The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Discourse in India (Soas Studies on South Asia)

SOAS Srudics in South Asia

The Unhappy Consciousness BANKlMCHANDRA CHATIOPADHYA Y AND THE FORMATION OF NATIONALIST DISCOURSE IN INDIA

SUDIPTA KAVIR.\]

DELHI

OXFORD BOMBhY

UNIVERSITY' Chl.CUTTh 1995

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Contents ISBN 0 19 SoJ294 X

vii A Taste for Transgrenion Limina~ty in the Novels of Bankimchandra Chattop•dhy•y

Typ
2

Humour and the Prison of Reality Kamalakanta and the Secret Autobiography of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyoy

27

3

The Myth of Praxis Construction of the Figure

72 of~'?-" in K!~'!acaritra

4

Imaginary History

5

Tragedy, Irony and Modernity

158

Notts a11d ~ftrtnas

169

/ndtx

190

107

Preface h is :olways difficult to make a proper accounting of intellectu:ol debts. In writing this book my grutest debt is to Partha Chatterjee for showing me his work on .ution:olism in its very early Stages. h showed me how interestingly nation:olist tCl
1

A Taste for Transgression Lirninality in the Novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay

In his work ~n ~rtist creates a world. Two distinct types of questioru·QO be uked about this wodd of his. First, what kind of a world is this-what is its structure, its limits of possibility, the inner logic of its working? Second, how did this world that the artist created relate to the world in which he lived?1 In thinking about literature it is difficult to keep these twO types of questions dearly apart, but they ~re ~nalytiC2lly distincL The second set of questions reprnent more the historians' concerru; the first is textual, that is, the answer to them must be found within constructs that arc internal to texts2 This essay seeks to understand the structure of the world in Bankirnchandra's fiction. It can be argued that to speak of'the world' in both cases is misleading; because the two 3tC not worlds in the same sense. Indeed, realists may assert that it is only the second which really qualifies to be a world, by virtue of something like the doctrine ~hat the world is all that is the case. There could be disputes about whether the world of the artist is part of aU that is the case or not. That in turn wiD raise questions about the ontology of the work of art and the language we use to describe them.> Without going into that class of questions, we can still see that even if both are 'worlds', even if they are both 'real', they could neither be real nor worlds in quite the same sense. What I wish to stress is tbat it is seriously wrong to deny the createdness of this world. There is something odd about the extreme realist position invoked often by historians rummaging in literuy tats for !llstorical material which holds tbat art can only reOect or play variations on reality. Indeed, the idea of 'playing a variation on reality' is a paradox for the realistic theory of art to solve. For the idea that one can 'play with' reality implies that one need not 1:1ke it u given, and suggests the possibility of an alternative relation to it. What we try to see in the artist's art is not wbat he sees, but the way he sees it. His way of seeing the world cannot be an objecr of his sight; but for others that is the proper thing to see, for otherwise we lose the distinction between art and the world.•

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II Taste for TransgrrJsion

Consciousness

As a serious artist, Bankimclundn created an artistic wodd of great internal vm«y. He was extremely sensitive to possibilities inside language, and controUed its resources with an admirably deli~te precision. He could create inOections at the touch of a word-o skill which may have come down to him liom the classical Sanskrit tradition he admired, in which apart &om a fictive imagination, a highly refined linguistic sensibiliry was considered a prerequisite for litenry creation. Bankim's world Ius a sunny and a dark side. The lighted side of his world is more easily seen, because he was one of the most accomplished writers of humour in the language.5 It is not proper, however, to see his humour as merely an inverted form of a philosophical melancholy. It seems to me dut the unifying vision, the underlying experience which runs through and structures his fictional art reveals a cbrk vision of the world. By attending to this aspect ofhis art we might be able to see a structure in his world-view which may help us undeatand better his mind and its engagement with history. Some themes and problems ocC:ur in his novels too frequently to be dismissed as merely inciden121 attributes. Indeed, I think it an be shown dut one of these centnl problems is constantly re.6 ned, given a central and clearer structure as his art evolves, moving from the margins of his artistic curiosity to the narntive centre. This is a concern with the liminal. 6 Bankimclundr:l must have been long intrigued by this problem of liminaliry; and must have felt that he was in the presence of an ontological questiOJ!. Bankim's centr.al philosophical concern could be described in two ways. Stories of his novels often tum around a conllict between two inevitabilities, two things that a~e cquaUy necesury truths of human life. A social world required ddinitions, a kind of basic social map which defined eennissions and prohibitions. At the same time, there are the elemental drives of human nature which these social constructs are meant to discipline into reasonably safefonns, but hardly an. The social and monl worlds in which men actuaUy live are made-up of these two dissimilar and contradictory clements- the desites which make men and the controls ~vhich make sociery. Much of Bankim's fictional movement arises liom this central conflict-between the inevitabiliry of moral orders and the inevitabiliry of their tnnsgrcssion.7 This could be seen in another way. Bankim's novels almost always c:enttc on a play around the liminal. usuolly a liminaliry of monls, constructing fictional situations which pose large, often unanswerable, questions to constituted moral theory. But this concern with moralliminaliry is not the shallow kind of monlizing one often found in Victorian novelists, who painted a morally placid social universe to frame a dr3ma of muted desires, where transgressions ore mere misunderstandings. 1\t the end of the story the symmetry of the moral order is restored. Bengali fiction by and lar&e aGcepted the narntive norm of this Victorhn rype.

3

Banlcim's concern with moraliry is of a very different kind M 1· · f d h' b · · ora rry rs o won e~ to rm ecause it seems to touch the ontological, tO reveal a rom>ntrc >nd fearsome darkness at the centre of the world_ When the firs~ sha~e of this fictional world was being etched in, at its moment of crea.non, rn th~ first scene of his first novel, his first character saw the world m a dark lrght. It is not his seeing that made the world cbrk; t!'"t was . the. way the world was. What Jagatsinha saw in the darkerung everung an the opening .scene of Durgcinandini was, 1 suspect, more than. an external landscape; rt was a glimpse of the nature of the world. h drd not represent something contingent, it exprCS$Cd a necessiry.

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I l ·I I

The nigbt feU before he could cross the immeme distance of the field Th sky ~w dark with bbek clouds. The douds of night made the hori.;,n :. dark rt was ~fficu!t to ~de on. The traveller m>dc his way in the err.rtic light o~thc occasronallightn~ng. Soon a violent summerstonn broke out with grot voole~ce, and a duck n:rn began to fall. The honeman lost .U sense ofdirection >nd did not know wluch w>y to proce
~we ~ow•. he eventu~lly blundered in this r>iny night into an encounter \VIth hJS dcsttny. That rs how ,human destiny is met. The wa~ he meets his destiny--the face ofTilot~mi-is symbolic. He meets ~er m an. aba~doned temple, in a place of ambiguous-holiness, in secret, m the ?tckenng uncertain light of a bmp which soon went out m a gust of wmd. What a way to meet one's destiny, to have the first glunpse of the face which would change one's life! Or is that the way it os met, always? Anyway, it wos a faul bndscape. Its gloom and foreboding coul~ have come from one of the romantic paintings of the unequ~l meen?g of man and the forces of nature. Like them, it seems to bear a dual s1gn1ficance. was not merely an event occurring in an individual m>ry, not the des~ny of this individual man, nor the darkness of this rainy mght. There was _another' night which stood beyond tlris night, anotherdarkness beyond Its darkness. M in the paintings of the Romantics the connngent, th~ event depicted, w•s significant precisely because i; expressed somethmg larger than itself. it revealed the nature of the world It was a m~taphysical inscription; and the storm of that night was th~ storm of eJUStence. It ~s also a landscape of the creator's mind. This is ~ow he thou~t the umverse wa.-tense, disorderly, nocturnal, swept by mcomprehensoble diSOrders. It was not accidental that faci"l; :h~t disorder w~ a man, ~ r~pres~ntative in Hindu theory, of the principle of order. This was an mnmanon of the condition of humaniry. The general question of liminality seems to have fascinated Bankim as a noveliSt, though th~ form of thi$ lirninaliry, its social context. varied • great
!t

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A Tostt for Transgression 4

of two tvolving relationships: his own love for Tilottami and Ayc:ia's growing lovt for him.• Somttimes it is suggestM that the boldness of the plot is derivative: for the similarity of its narntive stnK:ture with Scott's Jvanluw is too plain . I lind an irony in the ride of Banlcim's novel: l>oth women can be caUed tquaUy appropriately the daughter of the nuster of the casde. 9 Ayda overshadows Tilottami and Jagaainha. It is her pmion for jag11tsinha which holds the story together, makes it move, to use Todorov's phrnse, from the first adjectival equilibrium to the second. 10 The play about liminaliry is her play. The concern for liminaliry seems to me quite central to Bankim's plot : wilat w as interesting to Bankim the novelist is the &ct that the ways of love are inscrutable, and the possibility that it CQn arise unbidde n between people who are separatM by an uncrossoble social distance. The limiu which separate Ayda from Jagatsinha are not baniers pbcM there by the war; these are deeper prohibitions that separate two religiow communities. Yet that does not stop the possibility of romantic passion from really existing. The contradiction os between two aspects of the relation-what is humanly possible is socially unfeasible." The structure of Do:rgdna11dini demonstrates that iu narrative is a play on liminaliry, a panicubrly dangerous one for a first novel, so much~ that even Bankim did not play with it ever after, which even he in his maturity, perhaps, considered too dangerous. The way Bank.im's thought moves after Dougeinandini can be seen as both a radicalization and a dcradical· iz ation. Seen from one point of view, his fiction construction geu less radical, in the sense th>t the limit between two religions raises the spectre of a great transgressive act, much greater, if it had been crossed, than liaisons with widows or otherwise desirable but unattainable women within the confines of Hindu socicry. In that sense, Banlcim retreau from this k.ind of a radical theme. In a different, more formal sense however, he radic'aliz.es his problem, because what appears as a mere possibility, a mere hint of a stonn, only the idta of a rransgression. becomes in bter novels a series of rtol transgressive acu. Ayda does not enter into an aCiual transgression; Bankim's subsequent heroines aU do: Kunda, R.ohini, Sri, lndiri all enter into real transgressive acts. What causes this play around lirninaliry is the conflict between desire and denial, desire seen as man's (or mosdy woman's) elemental inclinations, and denial as the system of prohibitions constructed by society tQ bind and channel them, and render them safe. In the world of his creation, which he slowly constructs with thineen other novels after D11rgdnandini, this struggle between the brittle creations of sociery and the waves of human desire has the central place. However, its form changes. C haracters who enact this drama vary. The play is constructed differently in each case; but there is an underlying uniry of philosophic concern about this question, this dark possibility of transgressiori.

