The Dead Body
Manindra Gupta (Trans. Abu Hossain) The fable of the Brahmin and the Brahmani used to be an amalgamation of the mythical and the folk. The duo lives in that hutment right at the yonder corner of the village. The Brahmin, a simple guy, partly a simpleton even. The Brahmani, a termagant—a long life of travail and tribulation has made her utterly irritable at the fag end. The story could take different turns once you reach this juncture. For instance, he discovers a pot full of mohurs, guarded by the yaksha, among the ruins in the jungle, or impresses the lord of the land with his witticism and makes a fortune, or gets swindled by a conman, suffers harsh words from the Brahmani and chooses exile. This story of the twosome is actually our story—mine and my friends’. We get swindled everyday and our predicament worsens. As long as we were working, we were fishes secure within our respective shoals. A retired life is one of needless, sundry humiliation. How and where our fulsome sons and daughters spend their time, what drives their lives, I am rather unsure. Internationally acclaimed pundits doing the circuit or surefooted asocial danseuses adept at social dos—whatever their trade be—they have traversed a long way from us indeed. We oldies are vulnerable like the groping Brahmin couple of the tale. We queue up at the bus-stop, hear someone holler ‘get up, do get up.’ Soon the bus waves past, an anomalous bell ringing. We are left standing. An odd shove here, a thrust there in the crowd, (we hope to parry, but invariably fail) easily leaves us cold, downbeat, fallen. I recall the visage of old, weary Dhritarashtra, at the conclusion of the battle at Kurukshetra, returning with blooms and supplicating water—hungry, weak with fasting, trembling, superannuated, rapidly losing interest with living. Soon he enters the entrails of the forest with Gandhari, Kunti and Sanjay. And a fierce forest fire engulfs them. Sanjay entreats the old king to flee. The feeble king replies that he would rather scorch himself up. It is ideal to give up ones life to water, wind, fire and fasting. You may take leave Sanjay. King Bimbisara died of fasting too. I have noticed unwell creatures, nearing death, hunt down a quiet spot—quit food and await stilly until death arrives. Possibly their being wishes to touch some primordial pulse before departing for good. The threesome in Mahabharata also sat motionless. Modern death is a messy, troublesome affair. Face to face with death one realizes how perilous our circumstances are. These days there are hardly any treatment options at home. And nursing homes are veritable leeches. And then at the threshold of his last breath, the patient is pushed into a ventilator: artificial respiration initiates. Four or five days in that state, stark pale with death long ago, the nursing home declares the patient to be brain dead. The dead body and a bill of few lakhs are easily handed out. In the name of wellness and treatment, partial dead-bodies thus enter the chain of transaction. And a complete and spectacular disrespect for the dead starts right there. On one hand, the abhorrent antarjali-jatra, on the other, this horrendous ventilation: is there no simpler, more natural route for the patient on the death roll? Howsoever agreeably we lead our lives, in death we proceed towards the grandeur of the infinite and the unseen. These last couple of hours, at their very moment of disappearance, let not the dead suffer contempt from those who stay back. I would not have been so garrulous but for a jolt that I received the other day. I had gone to the samshan-ghaat, in solidarity, to witness the last rites of a neighboring friend. The gentleman, his wife, his kids—the whole family is illustrious, scholarly and free-minded. Probably the luster of scholarship had dried up the humidity of their bereavement. In every civic, popular or natural society, the disposal of the dead merits some procedural aspects. Various as the formalities are, one basic thread binds them: that we do not consider the dead to be gone, vanished, non-existent. The idea is to see that a modicum of love and benediction guide us even as we dispose off a body who had been possibly a fellow traveler with the living for so long and so richly. And to wonder and consider the remains before it surpasses touch and feel. The Eskimos of North Pole are an ancient lot. How do they resolve this conundrum of the wobbly, unsure old age? Once the old man realizes that he is unable to hunt, is dependent on his kinsman for food, the lumbering weight of life is getting better of him—he gets holds of a catamaran, and one evening quietly ventures on to the sea. Night in front, the ocean wide, below 30 degree Celsius the temperature. But he won’t return. What would happen to him, his body, his existence? The community is there by the sea-shore to bid him adieu. There are all kinds of traversing that final expanse: sometimes with such communal approval, at times alone and fasting—awaiting passage, and who knows, may be denying certain treatments even in the midst of mortal pain. There is a breed of sanyasis whose mortal remains are left to be eaten by the creatures of the wild. The whole of the Tower the Silence precisely hinges on such an understanding of the relationship of the living and the dead. Some practitioners are given water-burial, so that they enter the food chain via fishes and other aquatic creatures only to re-emerge materially. There is nothing demeaning about returning this earthly body back to the earth. Now, the usual rites are either internment or cremation. Two kinds of mentality work behind these differing procedures. Burial implies that he is around, his existence being mysterious now and he has left secretly to live elsewhere. The pyre suggests his unencumberdness, his transparency, the voyaging out: one can
Science & Fiction
