film is the complete and
The Wayfarer of Being
Manash Bhattacharjee [This obituary piece was written on the night of 19 April 1998, in Poorvanchal, JNU, on receiving the news of Octavio Paz’s death. It was handwritten in a ruled class register, and typed in a manual typewriter in Munirka by a vexed typewriter. He was placated by tea and cigarettes. The article, published in Literary Review of The Hindu, on 17 May 1998, has been retrieved from the physical archives of the newspaper, in Chennai. I would like to render my gratitude to Amit Sengupta, who had read this piece in the journal section of JNU’s library and encouraged me to send it to Nirmala Lakshman. I am also indebted to Kaustabh Deka, who currently works at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, for retrieving the piece for me.] ———————————————————————————————— The Buddha did not teach me how to die. He tells us that faces dissolve, that names are empty sounds. But at death we have a face, and we die with a name. In the borderland of ashes, who will open my eyes? ~ ‘Remembrance’ For Octavio Paz, to die meant ‘to return / to the place we don’t know’. Like most experiences, death for Paz for also a paradoxical event: to leave a place and move into another. Loss and recovery. But to this world, for us who cannot travel with him to that unknown frontier of self-experience, his death can only mean a loss. Indeed, it is hard to believe that Paz (1914–1998) will now be addressed in the past tense. At 84, he was still referred to as ‘a youthful man’. As a poet and essayist he was, till recently, pouring out his enormous wealth of creativity with impatient regularity and a furious sense of life. For Paz, poetry itself was a suspension between two paradoxical statuses of being: a bridge between solitude and communion. Poetry is born in the womb of solitude, but to Paz, solitude is never absolute. It is always populated by the presence of the other, which can even be ‘our shadow’. ‘I am never alone’, he wrote, ‘I speak with you always / you speak with me always’. Paz glimpsed reality always through the paradoxical nature of time. The ‘present’ for Paz was both motionless and fleeting. It cannot be touched. It is real in its clarity and unreal in the excess of its apparitions. The present is also a ‘presence’: ‘a fountain of reality’. Through time, poetry becomes a search for presences where you lose what you receive and retrieve what you lose. The day is short, the hour immense hour without my I and its sorrow the hour goes by without going by and escapes within me and is enchained. ~ ‘Constraint’ The antimony of this experience reveals a ‘third-state’ between what passes and what stays. This, says Paz, is the state of ‘empty plenitude’. Here, being inhabits a transparency and poetry slips between the affirmation and negation of its impulses: a bridge in the interstices between the ‘tangible’ and the ‘intangible’. By interpreting reality, poetry, however, alters it and leaves behind a residue of beauty. This aesthetic quest in Paz’s case was surrealistic in nature. Contrary impulses and meanings collapsed into each other, and a subversive and playful interaction occurred between language and experience. A turbulent imagery resulted along with the slippage of being between dream (past) and vision (present). In this way, Paz fuses different levels of being and reality into a rich and complex unity of poetic experience. His long poems like ‘Sunstone’ and ‘A Draft of Shadows’ are expressions of such kinds. Paz’s long poems are like spiral staircases through which the soul passes through different states of emotions, bordering on ‘vertigo’, and at last descending to the tranquil emptiness of clarity. Paz’s poems reveal his mixed inheritance. He drew together the Spanish and Nahuatl strands of Mexican poetry. Wordsworth particularly influenced ‘The Draft of Shadows’. His love poems had the fury of Breton, and the intensity of Eluard. He was also influenced by Freud, Sade, Bataille, and the Tantric and Zen Buddhism. All these disparate influences make Paz an interesting poet. Philosophically, Paz, like Eliot, suffered the modern dilemmas of communion. To counter this despair, Paz searched for the moment of experience outside time, which is also Eliot’s preoccupation in ‘Four Quartets’. But through the maze of dream and vision, such an escape for Paz ended with an affirmative negation. Manuel Duran calls Paz a ‘philosophical poet’ like Eliot, but ‘more intimate, more erotic, warmer than Eliot’. He says this because Paz always probed the alienated relationships of life with lyricism and a profound sympathy. Also Paz, as Duran rightly points out, opened ‘the windows of Mexican culture to all influences’. He was as much at home in the Orient as he was in Paris, in America or in his native Mexico. It makes Paz a true pluralist. He believed that the ethical foundations of the ‘new civilization’ would be ‘the plurality of different times and the presence of the other’ where ‘we would live in the full freedom of our diversity and sensuality in the certain knowledge of death’. The politics of this new world would be ‘a dialogue of culture’. Yet, in order to avoid nihilism, Paz desired ‘a higher unity’ as a guide. To Octavio Paz, it was not possible in the modern era to disengage from politics. He felt is his duty to intervene in the moral conflicts and errors of present-day politics. Stalinist rule and the Russian totalitarian state disenchanted him from communism and he pressed for the necessity of liberal values within socialism. This caused him to be dubbed as a ‘traitor’ and a reactionary among Leftist intellectuals, and it distanced him from his famous friends like Marquez and Fuentes. But Paz refused to be silent on the crimes of the communist states. He called the Soviet state ‘the first soulless state in human history’, as he felt that the millions who died