Jaaware’s Destitute
Prasanta Chakravarty In his book Practicing Caste, on Touching and Not Touching Aniket Jaaware takes caste as an instance in order to transport us elsewhere.We are not yet born, he says. So, he wants us to travel with him to the island of Hokkaido, and especially to Fukushima, and take a little pause with the ainu, an outcaste group which lies at the bottom of the traditional Japanese society. We could also go to Yemen and learn the language of the al-akhdam, who harbor negrito features on their cultured bodies. Jaaware wants us to see that there are other worlds too, with similar sets of primary and primal distinctions based on questions of pure being. In this our primary condition we are everywhere the same, making segments and boundaries of living all the time and trying to obliterate our common creaturely state. This is the condition of living. In our variegated living, humans shall continue to live as one in bringing others close or keeping them at bay depending on some inexplicable and unknown equations that they will invent (or have invented already) from within their chosen sect. Caste is an instance. Destitution is the state of being. Aniket Jaaware was wracking his brain and soul about the destitute, immersing himself as one more creature in the throes of destitution. He wanted to deliberately forget (his term is oublierring, from French oublier and English err) not just the hitherto deliberated upon history and sociology of caste studies but more importantly, the language of certainty and sociability which is also the language of our present ethical conundrum about destitution. The real problem to him was the condition of intellectual destitution—that we do not know where to go with our creaturely sense of fallenness, humiliation and abandonment. To bring rumination down to touching and not touching, therefore, is to break down a seemingly insurmountable problem into the basics and try addressing it afresh. And therefore, Hokkaido and Yemen. These are not geographical places to him, but insignia for a huge inchoate and unknown future, the elsewhere where the destitute of the world can say: just us, instead of getting into the infinite spiral of identity and victimhood. Only internalizing such a realization can perhaps open up the realm of freedom. There is Nothing Called Society There are several intimate cuts among ourselves; we will interact with some people and not with other animals and abject bodies. This is how groups, clans and segments work. Samaj is not society—there are divisions and hierarchies. These are real striations. Consequently, there are only forms of sociability (love or hate at first sight) in our living interactions. Beings interacting in sociability are deeply and phenomenologically bound to each other, though such bindings are invented through interactions. Sometimes these differential bonds turn ephemeral and transcendental and leave certain traces when some member(s) decide to quit a loyal sect or group—through exile, voluntary or otherwise, and through death. In ordinary circumstances we have sociable encounters with our alterity—with those who are from other segments but live within the communal space. Jaaware calls this the state of pathologically nonchalant non-sociability. Even civility seems to be too abstract for any exchanges to happen among individuals here. Others with whom we interact are rather obstacles to be overtaken or circumvented. The destitute are produced in this manner as obstacles. The destitute are not adversaries or competitors. They are simply not like us. Our parks and clubs, washrooms and corridors, gymnasiums and bazaars—all are made into kosher territories so that certain creatures can be hounded and pulverized. Being-in-the-world means that such a form of sociability has to be reinvented in and through every single encounter. This manner of interaction is customary. The fragility of this customary mode of sociability directly leads to violent and demanding impositions and maniacal postulations against the destitute enemy, the unknown person(s) whom we know as the interactive other. Jaaware gives the example of a performance artist who goes up to strangers and does ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ things: “touching them, jumping up and down in joy in front of them, picking a speck of dirt from their cheek (grandma’s spit), carrying a portable toilet and sitting on it in public with pants down, standing half-naked with just a jacket on in front of a painting, grabbing and eating food from someone else’s plate at a party, lying down in an art gallery and holding people’s legs and not letting go, posing nude beside a sculpture of a nude, standing half naked beside a clothes rack, asking people to dress her.” This is a control experiment in order to explore the way sociability actually takes place. By starkly deflating its operation we realize the power and ubiquity of sociable interaction. The artist is asking people to invent sociability by improvising or formulating human interactive methods right at the moment of her performance. This is exactly what one could see unfold after Aniket Jaaware’s death. Or the obverse of it rather. It was spring time and his material body had just been cremated a few days ago, along with his famous ear-stud! A really good discussion on his book was arranged at the Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi. And academics like me heard his video-recorded voice waft across the hall – and the hall indeed was choc-a-bloc. There was hope for something grand and gone for the audience. And therefore collegial sociability was everywhere. That is the only mode in which each makes peace with the other just before and after such discussion sessions: in the foyer or the rotunda or at the car park outside. These modes of temporary communality we carry to the hall itself (perch ourselves at the right spots, greet other fellow beings with a certain collegial air, preface questions later with polite humility, and so on).You keep on performing something ‘social’ – yourself as an academic, a journalist or as an intellectual – while being constantly individuated. This was the ‘silence’ part of the ‘social