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay What is science fiction and what can the genre give us that other genres cannot? This, of course, is to assume that science fiction is a ‘genre’ – something that has been identified, labelled and samples put in a glass jar alongside many other jars in the laboratory of literature. This however is far from the case. There are many definitions of science fiction, but there is none universally agreed upon[i]. The cynics usually refer to it as a marketing label, while enthusiasts call it by many names depending on which species of science fiction they find most sweet. Considering moreover that the term ‘science fiction’ is not in common usage until the 1930s, although coined as far back as 1851 by William Wilson, might make us a bit suspicious of the pretensions of a genre to emerge suddenly and find its niche in the genre tree. There are no “emergences” in literature – movement of language is a productive process and mutation is law. Genres can at best be perceived as mutable mobiles – they have antecedents, precursors, share family resemblances and are perpetually in transformation; even the most exemplary genre object texts are small pins on the charts and tables of literary influence. Note for instance Hugo Gernsback’s definition of ‘scientifiction’ in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, which is often understood to have launched the genre: “By scientifiction I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” (Gernsback 1926: 3) Like the narrator in Borges’ Pierre Menard, it is necessary for the reader of the new genre to know who begat who. What makes the retrospective labelling tick is not merely the pedigree, however important that might be in considerations of canonicity, but that it allows the identification of a preformation within which even the most qualitatively new becomes less bizarre. Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as the literature of “cognitive estrangement” relies equally on the balance between the estranged and the quotidian – for the radically new cannot be understood except by means of a reference to the old. While one may indeed be sympathetic to such claims, and also the attempts to give science fiction a long history going back to Ramayana and Lucian’s True History[ii], it is the specific character of the literature labelled as science fiction that is of interest to us. We might take 1851 as a watershed moment – a label first and then the genre that may be understood to fit that label. Such a model solves certain problems, such as that of chronology: anything prior may be classified as part of the same family but belonging to a different genre. It does not however resolve completely however the problem of definition. For instance, can we call Ibsen’s Ghosts or Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart novels as science fiction, simply because they deal with the now disregarded, but in the late nineteenth century regarded as ‘scientific’, theory of degeneration? There is science and there is a whole lot of fiction. But are they science fiction? Conversely, do we include theories now regarded as unscientific as science fiction? There are in fact two nested problems in the question of definition. The first is the proliferation of subtypes in science fiction, which makes it possible to label some texts as science fiction from certain perspectives and some other texts from other perspectives; a problem of inclusion and exclusion. The other problem lies in the nature of the alignment between science and fiction, insofar as the definition of science itself is unclear, which makes it impossible to label what is and what is not science fiction[iii]. By resolving (if possible) these two problems we can find the answer to our framing questions. Instead of providing an answer however, this short piece is a less ambitious attempt to identify a possible way of answering these questions. The first I believe can be addressed by means of a classificatory principle, namely that of ‘speculation’, and the second by a methodological principle that clarifies the nature of the science of science fiction. To begin with the second, constructivism or the sociological approaches to scientific knowledge provide an entry point because these focus on the manipulation of the categories of subjective and objective in the framing of scientific activity. Constructivist approaches, such of Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor and Barry Barnes, highlight the ‘theory ladenness of observation’, that is, what is observed in scientific activity is overdetermined by the theoretical perspective that one utilizes to explain the observation. The Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman’s invisible ball metaphor[iv] for scientific activity illustrates this – it is not that the explanation for the invisible ball is not a plausible one or has no connection with the observation, or that the observation itself is dubitable, though any of these is possible depending on the context, but that the explanation is a contingent one. As Bloor explains, reality as perceived through the senses is not denied by the sociologist; however, reality is under-determined by such perception: “because the area of reality being inspected under-determines the scientists understanding, an analysis of their knowledge must further assume the role of organising principles and orientations derived from elsewhere…scientists need their sensory experience of the world, and their natural inductive and deductive tendencies, but these always work through and with their culture, and that is the professional concern of the sociologist” (Bloor 1996: 841). Moreover, there is a continual attempt to establish a static picture of science in which experience and theory form a closed circle of knowledge, with one reflected in the other. Bloor argues that while empirical data does furnish experience and that the reliability of sense data is a precondition for sociological analysis, this experience alone is not knowledge. What gives experience its meaning is a theory, the “organising principles and orientations derived from elsewhere”, which is a social production, and not given along with the
And How Are You?
