On ‘Mudradosh’: Jibanananda Das and the Paradox of Subjectivity
Nazmul Sultan [Nazmul Sultan is a PhD student in Political Theory at the University of Chicago. He is also one of the editors of Itihashjan, a journal of politics and philosophy in Bengali.] 1. Mudradosh[i] evades the order of thought. Stealthily escaping the world of conscious authority, it recurs again and again, restlessly and relentlessly. At the first blush, the prime constituent of mudradosh appears to be the act of self-circling repetition. Mudradosh is that over which the subject has no real authority, for it does not rely on the sovereign decision of the subject. It is indeed a habit—a habit of both thought and action. And yet we understand little by reducing mudradosh to the category of habit. In some sense, everything is a form of habit. The all too well-known Humean argument that knowledge itself is a product of the custom and habit that govern our thought and action does not help much in understanding the singularity of mudradosh. For Hume, the source of knowledge is not any transcendental foundation of reason, but rather the fundamentally habitual nature of human thought and action that generates epistemic beliefs. Although Hume recognizes the centrality of the self in conceiving passions and emotions, these sensibilities remained grounded in the impressions that result from encounter with external objects and events. The self, as it were, is the medium that arranges the impression-produced beliefs in certain orders. In contrast, mudradosh refers to the repetitive failure of the subject itself. Mudradosh is distinguished from the generality of habit by virtue of its peculiar constitution—the coming together of “mudra” and “dosh” (fault). It is not quite easy to define mudra, a highly polysemous word. In ancient Indian philosophy, mudra denoted the gesture which is both symbolic and ritualistic. It is a physical act above all, one that designates gestures of yoga, dance, and so on. Given the embodiment of an authorized symbol on its body, coin itself is called mudra in several Indian languages. When a particular mudra is not reproduced in the authentic form, the resultant imperfect action is categorized as mudradosh. For example, the constitutive limit of a dancer may lead her to perform a mudra that deviates from the standard norm. Mudradosh is thus different from mannerism in the sense that it is not simply a whimsical particularity of an action. It entails the failure to meet the requirements of a ritualized norm. Yet mudradosh is not a transgression per se—for the failure is involuntary and is often tolerated. In other words, mudradosh is neither fully accepted nor is it fully signified with the status of a taboo. Between permissibility and revocation, mudradosh exists as an ambivalent subjective failure which has no traceable cause. The execution of an action that fits with the norm does not solicit any special attention. In the case of transgressing the boundary and committing a taboo, the action is readily identified as illegitimate and accordingly penalized. The one who commits mudradosh stands in between these two extremities. Mudradosh does get identified as a deviation from the norm, but the level of transgression is not so extreme as to delegitimize the action or to banish the accused. In the jungle of norm and ritual-constituted habits, mudradosh hangs like an insignificant shrub. The one who breaks the taboo gets no time for redemption, mediation, and dwelling with her deed—there is no scope for transcending the taboo from within (it can only be done from the outside). The one who is accused of mudradosh is allowed to dwell with her failure. Her way is therefore laid with tensions and contradictions amid the lingering pressure of repetitive failure. Jibanananda Das—one of the most influential modern Bengali poets, one whose immense popularity unfortunately did not quite translate into an appreciation of his philosophical genius—problematized mudradosh in a way that knots it with the paradox of subjectivity. As long as the beings are one with the world, they are not yet subjects. And when they discern the non-identity and autonomy, they are not presented with the sovereign power over themselves, let alone over the world. The poem that catapulted Jibanananda onto the chaotic plane of modernist Bangla literature, Bodh (1929), is nothing less than an exploration of this paradox of subjectivity. Mudradosh is one of the central problems of Bodh, even as this word is used only once in the course of the poem. The poem begins with the torment of the self that has been split into two parts. The split-part that narrates the poem wants to recuperate the state of oneness with the world. Jibanananda calls the “subject” who wants to identify with the world as sahaj lok (unified and spontaneous folks). The concept of sahaja—a basic tenet of the Vaishnava tradition—describes the realization of the self in the truth of unity. This is a state where the lover and the loved—i.e., the subject and the object—dissolves into the truth of oneness. As Ananda Coomaraswamy observed,“It [sahaja] is a release from the ego and from becoming: it is the realisation of self and of entity—when ‘nothing of ourself is left in us.’”[ii] Jibanananda deconstructs this idea of the sahaja, artfully collapsing the philosophical and the sociological by way of drawing a passage between sahaj lok (spontaneous and unified folks) and sakal lok (everyman). Neutralizing the drive of becoming, the sahaj lok spontaneously identifies itself with the nature. The narrator of the poem is disturbed, intrigued, and alarmed by the emergence of a cognizance that is forcing the self to become separated from itself and from the naturalized world. The observer I—the self that seeks to align with the sahaja—narrates its futile struggle to return to the world of oneness. Recounting that it too has performed everything that spontaneously unified folks do, it wonders why it is still not able to ward off the alienating cognizance. Introducing non-identity in the self, the very notion of “cognizance” forces the subject to move toward the negative and the incomplete. The narrator
