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
Scholar no Intellectual ? : Trends in Humanities Overground
[Trends in Humanities Overground: A HUG survey] ————————————————————- James Turner, in his monumental work Philology: The Forgotten Origins of Modern Humanities (2014) , makes an early distinction: between the scholar and the philosopher/intellectual. Not because each kind cannot delve into the other’s domain but because the methods of reaching their respective goals are different. The scholar is beholden to erudition. The intellectual, on the other hand is seeking wisdom. The scholar must harbour two clear propensities: one, an encyclopedic ambition to amass the details and shades of scholarship, and second, a detached sangfroid to excavate, parse, chisel, interpret and classify information systematically. He must be truly picky with every bit of data that he may garner and then try and join the dots. A scholar’s passion is rigorous source-criticism: to be found only in the minutia of his engaged world. The philosopher, on the contrary, is either seeking truth or trying to interrogate it. He will take a position, which will be argued with passion and logic. He is a man of ideas, unlike the scholar. And he might get into the missionary business of the social and the political, unlike the scholar again. James Turner and a group of scholar-philologists are taking on the tribe of the intellectuals. They are taking on the literary theorists—people who try to marry truth-concepts or terminologies to art, language and the ebb and flow of history. The philologist, by contrast, has an abiding passion for words and the turn of the phrase, in how meaning is conveyed. He respects the delicacy of language. Till 1800, an original unitary philology encompassed not only grammar and syntax but editing and commentary, etymology and lexicography and then anthropology, archeology, biblical exegesis, linguistics, law, art history and literary criticism. Turner’ diachronic and then spatial survey of the Atlantic philological learning eventually leads to the story of England’s global expansion in the 18th century, that occasions lengthy asides on the European appropriation of Sanskrit learning, from the time of Colebrooke and ‘Oriental’ Jones, and the first systematic studies of Native American languages, whose early enthusiasts included Thomas Jefferson. The turn of the next century finds intimations of emerging revolutions in history (e.g. Gibbon), the study of language (Humboldt), biblical philology (J. D. Michaelis), and the edition and interpretation of modern literature (especially Theobald and Dr Johnson on Shakespeare). In a perceptive review of the book, Whitney Cox tells us that the real turning point in Turner’s presentation comes with the emergence of the new knowledge-form of Altertumswissenschaft, beginning in earnest with the publication of Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte (1812). This new disciplinary formation, reliant upon rigorous source- criticism, was driven by a desire to reconstruct every aspect of a long-vanished human world. Inherent to it and decisive to Turner’s story is the proposition of an inherent difference between the world of the past and that of the modern researcher. This rapidly if controversially extended into the historical criticism of Christian scripture stimulated the study of the material and religious culture. “The process of the gradual reception of German learning into the Anglosphere is one of best set-pieces of Turner’s presentation: cosseted in their High Table otium. ” With this, the departmental structure of a modern liberal arts college or humanities faculty is basically in place, with each discipline by now in possession of its own professional associations, journals, and conferences, and its own sense of specialized problems and jargon. Such an apparent diversity, however, is a sham, Turner declares in his meditation. He laments that it is impossible to imagine a contemporary academic career of a serious philologist, cheerfully careening between Donne and Dante, medieval architraves and early-modern portraiture. Turner’s book is one of a kind, but he is not alone. In the past two decades, there has been a systematic interest in reviving and providing philology with a wider currency. And a simultaneous emphasis on literary historicism is back with a vengeance. The New Philology movement (though still disparate, the votaries hold a lot of sway within the academia) broadens the ambit of its own lineage, say, by not looking at manuscripts from the perspective of text and language alone. Visual images, annotations of various forms like captions, rubrics, glosses and interpolations have now emerged as key areas to explore within philology. The division between a text editor and an art historian is untenable, a new batch of younger scholars feel. Artists and artisans have always been together: poet, scribe, illuminator, rubricator, commentator, all in an act of creation and therefore interpretation, of text/texts. Collective effort and interartistic rivalries interest philologists now. For instance, in medieval studies, there is a remarkable inter-textual possibility when a painted miniature, poetic text, and copies of manuscript (or digital versions now) are studied, placing them alongside. The verbal and visual mediums vie with each other and the scope of parsing and classifying is immense. This is what a contemporary philologist will call the Manuscript Matrix or the Illuminated Matrix. Manuscript matrices are places of radical contingencies—of representation, chronology and perception. They reveal and conceal pulsations of the mystical which are also historical.Such matrix cultivate diversity and variance—an original impulse of philological scholarship. Around thirty years ago Paul de Man, in a prescient essay ‘The Return of Philology’ (collected in The Resistance to Theory, 1986), referred to the scholar Rueben Brower and pronounced: “Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures of language which it is the more or less secret aim of literary teaching to keep hidden”. This is what is said, in sheer appreciation about a kind of a transformative philological scholar, by one of the foremost deconstructionists of 20th century. For, de Man is one of the most rigorous
