‘What! Nothing more?’
Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky [Quite early in life Stepnyak began secretly to sow the sentiments of democracy among the peasants in the Russian countryside. His teaching did not long remain a secret, and in 1874 he was arrested. Stepnyak went to the Balkans and joined the rising against the Turks in Bosnia in 1876, and used that experience to write a manual on guerrilla warfare. He also joined Errico Malatesta in his small rebellion in the Italian province of Benevento in 1877. Returning to Russia in 1878, he joined Zemlya i volya (Land and Liberty). On August 4, 1878, he assassinated General Nikolai Mezentsov, the chief of Gendarme corps, the head of the country’s secret police with a dagger in the streets of St Petersburg. Here is a short excerpt from his book Underground Russia ] ————————————————————– I should like now to say a few words respecting the other section of Russian society, which, owing to my position, I frequented much more; I mean the students, not yet enrolled among the conspirators-for those already in the ranks it would be impossible to say too much. Had I not the evidence of my own eyes, I should have difficulty in believing that in the same city, within so short a distance, such striking contrasts could exist as are presented between the peaceful middle classes and the Russian young men. I will merely relate what I have seen and heard. Civil courage, in which the maturer portion of Russian society is entirely wanting, is only to be found among the young. It is strange, but it is perfectly true. Here is a notorious fact, which for many days was in every mouth In the Academy of Medicine, one of the students, a Viscount,’ as they called him, took it into his head to start a collection for a crown of flowers to be placed upon the coffin of the dead Emperor. This proposal was received in utter silence. The Viscount flung five roubles into his bat, and then went about from one to another. Nobody gave him even a kopeck. ‘But, gentlemen,’ asked the Viscount, what shall we do then!’ ‘Attend Professor Mergeevski’s lecture,’ said a voice among the students. But he would not give in, and continued to go about pestering everybody. At last he succeeded in finding somebody who put two more roubles into his hat. The lecture of Professor Mergeevski being over, the Viscount went about again and urged them to subscribe. But he obtained nothing more. But what shall we do, then, gentlemen?’ he cried in despair. ‘Attend the lecture of Professor-’ I do not recollect the name. This second lecture passed off. Then the Viscount resolved to put his companions in a fix. Throwing the money upon the table, be exclaimed: ‘What shall I do with this money?’ ‘Give it to the prisoners,’ replied a voice among the throng, which everybody present echoed. The Viscount and his companion hurried away in a fury. One of the students then arose, took the money which remained upon the table, and no one doubted that the famous seven roubles were sent to those who were entitled to them. The same day the students of the Academy collected fifty roubles for ‘the prisoners.’ This happened some days after the event of March 13, when the whole population was delirious with terror. In the other higher schools the conduct of the throng was similar, but not identical; for only those who were in Russia at that time can understand what courage was required to act as the students of, the Academy of Medicine acted. What is so striking in the life of the great mass of the Russian students, is the slight account taken a personal interests connected with their profession, their future, etc., and even of the pleasures which are said to grace the morning of life.’ It would seem as though the Russian students cared only for intellectual interests. Their sympathy with the Revolution is immense, universal, almost undivided. They give their last farthing for the Narodnaia Volia and for the Red Cross; that is, for the prisoners and exiles. All take an active part in the Organisation of concerts and balls, in order to obtain, by the sale of tickets, some few roubles to assist the revolution. Many endure hunger and cold in order to give their mite to the ‘cause.’ I leave known whole Communes which lived upon nothing but bread and soup, so as to give all their savings to the Revolution. The Revolution may be said to be the principal and absorbing interest of these young men, and it should be borne in mind that when arrests, trials, executions happen, they lose the privilege of continuing their studies. They meet in little parties in their rooms, and there, around the samovar, whisper, discuss, and communicate to each other their views and their feelings of indignation, of horror, and of admiration, and thus their revolutionary fervour increases, and is strengthened. That is the time to see them; their faces become anxious and serious, exactly like those of elderly men. They grasp with avidity at everything, at every trifle connected with the revolutionary world. The rapidity with which everything now of this kind spreads throughout the entire city is incredible. The telegraph, which the Government has in its bands, cannot vie with the legs of the Nihilists. Somebody is arrested, perhaps. The very next day the melancholy news is disseminated throughout the whole of St. Petersburg. Somebody has arrived; someone else is making disclosures; a third, on the other hand, maintains an exemplary firmness towards the police; all this is known immediately and everywhere. It need scarcely be added that, animated by such feelings, these young men are always ready to render every kind of service to the Revolutionists without giving a thought to the danger they may run. And with what ardour, with what solicitude they act! But I must finish. I have not the slightest pretension to depict the young men of Russia as they are; it would be a task much above my
Gay For More Than A Day Of Rage
