The Wind Instruments
HUG Editorial ______________________ # Humanities Studies in India at this Point of Time. There are two sides to it. One, institutional studies of the humanities. By that we mean the study of the languages and letters, arts & aesthetics. We are advisedly narrowing down humanities into certain specific fields—not to restrict its ambit but to highlight a methodological breakthrough and rigour that is missing in the narrow sense to begin with. There are many worthy ways of getting into the question of humanities but we still do not possess a sense of independently gauging and defining what might constitute humanities in the subcontinent per se at this point of time. Nor is there any concerted effort to give it fillip and direction. It is a doubly difficult proposition given the heterogeneity of languages and their internal arguments and hierarchies within the humanities academia itself. In India, the once intense parley between the votaries of philological and hermeneutic approaches on one hand, and the then counter-institutional challenges to canon formation and so on on the other, has largely come to an end. There is a meek sense of mea-culpa among the erstwhile rebels within the academia and a vigorous return of parsing and textual studies as a fodder for nation building simultaneously. The coming together of these twin developments are not an accident. It is as a result and fallout of such a consensual unanimity that fields like digital humanities, area studies, book history, archive building, world-literature and so on flourish. Only a limited few within the academia have any sense of what goes beyond the shibboleths of the seminar hall, projects, the archives and transnational travel. # Why largely Static and Undeviating? Partly, the reasons are external—namely, systematic undermining of existing structures within our universities and colleges and lack of support for independent research institutions that would deal exclusively in the humanities. But external factors are sometimes beyond our control. A more significant reason is the lack of imagination and drive from the scholars themselves to independently or collectively break fresh ground. If seen closely, this is not surprising, for unlike history or sociology, institutional forms of humanities in India have been remarkably conformist and self-consuming. In order to pay lip service to social radicalism, it allowed the social sciences to define its scope, ambit and methods in the final decades of the last century. It was the social sciences which worked as a bridge between hard sciences and the humanities—methodologically speaking. The result was a burgeoning of derivative humanities in the name of critical studies. The term culture studies was a trite and baggy offshoot of the same impulse. Barring some initial success such forays routinely accommodate unoriginality. On the other hand, there began a growing affair with philosophy and medical sciences by way of addressing the question of ethics within humanities. This is also imitative. Worthy as they are, in the long term, these forays could not help humanities reinvent itself. With no genuine critical tool within its own arsenal, humanities was left to flounder when it came to addressing contemporary developments in art and literature. By then, barring a minuscule and privileged fraction of the academic world, humanities studies had relinquished the disciplinary ways of interpreting the subjective and textual elements. It had forgotten the ways to recapitulate of the past and the techniques to churn the ordinary materiality of the senses. As a result of this two things have happened: one, a kowtowing to the social sciences with a shallow lip service paid to that fit-all buzzword: interdisciplinary. One must always remember though that whenever that word is used there is always and always a prioritizing of certain disciplines at the cost of some other. It is never a level playing field. And two, as a corollary to that, the humanities departments have lost touch with the intensity and the edge required of art and literature that would bring generations of students and researchers to study humanities. No amount of rethinking or probematizing around cobbled up refresher courses is going to bring forth any original verve within the academe. It is a fruitful thing to converse and work in tandem with other disciplines as long as you have your own priorities and aims periodically thrashed out from within the boundaries of your discipline. #Are there some Other Ways? Institutional study of humanities will continue to rely on its own routines and practices. That is not going to change soon. An instance: poetry, in many ways, is the defining impulse of humanities. And poets abound. As long as humans live they shall hum and intone. But there has not been any path-breaking study of that primary impulse of humanities by our academic literary critics. We mean truly original and sustained work. None. Not even from beyond the antiseptic world of English studies. This is a fundamental lack. There is only one conclusion to be drawn: that the academia, more often than not, is unable to make sense of animated subjectivity, the imperatives of rhythm and repetition. It likes to play the string instrument which allows one to be the master of oneself. Whereas, flute, pipe or clarinet puts you beside yourself. In her magisterial work Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart has reminded us that the wind instruments are endowed with the force of possession which is a vehicle of transformation and self transformation. The academia is intimidated by the power of the wind. It painstakingly trains itself to be deaf to the voice of the choric, tragic and the lyric. So, we must move beyond the academia in order to relate to our basic impulses. There is a parallel set of places where humanities can be deepened. The market forces understand that parallel world best. So they form ententes with academics, publishers, authors and connoisseurs and give us this periodic jamboree of literary, art and crafts festivals. They give us poetry reading sessions, film appreciation workshops and cultural retreats. These in turn lead