Arunava Sinha By Buddhadeva Bose (translated from Bengali) Sometimes I want to know how you are. When I go to sleep, when I wake up, when I drive at ninety miles an hour, when the weight of time suddenly drops after a few quick vodkas and brandies. Dawn breaks, night falls; dawn again, night again. The same way, day after day. Sometimes it feels as though something will happen. Nothing does. Day after day. Believe it or not, I look at myself in the mirror at times. When I shave? No, I think of other things then. But sometimes, alone in the room, after a bath, or before going to bed eventually, I stand face-to-face with myself, eyeball-to-eyeball. Just me, without adornment; a lump of flesh, flab and filth. Completely bald, blunt nose, bags under the eyes, a broad hairy chest, the spitting image of a powerful, aged baboon after removing the glittering false teeth. I enjoy taking off my dentures and making faces, balling up my fists – like two wild beasts poised for battle – when I open my mouth wide the darkness seems to be the road to hell. – How? I don’t even know where you are. Come, let me introduce the rest of you – this aged baboon you see is Abanish Ghoshal, with engineering degrees from Glasgow and Berlin, learnt the ropes at Ford’s factory in Detroit, now engaged in making steel at Pippalgarh. His monthly income is five thousand rupees, more or less, he has been around the entire world thrice at his company’s expense, he has to visit Japan or Germany or Sweden or Russia or America once a year. In other words, this aged baboon is a very important person. But actually I am someone else. Alas, there’s so much ugliness that the tailor can hide, so much pus that formidable degrees can conceal blandly. Fame, honour, riches, influence – all of it may have been achieved, but after that? What lies behind, covered, within? Was there really a ritual in Athens where young women would emerge naked after bathing in the sea for the ancients to select the most beautiful among them that year? But how else can beauty be judged? All we consider are the adornments. Degrees, learning, ‘qualifications’. Everyone wants to know what I can do, no one knows what I am. You know. Do you? The population of Pippalgarh is fifty thousand, everyone’s livelihood is this steel factory, their lives too, in fact. We are building the new India; creating wealth for the people, earning foreign exchange for the country, with four hundred million by our side, we are marching ahead, marching ahead. Can we ever say that the people involved in such a gigantic endeavour are not successful? But I remember you from time to time. Pippalgarh has a reputation around the country of being progressive. We have delivered radios to the homes of the workers; we have swept out cholera and small-pox; our huge cooperative store is a veritable showpiece. We have a school, a library, clubs at different levels and of different kinds, doctors, nurses, a free hospital, even a contraception clinic adjacent to the maternity home. Everyone here is happy; they work with healthy bodies, with resolve in their minds and with hope in their hearts: work goes on round the clock, smoothly; our productivity is the highest in India. We affirm life here. Do you remember that morning – those dewdrops on the grass, and the soft, tender, pink sunshine? There are hills in the distance here, a sea of earth lies grey beyond the town. There is only emptiness in the vast expanse stretching to the horizon, nothing but emptiness either in the enormous sky above. Nothing at all happens – the sun rises, the sun sets, nothing happens at all. Everyone says Mr Ghoshal works like a demon. They don’t lie; I feel no fatigue when it comes to work, I do not have the ability to rest. My routine stretches from eight to eight; I fell the day with a single blow. Yet the victory does not seem to be complete; sometimes I go back late at night – where the huge fires burn furiously, I walk around supervising things, when I come out I find the darkness thinning. There’s no need, of course, there are people specifically for this task – but this is what I enjoy. I like to think that something is happening – this pit of fire, this fierce sound, the mechanical movements of the factory-workers – all of these help me forget that I am actually someone else. And I can be seen at almost each of the innumerable parties that are thrown here in Pippalgarh – I always make an appearance, even if only for ten minutes – and if ever I feel like “letting myself go” I can put away one-and-a-half bottles of Scotch and still continue with my measured smiles, my conversation, my flirtations with the women, without breaking my stride. I am on cordial terms with everyone, but none of them means anything to me. That’s the way I like it. Like it? That’s incorrect. There’s no question of liking or disliking anything. I work – since I have nothing else. I go to parties – since I have nothing else. Nothing else. I do not have the one thing that would have meant having everything. So I have nothing. But is it even possible that I am the only one who has come to know this, but no one else has? Is it even possible that I am the only one among this fifty thousand who wonders how you are? Everyone is happy at Pippalgarh, but the happiest are the women – meaning, the wives of those “sahibs” who earn more than two thousand rupees a month. There’s a separate club for them – meaning, the “memsahibs”. There they can attempt self-improvement without the company of men: swimming,
Of Newspapers and Governments