Keisham Priyokumar and the Economy of Fragmented Narratives
Loiya Leima Oinam [This essay is on changing trends in identity formation in Manipur. I focus on the construction of the ethnic outsider in relation to anti-outsider movements and the Kuki Naga clashes (1992-97) in Manipur and the ways they were narrativised in short stories.] ——————————— Keisham Priyokumar is perhaps the most important author in this regard since his stories capture the challenges in presenting the subjectivities and a coherent narrative of the killings. His work shows that fiction can also provide an important intervention in the linear and sanitised histories that one comes across concerning these events. Here, I have dwelled on one short story by Priyokumar in order to understand the predicament of the writer in fictionally re-presenting real incidents of ethnic violence, and also to reflect on our own interpretive engagement with narratives of such nature. In a way, the difficulty faced by the author while trying to reconstruct this particular story leads us to a scenario where one can reconcile with narrative perspectives or voices that are sutured. *** In the first edition of his collection of short stories Nongdi Tarakkhidare (The Rain that Failed) (1995), Keisham Priyokumar expresses his objective of presenting “inner worlds”, and contends that the seriousness of literary work lies in the ability to depict the changing world.[1] This is not an “experiment”, he says, but the “journey” of the short story in Manipur (ibid). Priyokumar makes clear his commitment to representing people who live at the periphery of progress and modernity and to whom he dedicated his multiple awards winning book, including the Sahitya Akademi Award. As someone who is particularly conscious of the contribution of his stories in the field of arts, there has been a discernible change in his assessment of his own work and role as a writer. A decade later, he maintained that the long standing aim for a “new expression” in his writing is deliberate.[2] Amidst the gradual evolution of the short story form in Manipur in conjunction with the changing social situation, the 1970s marked a new wave in short story writing. Considered as path-breaking, the bi-monthly journal Meirik (Sparks) had its inception during the 1960s. From 1974 onwards it became a collective venture of some of the most renowned writers in Manipur. Conceptualised under the leadership of Nongthongbam Kunjamohan, the first volume of Meirik came out in 1974. The other writers were Shri Biren, Yumlembam Ibomcha, Lamabam Birmani, Keisham Priyokumar, Laitonjam Premchand, among others (Aruna, 2009). It heralded a new and experimental style in form and themes, and the use of dreams and allegories became popular. As subsequent writers began to focus on marginalised voices, the influence of Meirik became even more apparent in the realistic portrayal of society and contemporary issues besetting the state. Although the generation of short story writing to which Priyokumar belonged was in itself a groundbreaking one, for him, a desire for further change, if not disillusionment, set in. It stems from problems regarding publishing and even of readership. He says, “[m]oreover, our literature is not able to do anything for the society today… So, I can write no more short stories. This is what worries me. For now, I can just quietly observe and listen”.[3] Following this rather grim declaration in Lan amasung Mang (War and Dream) (2000), The Rain that Failed has seen its third edition due to its resonance in the current socio-political atmosphere. He admits that he continues to face queries from fellow writers as to whether he will write again or not. The eponymous short story “The Rain that Failed” won him critical acclaim and was adapted in theatre and as a telefilm.[4] From “The Rain” to other stories in the 1995 collection, one sees a collage of fragmented narratives and fractured selves of individuals getting habituated to living with ethnic conflict and everyday violence. Priyokumar’s work has stood out for its ability to sensitively and insightfully portray the lives of the underdogs and those living at the darker end of modernity and development. His changing perspective regarding the efficacy of the function of writers in contemporary times points towards the complex and rather important role of the fiction writer. He therefore brings up the centrality of the short story writer in relation to ‘acts’ of witnessing and questions about translating the real experiences and testimonial utterances into fiction. In the entire process of conceiving a story, the writer then draws upon the lives of the people he comes across for inspiration and presents the experiences as those of the fictional characters. “The Rain”, written in October, 1994, is one of the most poignant stories to have captured the deep-rooted social and personal devastations of the nineties Kuki-Naga clashes. Apart from it, the author has dwelled on the subject in “Ahing Ama” (One Night) and “Mangsatheigi Mang” (Mangsathei’s Dream) from War and Dream (2000). Based on the life of Chongnikim, whose husband died in the killings, “The Rain” is told through a series of flashbacks and reminiscences of events preceding Lungjahao, the husband’s, death. Set against a secluded village in Manipur that is situated near the Barak River (Assam), the story opens with a glimpse of a beguilingly simplistic life led by the couple even while facing acute adversity. In the story, Priyokumar depicts a multi-cultural society that draws its peaceful co-existence from a mutually demarcated distance and civility. This is only ritually crossed while carrying out trade-related transactions. Lungjahao cuts and sells bamboo to the “extremely thin, dark complexioned” Moti, which are then carried across to the other side of the village on a makeshift ferry through the powerful streams of the Barak river. However, when the much anticipated rain never comes and fails to fill the river, Lungjahao goes to another village to fish in order to provide for his family. Chongnikim’s good-humoured parting remark, “Be careful, lest the fish kills you” (“The Rain” 95), proves ominously prophetic when Lungjahao is brought back dead. Chongnikim is based on a real person