Ireland, Antigone and Sundry Mourning Bodies
Kusumita Datta [Kusumita Datta has submitted her MPhil work, undertaken at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. HUG thanks Amlan Dasgupta for facilitating the publication of this essay.] My larger work constitutes a close study of the Irish post-revolutionary deployment of Antigone, through the enactment of the myth, by placing it within the text’s own interpretive history as well as a mythological-historical document within the changing world of Irish society. I have tried to unravel the need for newer versions of the Antigone today, in contributing to a contemporary understanding of nationhood, especially in times of displacement and forceful assimilation in that troubled nation. The Irish Antigones since the 1980s do not simply emerge from discussions surrounding the civil‐rights movement in the North and the advent of the resurgence of civil strife from the late 1960s onwards. The particularly local potency of the 1980s Irish Antigones was founded upon pre‐existing cultural affinities and practices that allied Antigone to Erin, the virginal emblematic figure of Romantic Irish Nationalism. Indeed, even Seamus Heaney’s version, commissioned for the centenary celebrations of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, draws upon this rich seam of cultural resonance. But, in addition to nationalist accretions, Antigone was also merged with the mythological figure of Deirdre in the Irish cultural imaginary as a strong independent woman who challenges the dictates of the patriarchal system. Brendan Kennelly’s version, performed in the Peacock Theatre at the Abbey in 1986, was able to draw upon these deep affinities between Deirdre and Antigone. Heaney’s play on this theme is much indebted to William Butler Yeats’ Antigone who is portrayed implicitly as a figure for the depredations of civil war, the calamity wreaked on “Brother and brother, friend and friend, / Family and family” by the “great glory driven wild” that is Antigone’s response to Creon, “driven” by familial piety and affection against the unreasonable demands of the state. So, linking 1904 to 2004, Heaney’s Antigone may be a gesture of piety to Yeats. This intellectual heritage is therefore not just allegorical, political but also literary in nature, emphasizing for us the wide range which needs to be considered. In the larger work I have looked closely at four Irish authors and their retelling of the saga and the allegory—Seamus Heaney, Owen McCafferty, Brendan Kennelly and Tom Paulin. In the following essay, I would specifically like to consider the idea of mourning in these retellings of the Antigone allegory in the Irish context. The Fate of the Dead Body and its Grief in Antigone Death and burial have been integral issues in the myth and play of Antigone. George Steiner, while enumerating the various reasons for the endurance of this ancient play posits a minor reason in the ‘subject of live burials’ and the motif of ‘entombment of living persons’ as an exercise in arbitrary judicial power. Moreover the opposition between the household gods and gods of the city finds a pivotal manifestation in the burial of the dead. In death, the ‘individualized particularity’ (1) is best achieved as the individual reverts immensely to the ethical domain of the Self. Of course when death occurs in the war-service to the nation, this ‘achieved totality’ is expressly civic in nature. The ‘civic’ must then be understood in terms of a ‘communal totality’ when the family keeps away the appetites of unconscious organic agencies, and sets its own action in place of theirs, to wed the relative to the bosom of the earth and an elemental presence which does not pass away. This is what Hegel perceives as the ‘positive ethical act’. In the words of Tara Beaney: ‘Hegel’s thinking here is dialectic; he considers two subjects engaged in a life-and-death struggle to realise their subjecthood. Just as each stakes their own life, so too do they seek the other’s death, since ‘the other’ is something which opposes their own status as subject.’ (2) Hence the ethical act is perceived as a conflict whose reconciliation will result in the attainment of the Spirit of Self-Consciousness. In its reconciliatory ethics it enunciates a concept of the ‘beautiful death’ in a rightful acknowledgement by the family and an enactment of all rituals pertaining to the dead. Beaney has explained how the concept of the ‘beautiful’ dead is only a negotiation by the nineteenth century of ‘their own complex attitudes towards horror and death, and [they] have done so through seeing Antigone’s death as beautiful work of art.’(3) Hence it is hardly a site of reconciliation but only points a path forward to an inadequacy and indeterminacy in our due acknowledgement of the dead in the rites of mourning. Both Antigone and Creon embody a death-instinct, one acting for and one against the forces of life. The Hegelian conflict is also best dramatized in the kinship relations of fraternity and sorority. The rites of burial, with ‘their literal re-enclosure of the dead in the place of earth and in the shadow-sequence of generations which are the foundation of the familial, are the particular task of [the] woman.’(4) When this task falls upon the sister, bound by the most genuine bond of philia, it attains the greatest degree of holiness. Yet it is also a crime because the state may not be prepared to relinquish authority over the dead. The dead body may claim honour or chastisement. In Sophocles’ play Polyneices claims both. However the end there is a ‘calm of doom, parity…The body of Polyneices had to be buried if…the living was to be at peace with the house of the dead.'(5) But our consideration of mourning which follows the ritual of burial or a lack of it undermines the sense of the holy, the calm and the peaceful. In this context Jane Coyle feels that ‘Creon’s centrality marginalizes Antigone almost to the point of underplaying the importance of the burial itself’. (6) I’d therefore like to concentrate more on an act subsequent to the burial of the dead—the mourning of the dead, a lamentation evoked after