Brinda Bose Since ‘straight’ is linguistic harakiri for 377-talk, perhaps we first need to get this crooked: if we say ‘we are all queer’, we cannot make a ‘they’ out of the LGBT community, and more importantly out of all that which 377 targets, ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’. We must first understand what ‘nature’ means in the context of carnal intercourse, of course, but most crucially we must believe that being queer is a philosophy and a politics and a sensibility of desiring outside the pale of proscription. And it is also today a politics and a philosophy of protest and dissent: an assertion of our sexual selves that are denied existence by others, but in tandem, always, a celebration of those very selves – continued, secret or outed, extravagant or quiet – despite such denials and exclusions. Queer Desire: Raging, Carnivalesque ‘We are all queer’ as a movement is in league with (and not opposed to or lesser than) other battles against discrimination, like that of dalits or Kashmiri Muslims or transgenders or working class labourers. Anyone who dismisses the fight against 377 as lower on the rungs of political significance is astonishingly classist and casteist in such an argument, surely? And to say that, since only 200 ‘offenders’ have been booked in 150 years of the existence of section 377 of the IPC, this makes it any less critical to understandings of identitarian politics is to be the worst kind of offender in hierarchizing identities, it seems to me. So here then is a ‘gay’ – and we can all be gay as much as queer – that must necessarily be both a blithe spirit and an angered, avenging one. It must fight for spaces as much as mark its presence outside of legitimately-granted territories, because its very definition is to be outside of the prescribed, and to be in combat for a place that it does not really wish to seek under its contrarian sun. And so this queering must be raging and carnivalesque at once, a gay that protests, resists, rebels, chooses, loves, desires, kisses, caresses, copulates, orgasms – in whatever way it ‘wants’ the other, simply and yet complicatedly being propelled to bodily pleasure and passion by sexual urges, oblivious to what the law allows or does not. And let us be clear on this, the fight against Section 377 is not about a sloppy sentimental ‘love’ that de-fuses hate all over the world: it is about searing passionate romance, and the right to sexual practices impelled by raucous lusty desires that are seen as dangerous to the moral fabric of the nation-state – those that are legally disallowed, but not privately disavowed. It is about love all right, but it is a risky, risqué love that dares and bares and gives and takes with everything it’s got. Why is it crucial to make distinctions between loves when all are difficult enough, Calvino might ask. Then consider this: surely the BJP too thinks that love is not a crime when indulged in glorious saas-bahu technicolor, even while it renounces homosexuality in the morning’s headlines? It is imperative, therefore, to distinguish between a love that decimates romance and passion and makes of it a duty and a sacrifice and an aspiration to a higher, saintlier plane of being and living, and one that is passionate in giving and much as taking, an erotics of pleasure-soaked romantic love. Desire – the kind we are fighting for – is an overreacher, always wanting something beyond what we are allowed to possess; Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ and Jacques Ranciere’s ‘cruel radiance’ (though neither used it in exactly this context), where the oxymoronic nature of any exercise of will and wish is emphasized, may work well to focus both the sharpness and the ambiguity of desiring processes, sexuality being no exception to this melding of potentially-contradictory impulses. Desire is a choice one makes, individual liberty may guarantee the exercising of that choice – but desire also exists beyond all guarantees, it goes where liberty – or liberality – fears to tread. This is one critical aspect of the battle against 377 we cannot afford to lose sight of, that the battle itself is contradictory, it is looking to legitimize a space that is by its very ethics (and I use the term advisedly) against the ‘order of nature’ and all that is legitimized by such ‘nature’ in the way the Court has read it. That is the real reason for it being a fraught battle even within so many of us who wish to identify as queer – whether LGBT or H(etero) – and we must begin by acknowledging and dealing with this fraughtness – or this queerness, if we will. Everyone who has ever indulged in any sex outside the penile-vaginal straitjacket (and that includes masturbation) can, within the legalese of the Indian Penal Code, be incarcerated for a criminal offense under 377. This IPC section in the news now may have been framed in British colonial times but was accepted and legitimized by Nehru and Ambedkar when power transferred back to native hands, and we cannot afford to forget that. And the Supreme Court may well say today that it is merely upholding the spirit of the founding fathers of our nation who in their wisdom did not think it necessary to throw out what the British had imposed on the subcontinent. And so the Supreme Court of India’s failure to uphold Delhi High Court’s 2009 landmark reading-down of the offending sections of Section 377 about ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ damns not just the LGBT community which we belong to or support, but just about each and every one of us in our politics, philosophies, agentic actions, dreams and fantasies, as it also damns our first nation-builders whom we invoke in all our incantations of freedom and glory. ‘Reading Down’ Liberty and Progressive Divisiveness One of the astute ways
The Idea of an Institution
