Bridge and Door
Georg Simmel ________________________ The image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in external nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated. The uninterrupted transformations of materials as well as energies brings everything into relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements. On the other hand, however, the objects remain banished in the merciless separation of space; no particle matter can share its space with another and a real unity of the diverse does not exist in spatial terms. And, by virtue of this equal demand on self-excluding concepts, natural existence seems to resist any application of them at all. Only to humanity, in contrast to nature, has the right to connect and separate been granted, and in the distinctive manner that one of these activities is always the presupposition of the other. By choosing two items from the undisturbed store of natural things in order to designate them as ‘separate’, we have already related them to one another in our consciousness, we have emphasized these two together against whatever lies between them. And conversely, we can only sense those things to be related which we have previously somehow isolated from one another; things must first be separated from one another in order to be together. Practically as well as logically, it would be meaningless to connect that which was not separated, and indeed that which also remains separated in some sense. The formula according to which both types of activity come together in human undertakings, whether the connectedness or the separation is felt to be what was naturally ordained and the respective alternative is felt to be our task, is something which can guide all our activity. In the immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who separate the connected or connect the separate. The people who first built a path between two places performed one of the greatest human achievements. No matter how often they might have gone back and forth between the two and thus connected them subjectively, so to speak, it was only in visibly impressing the path into the surface of the earth that the places were objectively connected. The will to connection had become a shaping of things, a shaping that was available to the will at every repetition, without still being dependent on its frequency or rarity. Path-building, one could say, is a specifically human achievement; the animal too continuously overcomes a separation and often in the cleverest and most ingenious ways, but its beginning and end remain unconnected, it does not accomplish the miracle of the road: freezing movement into a solid structure that commences from it and in which it terminates. This achievement reaches its zenith in the construction of a bridge. Here the human will to connection seems to be confronted not only by the passive resistance of spatial separation but also by the active resistance of a special configuration. By overcoming this obstacle, the bridge symbolizes the extension of our volitional sphere over space. Only for us are the banks of a river not just apart but ‘separated’; if we did not first connect them in our practical thoughts, in our needs and in our fantasy, then the concept of separation would have no meaning. But natural form here approaches this concept as if with a positive intention; here the separation seems imposed between the elements in and of themselves, over which the spirit now prevails, reconciling and uniting. The bridge becomes an aesthetic value in so far as it accomplishes the connection between what is separated not only in reality and in order to fulfil practical goals, but in making it directly visible. The bridge gives to the eye the same support for connecting the sides of the landscape as it does to the body for practical reality. The mere dynamics of motion, in whose particular reality the ‘purpose’ of the bridge is exhausted, has become something visible and lasting, just as the portrait brings to a halt, as it were, the physical and mental life process in which the reality of humankind takes place and gathers the emotion of that reality, flowing and ebbing away in time, into a single timelessly stable visualization which reality never displays and never can display. The bridge confers an ultimate meaning elevated above all sensuousness, an individual meaning not mediated by any abstract reflection, an appearance that draws the practical purposive meaning of the bridge into itself, and brings it into a visible form in the same way as a work of art does with its ‘object’. Yet the bridge reveals its difference from the work of art, in the fact that despite its synthesis transcending nature, in the end it fits into the image of nature. For the eye it stands in a much closer and much less fortuitous relationship to the banks that it connects than does, say, a house to its earth foundation, which disappears from sight beneath it. People quite generally regard a bridge in a landscape to be a ‘picturesque’ element, because through it the fortuitousness of that which is given by nature is elevated to a unity, which is indeed of a completely intellectual nature. Yet by means of its immediate spatial visibility it does indeed possess precisely that aesthetic value, whose purity art represents when it puts the spiritually gained unity of the merely natural into its island-like ideal enclosedness. Whereas in the correlation of separateness and unity, the bridge always allows the accent to fall on the latter, and at the same time overcomes the separation of its anchor points that make them visible and measurable, the door represents in a more decisive manner how separating and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act. The human being who first erected a hut, like the first road-builder, revealed the
