Dread Not Rasta
Richard C. Salter The dusty street into St. Thomas, a medium-sized coastal village in the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica, ran east to west along a garbage-strewn stream spiked with disposable diapers and trash. Matewé was taking me to visit Duke, a fellow well-known by youth in the area for his wisdom and the small “church” (his term) that he ran. After traversing a few alleys, and gaining entrance to Duke’s grandmother’s yard with an identifying whistle, we passed through the wooden shack into the backyard where the church sat. The church was about six feet wide by eight feet long and was built onto another building that served as its back wall. The church was an appropriate symbol for subaltern resistance, for the building that served as the church’s back wall was actually the village police station. Duke welcomed us, and with three other dreadlocked church members we entered the building for what could be called a five-hour “reasoning” session. After we entered the church and turned on a boombox inside, Duke cut and sorted the seeds from some ganja and then heated the ganja on a hot plate to remove impurities such as fertilizers, pesticides and “things used on plantations” that may have gotten into it. He then packed it into the “chalice” and lit it. The chalice was a water pipe made with a large bamboo stem, a hollow water-filled coconut as a base, and a hollowed out stone bowl. It resembled the water pipes favored in many Rastafari yards, and it was similarly passed member to member throughout the reasoning session. Duke did not use the term “reasoning” to describe the church activities, instead referring to the passing of the chalice as “prayer.” His young daughter (perhaps 5 years old) was with us and was surprised to see me, a white man, in the church. She asked, as the chalice was passed to me, “You praying now?” For some of the time at church we sat quietly, but at other times we reasoned and discussed the world. Duke said he was trying to get away from “churchy stuff” at his church: “We come when we want. We talk about what we want.” Typical of many Rastas, Duke was critical of Roman Catholics and distinguished the rules at his church from those of the Catholic Church, where formality made it impossible to eat or for kids to walk around during the service. Many of the topics we covered could be found at any Rastafari reasoning: what is a proper diet? If you avoid eating blood, is it okay to eat siwik (river crab), since it does not appear to have blood in it? What about crayfish? Salt? We talked about the merits of “bush medicine,” the benefits of zèb chèpantyé (Carpenter Weed) as a blood cleaner. We talked about the roots of reggae and jazz. We talked about the “wickedness” people do and our responsibility to improve the world for children in this generation. Duke was particularly interested in talking about the merits of ganja. That was not surprising, and indeed the merits of ganja as inspiration, herbal remedy, or tea, or the economic benefits to be had through hemp production would also be a topic at any Rastafari reasoning. But Duke was particularly emphatic that ganja should not be smoked with any sort of tobacco, including the local Indian Tobacco (lobelia inflata). According to Duke, ganja is “lamb’s bread,” and “smoking is eating.” He reasoned that “Jesus broke bread” (i.e., he smoked marijuana) and that “real food” means “to be contented with God.” He considered smoking ganja to be eating real food because it satisfies, it brings “peace,” it “brings one to God.” Physically, Duke and his church members resembled any other Rastas on the island. They wore dreadlocks and used much of the same argot as other Rastas. They also smoked ganja in the same way, using similar accoutrements, and they reasoned about the same topics in a common format. But although Duke would fit into what I have broadly defined as the Rastafari movement, he and his other three church members were adamant that they were not Rastas. Duke was a Dread. Dreads do not always constitute a self-identified group as they did at Duke’s church, but there are certainly many who call themselves Dreads in order to differentiate their beliefs from orthodox Rastafari. In addition, there remain some general social and organizational differences between the two groups. For example, unlike many orthodox Rastas, Dreads are with rare exceptions from the lower classes. The Dread movement is far less hierarchically organized than most Rastafari groups, and with a few exceptions, like Duke’s small church, Dread practices are individualized, and often ad hoc and idiosyncratic. The Dreads remain a movement of small groups, without systematic communication among themselves, and thus they also tend to be associated strongly with particular villages or locales. There are also areas of worldview, ethos, rituals and food practices that differentiate Dreads from orthodox Rastas. The clearest divergence between Dreads and more orthodox Rastas is in their attitudes towards a deity. Orthodox Rastas tend to maintain a belief in Haile Selassie, former Emperor of Ethiopia, as God. Dreads, on the other hand, tend not to proclaim the divinity of Selassie. Duke, for example, ridiculed Selassie and Rastas who claimed any belief in him. Even Dreads who acknowledged Selassie as a great leader, or as a great African statesman, suggested that it is dangerous to worship a human being. Francis was representative of many Dreads when he said that he would not call himself a “Rastafarian” or anything else: “I would just call myself a living man.” To him the term Rastafari was a “perversion” because the term “Ras” means king, and it is a perversion to call a man king when in reality we are all just men. To him, Selassie “was man just like me.” It would have made no sense to accept Selassie as God: “How could
The Dead Body
Manindra Gupta (Trans. Abu Hossain) The fable of the Brahmin and the Brahmani used to be an amalgamation of the mythical and the folk. The duo lives in that hutment right at the yonder corner of the village. The Brahmin, a simple guy, partly a simpleton even. The Brahmani, a termagant—a long life of travail and tribulation has made her utterly irritable at the fag end. The story could take different turns once you reach this juncture. For instance, he discovers a pot full of mohurs, guarded by the yaksha, among the ruins in the jungle, or impresses the lord of the land with his witticism and makes a fortune, or gets swindled by a conman, suffers harsh words from the Brahmani and chooses exile. This story of the twosome is actually our story—mine and my friends’. We get swindled everyday and our predicament worsens. As long as we were working, we were fishes secure within our respective shoals. A retired life is one of needless, sundry humiliation. How and where our fulsome sons and daughters spend their time, what drives their lives, I am rather unsure. Internationally acclaimed pundits doing the circuit or surefooted asocial danseuses adept at social dos—whatever their trade be—they have traversed a long way from us indeed. We oldies are vulnerable like the groping Brahmin couple of the tale. We queue up at the bus-stop, hear someone holler ‘get up, do get up.’ Soon the bus waves past, an anomalous bell ringing. We are left standing. An odd shove here, a thrust there in the crowd, (we hope to parry, but invariably fail) easily leaves us cold, downbeat, fallen. I recall the visage of old, weary Dhritarashtra, at the conclusion of the battle at Kurukshetra, returning with blooms and supplicating water—hungry, weak with fasting, trembling, superannuated, rapidly losing interest with living. Soon he enters the entrails of the forest with Gandhari, Kunti and Sanjay. And a fierce forest fire engulfs them. Sanjay entreats the old king to flee. The feeble king replies that he would rather scorch himself up. It is ideal to give up ones life to water, wind, fire and fasting. You may take leave Sanjay. King Bimbisara died of fasting too. I have noticed unwell creatures, nearing death, hunt down a quiet spot—quit food and await stilly until death arrives. Possibly their being wishes to touch some primordial pulse before departing for good. The threesome in Mahabharata also sat motionless. Modern death is a messy, troublesome affair. Face to face with death one realizes how perilous our circumstances are. These days there are hardly any treatment options at home. And nursing homes are veritable leeches. And then at the threshold of his last breath, the patient is pushed into a ventilator: artificial respiration initiates. Four or five days in that state, stark pale with death long ago, the nursing home declares the patient to be brain dead. The dead body and a bill of few lakhs are easily handed out. In the name of wellness and treatment, partial dead-bodies thus enter the chain of transaction. And a complete and spectacular disrespect for the dead starts right there. On one hand, the abhorrent antarjali-jatra, on the other, this horrendous ventilation: is there no simpler, more natural route for the patient on the death roll? Howsoever agreeably we lead our lives, in death we proceed towards the grandeur of the infinite and the unseen. These last couple of hours, at their very moment of disappearance, let not the dead suffer contempt from those who stay back. I would not have been so garrulous but for a jolt that I received the other day. I had gone to the samshan-ghaat, in solidarity, to witness the last rites of a neighboring friend. The gentleman, his wife, his kids—the whole family is illustrious, scholarly and free-minded. Probably the luster of scholarship had dried up the humidity of their bereavement. In every civic, popular or natural society, the disposal of the dead merits some procedural aspects. Various as the formalities are, one basic thread binds them: that we do not consider the dead to be gone, vanished, non-existent. The idea is to see that a modicum of love and benediction guide us even as we dispose off a body who had been possibly a fellow traveler with the living for so long and so richly. And to wonder and consider the remains before it surpasses touch and feel. The Eskimos of North Pole are an ancient lot. How do they resolve this conundrum of the wobbly, unsure old age? Once the old man realizes that he is unable to hunt, is dependent on his kinsman for food, the lumbering weight of life is getting better of him—he gets holds of a catamaran, and one evening quietly ventures on to the sea. Night in front, the ocean wide, below 30 degree Celsius the temperature. But he won’t return. What would happen to him, his body, his existence? The community is there by the sea-shore to bid him adieu. There are all kinds of traversing that final expanse: sometimes with such communal approval, at times alone and fasting—awaiting passage, and who knows, may be denying certain treatments even in the midst of mortal pain. There is a breed of sanyasis whose mortal remains are left to be eaten by the creatures of the wild. The whole of the Tower the Silence precisely hinges on such an understanding of the relationship of the living and the dead. Some practitioners are given water-burial, so that they enter the food chain via fishes and other aquatic creatures only to re-emerge materially. There is nothing demeaning about returning this earthly body back to the earth. Now, the usual rites are either internment or cremation. Two kinds of mentality work behind these differing procedures. Burial implies that he is around, his existence being mysterious now and he has left secretly to live elsewhere. The pyre suggests his unencumberdness, his transparency, the voyaging out: one can
Science & Fiction
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay What is science fiction and what can the genre give us that other genres cannot? This, of course, is to assume that science fiction is a ‘genre’ – something that has been identified, labelled and samples put in a glass jar alongside many other jars in the laboratory of literature. This however is far from the case. There are many definitions of science fiction, but there is none universally agreed upon[i]. The cynics usually refer to it as a marketing label, while enthusiasts call it by many names depending on which species of science fiction they find most sweet. Considering moreover that the term ‘science fiction’ is not in common usage until the 1930s, although coined as far back as 1851 by William Wilson, might make us a bit suspicious of the pretensions of a genre to emerge suddenly and find its niche in the genre tree. There are no “emergences” in literature – movement of language is a productive process and mutation is law. Genres can at best be perceived as mutable mobiles – they have antecedents, precursors, share family resemblances and are perpetually in transformation; even the most exemplary genre object texts are small pins on the charts and tables of literary influence. Note for instance Hugo Gernsback’s definition of ‘scientifiction’ in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, which is often understood to have launched the genre: “By scientifiction I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” (Gernsback 1926: 3) Like the narrator in Borges’ Pierre Menard, it is necessary for the reader of the new genre to know who begat who. What makes the retrospective labelling tick is not merely the pedigree, however important that might be in considerations of canonicity, but that it allows the identification of a preformation within which even the most qualitatively new becomes less bizarre. Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as the literature of “cognitive estrangement” relies equally on the balance between the estranged and the quotidian – for the radically new cannot be understood except by means of a reference to the old. While one may indeed be sympathetic to such claims, and also the attempts to give science fiction a long history going back to Ramayana and Lucian’s True History[ii], it is the specific character of the literature labelled as science fiction that is of interest to us. We might take 1851 as a watershed moment – a label first and then the genre that may be understood to fit that label. Such a model solves certain problems, such as that of chronology: anything prior may be classified as part of the same family but belonging to a different genre. It does not however resolve completely however the problem of definition. For instance, can we call Ibsen’s Ghosts or Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart novels as science fiction, simply because they deal with the now disregarded, but in the late nineteenth century regarded as ‘scientific’, theory of degeneration? There is science and there is a whole lot of fiction. But are they science fiction? Conversely, do we include theories now regarded as unscientific as science fiction? There are in fact two nested problems in the question of definition. The first is the proliferation of subtypes in science fiction, which makes it possible to label some texts as science fiction from certain perspectives and some other texts from other perspectives; a problem of inclusion and exclusion. The other problem lies in the nature of the alignment between science and fiction, insofar as the definition of science itself is unclear, which makes it impossible to label what is and what is not science fiction[iii]. By resolving (if possible) these two problems we can find the answer to our framing questions. Instead of providing an answer however, this short piece is a less ambitious attempt to identify a possible way of answering these questions. The first I believe can be addressed by means of a classificatory principle, namely that of ‘speculation’, and the second by a methodological principle that clarifies the nature of the science of science fiction. To begin with the second, constructivism or the sociological approaches to scientific knowledge provide an entry point because these focus on the manipulation of the categories of subjective and objective in the framing of scientific activity. Constructivist approaches, such of Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor and Barry Barnes, highlight the ‘theory ladenness of observation’, that is, what is observed in scientific activity is overdetermined by the theoretical perspective that one utilizes to explain the observation. The Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman’s invisible ball metaphor[iv] for scientific activity illustrates this – it is not that the explanation for the invisible ball is not a plausible one or has no connection with the observation, or that the observation itself is dubitable, though any of these is possible depending on the context, but that the explanation is a contingent one. As Bloor explains, reality as perceived through the senses is not denied by the sociologist; however, reality is under-determined by such perception: “because the area of reality being inspected under-determines the scientists understanding, an analysis of their knowledge must further assume the role of organising principles and orientations derived from elsewhere…scientists need their sensory experience of the world, and their natural inductive and deductive tendencies, but these always work through and with their culture, and that is the professional concern of the sociologist” (Bloor 1996: 841). Moreover, there is a continual attempt to establish a static picture of science in which experience and theory form a closed circle of knowledge, with one reflected in the other. Bloor argues that while empirical data does furnish experience and that the reliability of sense data is a precondition for sociological analysis, this experience alone is not knowledge. What gives experience its meaning is a theory, the “organising principles and orientations derived from elsewhere”, which is a social production, and not given along with the
And How Are You?
Arunava Sinha By Buddhadeva Bose (translated from Bengali) Sometimes I want to know how you are. When I go to sleep, when I wake up, when I drive at ninety miles an hour, when the weight of time suddenly drops after a few quick vodkas and brandies. Dawn breaks, night falls; dawn again, night again. The same way, day after day. Sometimes it feels as though something will happen. Nothing does. Day after day. Believe it or not, I look at myself in the mirror at times. When I shave? No, I think of other things then. But sometimes, alone in the room, after a bath, or before going to bed eventually, I stand face-to-face with myself, eyeball-to-eyeball. Just me, without adornment; a lump of flesh, flab and filth. Completely bald, blunt nose, bags under the eyes, a broad hairy chest, the spitting image of a powerful, aged baboon after removing the glittering false teeth. I enjoy taking off my dentures and making faces, balling up my fists – like two wild beasts poised for battle – when I open my mouth wide the darkness seems to be the road to hell. – How? I don’t even know where you are. Come, let me introduce the rest of you – this aged baboon you see is Abanish Ghoshal, with engineering degrees from Glasgow and Berlin, learnt the ropes at Ford’s factory in Detroit, now engaged in making steel at Pippalgarh. His monthly income is five thousand rupees, more or less, he has been around the entire world thrice at his company’s expense, he has to visit Japan or Germany or Sweden or Russia or America once a year. In other words, this aged baboon is a very important person. But actually I am someone else. Alas, there’s so much ugliness that the tailor can hide, so much pus that formidable degrees can conceal blandly. Fame, honour, riches, influence – all of it may have been achieved, but after that? What lies behind, covered, within? Was there really a ritual in Athens where young women would emerge naked after bathing in the sea for the ancients to select the most beautiful among them that year? But how else can beauty be judged? All we consider are the adornments. Degrees, learning, ‘qualifications’. Everyone wants to know what I can do, no one knows what I am. You know. Do you? The population of Pippalgarh is fifty thousand, everyone’s livelihood is this steel factory, their lives too, in fact. We are building the new India; creating wealth for the people, earning foreign exchange for the country, with four hundred million by our side, we are marching ahead, marching ahead. Can we ever say that the people involved in such a gigantic endeavour are not successful? But I remember you from time to time. Pippalgarh has a reputation around the country of being progressive. We have delivered radios to the homes of the workers; we have swept out cholera and small-pox; our huge cooperative store is a veritable showpiece. We have a school, a library, clubs at different levels and of different kinds, doctors, nurses, a free hospital, even a contraception clinic adjacent to the maternity home. Everyone here is happy; they work with healthy bodies, with resolve in their minds and with hope in their hearts: work goes on round the clock, smoothly; our productivity is the highest in India. We affirm life here. Do you remember that morning – those dewdrops on the grass, and the soft, tender, pink sunshine? There are hills in the distance here, a sea of earth lies grey beyond the town. There is only emptiness in the vast expanse stretching to the horizon, nothing but emptiness either in the enormous sky above. Nothing at all happens – the sun rises, the sun sets, nothing happens at all. Everyone says Mr Ghoshal works like a demon. They don’t lie; I feel no fatigue when it comes to work, I do not have the ability to rest. My routine stretches from eight to eight; I fell the day with a single blow. Yet the victory does not seem to be complete; sometimes I go back late at night – where the huge fires burn furiously, I walk around supervising things, when I come out I find the darkness thinning. There’s no need, of course, there are people specifically for this task – but this is what I enjoy. I like to think that something is happening – this pit of fire, this fierce sound, the mechanical movements of the factory-workers – all of these help me forget that I am actually someone else. And I can be seen at almost each of the innumerable parties that are thrown here in Pippalgarh – I always make an appearance, even if only for ten minutes – and if ever I feel like “letting myself go” I can put away one-and-a-half bottles of Scotch and still continue with my measured smiles, my conversation, my flirtations with the women, without breaking my stride. I am on cordial terms with everyone, but none of them means anything to me. That’s the way I like it. Like it? That’s incorrect. There’s no question of liking or disliking anything. I work – since I have nothing else. I go to parties – since I have nothing else. Nothing else. I do not have the one thing that would have meant having everything. So I have nothing. But is it even possible that I am the only one who has come to know this, but no one else has? Is it even possible that I am the only one among this fifty thousand who wonders how you are? Everyone is happy at Pippalgarh, but the happiest are the women – meaning, the wives of those “sahibs” who earn more than two thousand rupees a month. There’s a separate club for them – meaning, the “memsahibs”. There they can attempt self-improvement without the company of men: swimming,