HUG If media reports are to be believed, then Presidency University in Kolkata is on the verge of formalizing a set of mandatory guidelines for its campus (and off-campus) inhabitants—about maintaining ‘university’ hours, holding protests and dharnas, using campus walls and substances, and finally about making negative or critical comments on the institution on social media sites. No institution can run without some form of rules and institutional mechanisms, of course. But what is important is to note the drift of those rules in this case. In other words, what do we gain by giving shape to this university in a certain manner—in order to inculcate a set of brilliant students and make the institution a site for a particular kind of excellence? We shall come back to these two words—brilliance and excellence – in a bit. There has been an interesting legend about this institution in question, a significant myth that is circulated periodically in the media and in the Bengali imagination generally—that as a harbinger of a certain argumentative tradition in the Bengali psyche and by way of ushering in a relentless and rigorous form of scholarship to go with it, this institution has produced prodigal individuals and a climate where a no-nonsense exchange of ideas can take place—ideas that then might transform disciplines and laboratories, boardrooms and political platforms. From this idea of an argumentative institute, then Presidency College, again sometimes in a mythical fashion, got another quite different tag after the seventies—that here was an institution which was not coldly or instrumentally reformist and merely argumentative, that it could also infuse powerful forms of personal and political romanticism within its ambit of ideas, that ideas needed to be tested on historical and material ground realities; that it was important and possible to be contrarians in a climate of conformity and ruthless oppression. On these twin towers of thinking—rigorously rational and considered romantic (which occasionally did clash with each other) – debates and ideas were bookended, even after it became clear that the institution was not marked by any particularly identifiable set of ferment or drive. This began to change by the eighties with the mushrooming of the very idea of management and management institutes—just like it happened in another institute in another part of the country—St Stephens, though the character of the two institutes are in many ways quite different too. (About this shift in ethos in St Stephens, where the idea of babudom got layered with the incursion of management studies, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has eloquently written). Singular events in the nineties showed this shift. In Presidency, many were surprised to see some student volunteers in formal jackets and all ‘tied up’, in their otherwise traditionally cerebral college festival Milieu. It seemed that in a place of robustness and laidback nonchalance, a set of people with a jarring set of principles had suddenly arrived or were trying to advance a different set of ethos which was neither classically argumentative nor like the ones undertaken by the risk-taking romantics. Some of the new lot was very articulate, with good social skills (often powerful quizzers and debaters, so that it seemed like they were thinking minds with a sense of argument). But if looked at carefully, one would see that a champion debater can argue from many sides, dazzlingly, polemically sometimes. The culture of debate paradoxically resists analysis. It also makes you conversant with multiple viewpoints and might help blunt your principled and ideological moorings. This new group of people consisted of doers, focussed, utterly practical in mindset, with an antipathy for what they actually considered was a needless wallowing in the realm of ideas—be it rational or suicidally romantic. The demise of USSR and its aftermath greatly helped this group of doers to sharpen their pragmatic position in the one direction possible: the market. They wanted to have a say in the development of their own situation and usher in a new ethos in Kolkata that needed a facelift, they argued. Finding it impossible to sustain their kind of dream in a powerfully laidback culture, they would flee the city and be highly successful in their chosen terrains. Not all were management people, mind you, but even if they were in more fundamental fields, the ethos was managerial and practical. It did not matter whether you debated for socialism in college. Success in the real world meant using social skills for creating and securing jobs, trying to relate theory through the lab to the market, helping create assets for the individual and the nation, fashioning happiness and happy events around our lives. And steadfastly keeping away from the robust and the transformative, the spontaneous and the morbid, even from the watery philanthropic and the civilized. This new ethos, born in the late eighties, has now taken a much more virulent and powerful form. And it is not just the administration and the faculty who think differently now. But primarily it is the students who have bought into this ethos—a zeitgeist of sorts that goes well with Thought and Literary festivals, with banning cycles and substances alike. Naturally, the idea of discipline has become a major rallying point now, even for otherwise progressive souls (or is it because they are progressives?). Lumpens are everywhere—this fear has infected the middle class Bengali living room. And these lumpens have short-sighted, populist and young mavericks to egg them on too from within the university! They distract the meritorious and the brilliant—the future nation builders in whose safe hands must we bequeath our labs and conference halls, our library carrels and our quadrangles, our starched sarees and our closed circuit networks. What’s more—there will be a blanket ban on ideas being exchanged about the soundness of the policies that the university will undertake. So, no badmouthing your institution in the public sphere and social media sites. This gag order not just subverts all forms of ‘harebrained thinking’ but even the very dictum of the old world liberals is gone now: