Inside and Outside of Time (अधूरी बातें )
Adhoori Baten (Click for the Full Essay in Hindi). HUG talks to Shubha, with reference to her reflective essay अधूरी बातें, on Time and Memory. _______________ HUG: Though your reflections in this composition flow from one thread to another, all sections, including the digressions, are woven into a tapestry. This is a weaving that I have often observed in your prose pieces. Here, I would like to talk about a seaming with Time. Time can be a prisoner, shackled and bound, but it also reserves the potential to be free, since its one end is always open and free—एक छोर खुला रहता है. Following this assertion, right at the outset, you hail time as limitless, unbounded (असीम), but then also as changing and transformative (सतत परिवर्तनशील). The first seems to indicate a geological, cosmological time, while the second leads to an identifying and measuring of time (शिनाख्त), and also its structuring (सांचे में ढालना) that eventually brings it to a visibility (पुनर्रचना, दृश्यमान)that is closer to historical time. How can the two things happen simultaneously? Shubha: See, what you call historical time, lived time, is often not enumerated and visibilized. Think of our freedom movement. How much do we know of the hardships, humiliations and inner fights? Much is still shrouded, since what we get are vignettes. All true yes, and yet only vignettes. The knowledge system through which we filter that time period is refracted via a methodologically subjective and perhaps even Western ways. With other methods, some of them doggedly indigenous, the same can be said. Often history misses the power of time—the zeitgeist-युगीन सच्चाई, which it bypasses. This part is complicated. A slice of time has at least two or more sides to it—पक्ष और विपक्ष. Can we measure its wholeness? Are humans equal to such a task? Appreciating time is at best, a divided and fractured possibility and in that sense, time remains open-ended and limitless. And yet we must keep measuring and keeping track of the predicament that time commands. Say, women’s history in a certain time period: her voice, tone, anxieties, force, her sharp criticality and her collective thought and action, these we can keep track of. Movements of resistance are often overlaid upon glaring elisions. How are we to capture that time, a time that precludes and forestalls? Here we are attempting to splice open duration in order to make it enumerable. This second effort cannot avoid histories. HUG: In this context of identification and structuring of time and also with reference to the question of labour, you also refer to trade unions. Shubha: Well, the trade unions have often debated and fought for a certain kind of time: the time of labour. They have often argued for a stipulated period of time for the worker, say 8 to 10 hours and so on. This is the time without, the measurable, quantifiable time within which questions of labour law and so forth are invoked. These are significant watersheds. But there is another kind of contiguity between labour and time. The relationships within the working class, the leisure time, its sense of beauty, the wage earners’ expressions which are also part of a certain time. What about the worker’s children, for instance? Or his health concerns? The feelings and anxieties that he has about his community members? The wholeness of it I mean-परिघटना. One must connect with existence and all existing tribulations. See, the trade union leader functioning within the late liberal climate has turned modern and smart, but is he sensitive and alive to the full social and cultural ambit of the wage earner? I sometimes wonder whether the unions ever were truly alive to human relationships emerging within a certain time-frame? How can one even think of total transformation of the social order without attending to the identification of such time on the part of the unions and such platforms? This has been the story of my life actually, this particular point that you are raising and I can go on and on. HUG:Right. You seem to take us away from individual memory and also from the ossified, repeatable orders and rituals of the collective. But this successful forging of a relationship between subjective individual recollection and communal memory seems to be the order of the day, is it not? We see this in the forging of quick identities around language, organized religion, nation, family and closed ties of loyalty. And all these remain shrouded and penetrated through relentless, conspicuous consumption creating a happy, addled, obedient and genuflecting world. How is one able to even conceive social time or social memory in such a climate? Shubha: I do not see social time distinct from the individual. That kind of decoupling is a mistake. One has always tried to understand and act the conflict, कश्मकश, enacted within the various forces in the social milieu. All kinds of navjagran, rebirth and renaissance dissolve the force of this conflict. These paper over power and the travails of the individual by talking merely about the individual! I mean, what have we done to the fabric of living? We have a mass of enlightened social beings but each one is feudal through and through. This is the primary diktat of the class system in our nation. There is no notion of humanity, and we use that word in lazy, daily recall. That kind of memorialization can only be ossified, alienating each one of us not into melancholy, but into happiness and more bubbling happiness. And thus, we turn more secretive and malignant by deploying memory, without actually visibilizing the hidden facets of time. We are not able to bring together the individual within the social at all, and the latter have remained an epiphenomenon. What might structural change mean unless we attend deeply to relationships? No one even records time and we shout from rooftops about transforming it? It is in this context that I have tried to think about the selection of