Dubey Is No Tolstoy & That’s That: The Contemporary Popular In Hindi
Aakriti Mandhwani The English publishing market today is beside itself with questions of viability, visibility and visualization of the popular book. The contemporary Indian book market in English is clearly witnessing a boom, with a proliferation of genres providing a spectrum of delightful possibilities to an increasingly aspirational reading market that continues to latch on to the fetish of the book and yet is unwilling to pay more than 100 rupees for one. It is no stretch of the imagination to say that there is a book for everyone in Indian popular writing in English today. However, what is its equivalent in Hindi? Is there an equivalent at all? After all, what does it mean to publish the Hindi popular today? I suggest that the current Hindi popular publishing market is indeed marking exciting changes in the way we view language, genres, urbanity, and belonging itself. In this short essay [1] I shall focus on two lines of inquiry. First, I shall examine some changes in the distribution, circulation and writing processes in the contemporary Hindi pulp fiction market, particularly through the Delhi-based publishing house Raja Pocket Books. I shall then focus on a new crop of popular writing being circulated by an upcoming Delhi-based publishing house, Hind Yugm. I am aiming to bring together two stances in popular publishing that might seem to be at variance with each other, to be catering to two different reading markets, and suggest that both of them are, in fact, aiming at a similar kind of consumer today. *** My work on the story of Hindi publishing began three years ago, as I researched Hindi pulp fiction in contemporary North India, especially the trajectory of Raja Pocket Books and its investment, since 2009, in uncharacteristically good production – in the form of glossy covers, superior quality paper and “collector’s editions” – for current best-selling author Surender Mohan Pathak’s novels [2], an unprecedented occurrence in Hindi pulp’s history. This attention to quality came at a price: a Pathak novel now costs twice what it used to at one point. In the past, pulp has always existed as a recyclable form, circulating only at the moment of its publication. However, with Pathak’s newer novels, I found that the Hindi pulp fiction novel had embarked on the road to becoming a collectible [3]. In order to further understand this shift in status and sensibility, I also undertook an extensive literary study of Pathak’s novels from 1970s onwards, focusing on the author’s engagement with the Hindi language in the decades preceding India’s liberalization in 1991 and the differences thereafter. By mapping the figure of Vimal, the much loved hero-protagonist of Pathak’s 42-book-long “Vimal series”, I also engaged myself in a longer study of “heroism” itself, arguing that contemporary pulp fiction articulates a conservative yet markedly aspirational cultural and political aesthetic, both in its production and its emphasis on a refined, class-conscious and chaste use of language. I tried to argue, in short, that “pulp” is no longer “pulp” the way it has been traditionally understood, and the pulp hero, too, attains a new, benevolent-moral articulation. I soon realized that the question of production was intricately connected to understanding patterns of consumption itself and hence reception was an area that demanded greater attention.The major question that arose from such a reading was regarding Pathak’s “new reader”, one who was willing to purchase a “non-pulp” pulp novel for a different kind of “pleasure” – now, however, for twice its earlier price. This, in turn, led to speculation about a new readership. A study of reader responses [4] to Pathak, along with the meticulously framed prefaces to his novels followed. This combination of Raja Pocket Books’ new productions of Pathak: by increasing the price of the novels, along with Pathak’s own transitions in the craft of writing and a substantial readership coming forward to read his new novels, therefore, raises its own set of questions. The new reader, it seems, cherishes Pathak’s new respectability. The very fact that the latest Surender Mohan Pathak novel has been published by Harper Collins Hindi stands as testimony to this change. Linking this transition to what one may call a post-neoliberal ethos in India – the current, supposedly benevolent-moral, “political” yet aspirational ethos – with a reading of Hind Yugm, a newer question arises: does the articulation of the new Hindi readership stop here? Or as expected, such a readership will continue to evolve in interesting directions? *** If Hindi pulp fiction has gained an audience in a more acceptable popular middle-class ethos, it oddly finds contention from the new writers in – for the lack of a better word – “Hinglish” writing. In Divya Prakash Dubey’s short story Keep Quiet from his 2014 collection Masala Chai published by Hind Yugm, a young girl in the 7th grade called Dhun wants to know what love is. She asks her best friend, Surabhi, who also happens to be class monitor. Surabhi, smart in many ways – her understanding of “good” and “bad” comes from a personal understanding of who has been “good” or “bad” to her, which in turn determines which names go up on the blackboard for disciplining and which don’t – goes and asks her mother this same question, because, “क्लास में किसी को भी प्यार का कोई first-hand experience नहीं था” (87) [5], (No one had any first-hand experience of love in the class). Surabhi’s mother, burdened with all the anxieties of raising a girl in a middle-class joint family, slaps her, interrogates her about seeing a boy, and ultimately tells her to stay away from Dhun. Dhun ultimately ends up asking the same question of her own mother, who is amused and tells her that love is what her father and she share for her. Dhun’s next question, to which her mother replies in the affirmative is “बहुत प्यार होने से बच्चे आते हैं क्या मम्मी?” (Does a lot of love bring forth children, mummy? ) (90). This family, the author