Malarvizhi Jayanth The memoirs of a former journalist who is using the Wikileaks context to settle old scores Once upon an election, the ruling party was bullying and booth-capturing recklessly. I was there. I saw it. Outside one booth, three Tata Sumos drove away at mad speeds, their screeching, spinning wheels blowing dust into my eyes in a scene straight out of the Tamil movies. I walked into the booth to find it had been ransacked minutes earlier. I saw weeping government officials and ballots with the stamp over the rising sun scattered everywhere. Other reporters saw similar scenes. Reporters received complaints of cash and biriyani(!) being distributed to voters. The management of the newspaper I worked for chose to run the Election Commission’s claims that the elections had been without incident, rather than accounts from several reporters who had seen the captured booths and heard from voters who had been offered bribes. Two days later, when almost all other media (barring the usual suspects) had run outraged stories about the brazenness of the booth capturing, hesitantly, The Hindu followed suit. Today, they announce to us that cash for votes is a way of political life in Tamil Nadu. Yeah, thanks, we know that already. Too bad you couldn’t believe your lowly brown-skinned reporters who told you all about it. A white man sends off a cable about it to his masters and then it becomes news? Really? The ways of power are mysterious. Now, The Hindu is releasing the WikiLeaks India cables to the world. Now, we know what many people in Tamil Nadu had been yelling about – that the Government of India was in cahoots with the Government of Sri Lanka to turn attention away from the bloodbath to wipe out the LTTE – was true. Now, in fact, we know that our worst fears and suspicions about institutions are often true. And now, I write about how I grew disenchanted with the newspaper I grew up with, the paper that framed my worldview, ruined my prose and beat any interest in journalism out of me. Once I discovered that bottled water could have cyanide or shit or worse in it. This was when the Chennai Corporation was on a spree of taking water samples and blacklisting bottled water brands because they claimed the samples were unfit for consumption. So. I visited several private water-bottling facilities in the outer suburbs of the city. Several brands can get their water bottled from the same plant. I saw workers on the same premises segregating bottles after they had been sealed and pasting the stickers of different brands on them. All these plants had laboratories to test samples of the water they are bottling, to comply with regulations. Samples had tested positive for everything from cyanide compounds to faecal matter. They have recorded these cheerfully, I have no clue why – possibly because inspection officials can be bribed – and shown them to me equally cheerfully – possibly confident that a stupid woman would not understand what these record notebooks had to say. I started drinking tap water from that day. I’m still alive. I went to the government Bureau of Indian Standards lab to understand the process of water testing. They walked me through the steps involved in testing water samples. I visited the Chennai Corporation lab where they claimed to be testing the water. My school’s chemistry lab was better equipped. This place did not have a functioning refrigerator to store samples at low temperatures (a crucial part of the testing process). They showed me some grimy test tubes when I asked to see samples of the water that were being tested. The claims about testing water were clearly false. The moral of the story: None of them are clean – neither the bottlers nor the people claiming to be testing it. The article I wrote shuttled between the internal censors for more than a week. Then it was quietly rewritten for unreadability and pubished. The Hindu is a good employer. They take care of their employees – practically free healthcare, heavily subsidized canteen food and all that jazz. I was a bad journalist. I did not know how to stay in the good books of the powers-that-be. I did not know how to impress the right people. Most of my stories about civic problems in the suburbs, the rites of the transgendered, the farmers markets in Thiruvallur and such-like trivia did not make the first three pages of the paper. Most importantly, I did not know how to cosy up to government officials – vital if I want to be able to milk them for stories later. I treated all of them like they had some communicable terminal illness. The Chennai Corporation Commissioner is a smooth operator who knows how to keep journalists and politicians happy. I pride myself on the fact that he yelled at me once when I was working on the water purification story. That is among the few moments in my journalistic career when I felt I was doing something right. I wish I could say that I walked out of office in rage over some incident of internal censorship and never went back. The reason I actually quit was far more trivial. A few months later, salaries were raised across the board since the management wanted to hire ACJ graduates, who were all being offered much higher starting pay by other organisations. My salary raise still did not equal the pay that freshers were being offered, though I had been working for this newspaper for three years. I am an ACJ graduate myself (oh, the exquisite irony of it all) I fought to get the raise. Then I quit. There was high drama and exchange of memos and self-righteous letters because I refused to serve the notice period for resignation. Each time I cross that office I feel a thrill of joy that I no longer work there. Cue next flashback: