Between Desire and Disability: Karichan Kunju’s Pasittamanidam (Hungry Humanity)
Kiran Keshavamurthy ————————————– Introduction The significance of the literary lies in its ability to imagine the inner workings of the human subject. The imagination of the human mind or body can never be notwithstanding the realist claims of a literary text, an accurate reflection of life itself. There has to be in any serious work of literature, an attempt to aestheticize the human relationship to the world at large, which may not be a reflection of what people actually feel or should feel. If the function of literature is to simulate without entirely corresponding to a certain reality, it would follow that literary meaning, or more specifically, the truth-claims of literature, lie in the domain of the possible and the probable. I wish to understand literature as a codified form that complicates and potentially transforms lived realities by imagining other possibilities. The role of any form of intellectual production may expand the notion of the social, which is always a construction constituted by exclusions. One of the functions of certain serious works of literature,for instance, have revealed the ambiguities that both constitute and alter visions of social justice. The question of moral ambiguity becomes all the more fraught when it comes to literary texts, where the line between representing and perpetuating social injustice cannot always be clearly drawn. This is not to condone texts that contribute to existing stereotypes and prejudices, but to evaluate the work of imagination within the diegetic world of the text and the social world to which the text responds.There have been many instances in the recent history of Indian literature where texts have been censored and banned for allegedly hurting the sentiments of religious or caste groups. These campaigns to censor literary texts have been motivated by dominant political interests without even reading the texts concerned. There has been a selective focus on the “offensive portions” of the texts and even the state has abstained from creating an intellectual space where there could be a deliberation over notions of offense and obscenity. These controversial texts have been significant in revealing the contradictions that undermine dominant or even competing notions of morality and ethics. Examples abound from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to a series of Tamil texts that were recently censored from Pudumaippittan’s short stories to Perumal Murugan’s novel One-Part Woman. But there could also be another way of reading moral ambiguity, which could form a formal element of the narrative.The following text for instance, creates a tension between the narrator’s sympathy for an ‘innocent’ character who ends up transgressing social and sexual norms and the character’s guilt that reflects or anticipates moral criticism. Here the literary text dramatizes the upholding and subversion of social norms to complicate the notion of what it means to be moral or ethical. This essay is a study of disability and sexuality in a novel by the Tamil writer, D Narayanasami (1919-1992) or Karichan Kunju as he was popularly known. In my larger book project, I located this writer in a modern literary lineage of writers mostly from the Tanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, writing primarily from the 1930s to the 1970s and 80s. Like his contemporaries, Karichan Kunju represented the life of the Brahmin man as an imagined conflict between sexuality and religiosity. Here the term religiosity may not refer to any specific form of brahminism and is often conflated with spirituality or advaita as something that characterizes the metaphysical identity between atman and brahman. Kunju’s protagonists are apparently divided by their illicit sexuality and their religious and spiritual impulse to transcend desire and the body. But what complicates a conventional opposition between sexuality and Hindu male asceticism, is firstly, the interpenetration of the religious, the spiritual and the sexual, secondly, the coincidence of the sexual and the religious in disease and disability and thirdly, the presence of protagonists who try to practice abstinence without being able to altogether renounce worldly life. These protagonists experience disability both as a religious experience of sexual redemption and as a self-affirmative and,what I call, an empathetic mode of sensuality. To be precise, the experience of shame and suffering is a transformative and empowering one that compels the protagonist to empathize and literally reach out to other outcastes, often through touch. What is posited as an untenable contradiction between the religious and the erotic reveals, I argue, a more fundamental disjuncture between the mind and the body. If dominant masculinity has been typically associated with strength and moral self-restraint, the male protagonist in the following text represents a crisis in masculinity with his lack of sexual restraint and capacity; a crisis that is in retrospect constituted by disease and disability. His moral interpretation of disability is also limited, or contradicted, by the fact that the disabled male body is a field of sexual and ethical possibilities that potentially overcomes the ontological disparity between body and mind and self and other. The modern figure who loomed large in the religious imagination of this generation of Tamil writers was Mohandas Gandhi. His growing popularity from the 1920s and 1930s inspired the writings of many self-styled Gandhian writers in Tamil and other Indian languages. Gandhi’s ideals of non-violent resistance, spiritual abstinence and social reform were widely and even loosely fictionalized by some early Tamil women writers (particularly VM Kodainayagiammal and the early Rajam Krishnan), who could for the first time imagine women sharing public spaces with men while protesting against foreign cloth and liquor. So even if there was not a direct allusion to Gandhi or his mass-movement, the Gandhian reformist spirit, as it were, pervaded a plethora of characters. While some of these female writers produced characters who protested against male alcoholism and domestic violence, their male counterparts created pious and restrained male characters whose conflicts with sexuality resemble even if somewhat crudely, a Gandhian model of abstinent masculinity. The protagonist of today’s discussion is another instance of a man whose attempts to redeem his sexuality by rechannelizing his desire in altruism represents, I argue,
Why “HokKolorob”?