That Brass Of Our Inheritance
Translations: Tarun Bhartiya ____________________________________ Raghuvir Sahay Laugh Laugh Laugh Instantly Laugh – you are being watched, Laugh but not at yourself because its bitterness Would be noticed and you would not survive it Laugh in a way that your happiness does not show As it would be suspected that you do not participate in the remorse And you would not survive it While laughing, don’t let anyone know who you are laughing at Let them all believe that like them you laugh A defeated laugh of intimacy Just as they laugh instead of speaking As long as that mighty round dome reverberates you can Speak to yourself When the echo is about to fade laugh again Because if found quiet, you shall be indicted for resistance If you laugh at the end then all will laugh and you can be safe Laugh but be careful of the jokes Jokes have words And words may have meanings ascribed by some person a century ago It is better to laugh while talking So that the talk looses all significance And laugh on those compulsory moments Like the assault on the destitute by the privileged When no one can do a thing Except for that destitute And even he often laughs Laugh laugh laugh instantly Laugh before they leave While shaking their hands With pleading eyes Laugh and remind them That you had laughed yesterday Coming Danger In this shameful and defeated age Go and find a mind Which does not flatter out of habit Go and find poverty Which asks nothing for itself And let it for once stare you in your eyes Do it right now, for the people have started flourishing Women would drink, men would eat – Ramesh There would come an age like this- Ramesh No one would have any point of view – Ramesh There would be anger but no resistance Except for petitions – Ramesh There would be Danger and Danger’s warning bell And the King would ring it – Ramesh Your Laugh The poor are being oppressed you said and laughed Democracy on its death bed you said and laughed Everyone is corrupt you said and laughed Everyone despondent you said and laughed So secure you must be I thought Suddenly finding me alone you laughed *** Dhoomil Lying Next To That Woman For the first time I felt That nudity Militates Against blindness Lying next to that woman I felt that where hatred and Candles have proved useless And the shadows of the melted Words have turned into faces Of menacing animals, my Poems survive on a diet of Mud and meat To rub out and Obliterate time It is not enough to have bouncing bodies While our faces face Leaking pots in the kitchen And night Does not become a path When water melons are being slaughtered inside us But our heads have Turned to stone on the pillows Lying next to that woman I have felt that home is Built on curses of small comforts And where it is forbidden to Walk with shoes This is grass i.e. green fear Enforcing my thoughts Is it not nice That my neighbour has lost All his teeth Like frostbitten peas Movements in his thighs Have collapsed And termites Have eaten through his ocular health Lying next to that woman (when suddenly the pumps fell silent in front of dingy houses) I felt that to turn Breathlessly into a forest next to a swamp Is not a man’s habit but his petty helplessness And there lives a coward mind inside me Which not only protects But is heir to my buttons *** Asad Zaidi East of West The poor knows nothing beyond his village The one who is less poor has seen the whole district Only the tyrants have seen the province and the nation They are the ones discovering novel ways of devotion Turning people into radishes and carrots And the poor into dried dark pickle Even the English found India very Indian As it seems these days to some Hindi Journalists Nineteen Hundred and Sixty Five I am talking about Aapaa[2] who is Talking about Ammi[3] who is talking of her Shauher[4] who was talking of that Officer who was Talking about the country who was talking About the war in a screaming voice Right now I am not going to talk of Pakistan Hindi Journalism I have a packet in my pocket It would profit you if you buy it View it and you would be surprised at your ability Feed it to a bad Muslim He would mutate into a good Hindu If a good Sikh eats it He would surely vanish in an instant Come on Sir, taste it, you shall be blessed with a grandson soon Poetry Reading I went to a place famous for its goons disillusioned prophets and unemployed half-poets It was evening and in my welcome a light was lit Audience trickled in one by one I kept getting their introductions – what they did what was their name Things I am sure to forget Students, clerk, few teachers even a postman and a Paanwaal That wretched Panwaadi He was smiling a very paternal smile and offering examples of self-composed poetry I spied a few old ladies some girls-adolescents Some Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh louts Extending their humble respects – O God how would poetry be saved in this province At last, clattered in wife of the city administrator to kick off the show (Recently I saw in the papers a small news item announcing her death reasons unknown) Ancestral Cannon Come sometimes to our place To view our glorious destitution There is this medieval cannon Difficult to use That brass of
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
Sweet Water, Silvery Ilish
Parimal Bhattacharya This is a translation from Abdul Jabbar’s Banglar Chalchitra, a collection of vignettes that capture the sights and sounds of south Bengal, its people and places, the dialects and daily rituals. ————————– O if I were a bird I’d take you to some other land. Loving you My bones have turned black. Late on a monsoon night, the sky pours in fierce torrents. Boatman Kalimuddi bursts into a raucous song as he lowers the hilsa net. A big tidal bore now rages upon the river like a herd of foamy-mouthed bulls. Kanai and Yaar Ali, his two mates, begin to dance with raised arms and swaying hips. They have just finished a six litre pot of toddy. Strong and frothy, it started to work as soon as it hit the belly. Now the stormy wind whiplash across their bare chests. Earlier, the cold had made them numb. They had called Kashem Ali on a nearby boat for liquor. By Allah, Kalimuddi uncle, not even a glass of it! Kashem had said. We’re smoking ganja to beat the cold. This fucking wind is too sharp. Everybody knows Kashem has hooch stowed away in his boat’s hull. Molasses fermented with calcium carbide and distilled hastily, for fear of the police, gives a clear hard liquor that burns down the throat. Toddy is much better. It is white as milk and soothing to the eyes. Kalimuddi checks the end of the net and feels the powerful tugs. Will they tear it off? He has weighed the net down with twenty-two bricks and has tied on top countless pieces of bamboo as floats. Altogether eighteen boats have dropped nets at Gadakhali. There are others at Raipur – quite a few ‘Rais’ or sluts do live there! – and also on Boatman Punte’s Whirl. The monsoon month has peaked and yet not much water in the skies. Schools of hilsa have suddenly arrived from the sea. Snow has melted in the mountains, discharging sweet red water. The fish are rushing into the river like crazy arrows madly labouring to release eggs. Yesterday Kalimuddi and his mates could get ten hilsas. The rain tonight promises more. They had sold the catch at the wholesale price of eight rupees a kilo. The wholesellers, in turn, had asked ten rupees. At one-and-half kilos each, it works out to fifteen rupees per fish: quite steep for poor people. Dariyar paanch peer badar badar! Hail to thee, five saints of the river! Everyone repeats the cry with raised arms. The tidal bore is here. Waves high as mountains toss the boats about like petals of banana flowers. The boatmen hold the paddle firmly against the heaving water. The thick wire tied at the end of the dragnet sends out a grating noise. Kalim uncle, we shouldn’t have dropped this fucking dragnet tonight – Kanai says. It seems a dolphin has got caught. D’you hear the noise? May be it’s timber from a shipwreck, Kalimuddi says. That’ll rip the net off. The mahajan will be furious, Kanai replies. Lightning flashes every now and then. The nets will be pulled up when the low tide begins. That would be around two in the morning. A knot of men and women are waiting at the riverbank, their lanterns twinkling in the dark. They are the wholesellers. They sit huddled under umbrellas and waterproofing, near the bushes of cacti and prickly pears. A weak rain dribbles from clots of cloud that drift in from nowhere and waste away. Everywhere one hears the rumble and gurgle of waters. At Boatman Punte’s Whirl, hyacinths, bits of straw, wood, broken canisters and other rubbish eddy about and are sucked in. Punte’s boat had sunk in that whirl. A hazardous spot. But a group of fishermen’s daughters have gathered there, catching topse, bhola, prawn, pangas and other varieties with their crude cloth nets. A few anglers have also gathered there. Red warning lamps flash on the floating buoys. A ship had once got stuck there on a sandbar. It had been a windfall for Kalimuddi and his mates. They had salvaged a lot of goods like timber, jars, drums, wheat, coal, liquor bottles and trunks. About fifty fishing boats lie in wait at the Bamboo-grove Ghat. They never ferry or catch fish. They sail towards the sea during low tide and collect contraband goods from ships. Occasionally, they do ferry night travelers across the river, but for fat sums. Some also carry kidnapped women. A ferryboat takes hours to cross the river from Anchipur to Uluberia. That is why, after the fishing season ends, Kalimuddi takes his two eight and ten-year-olds brats on the ferry line. He has to pay to the lessee of the service. For the government, leasing out the ferry ghats is a profitable business that involve investment. There must be shoals of fish towards Gadakhali-Naldanri, it seems! Kashem shouts. That’s why they have cast nets there. Bullshit! Kalimuddi replies. The river is deeper here, about fifteen fathoms. Do the fish dive across the sandbars, you bugger’s son? Kanai joins in. Whatever you get, it’ll go into the mahajan’s belly, he says. Five to seven hundred rupees worth of loans is there in the record book he keeps in his grocery. The boat and the net are his. One portion for the net, one-and-half for the boat, one for the boatman and one for the oarsman. It works out to two-and-a-half portion. In real terms he’ll divide the catch into five portions and take three of them. That means twelve fish for him. Of the remaining eight, the boatman will get four and the oarsmen two each. The wholesale price being eight rupees, a one-and-a-half kilo fish brings only twelve rupees. Twenty-four rupees for two. The mahajan will work up a temper and say –