Ritual Transgression, Historical Intervention, Ontological Exit
Soumyabrata Choudhury Prologue Even as I write this we are being sermonized from the Mount. We are being told to clean up: Swachh B. It has been a rather rapid climb upto the top from the banks of a great river in the last one year.. It all began with the wrenching reminder that the River was overflowing – with impurities. Rotting lifeless flesh, immortal lifeless metal, crystal and poison float and sink, mix and refuse to mix with the waters – surely, taken together they deserve the generic name of ‘impurity’? They would, fluently and felicitously, if it could be clarified what is that pure thing or element which each of these agents ‘impurifies’. Which pure vital life and which pure philosophical mercury does each parasite and impurity refer to? Surely that source and paragon of purity referred to is the River itself. The above vulgate needs to be examined: If the River stands for its own absolute purity, then it can’t be subject to the laws of bodies, of organic and non-organic life. The River cant be what a river is – the regular but continuously and imperceptibly changing flows of a kind of ‘mixed’ water. Water is water and water is also always a ‘mixture’ of bodies that are swept up by it. A river can be analysed into its ‘good’ mixtures and its ‘bad’ mixtures, its alluvium and its noxium; the River on the other hand, is changeless and waterless, immemorial and pure fiat, nothing else but the Name-of- the-River. So it is logical that such a Name should be commanded from a mount in a rather unchristlike sermon. But what does such an act imply? At least two things: First that the prototype of the immemorial pure entity that belongs to itself in an absolute consistency is the sacred entity. Its domain is traditionally religious and its mode of existence consecrational and ritualistic. But then it is no mystery that the contemporary sermon borrows its brute resonance from sacred hectoring, in the impressive tradition of religious propagandists. It is the second implication that is more interesting, more ‘mixed’ – and that much more insidious. Which is that given the absolute raising of stakes of the ‘practical’ operation of “cleaning up” to the restoration of a sacred consistency of the River, the consistency of the Name-of-the-River, it is ensured that we will never clean up this River, nay, this drain…this ‘drain-River’. We will not be able to clean the River because the latter is always pre-given as spotless, incapable of being impurified. It is this ‘axiom’ that the anonymous pilgrim enunciated as a fervent entreaty when she says, “…for all the repulsed sensoriums swimming against its current, don’t call the river polluted! She will not survive this assault, she will die from the hurt, don’t do it.” The anonymous pilgrim adds “we can be killers but we can’t be pollutants and transgressors even if we wanted to. Because the River is not a law, it is a truth and doesn’t even need to be capitalised…” But the Government-on-the-Mount will have none of this axiomatic pathos. It needs transgressors to the point of prescribing them. So the logic of the command/sermon is the following: “As transgressors, our punishment is to enter the drain. We will clean up and never cease cleaning up because in proportion to the degree of our profanation, the sacred Law-of-the-River is demonstrated by contrast. And not only by contrast! By the logic of ritual invocation our profane acts of ‘cleaning’ the drains becomes acts of ‘cleansing’ ourselves so as to prepare to become Citizens-of-the River. While that sublime future awaits us, let us obsess ourselves, as transgressors and penitents, with the task of becoming ritual citizens under this G – O – M & B ( Government-on-the-Mount & Bank). In my view notwithstanding the practical urgency of the “Swachh B” project, its essential rationality is to create a form of obedience on a global-national scale through a ritual structure of mutual presupposition between transgression and purification. Every act of transgression demands punishment of the transgressor and purification of the violated consistency; at the same time the setting up of the greater ‘theatre’ of consecrated purity provokes the further transgressive flourish. Strangely, it is the spiralling possibility of transgression that rationalises the endless extension of the ritual field and its efficacy. That is the essential point here: while the ‘acts’ of transgression and purification are encoded through ‘actors’ of the ritual – the pollutant and the priest, the two subjects-of-the-River – the efficacy of the ritual itself is constituted by a generalised obedience that I call “citizenship”. It is a tribute to the strategic acuity of the G-O-M&B that it foresees ritual to be effective in producing obedience on an ever greater scale – and across greatly heterogenous spaces including the political, the economic, the hygienic etc – and not limit ritual action to a formalism. Or, rather the invention of ongoing government is a ritual formalism, or mechanism, to unleash the real force of global-national obedience, paradoxically composed out of complicity between transgression and purification. Still the question must be posed that how does such an invention fabricate its machine of sermon and government, theatre and efficacy, subject and citizen… rivers and the River? What is its historical ground and cipher, the secret of its encodings? My thesis is that a caste-secret is playing upon the surface of our present and its archival lineaments are available for us to decipher. The purpose of this exercise is not only a critique of the present but also to shatter its secret such that we are freed from the vacillation between sacred hygiene and secular cleanliness, freed towards the possibility of a greater profane health. An Archival Context: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate In 1936, upon the publication of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste when Gandhi wrote his “vindication of caste”, Ambedkar vehemently – and methodically – shot back with the schematization that the