On Misunderstanding the Will of God
Amlan Das Gupta The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history Walter Benjamin I wish in this essay to consider a question which presents itself with some force in Samson Agonistes . As a consequence it has received considerable critical attention, but there may be, even after that, some point in re-examining it. Does Samson in his final act carry out the will of God, or does he significantly fail to realize it? The answer that we give to the question undoubtedly shapes our response to the play as a whole. Since I intend this paper to be as short as possible, let me set aside the considerable (and deeply interesting) body of criticism that has in the last ten or fifteen years concentrated on the problematic nature of Samson’s last action, and briefly summarize the information which needs to be taken into account as given in the play itself. Samson, till more than two-thirds of the play is over has little idea how his story will end, though he is fairly clear that it will end badly. At 1381 he makes his famous comment about experiencing “rousing motions” and reiterates his vows generally as an Isarelite and more specifically as a nazirite, one separate to God, and forbidden to eat certain kinds of food, cut his hair and visit graveyards. He also hints that he intends to perform some great deed or perish: exactly how is unclear at this point. I would draw attention to the fact that Milton is unusually cagey about letting Samson refer to divine will at this point: the “rousing motions” may be from God, but there is no clear indication. The Argument that prefaces the play is equally unclear. Having refused absolutely to go with the Philistine officer, Samson “at length” is “persuaded inwardly that this was from God”. The scene of the play’s catastrophe distances us from the loquacious and argumentative hero. The messenger does not hear him speak, apart from the loud cry that he gives addressing the Philistine nobility (1640). Otherwise Samson’s own words are heard through intermediaries (as in his desire to rest on the pillars, 1629), but his thoughts are the subject of speculation. He stands with bent head, in the posture of either one who prays, or one who meditates some great action. Milton would have known the difficulty in the Biblical text in this regard. The Biblical Samson speaks relatively little (unlike Milton’s character) but his last words are reported in the Bible. Versions differ: KJV has “Let me die with the Philistines”, Samson expressing his desire for suicide. The Geneva has “Let me lose my life with the Philistines. The Vulgate is even more uncompromising: Let my soul die with the Philistines, “Moriatur anima mea cum Philisthim”. Manoa is the first to recover from the shock of this news: after the tragic ode of the chorus, he seeks to put the best possible interpretation on the event. The first few lines seek to reestablish Samson’s heroic identity: “ Samson hath quit himself/Like Samson, and heroically hath finished/ A life heroic”: but he is quick to add that the best part of the whole business is that it proves that God has not abandoned Samson “as was fear’d”. The Chorus picks up this idea in a more assertive manner, concluding: All is best, though we oft doubt, What th’ unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. Oft he seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns And to his faithful Champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously; [ 1745-52] This then, baldly, is the substance of what the play offers. If we return to the question posed at the beginning, we find that there is any clear textual evidence as to whether Samson acts according to divine prompting in the twinned acts of slaying himself and destroying the Philistine nobility. I would make what I hope is an unexceptional point: there is nothing in the play itself that can help us resolve the question, and we need to fall back on either radical interpretation or scholarly supplement to resolve the question to our satisfaction. But one question may have received less attention that it deserves. It might be interesting to consider briefly how the notion of divine will is present in the play in a general way, and how it may be understood or misunderstood. The problem here arises out of the fact that the notion of the divine in Samson is itself difficult to understand: the play’s presentation of Samson, judge of Israel, has to accommodate both the neoclassical formalism of the play and its invocation of Greek models on the one hand, and the ethics of the Christian poet on the other . How divine will is known (or can be known) is clearly different in the three cultural models that the play seamlessly integrates: consequently. Samson’s opportunities for responding to divine dictate must be thought to be itself a problematic issue. Leaving aside the fact that within the three systems, the Greek, the Hebraic and the Christian, there are profound debates and differences in the articulation of the relationship of the human and the divine, we could try to examine the broad outlines of three paradigms which seem to be relevant to what the play offers. If each of these systems is seen to be offering a range of options, the ones that we will be choosing are probably on the extreme side: this, I should explain is not in order to present them in parodic form, but because it is here that we may more clearly understand the problems that present themselves to us. One point of convergence might be that in all these systems whatever happens is broadly in conformity with divine will; that is to say, irrespective of human agents, God’s will is manifested in events. It may be true that this is a relatively long term view: