Fault Lines of Settled Domesticity
Shirshendu Chakrabarti Between Nashtaneer (1901) and Dui Bon (1933) or Malancha (1934), there is a gap of more than three decades and the reader may find it rather odd that they have been included for translation in a cluster. While there are obvious differences between the early and later work of Tagore, these are perhaps less important than the central preoccupation, if not obsession, that unites them: an anatomy of upper-class conjugal relationship, in particular, women’s problematic location in it. On the one hand, trauma and loneliness in the home pushes the women to the brink of hysteric madness where they discover their unknown sexual intensities. On the other hand, the same women may imprison themselves in stereotypes of domesticity. Needless to say, such themes and issues are absent in many of Tagore’s earlier short stories with a rural background. As he puts it in a discussion late in his career, while the early stories had a youthful freshness, tenderness and spontaneity, his later fiction, focusing on urban life, was marked by psychological complexity and a conscious use of technique (Forward, 23 February, 1936). This urban fiction is characterized by an almost banal, everyday family life involving sober financial planning and calculation: the male protagonists are all engaged in business. The placid surface is then suddenly broken up by a seismic upheaval equally in matters of the heart and those of finance. Financial fraud and collapse accompany emotional treachery and turmoil. The paradigm of transgressive, often self-destructive, passion of women within a patrician or middle-class milieu can of course be traced back to the domestic fiction of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Barring a few exceptions, the Victorian domestic novel had been marked by settled family life and the prudential distrust of ungovernable passion. Thus, it could not have served as a model for Bankim or Tagore. At the same time, Victorian values were a visible ‘civilizing/colonizing’ influence on the Bengali middle and upper classes, shaping the ideals of companionate marriage, family, and home. But if Victorian morality gave rise to a new concept of domesticity, Tagore’s fictional representation of it exposed the stifling hypocrisy and limitations of that morality. Victorian values may have introduced the notion of companionate marriage to the middle-class Hindu household, but the entire process involved a poeticization of women. Thus, a prosaic and routine domesticity is turned into a sanctimonious ideal by a rhetoric of mystification. Tagore formulates his critique of the process in many of his writings: in Ghare Baire (1916), for instance, he does this appropriately through the interior monologue of Bimala, the heroine. Recalling her mother’s role as devoted wife, she simultaneously realizes that the unaffected, self-effacing simplicity of that domestic routine is beyond recovery. She discovers that the humdrum domesticity of the immediate past was being supplanted by a poeticized and mystified version. Public opinion now responded to change by moulding that which was as easy as breathing into a poetic art. The imaginatively inclined men of today are raising their pitch constantly as they hold forth on the unparalleled poetry of the wifely devotion of married women and abstinence of widows. It is evident from this how in this domain of life there has been a breach between truth and beauty (Rabindra Rachanabali, vol.4, Vishwabharati, 1987, p.474; translation mine).Sharmila (Dui Bon) and Niraja (Malancha) are victims of this mystification. The couples in these three novellas and indeed in most of Tagore’s urban fiction are childless. While it is common knowledge that a barren wife or one producing only girls was held in contempt—even the memoirs of Jnanadanandini Devi, wife of one of Tagore’s elder brothers, bear witness to this attitude—such issues are kept out by Tagore. Moreover, the mother-in-law or sister-in-law is conspicuously absent in the novellas. Evidently, Tagore excludes these relatives here in order to concentrate on the man-woman relationship which is specifically under stress in a period of transition. But the childlessness is more puzzling, especially in view of the unprecedented importance of childhood in his entire oeuvre, including critical and educational writings. The obvious contrast here is with the domestic fiction of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee where much of the happiness of the family derives from children. Could childlessness then be seen as a conscious strategy to question the inauthenticity (‘breach between truth and beauty’) of the domestic ideal discussed above? Sharmila’s maternal solicitude for her husband, juxtaposed with her childlessness, may thus indicate a mismatched relationship. As Tagore had put it in a letter, Shashanka and Sharmila had never really been united, although the cracks were not visible on the surface. Their marital relationship is therefore like a make-believe game and Shashanka openly rebukes her for treating him like a toy in front of the world. Despite her suffering, Sharmila somewhat masochistically surrenders to the stereotype of the woman who is ruthlessly left at home by her husband in pursuit of his commercial enterprise which for her is the eternal masculine, heroic struggle with fate. Her younger sister, Urmimala, is very different, impulsive, curious, and brimming over with vitality. But Nirad wishes to dominate her completely, disguising his love of power and money in the form of lofty ideals according to which he would mould her nature like a scientific procedure in the laboratory. Urmi submits to this subtle tyranny, this aestheticization, much against her nature, although fortunately she is not trapped into marriage. Internalizing the sermons of Nirad, she would periodically chastise herself and adopt an ascetic regimen even when he was away inEurope. She thus finds release from this stifling priggishness in the light-hearted relationship with Shashanka bordering upon adultery. Niraja’s love is also possessive, relentlessly directed equally at the garden, the pet dog and the dependant’s son. After the dog’s sudden death, when her own child dies during delivery, she is physically shattered and never recovers from it. But even on her sickbed, with the knowledge of impending death, she is unable to give up her exclusive claim on the garden. The case of Charulata
The Modalities of ‘Coming Out’
T.P. Sabitha I propose to look at the dynamics of the production of two kinds of subjects, the autobiographical and the fictional, and attempt to see how a gay identity informs and transforms the two in sometimes similar and sometimes differing ways. Let me look at Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (subsequently to be referred to as SM in the course of this essay) and Christopher and His Kind (to be referred to as CK). What makes the “subject” a specifically Modernist one in these texts written in 1964 (SM) and 1964 (CK)? And what makes it specifically gay? The last question will of necessity imply a look at the notion of the subject –my proposed objective – in that both the texts are narratives informed by the gay identity of the subject, fictional or autobiographical. And lastly, what are the implications of looking for a gay narrative or gay subject in these texts? These are the questions I wish to explore in the course of this essay. It is, I confess, is only a pointer in the direction of possible answers. So, how is the subject a “Modernist” one in these narratives? The novel, A Single Man, is not a first-person narrative, but it uses certain first-person narrative techniques like the Woolfian stream of consciousness and a certain Bergsonian idea of subjective time or durèe both of which are characteristic of what has come to be labeled “Modernist”. There is a certain interiority to the Modernist subject which comes from a self-awareness of this subject capable of objectivising itself and indeed reading itself. The fictional subject in A Single Man, George, is both the subject of this narrative and also the object. In the beginning as well as at the end of the novel, there is a pseudo-clinical objectivisation of the subject: Fear tweaks the vagus nerve…But meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has takes its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another; the legs stretch, the lower back is arched… And now, over the entire inter-communication system is issued the first general order of the day: UP…It stares and stares. Its lips part…It knows its name. It is called George” (SM 7-8). The novel here curiously resembles an autobiographical narrative in that there is an explicit rupture between the subject “George” and the George that this subject objectivises in the third person narrative of this novel. The opening lines of the novel establish the subject as the subject in two principal ways: first through a self-recognition (“I am”) and through the recognition of itself as George in the eyes of others, in a dialectical cognitive process. Its existence is confirmed by its self-awareness and its recognition by others. The public affirmation that this self desperately needs in order to establish its identity is a persisting idea in the text. Look at these lines for example: “George slips his parking-card into the slot (thereby offering a piece of circumstantial evidence that he is George); the barrier rises in spastic mechanical jerks, and he drives in” (SM 34) and “[a] veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, ‘Good morning!’ And the three secretaries – each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style – recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply ‘Good morning!’ to him” (SM 35). However, the recognition by others is also a misrecognition. They fail to read in George his not-so-concealed secret: his queerness. All the characters in the novel – including those who know about his liking of men – either fail to read altogether or misread this essential constitutive of the subject called George. In a conversation with his married student, Dreyer, George learns that his wife has taken up a teaching job and teasingly asks him, “ ‘So you’re fixing your own breakfast?’ ” and Dreyer replies, “ ‘Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer in. Or I get her pregnant.’ ” The narrative continues, “[h]e visibly enjoys this man-to-man stuff with George. (Does he know about me, George wonders; do any of them?)” (SM 40-1). There is misrecognition even by friends who “know” he is gay: After a few drinks with Charlotte, a close friend, when George gets up to leave, we are told, “As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in…It’s one of those drunken longshots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right out of its orbit and send it whizzing off another” (SM 122). Even the possibility of a true understanding – I am referring to the Kenny episode at the end – is shown to be impossible. This misrecognition is what makes George feel truly alienated. Indeed, the whole novel is marked by an acute feeling of alienation. And the only other self who will have understood this queer subject, Jim, is dead. Jim is an absent presence in the novel. Time, space and the alienated fictional subject – all bear markers of his absence. The absence of Jim is a signifier of a larger absence of understanding, sharing and desire – an absence of the returning gaze of the queer subject. And since subjectivity is presented in the novel as constituted as much by others as by the self, the queer subject remains partly unconstituted. However, the unreturned gaze of desire has been compensated through a fictional device in the text – that of making the subject the third person “he”, thus creating a rupture in the self (the self as observing and desiring subject and object that is observed and desired.) This fictional device of a fissure in the self creates a space for the acknowledgement of his homoerotic desire. This is further enacted
Beyond Violence
Srimati Basu “How am I going to manage without you?” my maternal grandmother Pata wailed at the viewing of her husband’s recently deceased body. As a precocious and carefully inscrutable 12-year-old, I remember feeling embarrassed on her behalf, and thus mine, that she expressed public grief for logistical support rather than the passionate loss I had seen at other mournings. Even at 12, I did know he was a hard man to mourn–physically (and likely sexually) violent, emotionally abusive, serial philanderer, financial deadbeat. But it felt both like a failure of love, which I must have believed undergirded their lives, and a lesson in the raw realities of marriage. In retrospect, it was probably one of her most outspoken acts of resistance. It does not seem too much of a stretch to imagine that the everyday experiences of my grandmother, who raised me for the first four years of my life and was a substantial presence over the next 15, animate my ideas of feminism and social justice. As Uma Narrayan says evocatively in the essay “Contesting Cultures,”My eventual feminist contestations of my culture have something to do with … my early sense of ‘the politics of home.’ As far back as memory serves, I resented my grandmother’s non-resistance, her lack of anger, her low moaning to gods, her turn to religion, her performance of abjection. “Ahalya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara, Mandodari,” she would chant first thing every morning. This auspicious litany of the “Five Women” was meant to bring good fortune, but these are all archetypal wronged wives in Hindu epics, rather difficult to recuperate as models of feminist agency. In what I now know to be common among battered women, she had a damaged optical nerve and was severely agoraphobic, which meant she could never come out and enjoy herself with us without a dramatic breakdown. I am wary of simple causality, and refrain from attributing my two decades of research on women’s property, law and marriage in India, and on violence within and outside marriage, to my grandmother. I do know that my work is driven by anger at our family silences around this violence. They echo the experiences of other friends whose families work to save face rather than confront abusers in their midst, relying on the quiet toughness of survivors. I have tried hard to understand that silence and compliance can be as crucial among coping strategies as any other, including finding solace in patriarchal religions. Even living well–if in oblivion–can be the best survival tool, as it seems it was for my mother and aunts. In the end, though, I can’t help cheering for fierceness, action, voluble speech. But last year, in clearing out an old drawer at home, I ran across a 1949 letter from my aunt to her father–my violent grandfather. “Bapi, how are you? I miss you,” it begins in the passionate voice of a four-year old. It suggests that she and her sister had left home for awhile with their mother, informing him that they are well and that her mother is taking good care of them. She complains about her sister’s temper and tells him about her new earrings. Her misspelled signature is a poignant reminder that she has just learned to write. A copy hangs above my desk as I work to finish my book on family law and violence, a reminder that love complicates shame and action beyond reason, much though we would like to exorcise violence in the name of feminism. Srimati Basu is Associate Professor, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Kentucky, Lexington. This article was a part of a week-long Bitch Media/ Ms. Magazine blog carnival in honor of Feminist Coming Out Day. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
On The Poverty of Student Life
Mustapha Khayati [First published in 1966 at the University of Strasbourg by students of the university and members of the Internationale Situationniste. A few students elected to the student union printed 10,000 copies with university funds. The copies were distributed at the official ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year. The student union was promptly closed by court order. HUG reproduces a section from the pamphlet.] We might very well say, and no one will disgaree with us, that the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the priest and the policeman. Naturally he is usually attacked from the wrong point of view, with specious reasons derived from the ruling ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a true revolutionary, yet a revolutionary critique of the student situation is currently taboo on the official Left. The licensed and impotent opponents of capitalism repress the obvious–that what is wrong with the students is also what is wrong with them. They convert their unconscious contempt into a blind enthusiasm. The radical intelligentsia (from Les Temps Modernes to L’Express) prostrates itself before the so-called “rise of the student” and the declining bureaucracies of the Left (from the “Communist” party to the Stalinist National Union of Students) bids noisily for his moral and material support. There are reasons for this sudden enthusiasm, but they are all provided by the present form of capitalism, in its overdeveloped state. We shall use this pamphlet for denunciation. We shall expose these reasons one by one, on the principle that the end of alienation is only reached by the straight and narrow path of alienation itself. Up to now, studies of student life have ignored the essential issue. The surveys and analyses have all been psychological or sociological or economic: in other words, academic exercises, content with the false categories of one specialization or another. None of them can achieve what is most needed–a view of modern society as a whole. Fourier denounced their error long ago as the attempt to apply scientific laws to the basic assumptions of the science (“porter régulièrement sur les questions primordiales”). Everything is said about our society except what it is, and the nature of its two basic principles–the commodity and the spectacle. The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, and the details consign the totality to oblivion. Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is a form of initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of more primitive societies with bizarre precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off from social reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his present status and his future role. The two are absolutely separate, and the journey from one to the other is a mechanical event “in the future.” Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation group to hide from that future. Protected from history, the present is a mystic trance. At least in consciousness, the student can exist apart from the official truths of “economic life.” But for very simple reasons: looked at economically, student life is a hard one. In our society of abundance,” he is still a pauper. 80% of students come from income groups well above the working class, yet 90% have less money than the meanest laborer Student poverty is an anachronism, a throw-back from an earlier age of capitalism; it does not share in the new poverties of the spectacular societies; it has yet to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat. Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the moral prejudices and authority of the family to become part of the market even before he is adolescent: at fifteen he has all the delights of being directly exploited. In contrast the student covets his protracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile paradise. Adolescence and its crises may bring occasional brushes with his family, but in essence he is not troublesome: he agrees to be treated as a baby by the institutions which provide his education. (If ever they stop screwing his arse off, it’s only to come round and kick him in the balls.) “There is no student problem.” Student passivity is only the most obvious symptom of a general state of affairs, for each sector of social life has been subdued by a similar imperialism. Our social thinkers have a bad conscience about the student problem, but only because the real problem is the poverty and servitude of all. But we have different reasons to despise the student and all his works. What is unforgivable is not so much his actual misery but his complaisance in the face of the misery of others. For him there is only one real alienation: his own. He is a full-time and happy consumer of that commodity, hoping to arouse at least our pity, since he cannot claim our interest. By the logic of modern capitalism, most students can only become mere petits cadres (with the same function in neo-capitalism as the skilled worker had in the nineteenth-century economy). The student really knows how miserable will be that golden future which is supposed to make up for the shameful poverty of the present. In the face of that knowledge, he prefers to dote on the present and invent an imaginary prestige for himself. After all, there will be no magical compensation for present drabness: tomorrow will be like yesterday, lighting these fools the way to dusty death. Not unnaturally he takes refuge in an unreal present. The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new family, the University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence, apparently,