Subhasish Ray ——————————— When students from Jadavpur University and their allies in other colleges and universities in West Bengal protested in large numbers last year, against what they correctly interpreted as the University administration’s callous mishandling of a sexual harassment incident, they were honoring a rich tradition of students in Indian campuses utilizing their democratic rights to hold government-backed administrations accountable for abuses of power. However, there was one critical aspect of these protests that also imbued them with a very different meaning. This was encapsulated in the choice of the core slogan used by the protesters: “HokKolorob.” Exploring this peculiar choice gives us a glimpse into the changing nature of anti-establishment student politics in West Bengal, and perhaps in the rest of India. Political protests have always been deeply embedded in everyday campus life in India. Part of the reason for this is, of course, something that was also peculiar to student politics in India: the integral links between students’ organizations and political parties. Those links, at least in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were extremely thick, and so, unsurprisingly, students could be easily mobilized, whether willingly or unwillingly, into anti-establishment politics especially by the left wing student groups. The hold of the organized Left on these groups, however, also implied that the vocabulary of political slogans and songs that were used in student protests were borrowed willy-nilly from people’s movements elsewhere in India. Looking back, anyone who had passed through Indian campuses during that time would recall Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) songs being played on election nights accompanied by a rhythmic, but monotonous, dafli, with students taking turns at the instrument. Pete Seeger’s songs were also perennial favorites and so was the early Dylan. It is instructive to note that around the same time, the likes of Suman Chattopadhyay and Pratul Mukhopadhyay, were shaking up campuses in West Bengal, providing a refreshing counterpoint to decades of hegemonic rule by the Left Front. Songs like “Haal cherona bondhu” or “Dinga Bhasao Saagore Saathire” were staples of the day. In retrospect, there are two aspects of the protest music of that period that stand out. First, the lyrics, with varying degrees of nuance, carried a clear political message. The goal of this music was not to achieve aesthetic beauty, but to be an instrument for political change. Second, and in sync with the first point, the musical element in the compositions was pared down to the minimum. Nothing epitomized this more than the sight of Suman Chattopadhyay on stage. Shorn off any musical accompaniments, other than a classical guitar slung on his shoulder, a harmonica mounted over his face, and a keyboard in tow, Suman would engage in what is best described as a one-man political theater. It was clear to anyone watching carefully that the musical elements of the compositions he “enacted” were simply embellishments to propel the performance, not standouts on their own. In an important piece, Sumangala Damodaran traces such performances to the “collective song” tradition within IPTA’s repertoire.[1] This was the tradition, Damodaran argues, that was carried forward from the 1940s and 1960s, when a series of musical experiments were conducted under the fledgling IPTA banner, and gradually became hegemonic over time. What distinguished this tradition from the other traditions that fell by the wayside was its emphasis on the content of the music instead of the form and grammar that were considered to be superfluous to the political agenda. None of this, propaganda or political theater, however, would have sufficed for Jadavpur. To understand why this is the case leads us to the realm of the sociological. There has been, to put it mildly, a sea change in the mode of political socialization of the generation that currently populates India’s colleges and university campuses compared to earlier generations. There are two main drivers of this new mode of socialization. First, the present generation has come of age, politically speaking, without a permanently mobilized Left to back them. They have witnessed, first hand, how the Left Front degenerated into a rump political force. They have also witnessed, first hand, how the political party that promised to bring “poriborton” is reproducing the moribund political institutions of the ancien regime in a new garb. Simply put, unlike previous generations, the current one cannot rely on a readily available party-political framework to frame its political subjectivity. Second, as clichéd as it may sound, the present generation is truly the first post-independence generation to be schooled by social media. What this effectively means is that their political selves have been forged, not within the ambit of ideological certitudes, but in that extraordinary mélange of, sometimes very contrary, ideas and influences, which is the global public sphere. Lest it seem as if these observations are merely caricatures of a small segment of the youth of West Bengal, and unrepresentative of the youth of West Bengal as a whole, the reader would do well to refer to the pioneering surveys conducted by scholars at the Center for the Study of Social Sciences in Kolkata, which demonstrate clearly that a very similar impulse, albeit with important differences, is at work in shaping the political outlook of the rural youth of West Bengal. In interview after interview, young men and women, asserted their desire to move out of agriculture, to become something other than the “subjects” of anti-poverty programs, and to be embedded in the same global networks of citizenship that were so easily accessible to their urban counterparts. But, what do these momentous developments add up to, in a conceptual sense? In many ways, they amount to a wholesale repudiation of the party-political framework as the central mode of conducting politics in India’s campuses. They reflect a newfound confidence among university and college students to take up political agendas without the stewardship of the organized left. At another level, and perhaps more importantly, it also signals the rise of what can best be described as politics in the defense
Quite A Few Struggles Remain Local
Vyomesh Shukla (for Pranay Krishna) ————————————— A statement about a place means reaching that place. Only they understand the statement of that place whose place it is. The statement about one’s place reaches one’s place. At an empty place a man helps sprout a chakbad shrub in a beautiful modern arrangement. Colourful butterflies, as they begin to assemble there, hang and flutter in such a fashion around the man’s head and shoulders as if such an arrangement does not even exist. It cannot be that this is for outside this place and it can be that it is for this place. Certainly for the butterflies this is what it is. Local people are of the opinion that the beast that arrives like a beast in tales and stories is, after all, not that beastly. For the people beyond the place, the beast is as dangerous as it has been described. Within the place, it is a common sight during summer evenings that a hundred snakes come to drink water from an embankment. As the snakes drink water from the place, from outside of the place it seems that a hundred sticks have been stacked closely, side by side. A place is such a place where snakes feel thirsty. Heaven knows what lies outside of the place that there the snake does not feel thirsty anymore and turns into a stick. People outside of the place are continually scared, confusing sticks with snakes. Outside of the place a man has a few eunuch friends. They do not pester him for money, do not badger him, do not consider him a eunuch and yet they are friends with him. They do not meet always but whenever they do, meetings happen in a friendly manner. Within the place people speak with each other, remember each other when they are unable to meet and are friends with each other. One cannot meet outside of the place. There are neither friends, nor people, neither existence, nor non-existence. बहुत सारे संघर्ष स्थानीय रह जाते हैं ( प्रणय कृष्ण के लिए ) जगह का बयान उसी जगह तक पहुँचता है। वहीं रहने वाले समझ पाते हैं बयान उस जगह का जो उनकी अपनी जगह है। अपनी जगह का बयान अपनी जगह तक पहुँचता है। एक आदमी सुंदर आधुनिक विन्यास में एक खाली जगह में चकवड़ के पौधे उगा देता है तो रंगबिरंगी तितलियाँ उस जगह आने लगती हैं और उस आदमी को पहचान कर उसके कन्धों और सर पर इस तरह छा जाती हैं जैसे ऐसा हो ही न सकता हो। ऐसा नहीं हो सकता यह जगह के बाहर के लिए है और ऐसा हो सकता है यह जगह के लिए। तितलियों के लिए तो ऐसा हो ही रहा है। किस्सों-कहानियों में ख़तरनाक जानवर की तरह आने वाले एक जानवर के बारे में जगह के लोगों की राय है कि वह उतना ख़तरनाक नहीं है जितना बताया जाता है। जबकि जगह के बाहर वह उतना ही ख़तरनाक है जितना बताया जाता है। जगह के भीतर का यह अतिपरिचित दृश्य है कि गर्मियों की शाम एक बंधी पर सौ साँप पानी पीने आते हैं। जगह में जब साँप पानी पी रहे होते हैं तो जगह के बाहर से देखने पर लगता है कि बंधी से सटाकर सौ डंडे रखे हुए हैं। जगह एक ऐसी जगह है जहाँ साँप को प्यास लगती है। जगह के बाहर न जाने क्या है कि साँप को प्यास नहीं लगती और वह डंडा हो जाता है। जगह के बाहर लोग डंडे जैसी दूसरी-तीसरी चीज़ों को सांप समझ कर डरते रहते हैं। जगह के बाहर एक आदमी के कई हिजड़े दोस्त हैं। वे उससे पैसा नहीं मांगते, उसे तंग नहीं करते, उसे हिजड़ा भी नहीं मानते, फिर भी उसके दोस्त हैं। वे उससे कभी-कभी मिलते हैं लेकिन जब मिलते हैं दोस्त की तरह। जगह में लोग एक-दूसरे से बात करते हैं, मुलाकात न हो पाने पर एक-दूसरे को याद करते हैं और एक-दूसरे के दोस्त होते हैं। जगह के बाहर मुलाकातें नहीं हो सकतीं। न दोस्त होते हैं, न लोग होते हैं, न होना होता है, न न होना होता है। **** Vyomesh Shukla is a distinct and deep voice from Varanasi. This prose-poem was first published in Sabad (vatsanurag.blogspot.com) in April 2009 and had won the Bharat Bhushan Agarwal Award for that year. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
About A Song: The Use And Abuse Of ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’
Moushumi Bhowmik On 27 August I was at a workshop on copyright and the traditional arts at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) on our E.M.Bypass. They wanted me to take part both in my capacity as singer and writer with some published work, and as someone who has been involved since 2003, in a field recordings-based project in Bengal, covering parts of eastern India and Bangladesh, called The Travelling Archive, with sound recordist Sukanta Majumdar. There is our non-commercial website based on that project and we are responsible for all the material that we put up on it. Besides, we also have our own record label now, which we call Travelling Archive Records, and which gives us another set of experiences and entrusts us with another set of responsibilities as producer/publisher. Legal matters are not easy to deal with. Questions of tradition, rights, protocol, cultural expression and cultural expectation, communal (meaning, of the community) ownership, acknowledgment and so on can be extremely complex, and they vary from place to place, and from situation to situation. I told Ruchira Goswami, sociologist and one of the workshop convenors, that I could only talk about my experiences, as I could not always understand legalities, nor did I necessarily live by them. If there was anything which had a more abiding role in my life, then it was a personal politics—my own sense of what is right and what is not. Of course it isn’t something exclusive to me, there are others too who live in their little worlds guided by similar principles. We know and know of some; others we have not yet met. Ruchira said that that was apparently what they were expecting to hear from me. I was a bit wary of what would happen at this meeting but the night before, I looked through my writings, our field recordings, my field notes, my own albums—the original ones and the bootlegs—our records from Travelling Archive Records, old emails, remembering forgotten details of things which have happened over the past two decades of my active working life. At the workshop the next day, to my pleasant surprise, there was much that we learned from one another, and shared, and I came home feeling quite stimulated. I had my own stories to tell and some of my most interesting ones are about this song which I wrote a long time ago—a song (in fact, often the only song) by which many people identify me—which is ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’, beginning with the line ‘Ami shunechhi shedin’. Or, they do not know me at all, but know the song. My friend and colleague Oliver Weeks had once told me, this song is a bit like Elton’s ‘Candle in the Wind’; just that you haven’t earned as much money from it! And we had laughed. So I told them at this workshop about how I might be calling someone and then I hear my own song playing as the ringtone, and it is a funny feeling. And we laughed again. I said, maybe I could do something about it all, but then I don’t really have the wish or the time. My priorities are different. I could have won a case perhaps, but that would mean I would not be doing all these other things which matter to me. They understood, but then Anirban Mazumder, Intellectual Property Rights specialist at NUJS, said later that maybe we also need to take up some issues in order to create a precedence. Well, to me I think it depends on who is standing on the other side of the battleline. I did confront Tara Muzik once for a telefilm in which Parambrata goes about singing my song, which I do not mind, then he messes up the words, and even that is pardonable. But then there is not any credit given to me. I complained, and the director did respond with grace and humility. Actually, not every gain can be quantified. Once in 2008, we were waiting for the boat in a small and old river-port called Markuli Bazar, in Habiganj district of the Sylhet region of Bangladesh. In that tiny market by the old ghat, as we sat and sipped sweet tea thickened with condensed milk, we heard ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’ playing on the radio in a shop across the road. Did that make me think of my rights as an artist or about unholy transactions? Wasn’t there more to the story than that? There is another one very dear to me. This was around 2002 or 03, in London. Srikanta Acharya and Arna Seal were visiting, as Srikanta was giving a concert at the Bhavan, which is an important Indian cultural centre of the city. So, I went to listen (I was based in London at the time), as they are very old friends of mine. There was to be a dance by some local talent before the actual concert. So I sat there with my friends—Arna’s mashi, her friend, their daughters and so on. Now, the curtain begins to part in slow motion and there is smoke on the stage. Clouds filling up the space. And I hear the strumming of the guitar. It sounds kind of familiar. The more the curtain parts, the more familiar the music sounds but I just can’t place it. I have heard this music, I tell my friends. What is it? There half-hidden in the clouds, is a girl dressed as an apsara in white, dancing away. Then of course it predictably begins, ‘Aa, aa aa aa. . .’ And one of my elderly friends becomes super excited! Hey, that’s your song! I understand the reason behind the clouds—it is a song about dreams and dreaming after all! The question indeed is one of who is standing on the other side of the battleline. By a strange coincidence, only five days after this consultative workshop at NUJS, I had a phone call from