The Crossover Is In The Mind
Prasanta Chakravarty The Filter People are mostly helpless, mostly tangled and messy. Irresponsible with our lives. With others’ lives too. We repeatedly falter. This, our human condition. This word—irresponsibility, and its consequent aftermath: failing, is what art concerns itself with. Not all art. But some—the majestic ones, which also respect immediacy of experience. I mean the full panoply of experience, warts and all. Mostly warts. Festering wounds, jetsam of our deviancy and our punishments. Majestic because only such art is able to bridge the gap between the fantastic and the material. In such forms, our dreams and nightmares get stitched with our hourly slavishness, our moments of hard toil. Those who are immersed in this endeavour—artists and connoisseurs, may seem detached and unmoved at first glance. But actually their canvasses throb with life—with life’s abandonings, ennui, and its brute moments. And then sometimes, only sometimes, a heroic rising from that sense of acute pessimism by letting oneself and one’s creations pass through the abject. Always by passing. There is no shortcut. This passing is like a purgatory, a filter if you like. This is a streak—in Aeschylus and in Dante, in Gauguin and Ramkinkar we see this work. When it was alleged his plays revealed the Eleusinian mysteries, Aeschylus took refuge in the altar of Dionysius. And The Libation Bearers would announce: “But, as a beam balances, so/Sudden disasters wait, to strike/Some in brightness, some in gloom.” In Muktibodh and Binoy Majumdar, in different ways, we witness a distilled version that emerges after traversing life’s purgatories. Taslima Nasreen, with her many failings, will live because she squares her sense of social justice with an equal sense of squeezing out the last drop of life’s bounties. A full life and a fuller expression of that living. Her poetry is a particular case in point: “জন্মের দায়, প্রতিভার পাপ নিয়ে/নিত্য নিয়ত পাথর সরিয়ে হাঁটি–The toll of life, bearing this talent-sin/This trudge, dislodging stone after stone, every single day.” A real artist will square with herself, with a restlessness that develops out of a sense of being always at historical and personal crossroads, which at times is also a performance of sorts. You do not commit treachery with this urge to square. The fallout, the art object that arises out of such a steeling process, is where reality shimmers with a certain incandescence. It appears suddenly in front of us in its grandeur and ugliness. Stark. That is what disturbs all order. The starkness of Antigone’s acts. Or Blake’s Laocoon, when its re-coding of the struggling contortions and agony, bursts forth into that terrible prophecy. There is no distortion of historical reality in such art—just a refracted form of it, with an excess force that is hard to map, but its power felt and striking. For the social sciences, which consist of responsible people, fairness is the chief concern. Even when one deals in social and political unfairness—the issue of justice is hard to avoid. It is a significant concern, but it falls short of addressing our relentless, inevitable back and forth between what is social and what is asocial, antisocial and finally cosmic. The Institutions No way can one justify the pursuit of art with any form of success. So, first of all let us keep that aside. Unambiguously. As I have said, art and literature nourish a dogged pursuit to fail, dwindle and vanish. To be with those who are destined to lose. This drive affects art, even while indulging in more surpassing moulds of pleasure (catharsis, jouissance). Institutions, on the other hand, will always have a sense of success and responsibility imbued within them, howsoever public and democratic their raison de etre might be. In the West, that starts with Aristotle’s Lyceum—which had a serious social aim. There are similar aims in other great visionaries who have given a lifetime to the creative imagination—Tagore, Ivan Illych, Romain Rolland. The Medicis or the Habsburgs in Vienna have been exemplary in this regard. Or at a slight remove, even Lenin or Nehru in the last century patronized culture. On a more subterranean level, the influence of royal, princely aesthetics and a cosmopolitan ‘collector’s sensibility’ on Indian cinema, tourism and popular culture has been enormous. So, at one end of the spectrum, the politics of art is connected with a certain kind of institutionalizing of art. Chapels and temples and sangharams and their patrons have tried to harness the artistic impulse. Universities, libraries, theatres and coffeehouses made art polite, rational, virtuous and therefore, detached from its gravity and levity alike. We have moved at best from churches to charitable foundations and endowments. These changes did secularize things and made the ‘discourse’ critical but the price of that very criticality has been to look askance at art’s power, which is actually political in a far wider sense. Pronounced social aim, paradoxically, has often diminished art’s excesses and silences. The whole edifice stands on a singular idea: commitment to culture, which has little to do with art. For instance, rhetoric as a political tool is vital for any litterateur or an orator. This, an ideologue might overlook or be suspicious of. Art is not a discourse or a field where we intervene, save in a very limited sense. See, artists are often poor people—literally. So they need patrons—state or market or plain philanthropy. The financiers have their own motive—responsibility, commissioning, profit, display. We cannot so easily be judgmental about money or fame. In fact, many great artists knew exactly how to do well in life—Shakespeare being the greatest example. He bought multiple houses and further property in and around Stratford. Competition and social climbing among artists is a given just like in any another conglomerate. We really have to be careful before we get on the high horse of political righteousness. But politics is about taking a principled partisan position regardless, not plain expediency. It is also not about personal enmity or grudge or scheming. In this context, the word poverty also comes with a
Notes From The Underground
Avishek Parui Picture a train leaving an underground station. Neither the name of the station nor the destination of the train should be important. Names and destinations rarely matter. You could be anywhere while picturing the train. Anywhere with a river before you, preferably standing on a river-bridge. For rivers are like trains. They help you imagine moving bodies. Moving bodies help you make memories. The loveliest memories are of course of things and events that did not happen. How many real rivers have you really seen? Liffey, Brahmaputra, Thames, Ganges. But don’t digress. Bring yourself back to the image. Picture a train leaving an underground station. Of course you are in the train. On a lovely window seat if you like. Looking out at yourself standing on the platform. Two pairs of hands waving goodbyes at each other, if you want to picture something more sentimental. This isn’t a dream by the way. This isn’t real by the way. There aren’t many ways anyway. You look at yourself leave in the train. You think of leaping in front of it. Not now, not yet. But that would be so much better than jumping off a window ledge or a bridge. You could never do it. You have tried. Why only last night. You were sitting on the ledge of your hotel window. Overlooking the Liffey with all its bridgelights falling across the cold Dublin nightair. For twenty minutes or so you ceased to care. You felt so free that you wanted to fly, knowing you will fall. You didn’t care. You just wanted to end it all. But it never works out that way. And you always end up with a tiredness that traps you back. Then it all dies with the thoughts about things to do and stuff to produce and reproduce. Stuff you know you cannot produce and reproduce. For your life is a long lonely struggle not to be found out. So you step down. From the ledge or the bridge. Hoping you will climb again soon. Your stories are never complete. Waiting for trains in a platform full of strangers is a good exercise in existential solidarity. For you end up sharing a slice of time with a random group of people, a slice of time that will slip into all your lives and connect you all for as long as you live although you may never see each other again. All your lives will always contain this wait. Standing with strangers in a metro station makes you feel most comfortable with yourself. You feel freer, sweat lesser and breathe easier. Away from the familiar faces you endlessly entertain with your overdone orchestra of mindful mannerisms and manoeuvres. Waiting at a metro station is a pleasant break from the barbed wires and booby traps in the world of contraptions above. Till the train that comes to take you back. There’s always a train to take you where you don’t want to go. To what you don’t want to know. But waiting for a train isn’t that bad. Especially in the underground where the white platform light oversees yellow trains swishing in like monocled machines. The lights cross and mix with the electronic announcements and screeches. Like metronomic music pieces. Triggering off a synaesthetic stream of consciousness. Together the alchemy makes you feel more alive than you really are. Everyone seems to behave better in the underground. And noises turn to smaller sounds. You may also want to experience the smells in the underground station, if you like. It’s that time of the night when the smell of bleach mixes with sweaty shirts in quiet corners. You have always thought bleach smells a lot like rotting knee-wound, especially mild bleach of lesser quality. You could be mistaken. Perhaps you smelt bleach right before or after you first smelt a rotting knee-wound. Your knee-wound. Perhaps that memory stayed with its associative effect. Memories of smells and their subconscious stains. But you digress again. Meanwhile, someone in the platform has just peeled off an orange, or a peach, if you please. An orange smells better though, you think. And then there are evening newspapers with coffee smells and old leather bags and warm groundnuts bought from the station entrance above. Smells bring back memories, as scientists say and novelists show. Almost everyone around you is remembering something now as the bleach, sweat, orange, coffee, leather and groundnuts mix in unequal intensities. The train is still leaving the station. Slowly slowly slowly. Just in case you don’t lose sight of it in your mind. You can quicken or slow it down as per your wish. Remember. You are in it. Step back a bit. Step up again. Position yourself in the platform perfectly diagonal to the driver’s cabin. Till the train becomes a hazy yellow. Till the only things clear are a wholly peeled orange skin on the platform and you sitting in the moving yellow by a glass. Let a moment pass. The faces around you have become apparitions. Apparitions in a cold morgue like metro. Think of all the madmen you have met. The ones who revisit you in narcoleptic afternoons, standing on the edge of your Rapid Eye Movement visions. By the Brahmaputra, the Thames, the Liffey, the Ganges. Rivers again. Rivers leave memories and madmen behind by their muddied banks. By the bridges. The Howrah Bridge, Old London Bridge, Ha’Penny Bridge. All have homeless madmen along their railings staring at stars. Not all madmen are homeless though. Some draw salaries and drive their own cars. Look at yourself sitting on the train looking at you on the platform. One of you should be leaving behind the other. You aren’t sure yet who is really being left behind. The train is now a river. A yellow river with no name. Remember. A certain madman before the closed Coffee House in Calcutta had told you that the State shouldn’t exist, except as an idea
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