Homeric-Thersitic
Robert H. Bell “But after all, what is the whole subject matter of that revered poem the Iliad but ‘the broils of foolish kings and the foolish populace’?”—Desiderius Erasmus (The Praise of Folly) Human folly at Troy is rampant, starting with the Greek king and commander Agamemnon, who recklessly insults Achilles, refuses to apologize, and suddenly, inexplicably, decides to test the resolve of his army. Declaring the end of the siege, the king is flummoxed when his troops flock eagerly to their ships. The Greek cause appears lost. Suddenly steps forth a remarkable, puzzling figure: “Thersites of the endless speech,” who “knew within his head many words, but disorderly;/vain, and without decency, to quarrel with the princes/with any word he thought might be amusing to the Argives.” Who is Thersites? Not even Homer seems to know. The single orator in the Iliad unidentified by rank, patronymic, or place of origin, his name suggests “loud-mouth” and “courage,” in the sense of boldness, impudence. Reputedly the ugliest man at Troy, he surpasses his glowing, glowering peers for sheer repulsiveness. Since only one other Iliadic character is individuated by appearance and few ever described physically, the elaborate delineation of an apparently minor, fleeting figure is striking. The bard oddly highlights and seemingly undermines Thersites. Deformed and despised, Thersites seems utterly grotesque. Despite conspicuous disqualifications, reviled Thersites seizes the stage and delivers a sixteen-line speech to the entire assembly. Astonishingly, this scorned freak publicly upbraids Agamemnon for greed and lust: you’ve already claimed valuable bronze and the choicest women, “whom we Achaians/give to you first of all whenever we capture some stronghold/Or is it still more gold you will be wanting, that some son/of the Trojans, breakers of horses, brings as ransom out of Ilion.” All this ransom and booty are the spoils “that I, or some other Achaian, capture and bring in? / Is it some young woman to lie with in love and keep her/all to yourself apart from the others? It is not right for/you, their leader, to lead in sorrow the sons of the Achaians.” After excoriating Agamemnon, and flaunting the principles of rhetoric, Thersites assails his audience (“Achaian girls . . . women, not men”), repudiates their mission, and urges abandonment. Although Thersites’ rabble-rousing is unavailing, it provokes an immediate, decisive reaction from Odysseus, who abuses and scourges Thersites. Everyone laughs over him happily. Entertained and amused, the soldiers forget their incipient mutiny and return to ranks. So much, it seems, for Thersites, basest wretch at Troy. Humiliated, a pathetic, obnoxious creature, he disappears into oblivion. As is right and proper, according to Odysseus, and to most right-thinking people. Reading Homer in the nineteenth century, Prime Minister Gladstone found the speech “not a good one.” Because Thersites is so flamboyantly over the top, he is not always credited for being on the mark. Critics tend to agree with the soldiers and Odysseus. They have marked Thersites’ tendentious description, his physical ugliness and moral turpitude. Is Thersites a monstrosity by heroic standards? Martin argues that the speech of Thersites, “quite literally, ‘without meter,’” is “over-determined to look bad by a number of criteria,” including slurring his words. Evidently “just an entertainer,” he “deserves no respect.” Much like the Hephaestos sequence, another intervention by a disabled figure prompting mocking laughter, this episode is disconcerting, and fruitfully so. But ought we to dismiss Thersites so precipitately? Notwithstanding the soldiers’ contempt, the narrator’s malice, and the PM’s condescension, Thersites’ “words of revilement” are words of power provoking instant reaction from Odysseus. Thersites is no blithering madman or prating malcontent, and Agamemnon’s reckless conduct he himself eventually acknowledges as folly or madness, até. Impertinent yet pertinent, speaking truth to power, Thersites is seriously threatening. He says that Agamemnon “dishonoured Achilles, a man much better/than he is.” Thersites sarcastically echoes and ironically lauds Achilles: “there is no gall in Achilles’ heart, and he is forgiving.” Ha! “Otherwise,” he says to Agamemnon, “this were your last outrage.” Thersites locates (one might say) the Achilles heel of the antagonistic chiefs. Shrewdly, he recognizes the gravity of the king’s transgression, and intuits how close Agamemnon was to being killed by the infuriated Achilles. Laughed at, willing to “say any word he thought might be amusing,” Thersites is an unusual yet recognizable comic figure. Aristotle conceives comic types as “worse” than men are, meaning less admirable in appearance, character, and conduct. While “high mimetic” characters like Achilles live for an ideal (glory, say, or arête), “low mimetic” figures like Thersites are more fully embodied. Thersites’ physical freakishness exposes the sexual and appetitive motives of Agamemnon and Achilles, and for his pains is pummeled and harried. Aristotle’s brief remarks On Rhetoric, identifying three types of comic characters, bear upon Thersites. He is a buffoon, jesting to amuse others; he is an eiron, feigning ideals to mock Agamemnon; he is also an alazon or imposter, strutting and blustering to aggrandize himself. It’s possible to regard Thersites as comic relief or as a foil to set off the solemnity of the heroes and their epic mission. In this view, Thersites is a lightning rod, like those Shakespearean commentators who exist, observes William Empson pungently, “not at all to parody the heroes but to stop you from doing so: ‘If you want to laugh at this sort of thing laugh now and get it over.” Arguably, Thersites absorbs the destructive capability of purely derisive cynicism. To sustain a potent, viable heroic spirit, one might conclude, Homer inoculates his characters to resist more devastating, potentially fatal, strains of irony. Though tempting, this model fails to account for the extent of Thersites’ disruptive force. Like Shakespeare who develops Thersites into a major character in Troilus and Cressida, Homer conjures not a stock buffoon but a truth-teller, a wise fool. Certainly Thersites is foolish and reckless: “disorderly;/vain, and without decency,” he thwarts order, propriety, and decorum. Thersites presumes the fool’s remarkable license to speak harsh truths. However abusive and merciless, his invective is inventive
Narrativisationalities of Ribaldian Discourse
Dilip Simeon This is my Rifle and that is my Gun, This is for shooting and that is for fun. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text, Discourse for this life, and Text for the next. Ethnicity, Felicity, Moment of Poesis, Deploying Derrida, contrive halitosis. Deconstruct Narratives, re-inventing the Nation, Imagining India, maximise obfuscation. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text..etc Field Marshal editor, Subaltern mate, Retrieving the Body, what fun to relate. Self from the Occident, Other from East, Apply your Mind to know Beauty from Beast. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc This is my Thesis and that my curricula, Voyaging westwards, remain perpendicular. Narrativize textuality of sexuality, Canonize Prurience of Orientality. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text..etc Archaeological Silences, scatalogical noise, Knowledge is Power, wear it with poise. Positing Subject, we wish to sublate, Delivering seminar, we sit and rotate. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Eros, Telos, Nemesis, Mimesis, Mug up my jargon for passing your thesis. Alas ! Alack ! the subversifying Mind, Earning hard currency, so hard to find. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Mentalitie and Problematique, Academic fashions need a boutique Matriarch, Patriarch, theme for research, Mantra and Tantra from ivory perch. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc Subliminalities of subtextualities, Ponder pomposities of prolix verbosities. Problematising the hidden thematic, Metatextualising intellectuals Asiatic. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Locating, Migrating, mastering Said, Oriental professor wants to get —–. Multicultural interpenetration, Metropolitan colonial wants integration. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Ethnographics of phantasmagoria, Induce seances of mental euphoria. While translating the palimpsest tender, Oh how I long for the opposite gender. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Overinterpreting marxist constipation, Wallow in post-modern self flagellation. Transposing observer to popular stance, Overdetermining professorial romance. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc Agenda of subtext needs corrigendum, Traversing terrain of ethnic pudendum. Verbs become nouns, with lightening velocity, Opaqueness of meaning, euphonic ferocity. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Excavating silences, admiring the skirt, Unearthing allegories of lexico-inert. Pluralisms of syncretistic exterior, Massaging advisors’ psychic interior. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Dissecting semiotics of peasant Tebhaga, Fieldworking students need munim dhaga. But how to explain to examiners’ team, The subtler uses of dhaga munim. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Teasing long hidden truths if I may, Bribing chaprasis how can I say. Slog long enough, material will out, By which time victory will turn into rout. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency Turmoil underneath causing slight divergency. Inverting reality only goes to show, Faculty wanting History from below. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc. Dilip Simeon is a labour historian, political activist and chairperson of the Aman Trust. He is the author of Revolution Highway (Penguin India, 2010). adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Courtesans in the Academia?
Basuli Deb The National Women’s Studies Association in the US selected “Outsider Feminisms” as one of the sub-themes for their annual conference at Denver, Colorado, in November 2010. The conference itself was themed “Difficult Dialogues II” in continuation with the previous year’s topic. Drawing on outsider feminisms as a mode of critique, this was an attempt to engage in difficult dialogues around the performative arts which have been the disenfranchised areas of feminist inquiry within the US academia. In this context, I often keep on wondering how such dispossession is intensified in the context of transnational encounters between US academic feminism and the figure of the woman artist from beyond the borders? So, I thought I’d revisit Muzaffar Ali’s film Umrao Jaan (1981), based on Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s 1905 Urdu novel Umrao Jan Ada about the life of the nineteenth century dancer courtesan, Umrao Jaan and think through the issue. Is it possible for performative feminism to get an entry into feminist inquiry by way of US film studies? So, this is an attempt to think and if possible, reinvent the position and role of outsider feminisms (like performative feminisms) within the structures of the academia. The larger question is about internal disciplinary hierarchies and boundaries within social sciences and humanities and ultimately about the politics of the job market. First, using the film Umrao Jaan as our lens, I’d like to think about the relationship in which feminist performative art, especially those embedded in a non Euro-American tradition, stands with respect to Women’s Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies departments/programs in the US. Transnational feminism happens to be the current buzzword within feminist inquiry, and departments and programs look cutting edge and frankly fashionable when such an area of feminist inquiry is introduced. But how has transnational feminism, with its strong affiliations with the idea of crossing borders, incorporated the figure of the woman artist from beyond the Euro-American cultural tradition? What is transnational feminism’s response to women artists, such as Umrao Jaan, who inhabit the courts of the Muslim aristocracy in the nineteenth century British empire in India? How much interest does transnational feminism have in getting to know the lives of these women courtesans who were caught in the double bind of being highly valued as artists and defamed as prostitutes? Why such women, despite their tragic stories of abduction from their natal families and being sold into prostitution, not eligible for entry into feminist studies, while human trafficking is becoming an increasingly significant area of feminist analysis? To draw on Audre Lorde’s famous description of multiple social locations of disenfranchisement for women, Umrao Jaan is perhaps the “sister outsider” of feminist studies; the likes of her hardly enter feminist inquiry, and more so when she belongs not to the underclass of Europe or America, but to the margins of the Indian aristocracy. What other factors make it so hard for some one like Umrao to enter the realm of feminist inquiry in the US academia? It is true that performance itself remains largely an untheorized and neglected area within feminist scholarship. But Umrao, in her relationship with Nawab Sultan, also embodies romantic love between an aristocrat and a courtesan that has little hope for culminating into wedded bliss. “Under western eyes” Umrao Jaan could have been lumped with the motley crowd of “Third World women”, rendered faceless and homogenous by their victim status. But Chandra Mohanty has already dismantled the authority of such feminisms by exposing the underlying imperialist, and by extension racist, assumptions that mark them. Umrao Jaan could possibly have entered the domain of feminist inquiry as the woman artist, but her art speaks another language—incomprehensible to US academic feminism with its meager interest in cultural studies and art forms outside the Euro-American tradition. This is true even when positions in Women’s Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs and departments are opened up in transnational feminism. Contemporary art forms from elsewhere can still make an entry into the rarefied world of academic feminism, but the likes of Umrao Jaan, with their classical traditions and aristocratic affiliations, rarely do. Umrao’s chosen dance form, the mujra, as we know, sprang during the Mughal period and was heavily patronized by India’s Muslim aristocracy. Mujra is a hybrid form that the pre-sixteenth century theatrical storytellers routinely performed in the courtyards of the Hindu temples space. In mujra, kathak intersect with the vocal musical forms of the thumri and the ghazal. The thumri is the musical form which has an intimate and material relationship of women for Lord Krishna. Pangs of loss or separation, so central to the internal dynamics of the workings of the genre of the ghazal, takes a more formal shape sometime in the sixth century. Umrao, who performs the mujra for the royalty and the aristocracy of India, represents an excess in the realm of feminist inquiry—the sister outsider, debarred from entry even into the domain of transnational feminism, with its strong affiliations with the elsewhere—beyond the borders of the familiar. She is not Phoolan Devi—the bandit queen of India—the beloved of transnational feminist inquiry into Bollywood—the lower caste woman, the outlaw of the postcolonial state, the sensational exception to the rule of Third World women’s victimhood that “Western feminism” loves. Her nuanced, median position becomes her undoing even in the highly slotted academic space as it used to be in her known world. But what if Umrao Jaan tries to enter the realm of critical inquiry via an analytic of the British Empire in India in the nineteenth century? It is in the context of the 1857 series of wars between the British and the natives of India and the British repression of resistance against foreign rule that we need to understand the figure of Umrao. The British, in their imperial interests to rule India, annexed large territories of the princely states by dethroning the native kings of the region, often by claiming that they were inefficient rulers because their
Lunatic Asylums Arrive in Calcutta
Amit Ranjan Basu The arrival of psychiatry in India was a disjuncture from the practices that already existed for mental healing. Not only were these practices based on concepts that did not follow the Cartesian mind/body binary, but I also consider it inappropriate to call those practices psychiatry though many historians of Indian medicine do. It is one thing to use ’mental health’ or ’psychiatry’ or ’psychology’ interchangeably as a rhetoric while elaborating on indigenous systems in English, but to reduce different culturally saturated practices with their own terminologies to an all-engulfing western word psychiatry, is another. For, it tends to produce a narrative that simplistically brings psychiatry in a line where pre-colonial systems at once lose their characteristics and any autonomous domain. It is not true that mad persons were not confined in houses before the colonialists came. A brief historical overview on the Indian Lunacy Act, 1912 mentioned Mahmud Khilji (1436-69), who established a ’mental hospital’ at Dhar, near Mandu in Madhya Pradesh with Maulana Fazular Lah Hakim as the appointed physician.’[1] In fact, the concept of hospitals was first conceived and practised in Arabian medicine in all the countries ruled by Muslims, and served as a model for the European hospitals. The first such hospital was founded by Walid b. Abdal Malik in AD 707. Two types of hospitals emerged. One was the ’fixed hospital’ located in particular places and the other, the ’mobile’ one that used to move from place to place and stopped at one place as long as it was necessary. Insane persons were kept locked up and chained in hospitals specified for them under regular supervision. Firuz Shah, successor of Mohmmad Bin Tuglak, added several hospitals to a list of 70 hospitals run by his predecessor in Delhi. Firuz Shah had ordered that everyone suffering from insanity should be captured, chained and kept in the hospital and treated with medicine ’prescribed by him’ which was found ’useful’. Moreover, he also provided a ’special diet’ for them.[2] In any case, it is not very difficult to imagine that wandering and violent people were kept in custody and not many hospitals for the insane came up as it happened with British colonialists, who brought in a rational system of western medicine, which saw a growth of many institutions by the mid-eighteenth century. Arrangements for keeping lunatics under private care but with the East India Company’s patronage had started by the late-eighteenth century in Calcutta. The first recorded evidence for it can be dated to 1787. D.G. Crawford, who wrote A History of the Indian Medical Service, 1600-1913 in two volumes, gave a brief account of the establishment of this lunatic asylum in Calcutta: “The proceeding of the Calcutta Medical Board of 3rd April 1887, contain a memorial from surgeon G. M. Kenderdine in charge of the Insane Asylum …[t]he Board recommended to Government, in a letter dated 7th May 1787 the foundation of a regular asylum and nominated Assistant Surgeon William Dick to its charge … Dick was appointed on a salary of Rs. 200 per month. A Bengal Military letter dated 16th August 1787, reports in para 108-’Lunatic Hospital. Have accepted the proposals of Mr. Dick, an Asstt. Surgeon for the erection of one. The House (sic) is to be built at his Expense (sic) and rented by the company at Rs. 400 per month’ . A General letter from Bengal dated 6th November 1788, reports in para 98 that sanction has been given to the erection of a Lunatic Hospital for females, for which a rent of 200 rupees a month will be paid.”[3] During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ’trade in lunacy’ became a lucrative business for England and India. In Calcutta, a surgeon, Mr Beardsmore entered into a contract with the Government of Bengal, which lasted for 30 years, and the government provided from about Rs. 20,000-40,000 per year for taking care of, on an average, 20-40 lunatics. Compared to the Hanwell Asylum of England, the average cost per patient was seven to eight times more here![4] The asylum came up in Calcutta in 1817 exclusively for Europeans. Unlike the previous one, which had to close down, this asylum still exists in the city as the Institute of Psychiatry. Let us look at its emergence narrated by an Indian psychiatrist 50 years ago: ” [I]n 1817, Surgeon Mr. Beardsmore who was superintendent of a Government Lunatic Asylum found that the conditions in the lunatic hospital were not congenial for the patients and so he decided to erect the lunatic asylum at the outskirts of Calcutta immediately behind the Presidency Jail. This was solely due to the enterprise and enthusiasm of Mr. Beardsmore and the hospital was a private property. It was meant exclusively for Europeans. Govt. contributed five-sixth of its expenses while one-sixth was met by the contributions of the private patients themselves. When the hospital was started Mr. Beardsmore had hardly half a dozen patients but soon they increased to 50-60 in number. The asylum had a central house surrounded by several ranges of barracks, which were thrown together in no very definite plan but were added from time to time to suit the needs of the public. Every visitor was pleased with the cleanliness of the apartments and ventilation of the rooms. The gardens were beautiful and had a pleasing and refreshing appearance. Patients looked happy, cheerful and comfortable. The asylum was managed by a European superintendent and a steward. There was an Apothecary to look after the male patients and a Matron to watch the female patients. Restraint was in use but it was in extreme moderation. Excited patients were treated with morphia, opium and hot baths. Sometimes leeches had to be applied to such patients in order to alloy their excitements but venesection was never done. Blisters were found useful in chronic patients as it helped them to shorten the duration of their periodic excitements.”[5] By early nineteenth century, the Court of Directors of