Adda at Barda’s Shop
Amitranjan Basu [1] When I stood at the main gate of National Library and looked ahead, I got a jolt! Where did Barda[2]’s shop go? I crossed the road and came near the gate of the Zoo and discovered that really Barda’s shop is gone! A high footpath has gone toward the Zeerut Bridge and along the footpath bus stands have come up with small tea kiosks for the bus workers but Barda’s shop has simply vanished! Just can’t remember who among us had discovered this shop first. When we were finishing our schools in 1970-71, our adda brewed up in and around this inn. Barda’s shop was rather large and longish. In two rows there were about fourteen or fifteen tables with white marble tops. These tables rocked with this heavy marble tops on decade old weak legs with four darkish chairs that bore several marks of repair. Some of the chairs sheltered bugs. The road side wall was half-open and the shop was roofed with corrugated tin sheets. A paan-cigarette shop was evolved on the road side wall and the bridge-facing wall had the kitchen, in front of which the manager’s chair was placed. The manager– Barda– sat on this chair behind a shabby showcase with an Anandabazar Patrika in his hand. We used to sit on a table that faced the gate of the zoo where the shop had a small door and adjacent to that was a small banyan tree. The shop did not have any fans. Yellowish bulbs hung from the ceiling. As a whole the shop had such a characteristic look that most of the zoo visitors – who were from a humble background– liked to come and take their seats. Initially, it was Sudhansu, Nirmal and me who started the adda and Sanju joined us soon followed by Sunil, Bijay, Hiren, Kirshnaswamy and Swapan. Barring Sudhansu and Hiren, the rest of us stayed within the boundaries of National Library. The colonial name of the place is Belvedere Estate. Sudhansu was a childhood friend who stayed in the staff quarters of Birla House and Hiren stayed in the staff quarters for zoo employees, who joined us during the first year of my college. Another group from Belvedere, slightly elder to us, used to come to this shop. From this other group , few would join this adda regularly. But none other than Kanuda and Sudhansu’s elder brother Bishtu were actively engaged with the life at Belvedere. Raju-da, Nepu-da and Kamal-da – came to Belvedere after finishing their college. To me they were the first educated unemployed youth seen from close quarters. In spite of being ‘dadas’, they were liberal enough to allow us to smoke in front them and we could discuss anything under the sun with them. At times we used to join both the tables and carry on chatting over endless cups of tea. Sometimes they used to include us in their drinking party. Another group, elder than this one, had their adda in the Ureyer Dokaan (Oriya guy’s Shop) near Anderson House (now Bhabani Bhaban). For a long time, we dared not smoke in front of them. Life at Belvedere seems a time travel to me! Sirajuddoula, after capturing Calcutta from the British, named this area Alinagar. During the time of Mirzafar it was renamed as Alipore. I have read that the grandson of Aurangzeb built the first phase of the buildings. After fourteen years, Surman, a diplomat from England bought this house with the gardens from Mughal Emperor Farrukhshayar (1713-1719) and transformed into his summer palace and named it “Belvedere House.” However, Surman’s house was also put into auction and the revenue minister of Bengal Nawab, Suza Khan bought it in one lakh twenty thousand rupees. Next buyer was Warren Hastings, who bought it in sixty thousand sikkas, and after becoming the Governor General of Bengal he made it into his pleasure palace. Browsing the map of Calcutta of 1794 one can see that, a long stretch from today’s race course to Judges’ Court there is only one house engulfed by trees and the Adiganga. The Belvedere House with a huge garden full of various kinds of trees and a crescent-shaped lake formed the Belvedere Estate. In postcolonial times this house became the National Library and quarters and government employees started arriving in ones and twos. By the end of fifties of the last century a new community started emerging. People from different states settled in their temporary houses at Belvedere Estate. This Belvedere of our childhood was a space of immense curiosity and excitement. In those days gas-lights illuminated Alipore and Baker Road. The house itself had such lights in beautiful decorated stands over the railings of the wide and long staircases, both in front and on the rear side. There were also wonderful marble sculptures of European kinds that decorated the staircase. If you were standing on the top of the frontal staircase it would seem that you were standing in front of a huge water coloured landscape of a plush green, sprawling field with a gigantic Sundari tree at the corner with the crescent shaped lake embracing it from the back. What kind of tree was not there in the garden? While playing over the branches of the big banyan tree we felt that this must be bigger than the famous banyan tree at the Botanical Garden! When dusky evenings would come down by the gas-lights over the Belvedere House – it took us instantly to colonial times. In this ghostly mystic environment the stories of the spirits of sahibs and memsahibs told by the elderly guards and staff seemed all too real! Playground, Children’s Library, aimlessly loitering in the garden in a holiday afternoon, visiting the zoo whenever some new animals or birds came, or scaling the boundary walls of Agri-Horticultural Society garden to see different kinds of beautiful flowers around – all these had made our community life special. It was neither a typical
Justice in a Landscape of Trees
Rajarshi Dasgupta Homeward Bound How does a call for justice appear? When is such a call thought justified? Standing at the crossroads of 1947, as colonial rule came to end in south Asia, the Indian Left had coined a slogan: yeh azaadi jhoota hai, this freedom is lie. But the reasons did not seem very clear to them. Sixty years after, writing in support of a nuclear treaty with the US opposed by the Left, the editor of an English daily recalls how the nation was let down at the very moment of independence. Why, we may even like to think of it as a crime, throwing our hard-earned nationhood into question, is that what you call justice? The point is that such moves are always difficult to justify as they pass through the nation state towards a wider field of ethics, coming to it in response to the violence and injustice that underlie our nations. Thanks to a rich body of scholarship on the partition and refugees, today we have come to recognize the enormous carnivorous sacrifice that made India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, possible.But perhaps we have never really understood how displacement has made the very ground of the citizen subject unstable and shifting in south Asia, turning freedom into a violent force of individuation and justice already into an object of loss. It is here that an exercise of moral freedom runs into conflict with juridical propriety, where the everyday subject of experience is unplugged from the abstract citizen. In order to grasp this uncommon thread of moral freedom, we must listen to the narratives of displaced without the rush to formulate them into a rights discourse, which cannot afford to pay that singular attention required of justice in this case. My paper contends that there is a terrain of justice and moral freedom, pressing for critical recognition in the ideas of home in refugee discourses, which cannot be assembled in a talk of pure logic, but enjoys the felicity of a poetic narration. We can observe here certain forms of subjectivation of the displaced, where one need not construct the reality as it is framed in law, but as it ought to be, framed ethically, overriding the law. We shall see how this implies an escape from present – a flight into the past, as well as, a return to the responsibility of future. In this way, such exercise comes to involve a back and forth movement of thought, holding the current state of affairs against an imagined horizon of infinity, in order to judge the truth, as it were, in other times and places. The texts selected here chiefly illustrate the making of this different awareness of time and place, where moral freedom does not mean ensuring entitlements, but the performance of certain critical modes of subjectivity. In a way, this stages a trial of the modern subject on the margins of the global capital that is producing new ways of thinking about oneself today. Perhaps, it is impossible to keep in mind the historical contingencies of our freedom and respond to the query of why that freedom was untrue or inauthentic to some of us. As recent debates in political theory indicate, there is a danger in underestimating the reality of nation state in south Asia, divided on religious grounds, bordering unfriendly governments, territorially binding on people, rent apart with a seal of finality. Yet, there are overlapping surplus of disturbing memories, as there is a daily traffic across the borders of commerce and human relations, and adamant claims to belong elsewhere rather than the permissible place, which practically spells a gnawing disquiet for the region’s law and order. The displacement needed to carve up the nations and citizen subjects seems to have produced a call for justice at the very heart of the question – where should one belong, regardless of our lawful habitations, as a free subject. The examples we will look into here deal with this very theme of belongingness: how the subject of displacement needs to belong and wants to recreate a home, despite its impossibility in the strict sense of the fact. I hope the analysis will give us a clear idea of an impossible homeward bound-ness, performed through narratives that carry the sense of justice in a way that cannot be legally enforced but invested obliquely, ethically and aesthetically, although not without a sense of irony. Here we may see the ideas of home in the shifting invocations of a territory – an ancestral village very often, sometimes a keenly contested terrain of politics and history, as well as, where I will focus, at times, an elemental, enigmatic site of nature. Rather than a culturally particular location, we need to think of morphologies here, in keeping with what geographers treat as a conceptual space, we may call these invocations a theoretical landscape. Of course, there would be proper names to such places in some discourse, for a historian like Dipesh Chakrabarty, talking about this particular revisited village, or a poet like Jibanananda Das, meditating on the flora of that specific district in undivided Bengal. But we are not exactly interested in the physical-geographical locus of stated individuals in this paper. Instead, we think that despite the names of such places in memory one cannot be restricted to a solitary archive only, which holds the census and administrative data about a place. There is a sense here of other kinds of archives that record and relate differently to the sense impressions and ways of representation in the testimonies we are about to judge. The paper suggests that in keeping the interpretive possibility of such landscapes open to universal implication, we take up a difficult and challenging labour of reading. And that is the only way to understand the political aspect of what leading scholars are happy to knock down as aesthetic parley rather than engaging reality. There is no doubt that the morphology of landscapes often involve a glossing over
The Foreboding of Autumn: Aamir Bashir’s Harud
Akhil Katyal Director: Aamir Bashir Cast: Reza Naji, Shanawaz Bhat, Shamim Basharat, Salma Ashai If you work with silence as your frame, every sound gets registered. If you work with scarcity as your chosen form, every little detail is capable of a denotative surplus. Aamir Bashir takes this formal technique and builds from it his film Harud that matches, shot by shot, the gravitas of its subject, carefully ‘seeking dignity,’ as he puts it, ‘in a violent place’. Harud is set in Srinagar. It is about a Kashmiri Muslim family coming to terms with the disappearance of their son Tauqir. The film takes place in that breach which refuses to close when someone in the family is enforcedly disappeared by a power that is almost beyond redressal. In each shot, Tauqir’s younger brother Rafiq and his parents Fatima and Yusuf are seen attempting to adequately mourn a loss that they do not know the final shape of, that they necessarily cannot know the final shape of. When someone dies, you mourn their death. The certainty of their going away is the vehicle of the mourning. When someone disappears, even that certainty is withheld from you. You live a kind of daily life in which no hope remains uncontaminated with despair, where the object of your loss is both perpetually retrievable and permanently lost at the same time. In such an anchorless world, we see Rafiq and his family trying to find directions, but as if with a compass that is missing the lodestone. When he was asked to give a brief synopsis of the film to an interviewer in 2010, the year this film released, Bashir summarized thatHarud, or Autumn, ‘is about decay, it’s about psychological decay, and you see this…through the family, primarily through the protagonist…Rafiq’. The film could not have released in any other year. 2010 was its necessary place in time. It was in the summer of that year when this decay, so acutely shared among so many in the valley, transformed and erupted from the hands of thousands of Kashmiri boys on the streets of Srinagar, most as young as Rafiq, who picked up stones and hurled them at police and paramilitary forces on whose shoulders the Indian occupation in Kashmir rests. The film begins with this real time footage of stone-throwing. These young men on the streets provide the film its epigraph. 2010 was also when the actual story of the disappearance of the Nadihal men – a story more terrible because it mirrored many more like it – had broken out. A Special Police Officer had offered army jobs to three young men in the Nadihal village. Mohammad, 19, an apple farmer, Riyaz, 20, a herder and Shahzad, 27, a laborer were given a paltry sum of money and were taken to a remote army camp in Machil where nine soldiers shot them down. This was done to claim the reward money that the Indian state offers for the killing of ‘militants’. In the script that the army wrote for its press release shortly after the massacre, this herder, laborer and apple farmer were found in the possession of three AK-47s, one Pakistani pistol, ammunition, cigarettes, chocolates, dates, two water bottles, a Kenwood radio and 1,000 Pakistani rupees. In the last quarter of a century in Kashmir, if a young man goes missing, you shudder to imagine the possible consequences he or his body has met, what official script he or it has been instrumentalized towards. The endless speculation makes you fall apart, the cost of conflict comes home with every living second without him who has vanished. This is why Harud patiently bears out its each second. The film makes of allocating screen time to objects, scenes and characters an art, marking affiliation with how time looks like when in grief. The camera focuses long on the face, particularly the scorching eyes of Rafiq, played by Shanawaz Bhat. It rests gently and with an always uneasy calm on landscapes. It saddles together the unmatched beauty of the valley with its fragility, with the constant fear that attends the streets of downtown Srinagar and their inhabitants. This constancy of fear hangs like a fog which obscures the legendary beauty of the valley. In fact, the film, as Bashir claims, is about the exact opposite of beauty, it is ‘about decay’, that particular passage of time when beauty disappears slowly. Autumn for Bashir is both a season and a metaphor for this decay that takes its toll almost silently. No matter how beautiful that time of the year is, ‘in Kashmir,’ Bashir says, autumn ‘is also a precursor to dark winters’, one has to prepare for them, one has to be ready to cope with them. In one of the recurring sequences of the film wherein the camera follows Rafiq closely as he vends newspapers at dawn in Srinagar, he cycles past a shop of wrist-watches that has not yet opened. ‘Timex,’ the shop front reads, ‘Life is Ticking.’ Bashir keeps his screen time patiently ticking, every moment pregnant with apprehension, till it explodes in the last shot. But the opposite of fear also stalks the valley, that is, the real antonym of fear, not tranquility, but courage. In 1991, Parveena Ahangar’s son, like Tauqir, had also disappeared. He was at his uncle’s home where he had been studying when he was picked up by the Indian security forces during a search and cordon exercise and was taken away in a van. Javaid Ahangar was nineteen then and Parveena never heard of him again. Through these years the grief has remained as raw as the day she lost him. She went from every police station she could find, every interrogation centre, hospital and camp looking for him. During these searches, she met those who were her exact mirror images, scores of parents and relatives of men and boys who had been enforcedly disappeared in Kashmir. She invited them to make this search for their loved ones a collective one and in 1994 the
Abstract, Abstraction
Swapan Chakravorty The primary problem with the adjective ‘abstract’ stems from its etymology. It derives from the Latin ab, meaning ‘from’, and trahere, ‘drawn away’. In other words, it carries a sense of being withdrawn, separated, extracted. When Locke spoke of ‘abstract general ideas’, he meant a process of detaching, or abstracting properties from something until one arrived at its concept. A more recent philosopher such as Frege would think of abstraction partly in Lockean terms: when characteristics are withdrawn, one arrives at ‘abstract concepts’: Suppose there are a black and a white cat sitting side by side before us. We stop attending to their colour, and they become colourless…We stop attending to position; they cease to have place, but still remain different. In this way, perhaps, we obtain from each of them a general concept of Cat. By continuous application of this procedure, we obtain a more and more bloodless phantom. (1) The phrase ‘bloodless phantom’ suggests a diminution of life, a loss of that sanguine vigour which supposedly characterizes art. It is in this way, for instance, that one uses the phrase ‘abstract thinking’ as one that is at odds with the aesthetic way of perception. Yet, extracting properties from an object may also be interpreted as leading toward an object that stands on its own, which is conferred being without the need for extraneous significance, likeness or expression. That is, ‘abstract art’ may be seen as non-figurative, ‘not a depiction, not having a significance outside itself.’(2) Andrew Harrison has drawn attention to the second sense in which one might use the word ‘abstract’ when discussing art. While the first idea of pure abstraction eliminates process and becoming, the second interprets abstraction as leading from one point to another: ‘this second concept has essentially to do with process, normally that marks a stage within, towards the end of, a mental, or interpretative, process.’ Abstraction in the latter sense is ‘bound up with the idea of meaning and with the matter of making meaning.’ (3) The usual sense in which the word ‘abstract’ is made to qualify art is seldom Lockean. Rather, it is most often used simply to mean non-representational, that ‘which is not a picture of anything at all’. (4). However, if we stick to the Lockean roots, the abstraction is not wholly separable from the object of which it is an abstract. This is the reason some painters object to the term as ambiguous, if not useless. The painter Paul Ziff writes: An abstract is a summary, an abstracted person is one which is withdrawn or separated, while an abstracted watch is one that has been purloined. An abstract of a document is supposed to convey the substance, the gist, of the document; in consequence, an abstract is not wholly independent of that which it is an abstract of: the character of the abstract is dependent on and determined by that of its original. But if I abstract myself from company, I turn from this company: it need no longer enter the purlieus of my concern. Ziff points to the Janus-like quality of the adjective when applied to art: it leads one to and away from something. In some ways, this is similar to (though not the same thing as) the ambivalence discussed by Harrison: abstraction as being, and abstraction as becoming. I am an abstract artist…Yet my works are not abstracted from anything; they are not derived from anything; they stand in no relation to anything that I have turned away from. The term is wrong, or if not wrong, it will not do…I find it implausible to suppose that an Alber’s ‘Square’ is abstracted from, or derived from, or related in any significant way to anything other than the work itself and its own creation. (5) Yet, this for major artists could be more ‘concrete’ or ‘real’ than depiction. The word ‘abstract’ applied to his art would irritate Constantin Brancusi. He considered his art ‘real’, for the real is not his likeness but in the idea: ce qui est réel n’est pas l’apparence mais l’idée, l’essence des choses. Brancusi was in some ways a Platonist, and influenced by the ideas of the Rumanian Orthodox Church and Tibetan Buddhism. (6) However, the co-incidence of the ‘real’ or ‘concrete’ with art that strikes one as non-representational (or ‘abstract’) needs no recourse to the ideal forms of Plato or the enlightenment of Brancusi’s other major source of inspiration, the eleventh-century Buddhist poet Milarepa. In 1930, Van Doesburg suggested the word ‘concrete’ for art that abjured figuration, and Hans Arp and Wassily Kandinsky backed the term later in the decade. (7) To ‘abstract’ may be seen to be a move from figuration to ‘pure’ object. Hence, Hilla Rebay’s misleading term ‘nonobjectivism’ caused some confusion in Europe and America in the 1930s.(8) The best instance of the focal co-incidence of the abstract and the concrete are the sparse writings of Piet Mondrian on his own work.9 In 1942, Mondrian wrote of his discovery that science has shown that ‘time and subjective vision veil the true reality’ (p. 15), and that the visual arts may redeem that truth through ‘pure plastics’ (p. 10). The previous year, he had written in essay ‘Abstract Art’: In the course of centuries, the culture of plastic art has taught us that this transformation is actually the beginning of the abstraction of natural vision, which in modern times manifests itself as Abstract art. Although Abstract art has developed through the abstraction of the natural aspect, nevertheless in its present evolution is more concrete because it makes use of pure form and pure colour. (p. 28) Mondrian moves close to Harrison’s sense of abstraction in art as involved in the process of making meaning, and at the same time tries to remove the stigma of the ‘bloodless phantom’ by arguing on behalf of the concrete vitality of pure plastics. In an astute move, he transports the word ‘objective’ to a different ontological plane. Abstract is objective in trying to capture the reality veiled by subjective vision, but is non-objective in Rebay’s loose sense of the non-figurative: We come to see that the principal problem in plastic art is not to avoid the representation of objects, but to be as objective as possible. The name ‘Non-Objective Art’ must have been created with a view to the object, [but] that is in another order of ideas. (p. 28) The antonym ‘objective-abstract’ is as misleading, wrote Mondrian in another 1941 essay, as the paired opposites ‘realistic-abstract’. In the essay titled ‘Liberation from Oppression in Art and Life’, he wrote that realistic art is taken to spring from aesthetic feelings aroused