5

17tt Unhappy Comtiomncss I have earlier caUM this a philosophic problem stemming from morality. It is important to see exactly what this means. It is not a moral problem in the narrow sense. A moral judgement often judges an act or a life against rules set down by a particular moral system. and evaluates them ethically as right or wrong. But the k.ind of judgement this rype of story-telling invites is very di((erent. What we come to reflect upon and judge is less the m oral quality of an act than the nature of morality itself. and the rightness and wrongness of having this kind of a system of right or wrong. The feeling left in '!.1 at the end of the story is not one of m oral horror at the presumption of Aydi's transgressive love for Jagatsinha, but a stealthy fundamental sympathy. To use another philosophic tenn, we get a tragic taste of finitude. II is not an empirical question ofjudging an act against a set of moral rules; but reflecting upon the necessity of having to judge, of having moral codes which prohibit inclinations, impose an impoverishing format on human liv!;S. destroying happiness by interdicts. 12 We come not to say how wrong AyeSa's emotions are, but how wrong is a world in which such feelingr have to be seen as wrong. It creatcs-«o use Rene Girard's argument-not a sense of wrongness of the act, but of wrongness of the world-the basic emotion of the tragic. In one sense, it explores the behaviour of a 'problematic individual', but by the skill of an it accomplishes a subtle transformation of this enquiry, and turns it into a sense of the problematiciry of the world iuelf.ll Liminaliry of a related but somewhat different son arises for the first time in Bank.im's third novel, Mrnalinl, 14 a story without much narrative complexity. Two stories are wo~en together simply by the accident of time and space. The protagonists of both stories happen to live in Nabadwip when the evenu of tloe narrative unfold. An outer. structure is formed by the tide story of M !'lilini and Hemcandra, the deposed crown prince of Magadh, seelcing revenge against the Muslim despoi.l ers of hi.s &ther's kingdom. His characru does not display any remarluble qualiry except a muscular unintelligence which causes MrniJiru much avoidable suffering.•s Within the story ofM!'Iiliru and Hemcandra, there is an inset of a rernad::able second narrative which reveals all the basic elements of Banlcim's metaphysical search for the nature of the liminal. Gaud, an independent lcingdom of Bengal, is ruiM fonnally by iu feeble old king, La~ansen. Actually, the man who rules in name of the old k.ing is P.Supati, an extraordinarily able Brahmin, a schemer, above ordinary moral scruples, constantly plotting violent d eeds for the sake of power. At the centre of his personality is an intense and interesting frustration. H e loves tloe daughter of a local priest, of vague antecedents, Manoramawoman of surpassing beauty. (A constant feature of Bank.im's fiction: I think it is not just a matter of literary conventions which did not allow unspectacular women to be o bjects of art: they had to be naturnl masterpieces to find a place in artistic ones. Bur there. may

6

Tht Unhappy Consciol4ntsS

be • deeper philosophic point: they have to symbolize the power of d1eir sex, their &tal annc:tion; for they 2fways represent the invibtion of the liminal; their beauty is 2 marie of their being expressions of 2 principle, somet!Ung larger and more irucrubble th2n themselves.) Not!Ung is known of Manor21lli's life except that she h2d lost her husband wd was 2 young widow, the symbol in Hindu society of both artnction and interdiction. Bankim invests her 6gure with 21! the mysteriousness that the Hindu religious and cultural traditions ch2raeterize a woman with-2 contradictoty personality fluctuating between the serious and the pbyful, 2 cleor imeUect and childish innocence and, above all, • masterful capacity to use precisely dtis duality of her personality to keep Pasupati at bay.•• In the end, Paiupati dies, unable to control his destiny though he was perh2ps the most competent of rational players of his time, showing to us one face of fate. 17 Paiupati experiences 2 consuming passion for Manonmi, which docs not bring her to him. Wlu:n he dies, 2 victim of his own diplomacy, she is still disbnt, unatbined. At the end of the novel, it is reveoled that Manor21lli was not a widow; she was in f2c1, P.Supati's wedded wife; but be \Y2S kept in the dark about this by 2 &Jse interpretation of 2n ascrologcr's forecast_,, Here we 6nd a man and a woman bound together by two distinct rebrions simultaneously, and the relation between the two rel.2tions is contradictory. The first is the relation of marriage, the socially sanctified form of desire. The second is a socially unsancti6ed form of passion, something dark and noctum~. something that threatens the mapping and the whole orchitecture of the social world. Obviously, these two relations symbolizing two forms of desire, are contradiCtory in the social world that Ban kim too!< 2s given, the map ofmorol order provided by the Hindu tndition. Every structure of its kind is defined by its basic antinomies, the central de6rtitions which must be held in pbce if the entire strucrure of secondary de6rtitions is not to coll2pse in confusion. Certainly, within Hinduism the exclusion between wife and mistress is on antinomy of this kind. Within t!Us structure, they 2re exclusive of eoch other, in the sense th2t if one exists, the other connot. The same womon connot be both 2t the some time to the same m2n. •• Seen from this ongle, P.Supati is actually Manoro.III3's husband, but he is ~o. at least potentially, the dangerous mougressor. He should have h•d Manonmi 2s his wife, but is reduced by circumstances to desire her as a mistress. In a sense, the refore. in this curious story we find an overby, a

confusion of the two antithetic de6nitions-
A Taste for Transgrtsslon

7

desire; he did not &JJ into actual 'sin'. We shall see that this Oaw would be rectified in IndiTii by a more radical construction of the namtive. !t _seems ~o ~e that what is implicit in this extnordinary plot is an arusuc enqucry mto the ontology of social relations. Is not the _artist asking through the story what soci•l relatioou ore, and what constitutes morol Judgement about them? But wh2t kind of thing is a rebtion of this social-moral kind? Mter all , the sexual relation between two individuals is a fairly simple affair. Its mysteries are not philosophical. It is free of the p~oblenu_tic and elusiv: quolity of the social descriptions that could be goven_of 11. Moral and unmoral are social descriptions. TI1ey presuppose a so~oety whoch chooses one universe of mo ral discourse among many posstble ones. Mo~ descriptions, being wife or being mistress, because these, 2frer all, are not mere slltcs of affilirs, are not such simple things. What u reaUy added on to the sheer behavioun.l relation between two individuals for it to tum into something morally acceptable or condemnable? Some would perhaps object that this questioning of lintinality was not part of the novelist's intentions. Intention, however, is on odd and surprisingly complex maner, particularly when applied ro artistic texts. Surely it is odd to suggest that such a momentous questioning of the limitS of the mo~ order he accepted was an entirely non-deliberate affi>ir that he did not see in this ndical sense what he was doing. An acciden; that h2ppens in seven novels is an extraordinary accident indeed! What is sometimes said of painters and artistS is also true of novelists, ~nd of Dan kim. Anists often seck a perfect re~ization of a problem or an •mage. Leonardo, Freud said, sought the perfect rendering of that mysterious beginrting ofa smile--through the remarkable consistency ofhis painted women.20 Bankim seems to have had a similar obsessiveness with the PO:O~lem of duality of relationships, i.e., the same e~ppiri~ relation being clrgoble for two contradictoty descriptions, until he reached the cleorest and the most extreme form in the otherwise unspeetacubr novel, JndGii. By coaunoo consent, lndiTii is not one ofBankim's best .;ovels whether judged in purely aesthetic terms or by the normal criteria of e~ceUence ofth~ novel fo~ The st~ry which holds these inciden!S together is highly contnved, a senous flaw m construCtion given the ideals of reolist art that Banlcim ~on_siStendy pursued. But his is a pren2ui~istic realism. Linearity of ~•rn_to~e os the norm here; he indulges in 2n old-12shioned story-telling, quote drsnnct from the perspectiv~ experimenwism of some of his own later novels like Rajani. 21 The basic trouble with the story is its unreality. O ne con uke it seriously only through a wiiJjng suspension of disbelief on crucial points. Even if the robbery is credible, though the daughter of a wealthy family would perhaps go out somewhat better protected in d1ose unsetded times, India's subsequent run of uninterrupted good

A 8

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9

Unhippy Consriounrm

fortune is hordly so. lndirii is lucky in meeting • Brahmin who apparcnt!Y ~xim for the explicit purpose of helping girls in distress. She J.S lucky tn getting an employer like Suhisini. She is incredrbly lucky m the ~hance of her husband's susceptibility to physical be>ury and her ~ron ~f the exact kind that Batters him, and particularly the fact that thas potcntJ>I was not olready exploited by ony pr~ccding cook in his life. Ycot it is difficult $omehow to say that Indira is entirely unrealistic. One finds pleasure in Bankim's characteristic observation of the snull thin~ of domestic life. The realism of a story is, after all, a rather complex alfaar. It is not just a matter of the plot, the sequence of even~ which constitute the movement of the story from one point of equahbnum to the next. If we use Todorov's distinction, the story is unrealistic. in its 'verb' asp~ct, but ~ntirely credible in its '•djectives'. All thOS<: orcumstanc~ wh.ich move the story from one equilibrium to another are unconvmcmg, but the st2tes of equilibrium which it depicts, when the story does not ~ove, are characterized by 20 undeniable sociol rc•lism. It as an enmely unhkely chain of events in an entirely likely world. One realiry it depicts with particular conviction-the world of women in the ordinary bhadralolt household, and how different the women's sense of the world is from that of the men's which is ordinarily taken to be the self-evidently 'right', normal view of these thin_gs. It shows consequently, the obliqueness of the feminine vision. In thas sense, the skrl~ul use of languoge in the dialogues pbys a very significant p•rt; •nd not •codenully. dialogues constitute a brge part of the novel. Justifi•bly. Indira will. figure prominently in any discussion on the development of the .B~ng2b hterary language. Bankim's fictionol work is rmrk~d by an astonJShmg openness and experimentalism in language usc. Quate deliberately, he g>ves us a reprieve from the conventional onc-dimensionaliry of fictional bngu•gc, the monotony of a novel all written in one bnguage--:eather the formal or the colloquioJ.22 His bnguage is always full ~f surpnses: It changes ·~ its key, its tone, its refinement and coorseness, Its symbohsm..lnde:d, ." is quite distinct from the language of other contemporary wnters Ill tts abiliry to usc coarser linguistic forms selectively, .somet~rng that Togore, for instance, never docs. Language inside his ficuon shafts constantly between levels, changing with great sensitivity to contexts. Thus the play of language odds to the constant play of the plot, between fomul a~d informal language, betwee n high and low, the language of the ceremomal and the spo!'taneous, of men ond women, of the h~me and the office, Jangu•ges of description and oi diologue, the author s language ond the characters' language, the character's bnguoge varying ~ccording to what kind of character it is. Curiously, there are two way~ m whJCh language could be said to have been used well in fiction: one as • subtle and latent use where the optness oflinguistic expression makes us nearly forget the presence oflanguoge, where languogc nukes its presence transporent. The

other sryle presents languoge with on unforgettable tangibiliry where the 'rustle of language', iiS sounds, its ploy, its surprises, neve.r allow us to forget that whot is happening is h•ppening inside language where the semantic is never able to eclipse the aural. Bankim's usage is of course unmistakably of the second kind. Through language Bankim is able to realize in the novel the kind of change of scene and alteration of perspective one usually Gnds in· a drama, in the constant Grst-personness of the dialogue. In a purely 'formal sense, Bankim's novels have a mix of drama. His fiction does not have the inevitable narrative length of novels ./ but has the compactness arising out of a condensation of 2ction and movement more akin to drama. Th.is technique oflanguage use however was not hew. In this he was foUowing an established tradition of classical Sanskrit ploys. In Sakunt4/4m, for instance, there is a careful matching of character •nd the weight ofbnguoge used, moving from the ornate fo~ languoge of hermits and the king to the vernacular prakrt spoken by women. Evidently, this performs a duol function: it makes conversation realistic, but it also works as a kind of linguistic indexing, alerting the audience to the symbols of status. Befote .Bankim, in Bengoli Gction two rypes of language use were common, both, in the sense I am using the term, one-dimensional. A more conventional sryle could be found in Vidyasagiir who used a heavy, fomul language for both narrative and dialogue, the bnguage of the narrator and of the characters, an internal and external bnguage. 23 There was however a dissenting tradition in the use of coUoquial .Bengali in A/Qitr Ch4rtr Duliil and Hutom Ptniiir Naldii. z• Both types however stuck to the unity of the internal and external language and are quite different from Bankim's style.25 He uses a beovy, formal, but extremely resourceful / language for the narrator--which could reoch into the riches of Sanskrit gra~r; and a colloquial idiom for his speaken. varying thiS context sensitively. By implication, this creates a distinction between the spontaneity oflife and the conventionality of narrative. Context-scnsitiviry of language used in fiction is to be se.e n in two ways. It is sensitive to both situations and octors. Language used by men and women is idiomatically different. Apart from the fictive pretence of lndirii being an autobiographical novel, and therefore the bngu•ge of the narrator being i~distinguishoble from the language of the central character, the novel is linguistically most remarkable, for it takes the culturally neglected colloquial Benpli of the kitchen 26 and pbces it right at the centre stage of high literature. In that sense, it ccrta.inly constitutes a landmark in Bengali fiction. Titis leads to on internal transformation of the genre Bankim had founded. It is a dramatically undramatic novel, a start~ng departure from dae Gothic plots of Durgdrrandini and Mrniilirri. and equally distant, though in a different way, from the tales of nemesis within his social novels. Indira is an undramatic novel except m its

The Unhappy Consdousnw

A TtUtt for Trarugrtssion

unconvincing lint section and the even less convincing l:ut act; perlups its drama is of a different !rind. Indeed while ~he ~thers. are n~>Vels of action this is a novel which explores relationships, m which acnons are neglig\bJe 2nd exter=l. Wlut luppens goes on in the kitchen o r its ~ viciniry. At any rate, it rarely moves out of the andatmaha~ the women s sanctuuy within the Bengali household, except for some forays to moc.k at that lugubrious symbol of the ·formal, w~emized outside world, the perennial object ofBank:im's ridicule-coloma! cou~. . Some interesting allegories could ~ fou~d o.n .this. level. There •s at play a caricatured version of the phil~sop~1c dis~ncno~ berwe.en male and female principles, a serious enough 1dea m ongmal ~mdu ph•losophy but adapted by the imitative Victorianism o.f the babu mto one between an all-!mportant outside world and an uru~porta~t home. The bab~ version, the rationaliry of the male and ~~nnm~ntalJSm of the fc~e, JS of course a caricature of the original rradJOona!Jdea; and there IS eVIdent justice in its being caricatured in rum. It shows up the world-consurrung pretensions and delusions ofthe babu, the ineffectualiry of the subordination he wishes to impose on Others who live around ~· Men repr~ent, in this very masculine of myths, the outside_ world ~f we1ghry and mrncate decisions, women the uncomplicated sentunental•ty of th~ ho~seh~ld. It is men who bold the world in order, and stop it fro":' dissolVIng mto a confusion of indulgence and tears, a stereotype tlut nu~<~:~e-class. women commonly internalized and enacted. Banki.m wished to. ndicule thu s1mple dichotomy of the babu by asserting a Shaw-like t~em of women bemg the prime, instinctual, if indirect, makers of decJSJons. Th.•s may, ~~ a deeper level, be related to a point about the play of su~altem•ncs of ~a no us kinds. Banlcim gestures often in his novels, to the ab;:~tness o~ ~e b~bu, his utter inconsequentiality in the office world of Bnnsh adrrurusrrauoJ~, a world which he can give o ut to be h is only by d1ssembbng. For. t~1s babu, this sovereign rationalist master within his ho~ehold, 1S a Muo~m Gud in his office: He can hide his social subaltem•ry only on condinon of the woman's domestic subaltemity, on condition she does not lcnow anyt.h ing about the world outside. Still, ofien she lcnows; s~e sees through his pretence of rationaliry. control and power.r> But she ss a crea~e of the repressive Hindu middle-class household, and is adept at ~e ~linc:aJ use of pretence against oule power. H er subtlety creates a s•~non m which the babu does not understand tlut she understands. ThiS leads to 20 ironic inversion of relations. Eventually, it is nol the voluble ":e~tem­ ized rationalist male who represents the principle of autonomy; n JS she who, inside her household fortress, remains hidden and culturally unconquered . · 1 Language is thus intimately related to the social contrasts m the comp ex world that stretches between the lcitchcn "-?d the court. In the world .of his novels, diis dichotomy st:lnds for nuny thmgJ; several other dichotorrues

are superscribed o n this b:uic scheme. Men are more fomuJ. ceremonious, otlen to the point of being ridiculous; women are spontaneous, without ./ worldly pretensions, a cont:ra.st reflected with particular clarity in the many unequal contests in KarruJ/Okont
10

II

12

'T/u

Unl1•ppy Consciousness

their husband's family in late odolexence. On the way hersmoU cntouroge is set upon by a g;mg of exceptionaUy law-abiding robbers. Their sense of the limits to looting practices introduced by the English rule of bw is admirably precise. She is robbed of everything including her expensive sari. An inexperienced and youthful robber suggesu that she is too pretty to be left behind; but a senior coUeague advises professiorwism, and demands that they do not mix business with pleasure. After aU, they were now part of the efficiently administered Company regime. A rationalist sense of social differentiation and strict rules of profession had spread to even the more aggressive trodes. Common robbers in Beng21's forests were not immune from the spreod of European ratiomlism. Thus let off, she htdes in bushes until dark. At night she goes to a Brohmin family who take pity on her, and on the supposition that she must come from a distinguished family, send her off to Calcutu to find suitably undemeaning housework. In Calcutta she is given the non-menial work of a cook in • lawyer's household. The lawyer's wife guesses that she must have some dark and trogic secret, wonns it out of her and willingly believes in her improbable story. She resolves to reunite Indira with her husband. Happily, in this best of aU possible worlds, lndiri's husband is a client of this very lawyer; inscrutably kind are the ways of providence if one is born into the right kind of family. lndiri's husband is called to Calcutta for an ostensible consultation on leg21 matters. He is served food by the aUeged cook, who is coreful to let him have enough of a glimpse of her to be absolutely smitten by her beauty. He is so struck that he proposes a rather sordid arrangement for such a noble sentiment-she should live out of wedlock in his house in Calcutta, a fairly common expedient for aflluent Beng.lis of the time. lndiri agrees to do so, and during this period of cohabitation lets her husband gather through her conversation that she is either his lost wife or someone endowed with supernatural powers. At the end she is united with her husband through irrelevantly unconvincing means, her 'double' husband too fond of her to scruple cxcessivcl)· about the vagueness of her earlier coreer. Under its thin and unconvincing narrative plot the story poses a philo.sophic problem. Since we can detect a genealogy of this question 10 Bank.im's earlier work, such a hypothesis becomes more credible. Even to the non-philosoph~c reader the story must have underlying compulsion because of the masterly way it handles the question of identity. Jndiri is origin~Uy wife to her husband Upendra. By the robbery, she is taken out of the map of sociaUy established moral relations. She, in other words, loses her claim on Upendra. because that claim is dependent on some conditions she is not able to fulfil. (What is interesting here is the similarity of her case to the mytho logical figure of Siti. She h•d not transgressed; but the poi"'t is not whether she has in reality transgressed or sinned, but the impossibility of·p roof to a sceptic that she has not.)30 Her only way

A Ta.stt for Tran.sgression

13

of getting him back tO her, which is the same as finding her way bock into the social nup, is a more elemental way. to usc her scxu3l 3ttr.action which she uses, happily, with fatal effect. ' In aU th.is her identity is under .radic~l questioning; and, 1shall suggest. wh~t ge? mterrogated IS not the 1dennry of an individual, bur the nature of 1dent1ty. 31 Wh at makes .one· socially what one is? lndiri's identity is shown to be fuU of controdictions. She is a wife who ceases to be a wife wh~ch raises the question. is the rdationship of being a wife something whoch can cease t? be.? In the middle of the story. I ndiri still reb""ds herself as Upendra s wofe. But the ode of a wife is a socially conferred one. and her behaviour shows that she accepts that she docs not have that ki~ld of cbim on her husband. Clearly, the relation she comes to have w~th Upendro. is a sinful relation, of being a mistress. Upcndra notWJthsunding. hiS. fondness treats her accordingly. The philosophical point of the story hes m the dual1ty of their relationship. From Jndiri's side the ~el~tion is still one of marriage, only accidentally suspended, a stotus she ~s nghtfuUy trying to recapture. But it is not really tim simple. For there ~s also a ~ense in which she implicates her husband in a relationship th>t IS really smful, because 11 IS exmnurital. The relation between these two relati~~~f being ~fe and. being mistress and their alleged inccompanblbry-os the mostmterenmg quesrion of all. On .~o~orov's schema, in this narrative, there ore three distinct points of equtbbnum. In the first, before lndiri sets out on her fatal journey. she IS of cours<: Upendra's wife. After the incident with the dacoits this id~nti~ as wi:e lapses. A marri~ge relation, this shows, far from h;ving ObJecuve attnbutes (and dcsp1te bemg made in heaven) is a social consc_ruct:-in fact,. of a particularly vulnerable texture. This is a problem that. ':' ra1sed and m~e~ted constantly iJ] the classical Indian literary tradition from the Ramay•na and Abhijniina Sok11nta/am. At the end Jndir2 wins .her srarus back but entirely by her human device, and by wholly quesuonable means, not by the omnipotence o(the sacred tie.J2 Marriage u es a~e doubly vulnerable: tf they are not recognized, they simply cease to exJSt; secondly, ~e m~_!:e tie can be destroyed with astonishing ease by a~ elemental dCSJre. lndiri cleverly uses a force which normally breaks mamagcs to reconstruct hers. Finally, of course she becomes that wife a!?in; or does she? Whether she does or not is a question which is not raJSed bee~ use of narrative closure. She gets back her due, strictly speaking, through sm. Jfknnwl•clge is a constitutive aspect of moral behaviour, for her husba:'d the affiir with this nameless cook is a gross transgression . Upendra IS merely another of Bank.im's gaUery of irresolute men who succumb to the seduction of the Oesh, another victim of the irresistible sexual •.n~~c~on which society .sanctions with a feeble seal of approval. On I ndtra s $ode too, the bchav1our 1s at best morally ambiguous. Since she knows that her husband docs not know that they are married, it is

A Task for Tran.sgrwion 14

The Unhappy

Cc>~nen

hardly unimpe.achable conduct on her part. She can. however clai":' a desperate extenuation. She is driven to it by a kmd of Hobbes~an argument-that there is a gnding of moral ocC>SJons, that even somethmg which is not ordinarily justifiable is right for the sake ofsdf-preservationn She is driven to do this to win her way back into h
IS

two stories arc of course wholly different. They show the novelist in very different creative moods. lrrdirii is lightly told, humorous, despite the desperate situation of the h•nlirri by contrast has a Gothic and romontic daign, an inner sense o f balance between the two di(forent destinies of tWO Of its Stories-the tragiC end Of one Set ogainst the union of another. ManoraiiU is the direct opposite of Indira. Indira is urban, eventually reunited with her husband, telling a cont.ic tale. Manorami is an inscrutable figure of ronuntic conception, a dark tale with a dark and tragic ending in a world full of •pocalyptic symbols~rumbling edifices, a temple on fire, ofsmoke swirling to eclipse a disappearing world, a physical obliteration which symbolizes a deeper historical obliteration.35 Still, despite these differences between darkn.ss and light, the comic and the tragic, there is an undeniable underlying philosophic uniry. This is the uniry of a question to which the novelist is trying to find an answer by varying contexts and fictional bearer1. Both women know of their marriage, but use it differently-Manorami to raise a barrier against Paiupati, Indira to sanction · her transgression. The distinctness of the physical and the social relations is e mphasized precisely by their indistinguishabiliry. In Paiupati's case, the object of desire eludes him; Upendra has greatc entire space of its mornl wo rld. These are the axionu of iu geometry; the standards of iu measure. Clearly, the basic standards of judging acu and relationships arc set up by che dichotomy between the sanctioned and the unsanctioned. The physical substratum is the same in both cases; but the mixing of social acceptance with desire makes the nurriage tie sacred, iu absence a viobtion. The securiry of the social world requires that these rwo contraries arc held in place, dut their limits, their boundaries, are marked with absolute clariry. It is around d1e area of these limiu that B•nkim's artistic curiosity plays. His characters are people who are nearly always living their lives close to these regions of intetsection, ofliminality, where o pposites come to play./ with each other. If there is a central theme in his novels, I suggest it is this enquiry, this concern about the nature o f the liminal. The subject of his literary inugination is thiS endlessly rene\ved and endlessly indecisive conOict between the turbulence of desire on
A Tastt for Transgression 16

17

TIIC U11/rappy Consciousntss

At crucial poinu of the story, desire bursu through the barriers of social interdictions to create dr.amatic tension. These transgressions vary a great deal- from the subtle and wistful, often unnoticed by the char.acters themselves, particularly ~y his dimwiued heroes. It begins with a momenury look oflonging on Ayd:i's face which betrays her emotions to her remarkably unsubtle prisoner. One thinks of the kiss"s bc.stowed, at crucial momenu of the narratives on Praphulb and R.ohini. In many others th" h"roines escape such agreeable defilement very mrrowly, and ceminly not due to any moral exertion on their put. Indeed, they lead their men into these indiscretions with a coyness which can be sc"n as ontological. It can be argued that Dankim never gave up this puzzling over personal r.elations, and this teasing possibility ofseveral identities being indiscemibly superimposed. There can be an interesting comparison bc.tween Indira and Sitiiriim, his last novel.lto The moral problem in Sitaram is remarkably similar to Indira. A wedded wife, renounced in early life, comes back to Sitarim, her elemental ntraction swamping the barriers of interdictions imposed by his family, or expectations of propriety among his subjecu. From a purely fornul point of view, Danltim's expenmentalism has grown more daring. In the Hindu moral order, her sexual role is central to the woman's identity; and in this the role of wife is the status of nonnolcy, for in this case, the passions foUow and obc.y the social nup. At the same time, the role of wife has contrasts on two sides, not j ust one. In his earlier novels Ban kim returns obsessively to the more ordinary contraSt-between the wonun of normalcy and the woman of rransgressio~ichotomiung them, collapsing them, merging them into curious forms of indefinability. Now he tries something more complex-interweaving rh~ roles. The role of wife is taken as the standard, the norm; that of mistress is related to this as a lower case ofliminality, lower bc.causc morally condemnable. It is lower also, perhaps, because the woman who gives herself outside of social sanction gives priority to pas:sion over the ratiorul necessity for self-control, or mortification of desire. Since in the Hindu moral code high and low is of~en measured by this gauge-<>f occess or renunciation of desire-which yields the distinction bc.tween the g!hi and the S<Jnnyiisi, it must also do so in the case of a woman, between a wonun who has access to desire and a woman who renounces desire on her own--a considerably more remarkable feat bc.cause she is supposed to bc. the object, the creator and therefore the symbol of desire. We shall see later in what exact sense she symbolizes desire-not as might be wrongly believed as a fault in her individual pcr.;onaliry, but as part of the world's design. This offers a more interesting and complex possibihty of constructing an identity problem. Alongside the nomulcy of wife, we now have rwo rypes of linunality--a woman who renounces desire •nd crosses a limit above, •nd a woman who falls for it and crosses a limit bc.low. Consider now the diffrrent aspects of Siuram's relation with Sri. At

l equtlibriun>, she ~ns by bdng Siurim's t.wfully wedd~d wife, the relationship of normalcy, of unevenrfulness; but at a nme ofhfe when it could not be seen as a nornul relation of sexuality. Afterwards, as in so nuny of Bankim's stories, there is obligatory interference by a fnudulent version of fate. Sitirim's &mily finds, on having her horoscope read (and the reader m•kes a true statement of truly o racular o~aci.ty) that she is fated to cause death to her dearest. It is a sutemeot wh1ch u to bc. intetpreted twice," and the nearer intetpretation is characteristically wrong. She is estranged from Sitiram as a conseq~ence. They l~:_v: a~• accidental second meeting which revives their reJanon. In fact, Sw>ram s conduct on th1s second meeting is nor above reproach; for he wishes to take Sri back not out of a moral conviction of injustice done against her, or of her rights as his wife, but for the very differ~nt claims of her bca~ty. Siuram gets attracted nor to his wifc--2 social relanon--but to the beaunful woman a relation of natural instinct. For a speU, in a foreshortened sort of way,' Sri is 1ndira to Siurim, but this is not dra~~ out, for dut is ~ot the point of this particular story. It has greater arnb1nons of consrrucung relational complexiry. Sri takes a further step by renounang her conta.ct with her husband, becoming a sannyiisr~ a renouncer of the world and IU ordinary desires. When she returns to Siurim it is ~th a new 1de?uty. she agrees to live near him without public rites of.mamage; for the ~tgher and the lower liminality are identical on one pomt: to both the rrustrcss and the renouncer the path of marriage is barred. Sitirim's behaviour towards Sri is JWf what one would expect towards a mistress, one ~un~ by this strongest of all relations. He is shown to be besotted. Sn tS h1s addict.i on as no wife, no woman of nornulcy can bc.. This can happen only with a wom•n who has the darkness ofliminality about her~ a woman transfigured by transgreuion. At the midpoint of the story, ~n has three different fem2le identities superimposed on one another, whtch relate to Siurim in three distinct ways, yet all subsisting within herself. She covers the realm of nornulcy and the rwo liminal realms at the same time. She is a sannyiisl, one who has given up the rights of desire; s~e is a ':"ife, a woman in the nornul space; she is also perilously close to bc.10g a t~tress, a wonun who represcnu this dark sexuality of tnnsl!"esston. ObVJo~ty the question of transgression, of a faU, is exacerba~ed by the fact that tt IS not d1e faU of a housewife, but of a renouncer. It t.S seen exactly this w_ay by the rwo rather prudish subjects ofSiurim's ltingdom who ~ct as a ltind of chorus to their &te.lS Sri is seen as going out of the sOCial space of nonnalcy in cwo different directions. If relations define id~ntity, who is she? What is she to Siurim? What could bc. a good moral JUdgement on what she has done with her life? There can hordly be any greater indefinab1hty than in this ease. In a sense: her~ ~an~ had achiev.ed c : something like a hminal case of constructing linunality; the pby With limiu has reached a limit of its own.

18

The Unhappy Consdous11ess

***

In this world that we ~e building up gndually through >ucceeding novels of dc:sire there are some underlying regularities of structure and form. The point of underlyingness. or implicitness is important. An artist as successful, prolific and creative as Bankim obviously followed deliberate plans and strategies of narntive construction. His fiction .!so shows a remarlc.able variety of situations, of personalities, of plot construction, a deliberate and very well-judged variety of language. Still, there are some underlying themes and f9rrns conunon to practically aU his novels. If this had been a real world, these would have constituted iu structure and its laws of motion. There is of course nothing contradictory in this. What the artist depiccs is the variety of a world, and to be a world it must have form and order. What is revealed by these is the author's sense of the world; what he thinks the world is. One of the most significant features of this world, the way the world is. is what women do in its general scheme." though perhaps the proper verb for what I wish to convey is nOt do, but ~. Bankim must have been conscious of this ambiguous centrality of the woman in the transactions of the world of his making. At the most obvious level, this is announced in the names of novels after thdr central figures: Durgdnanclini M('tiilini, Indira, RaclhDrani, Rajani, Devi Cauc/hurani, Kapalkuntlafii. This consists in a declaration by the author that these narnrives arc centred around tl)ese characters. Only Candrasekhar, RDjsinha and Sitaram bear the names of their heroes. But the logic of history and the logic of narrative are different. There is a sense in .which even these stories which do not fomtally revolve round the fates of women, do depend on them for the movement of the ,I narnrive. Women are the,prime movers of the verbs. Clearly, the story in Candrasekl1aris as much Saibaliru~s story as C•ndrasekhar's, in fuct, more so. For •!though Candrasekhu and S•ibalini constitute one of the few p•irs in which the relation between possive •nd weak men and dominant and active women hos been forrnolly reversed-becouse Saibaluu Jus no remorkoble trait excepr her beouty, the 1001 of all rrouble--stiU, it is she who is critically significanr for the mOtion of the narrative. It is h.or life •nd pbyfulness which bring th~ disparate elements of the story together. It is the rebtion of three men with her-Candr2sekhor bound by the tie of marriage, Foster by the tie of violence, and Prolip by the wistful relationship ofrenunciation-which keeps the srory going. She is the cause in the story of all the
A Tast• for Transgression

19

h•ve to de~brc;.some things as wrong. Ther~ is a peculi3 r purity, innocence, no~1hty m t~e des1re that Prarip and &aibalini feel for each other; ~nd t~ere IS somethmg groresque in the artifici>l puriry imposed on them m the~r everydoy conjugality wir~ ~ndr•sekhar >nd Sundan•l This •gain plays th~ game of shutlling defimuons- m>king the right wrong and the wrong nght. In RDjsinha too, it is Cancalkumiii's decision to deviate &om what her w?.''.d ex~ected her to do that creates the initial narr.ltive movement. l~aJsmha IS certainly more significant than Cancalkumiri in terms of lliS.ve exisred as he did exist in ~utory;. bur the Sitacim of the story could nor have. He is lirerally brought mto ex1stence by her. In Devi Cauclhuriini, it is Praphulla 's ability 10 do tl1e unexpecred which creates the structure of rhe narrauve. Curiously, it IS always women who act excraordinorily, who exere1se the frightening acts of choice. Women are therefore symbols of tronsgression in a double se~e. They create or mduce transgression by being objects or symbols of des.~re. But they arc also literally the agents of transgressive or liminal acuon. They are seen as being peculiarly capable of breaking the world's moulds. In both rhe early Lukacs and Girard, there is a theory that the novel form revolves around a problematic hero. bec.use of an original Jack of fir between their inclination, their trurh, and the strucrure of the world around. them, the truth ?f rhc world, between a subjectivity thar is e~pan.s1ve and a world thot1S too narrow. In Bankim's world, interestingly, Ill~ wo":'e~ who are always the symbols and vehicles ofthis problemaricity. J lr ~~ the1r mrenul confliccs or their con01cU with this narrowing world whiCh .make the story.. Male figures. even when •mstically forceful, are stanc and unconcradictoty. tOO predictable and therefore unable to gen~rate nurative tension. Jagatsinha's characrer is not weak in the ordi~ary sense:.. though ~h~se of Govindaliil, Nagendra and Upendra cerra1nly are. IUJSinho, Sitaram and Pratiip are not portrayed as feeble mew yet ~ey do "?' move their srories. This may have something to do wid; t~e 1clennGcanon of women witl1 instinct which makes their behaviour simultaneously less predicuble and more final, while men representing .; reason,'~ ar~ fixed .and unsurprising, and when acting. hesitant. Bank1m 1s not mterrogatmg an everyday relation between men and women . As a novelist, he does depict such rclarions quire often because a world full of extraordinary relations would be less than credible.; indeed,

20

Tire Unhappy ConsaoUJn<ss

they would not show thenudv<S as extraordinary, and consequently would not b< spectacular. But these ordinary relations are a part of his field of vision, not its object. They show unmistakable marks of fictional indifference. They are not wh~t interests him. what he is interrog:~ting; the object of his search is the strange, the abnormal, what I have called the liminal. · Marriage rebtions may be made in heaven; but they are, with frightening regularity broken on eorrh 0 Still, though women draw men towards them, they do so with a curious inoocenu. We must understand the nature of this fataliry which women carry within rhemsdv<S. They ploy • fatal role •II round. It is not only men whom they dng to destruction but abo themselves. Nearly alw•ys they strike as a force ofuncomprehending deStruction. They do not do it out of design, and it is therefore not attribuuble tO some moral flaw in the person who plays the role of fate. That women, especially anractive ones, are destructive of families, of the straight and narrow path, is not due to their personal malevolence, weakness or baseness of character. It is part of their being. To accuse them for being so is as sensible as bbming a bird for Oying or a flower for being beautiful." Playing variations !>ocence ·and simplicity, entirely devoid of ill will towards •nyone. But the consequences for the two families which come in couch with them are identical. Even if tllis is not a deliberate construction, it makes a point with particular cbriry. Differences in character arc not J significant for the detenninarion of fate. It is not their in tendon or their personality which c•use destruCtion. but their very being. TypicaUy, in ne2rly aU of .Bankim's noveb of crime and punishment, there are indications pointing towards either a philosophical or cin:umst>ntif-1 extenuation. Often, the character who tmugresscs, usually a wom•n. at a time of crisis gives • powerful and entirely credible justification of what she

A T.utt for Transgrwion

21

has done. Often, the narrator shows how she could not have 2cted othe~s:--o' .questioning of the concepts of guilt, responsibility and detenrurusm·lies at the heart of Bank.im's art. It is in this sense that his art, when he"::ims at it, attains the truly tragic. like all great tragedies we seem to encounter in them something that cannot be reckoned in terms of human agency and responsibility alone. It is what happens incvitobly and ~efies accounting for _in ordinary temu of cause and responsibility that IS called fate. . "!d it be objected .perhaps that Banlcim could not have thought of linunahty and transgressron as truly tragic. and this is too Niec:aschean at least west~, ~o b< true a~ut him~ Could be h•ve thought of th.; 2s P•r;t of an u~digc.n~us traditton? I think he could have derived this way oflnterrog:~tmg liminality and understanding the architecture of the world from the classical Hindu trad~tio~, or at least a certain reading of it. Surely, not all t;'tndu ':"yths have th1s kind of design. The Ramayana for instance lS a claSSt~ally Simple s~ory. It is an epic in simplicity, t~e simpliciry of the story, of Its emooons, 1ts fundamental conOict, irs eventual r<~solution, and ~he utt~r undisturbed. symmeay of its moral universe. Perhaps one mteresu?g fact about It IS how so simple a story could b< poetically so ~ompeUmg. Its figures show ~ highly Stylized idea of the 6naliry of the s1mple. The idealiry of its uni~erse is another; and such idealiry may be cons1dered necessary m the d~1ly struggle with the untidiness of real life. At the. end of the day, ~s a foil to the complexity of experience, it is reass~nng to represent thiS fundamental map of the simple relations which constitute the structure of life. It is natural therefore that it is the Ramiiya11a that would be part of such d2ily rituals of iterating how the universe is built. By con.trast, the Malroblrarata seems more concerned ,yjth lin~inaliry, ,/ ~nd. Bank.im has an ~dl_ess curi~siry about it. in contrast to his general ~ndiff~ence to the Riimayana. E1ther the Mahabharata story, or some of Its denvarive legends, like the folk mythology of~~. arrange careful encoun.cer_s between the settle~ n~nns of everyday life and on experience o~the l~nunal. If one ":'akes on mvenrory of the roles by which a common Hmdu IS expected co .hve .his life •. the Mal1abharata and the related complex of myths could prov1de mtcresrmg counterpoints co nearly each one of th.em. Women must not bear children outside marriage; but Kunti' does,.../ w1thout much apparent defilement. The career of chis child also belies the possible be.lief that such children are miserable products of sin and des~ned ro a ltfe of sorrow. Despite a contradiCtory f•te, he is a child desuned for glory, to being exalted, though h~ bears the m>rk of transgression on himsdf 48 Draupadi's marriage to five brothers puts even Bonk.im's argumen1:1tive ingenuiry to considerable strain. Sim1larly, there are extreme interdictions ag:ainst sexual relations with won1cn who are older, morricd, particubrly to one's qelarives. But the story of~l)a's love ·

A Tastt for Transgrwion 22

23

The Unhappy CotiSdousnus

for IUdhi transgresses all su'h nomu. Cl=ly, the purpose of su.ch s~ories is not to tum people away by their wantonness, or to show the me~~ble ugliness oflife."' Transgression here is ex:alted by lhe t~uch o~the div~ne, so revulsion could hardly be their point. Often, there IS a prunent dehght at the exploit$ of the divine transgressors. 50 After a public exultation ~ver clinial accounts of erotic pby between the divine but unaccredited )overs,st members of religious congreg;uions trudge back to their severely ruled lives, in which even a mention, a mere thought of such abandon would be sacrilege. Two extenuating interpretations are usually ~ffe~ed to mitigate their wantonness. A common though ha~y con"".'c~ng answer is that this is to show the difference between humaruty anddiVlruty. Another construction is that these are a me12phorical taking away of metaphorical clothes to reveal the metaphorical puri~ of th~ devo~ees' souJs.Sl But there are difficulties about such cxpbnanons. It IS a cunous way of making men obey sexual mores to show that gods rarely ~serve t/tem. Besides in cases like the Citagovirula metaphorical joys are depiCted. ~nd could be ~eeeived with a suspiciously unmetaphorical delight in their materialism;SJ and secondly, other metaphors could perhaps have con veyed such con,ep~ual ideas equally well without causing the a~ delusions which may arise in this ase. A third different consrrual of th1s kind of thing would be th•t this shows • con~em. for the p~oblem ~f liminality, though there an obviously be v:uymg mtetpre~:~nons of tts . . possible reosons and culturol implications. . . . If Hindu scriptures show • concem for linunality, this could furnish a possible source for Bankim's interrOgation within a traditi~n ~e so obviously valued. It is not pleasing or prurient, but morally Significant and philosophially imporl:lnt co come to the edg<: of the world and ~er at the darlrness beyond, to stand at the limit and look at the other s1de. That alone c•n create a sense of what it is a limit of: it is an understandmg of the Other that creates a deeper sense of the sel( An interrogation of moral limits is. quite different from the easy moral nominalism which believes that it is simply necessary to name something a moral guilt to begin itS correction, to produce a simple un&iling recipe for virtue. If there is 3 doctrine of virrue in the Mahiibhiirata, that seems cons1derobly more complex~howing how morals tend to break down in liminal eases, how people often have to invent a morality, i.e:, ways of ac~ng _uprightly and well, for unprecedented situations. To hve a _good life. IS n~t an uncritical pursuit of immutable rules which an _gu1de ':"'havtour .'" aU conceivable situations. It is a critial adventure. Philosoph,eally, the mterrogation of this moral other is simibr to the great question. ?f the other of life, death. Death is not something one can name famihady, something that can be described like other experiences; it. is, as th.e !ratlatus put it. not an event in life.S< Death in that sense constitutes a hnut to the discourse abOut life. A language whi~ is at home in life, when confronted

with de<>th, cannot pass a judgement, because it does not know what kind ofjudgement to pass. It cannot dc:Scribe because it faces an occasion when describing is somehow not the right thing to do. Death extracts this kind of philosophic seriousness, a respect for the unknown, the liminal. The Mahabharata treats moral liminality the same way--nOt to treat it simply and pejoratively in terms of everydoy morals, but to respect it as a genuine limit, an occasion when the everyday discourse of morals UJJs silent. Sometimes, these are ascribed to the divine; i.e. to signali1e, to mark symbolically that the discourse of man stops here; here we require a different discourse. To understand what discourse can bring into speech, it is to be taken to a point wbere discourse must f.aU silent.

l

It is not a long way to travd from this quest for the liminal to the aesthetic forrn of the tragic. Liminality can evoke two responses: an eaty response ofdefining it into someth.ing akin to criminal, or a more complex response respecting it as a form of the unknown. The second kind of mind would consider the liminaHn the cognitive, the moral, the livin~s the only thing worth seriously exploring, or worthy of wonder. This affiliates the liminal to the tragic; for an enquiry into such liminality, rragedy is the only proper form_ And Bankimchandra's artistic world, despite irs occasional transcendence through laughter, is essentially, ineradicably, tragic. / Su'h a world would not comfort an ordinary conservative. In this world. luminously clear. uninfringable relationships are bent out of shape, sent into a mysterious abeyance. It does to the rdations with which we constitute the social landscape ofour everyday world exactly what romantic painting does to our feeling of the invarionce and availability of nature . It grows strange, alien, mysterious. The darkness of the world is 6lled with the debris of definitions we take for granted. It is, in that sense, a typically romanti~ moral landscape, a world of beautiful and sublime destruction. And this world finds its proper representatives in the beautiful ladies of dorkness. . • There is an idea commonly applied to painting which could perhaps be used to understand the dorkness of Bankim's world. Such perception is not always a matter of deliberate choice; they do not really perceive the world that way because they choose to. That represents a certain distilbtion of their experience of the world. Even though they sometimes wish to say something quite different, this perception comes through in what they wish to say: through what they are trying to say, something else gets said, something which is also theirs, but in a more profound, non-deliberate way. Such views, art critics say, come out sometimes in painters' usc: of colours. As time passes, an artist's view of the world may get darker. Often the same objects are depicted, after cwenty years, in an indefinably darker tone. What is smeared on these objects of the world is not JUSt paint, but something more fundamental to painting than paint

25

A Tastt for Transgf'tSSion 24

1k Unhappy (AIIS(iousneu

itself: they are smeared with the .artist's sadntss. It a in thu sense that Rc~brandt lived in a world that is dark. lu he goes along, Michelangelo's _ . palette and his world get darker and more mynciious. In literature too artists tend to respond to the world m the~r own individual waY1. and depict it in their tones. To we the tone in case of laneuage-rather than colour is n~ wholly ina_Ppropriate. Frege uses the term tone to indicate those qu>l•nes a propoSinon may have other than its meaning, i.e., the quality about which one cannot say that it is either right or wrong. This does not mean that the artist wiU not wish so~ctim':s to depict the world in a different mood. He must surely do that tf he lS a real artist, if only to sec how the world looks like when it a not what it really h. Thus we have radiant and lighted ~aintings by painters wh? speciali~e in creating the most threatening of mghts, and whose genms lS at home there, who feel as if the day is somehow discordant. is somehow merely an intedude in the night that represents the nature of this world. This metaphysical tone in Bankim's art seems to me to be predornimmtly tragic. Hh stories show this darkness in the p_ecu~iar ~gility ofh~ppiness, the consunt lapse of smiling, incomequennal lives mto unmented and uncomprehended suffering. It remind$ me of one of the damned in Michebngelo's 'Last Judgement'; what is arrested in hi~ face in _the final moment of his metaphysical existence is a rather pecuhar emouon. It lS not a face of contrition. It is not a face of ordinary terror, nor the face of one who sinned boldly and is now cowering before his maker. It is a f.tce expressing a dark and terrible wonder, of a creature startled by the smallness of the transgression and the eternity of its retribution. In this cragic world happiness. rationality, the human ability to create an order of whatever kind, a moral o rder, a rational order, or the smaU order of a little family of ordered unthreatened relationships, is forever threatened by the stonn of the universe, the night___,n incomprehensible and irresistible force which can destroy_everything. Stories of human life are allegories of the world; they show the utter contingency of everything. The night we arc calkin.g about is the night of the world. The only conceivable attitude toward$ it is of wonder. For this is no ordinary nigh_t, not a night which passes obediently into a following day. It is a nig~ll that r~sides in the nature of things. Bankim's world is also nocturnal, With the darkness of a night without end. . . . Art, it is said, is a rhetoric on the world. An arust expencnccs hfe tn a parti~ul3r mode, and decides through some largely i~explica~le process that it is in the nature of the existence of men to be m a parucubr way. Th1< determines the tone of his art. His art may reveal a world which is dark, mY1terious, threatening, nocturnal, hke Rembrandt's. Or the world of a Rabebis--of sensuousness, rnirth, full-blooded enjoyment. It can be the world ofthe Classicist painters--orderly. measured, t>tional, perpetually bathed in ·a rational sunlight, throwing orderly shadows, where even

disorder leaves enough reminiscences of order. Or it can be the world of the Romantics' lanruapes-where the smallish earth is dwarfed by a majestic sky. in which the world is being tom apart by an unending storm, trees bent in the wind, where everything is at the edge of.this darkness of a night which will not end next morning. but a meuphysical night that will never lili. Most ofBankim's better novels have a metaphysical air of the tragic. They nuy not in a formal sense always bear a tragic fom>. What does the tragic mean in Bankim? Of course there is a lot of levity in his prose, and in his narrative construction. Tragedy here nonetheless exacs like the tone of an artist's painting. That seems to reach the essence of life's meaning for him. He is not alwaY1 deliberately lngic; rather this sense of tragedy transcend$ the strategies of his deliberate crafc. Some fundamental beliefS of people colour aU that they see without being present in their conscious design, or indeed in their own consciousness. For seeing itself is not an object of seeing. Tragedies can arise through two different modalities. There are what can be called tragedies of suboptimality, o f faults or Oaws of character. Individuals can tempt &te by their lack of self-Gontrol, or their predominant passion . In the tragedies of ComeiDe for instance, this occurs through an excess of a seme of glory.ss People can tempt fate by not cbecking themselves, sometimes by not knowing themselves. They meet disaster througb an excess ofambition, power, covetousness, caution, even love. Such errors are faults of character; we see the personalities as Oawed, one-sided. Often they take decisions they nud not have taken. In these cases an equal seme of finality does not arise because it is easy to conceive •0 f an alternative, a case in which the mistake is not made. There are tragedies of a second kind where the facaliry arises not out of an error, but from finiteness. They arise from the fact that people cannot be everythlng at the same time, or the fact of being just what they ar~. f~~ no fault of theirs. It is a pity that jagauinha must choose between Ayesa and Tilottami that he met both of them, and not one; that Kunda cannot buy happiness' with her innocence; that Pratip cannot love Saibalini and cannot stop loving her. These are trage(lies of choice, where the tragic thing is not the choice made, but the obligation to choose. is the structure of the world which requires these choices, that there •s one at the expense of the other. Tragedies arc in this way dose to apom-<Juestions which do not admit of answers. Or they spring from the conflict between two equally inevitable things. Undedying all of Bankim 's novels is a recognition of this kind of conOict-which rears people apart. which has no solution. 1\s a to11servative he lin& the fomul necessity of social order immutable and inviolable; as an artul he lind$ the surges of desire equally irrunutoblc and

!t

26

2

T'IK Unh•ppy CcnS(iOU.SIItss

ungovernable by human conventions. Marx offers ~n. his conune?ts o~ Balrac a fertile suggestion about the nature of wntn~g: If his vtew ts sensible, then there are twO writin" in Baluc or two vtst~ns- Baluc sees the world and writes as a legitimist: this is the author's V1Ston; but there is also a vision of the text which unravels capitalist social rebtions as no one else could ifl that generation. Balue did not intend to do this; yet Balzac does do it; and it is odd, to say the least, to assert that his deptctlon of capitalism is entirely unintended. Obviously this calls for a more complex theory of textual intentionaliry, a theo~ of secmg ·~ tenus of degrees what it is nornul to see in tenns of a Slm.ple opposmon of the intended/unintended. Anyway, the truth of Balzac s texts would have to be something complex, which cannot deny the truth of either of these two visions. The truth of Bankim's consciousness, I suggest, has to be similarly constructed. A proper slogan for his art would ~ th_at not marriages but transgressions are made in heav~n. ~ puttling 1dea mdeed for a Hindu conservative. hs both of these are 1nevttable and pemunendy at work, the world moves pemunendy in conflict; this _is the reason for the existence of art whose object is not just entertamment but also philosophic wonder. Individuals in that sen~e are me~e instru~ents, a character's central position in a work means s1mply that he ts parllcularly wdl suited to reveal something problematic in life'.56 Bankim's art creatc;s life stories of individuals to express wonder at this primeval darkness, th1s peculiar problematicity of life that is much easier to think of through art than through conceptual thought. In K~m•liikanr~ this wonder finds explicit expression, in a passage about happmess whiCh IS not a happmess of enjoyment but the startling happiness of :wonder: 'You have no one of your own in this world, only your h•ppmess; I too h~ve no one 10 call my own, except my happiness. . . . I call the beauufuL_ I call tho good. 1 caD whoever is listening to my caU. This wondrous uruverse that stands in front of me which I cannot understand, only wonder at, I call this universe'.57 A world is held up and stays in pbce ~cause of such limits._c_onsequendy, there could ~ nothing more import•nt for someo~JC 'VIShing to know the strUcture of this universe th~n to know these lim1ts: ~~ t~ know the limits is to undei'Siand the order of • world. To know a ltm1t is 10 know the two thin" it separates and gives identity to; it is these which structure the world and give it form . If we cannot really know these limits and ddinitions, we know ot lean their &llible and hum.an } choracter, their provisionality, their constructedness. If we c•nnot c~ass1fy and judge aU human acts and aU lnnmn fates by t~e sm~l _repertoare of judgemen~ that a moral code provides, through tlus cogmnvc fa1lure we learn something far more important. We •ccept the pro~s1onal1ty of our happiness .. We learn to forgive . We grasp d1e secret of kindness.

Humour and the Prison of Reality Kamalakanta as the Secret Autobiography of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay

Nothing in discourse can be so many thin~. carry so many meanin" as humour. Perhaps nothing else in discourse is so completely free of the usual demands of linearity. Bankimch•ndr2s JG.mafiiltanta 1 shows in Bcng>li literature the spectacle of the manysidedness of laughter, its indefinability. My text here is less a book than 2 manner of writing. Kamaliiltanta is not th.e only place to look for Bankim's humour. Even when he is not writing explicit satire, he tends to take refuge in it. He nude it his characteristic weapon, his way of attacking without ~ing attacked, criticizing those with whom he does not wish to enter into a dialogue. Humorous writing is in any case an unanswerable weapon, and few of his gener:ttion could usc it with comparable e!Tect, few indeed in the entire history of Beng>li literature. K•m•liikat~C• shows the great versatiliry of a literature oflaughttr, its internal repertory: it is at different times the laughter of contempt, of not uking something seriously, the laughter of reproach, of piry, the laughter about the self which feels it is part of what it is laughing •bout. Kam•liiltanr• is the greatest example in Bengali literature of Bakhtin's argument about laughter, its having a 'Key to the world's mysteries which other forms of more serious literary writing lack: Laught
•mbiv>lent wholeness.l The fundament•! secret of the power of humour was wonderfully in two lines in Sukum•r R•y's 'Khicudi', the poem which reports

reve~led

Humour and tht Prison

28

The Unhappy Consciousnes.s

that the duck and the porcupine carried on a traditional existence until a time when, by the miracle of humour, the 'grammar of rellity' fell away, and dtey formed a nuxed aninuL' Humour precisely allows us to break the grammar of reality and history. K.tmalikanta. the protagonist of / Bank.im 's humorous essays, is an ungrammatical being, in this sense, hal{ conformist, half rebel. uughter is an equivalent of play in art. Art. it is often argued, is play compared to the seriousness and deadliness of everyday life: the beauty of art a foil to its drabness, an's poignancy to its tendency to slide into meaninglessness, an's clear form a foil to its endless and shapeless stretch. Even within an, which can be serious, humour has a special place as play. Compared to more formal literary sryles, it is playful. That is why in humorous a.n we find a peculiar gaiety of liberation from encumbrances of form. There is a peculiar openness of form in Kamaliiltanta. It is in pan serious ironical prose, in pan essay, stoty, drama mixed together. In terms of writing, it takes the most unpredictable of rums. As it is non-serious, it is free from obligations of consistency, it can play between its own possible meanings. It can be any of them, it can be all; it can be, precisely because it is laughter, this irresponsible play of astonishment. The text we are going tO read is a text of madness. Its putative author, Bank.irn says, was regarded by ordinary people, as nud• The modness thot produces this text is, however, a text in itself, a sign. It can be read, made to yield its meaning. We must first understand who says this text, before we can grasp what it says. In a manner of spe•king, the foremost question is about understanding the almost unknown author of one of the most celebrated texts of Bengali prose. This is writren ollegedly by K.tnulakanta Cakravarti, a Brahmin, homeless, occupationless, clossless,s a drug addict, a parasite, a sayer of the unsayable. Curiously, very little is usually said about this remarkably odd figure. He is wholly merged into the authorial personality of Bimkimchandra. But he is not so negligible; because he exemplifies, to my understanding, not only an imponant segment of .6ankim's an, but also his strategy of intellectual existence. Still, it is hardly ever asked in litetature why the author creates another author who is such an interesting negation of himself. What does the author's alienation of his own text signify? On his own pan Bank.im clearly cook great pains to put the text at a distance from himself. alienating K.tmalikinta's utterances from his own by a series of symbolic disjunctions.• Bankim is sane, Kamalakinta is suspected of inunity; Bank.im is staidly respectable, Kamalalc:anta is marginal, of doubtful (unspecified) occupation; the author normal, Karnalikinta an opium-eater; Bank.im is a solid civil servant, a salaried man of a decidedly upper bracket; he is dependent on something of • mixture between respect and pity; Bank.irn is a realist, he is a dreamer. To state the 'argument in more serious form, Komalikinta is a bundle of

of Reality

29

ntgati"" attributes, indescriboble in terms of the available categories of social description .' Whatever he might be, he is, quintessentially, nor a /Jdbu. Bankimchandra was a model of the successful Bengali gentleman (bhadralok; the English term 'gentleman' is a conunon but strictly inappropriate translation) under the colonial social dispensatio~ucc""­ ful, contented. reconciled. Kamalikinta is his exoct opposite--idle, disorderly, unmarried, unkempt, socially indescribable, an irrationalist, or perhaps, a rationalist dedicated to the cause of what his contemporaries would have seen as 'irrationality'. Yet, despite his incongruity in this babu world of nineteenth..;:entury Bengal, Kanulikinta is something undeniable. He is everything that Bankim is not, or in a different reading, everything that Banlc:im would like to be in his dreams of an alternate world. H e is his self which has broken the synux of reality, his self in a dream. He is, in a manner of speaking, writing the secret autobiography of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. Indeed, Kamaliiltiinta cannot be read adequately without decoding all its pretences. Some of these are of course fairly obvious. It pursues a line of thought entirely unrepresentative in this Bengali 'age of reason'. It is quick to rernuk that in colonialism everything that was pan of European history tended tO have a parodied reenactment. It refers constantly to the cffon at reenactment of European history by the babu and destroys it by satire. Parody contains a principle of this alternative construction of reality. By a change of pronunciation, an altered inflection of the voice, by changing a word, parody achieves a stanling di~placement o~ m,eaning. Dankim's humour uses the myths, the tropes, the hteran:hles ofstgmficance of Enlightenment discourse itself tO undermine that discourse. His special favourite is a form ofhumour Sanskrit poetics coiled the vyajastuti (literally, false praise). In that poetics · all literary expression is called valtrokti (utterances which have some obliqueness about them); but this has an obliqueness that makes it vakrokri par txctlltrrct. And there is an adequacy between the obliqueness of this form and the obliqueness ofKanulakinta's vision of the world. The world, especially the social world, hides its truth; · it requires an oblique, a second sight to see it. Defying the grammar of reality has some implications which ought to be clearly Stoted. Humour has a more open structure than other types of discourse because it regards more possibilities as admissible than real life does. That is why humour is critical and subversive, and particularly effective against those assumptions of social life which pr~tend to some kind of self-evidence. It is hopeful precisely because in ridiculing the reality of soctal relations it asseru the imponant &ct that the world tlut exists is always shon of, is a travesty in a sense, of the .w orld that ought to be. Other rypes of thinking do this too. One obvious parallel would be religious utopian paintings of paradise, where non-':'iolent lions ~ve on exeeUent rerms with deer. Another could be the utopto. of a revoluoon

Humour artd tht Prison

30

of Reality

31

TltL Unhappy Consciousnw d~fensible

which defies a grarnnur of a political kind. Conceptions of revolution, of paradise and humour-all, on !his view, would have something in common-they all defY the colligation of reality, they all have the gift of seeing as historical and contingent what to ordin•ry eyes appear lS necessary.

A study ofBankim's humour must be an analysis ofiu totality. not just a part. I would not like to associate his humour too closdy only wilh me mood of defi2nee, for mere is also a sorrowful, dark aspect to it-the fact ofits mocking itselfin the act of what it says, its pei)>Ctual tension becween me babuness of his existence and his intellectu:ll rejection of the babu social and ideological order, and what could be called an implicit rejection of this rejection by choosing to do it within a subterfuge. This indicates, at least partly, a bad conscience, not an unambiguous attitude of rebellion. It is followed by a certain ineradicable sense of guilt. Obviously, he was not able to attempt what. if radical historiography is to be trusted. the unlettered peasantry undertook at times. Bankim in that sense retreats from the more demanding task of 'changing the world' into merely offering an interpretation. The babus get his contempt because they translate acu into discou~e. which represents movement in the wrong direction, tuming away from the obvious practical syllogism of colonial politic:ll existence. Instead of going forward from liberal, rational premises into political action the babu collapsed back into discourse, substituting radic:ll propositions for radic:ll "u. Some of the humour, p>rticularly its occasional pessimism, must be linked to the perception that Bankim himself could be rebuked for doing the same thing. and the limits of the existence of the babu that he analysed with such power turned out to be the limits of his own sci( Irony thus rums back upon itself; it C>n be seen in an ironic:ll lighr. It is common knowledge that insanity is a way of living with unresolved contradictions. This could be one reason why the speaker of !his ironical discourse uses the literary sign of madness. But madness means different things in the cultures of rationalist Europe and traditional India. I wish to suggest mat the madness out of which Kamalikinta speaks is a complex sign constructed out of elements taken from both these cultures, giving him the privilege of an unprecedented insanity.

In quite a literal sense, Kamalilinta offers us a play of two sights. He is gifted wilh a second sight which opens up when he takes opium. To the ordinary sight the world is closed in its tra.nSparencc. It can see only sclf-<:vident thingJ. Opium intcnsi6es his sight, and when he takes it, what he sees is a world of essences alone. To this sight being"l tum into objects, objects into beings. cats begin to speak and carry on socialisric disputation of a delightful and convincing irreverence. In a word, the world opens itself. and yields its secrets to this second sight. Take tl)e eat's discourse on property; his inverted socb.Jistic vision of the world. It is a rationally

construction of me social world, bur it does not figure in me of the real world, because there is no one to say it, me conungcnt absenu of a speaker of true speech. But truth should not be ~oiceless simply because it docs not have a speaker. In a world ofessences " can be spoken by a political cat. ' Since_it reveals _essences, something that ordinary sig/tt cannot, people ~eed _ !his ~econd Stght, which shows the structure of UIC world as it really 1s, qmte d1fferent from the way it appears to be. He too could say, echoing someone else, had the world of appearances been the same as the world of reality, human beings would not have needed opium. It is wrong to sa.)! that when he h>s opium he sees berter, because that would be a physicalist idea; it assists him tO see in an altogether new way. He sees the world through the logic of alternatives, as it could have been, as it could, a.ltemativdy, be. Just_ as i_n Foucault:s ~ory, ratio~ality defines madness in order to say what u tbmks about 1t. m exactly mve~e terms, in Kamaliikartla critical thought assumes !his title of madness to say what it thinks about rationality. In thiS I see the working of bolh an inremal and an external traditton whiCh arc opportunistically blended. TI1e trace of the European definition of in<>nity is of course very clear. But we must also seek more seriously for the mfluc~ces of an mdigenous tradition of the reve~e type to unde~nd tins unprecedented insanity of Kamalikinta. The liminal figure, or rather the o~tsider here is not entirely like the Western figure of me madman. he_~ much cl~er to the indigenous figure of the renounc_er. the saomyasr. ~~en saymg his farewell, Kamaliikinta explicitly ~arks hmuelf as a sannyas1: Kamalakinta is a S>nnyisi at heart' (Kamalakanta an/art nntarc sanny4Jr).8 Unfortunately, he cannot be a classical but only a debased renouncer, because all possibilities are debased in his culture. He is both • sannyasi and his caricature, just os Bankiin is a rebel and a _ca:'cature ~fa _rebel at the same rime (an/art a111art). AU that the babu ms1de Bankim IS capable of is this secret resentment and a secret rebeUion; such things like secret rebeUions, are really dreams. or judged more severely, a defilement. To act ~ensibly is simply to act rationally within cermin ordinary acceptable pre011scs, b~t these prenm''$ ?f ~veryday rationality ore not uniquely grou~ded. a_nd JU~nfiable. They md1cate mere appropriateness. and its pre011ses~ It IS re:>:dily conceded, would not hold w1der serious philosophical ques~onmg. This_theory of an inversion of me everyday sight in the truth percetved by • higher sight is simplified by popular consciousness into a strange equatio~ of r_eligious insight and madness. Anyway, tlus could in fact tum the :"t10nah~oc theory upside down by claiming that it is those who do ~o~ live w1thm the limitS of utionality who can speak the truth . .· lm~hctt m t?is doctrine therefore there is • theory of multiple rauonallty. If ranonahty has cwo princip>l criteria-of bdng internally dtsc~urses

32

!·

i"

I

!i

,,

71re Unhappy CcnsciouJnfis

consistent, •nd of being in some sense consistent with the world such th•t it allows us to handle d1is world effectively-then, it is implied, there could be more than one way of acting rationally. Ordinary relations with the world, represented by the j!l•i are of course ration:ll in an undeniable sense. But the other's W2Y is also rational. Whu is remarlcable is the relation set up between these two W2ys of acting on the (at least the social) world. Pr:actitioners of the other r:arionality are tolerant of the ordinary register, they do not call that irrational. Most of these traditions assert the possibility of tran.sfers, ofpassing back and forth, so that the reasonableness of one W2Y of acting can be appreciated from inside the other. Thus d1ere was available a living tradition of thought which celebrated marginality. and treated it :u a sign and qualification for seeing great truths of exiltence. At any rate, these reveal a certain figurt of thought, which associates • privileges of either cognition or of sentiment, with the o11tside. The right to the truth, as the right to love, belongs to one who has the courage to step into this great unknown outside. Banlcim's Kamaldltiinta belongs to this tradition, but with a certain obliqueness, both an ancestor and inheritor. He is an inheritor of this curse (or gift) of an inspired liminality, being able to see what others cannot. He emphasizes by signs the tragedy of prophecy, its mixed quality of being half gift and half curse. He is also an ancestor ofTagorc's biiuls and bairiigis. In both his and Tagore's works these outsiders arc marked by a dilferent language. In Tagore these char:aeters most olieo leave their cornmentaty on evetyday life in songs--a rhythmic, harmonic counterpoint to the prose of daily existence. Kam:llikanta toO speaks a different language: he speaks in humour, in a different key from the humourless seriousness of the everyday language of interest. Kamalikanta's insanity. I suggest, has something ro do with the unridy. torrured, self-doubting begioningt of a cri6que. This is reflected in the potchy .clarity of his utterance. In individual parts, Kama!.ikanta's arguments are clear, and theoreticaUy sound; but it does not add up to a general solution ro the questions that are latent in his discourse. He sees clearly that coloniol represenr.tions of western rationalism need critiques, but not very clearly whot dtat critique would be in its fuU form. And madness offers a wonderful sign of this indecisiveness, a subtle W2Y of :usening statements, but pucnng these statements themselves under a sort of questioning at the same time. Madness gives this whole undertalcing a philosophicaUy tentative, interrogatory form, a sign of the uoconcluded nature of this critique. Humour, by itself. is an abstnct idea, because it can :usume various fonns. Of the great number of possibilities, I classifY Bankimchandra's humour in Kam•&ikanta os double irony. Double irony has a simple formal feature which distinguishes it from other lcinds of humour. It not merely mocks

Humour and the Prison

of Reality

33

at the world; it does also, in the same act, mode at its own moclcing at the world, and therefore itsel( . . . Does this son of discourse when used in high literature, mdicar_e anything beyond an individu:ll predicament or a penonal style? Does thu show something interesting only about the author of t~ese essays, ~r are there perhaps signs in this discourse of a shared, coUccnve difficulty. Are there some people, some classes, some politi~ gro~~· who must speak like this, in this roaMer of saying and not s.>ymg, hiding what they say, turning their whole discourse into an endless double tnttttdre? It seems to me that this is the typical discourse of subalttmity, of a subaltern gr~up which feels the inevitability ofcriticism and the inevitability of its pracncal &ilurc . .Also quite typical of the sub:lltem is this tr:agic _disj_ngenuo~ness, of making criticism, and hiding it in the act. Sub:llterruty IS a tra8)C fate, and for those who are not able to come tO terms with it cognitive!~ and practically, the only recourse, the most ambiguous recoune of all, _1s the discourse of irony. Abstracdy, the two lcinds of discourse, the tra_8)C ~nd the ironical, could be very &r apart; but it is this situation of hJStoncal subaltemity which const2ndy causes them to form peculiarly u~table configurations, and Banlcim's tboug~t moves from a tragtc percepnon of the world to an ironical way of deahng With 1t. In moclcing at the world, it can also mock_ a~ its ?wn moclcing at li•e world. This is not just a rhetorical phrase. ThiS 1mplies that if aU that the humorous statements say about colonialism is rrue, then It could ha~dly do to merely mock at it; and we are back at the gu1lt a~ut _r>rac~eal syllogism. In Banlcim the critique of the babu by Ka~ik~nta •s .~xed with 2 critique of Kamalilinta. It comes dose to a ruhilisoc pesmrnsm; for it sotirizes power but does not forget to sotirize helplcssn~. It has dm rarest of ability tO turn the critique toW2rds the self. In calhng t~c. world in question. it can :llso caU in question its owo _ pretenst?~· It IS. m that sense a deeply tragic sense of the comical. For the sense WI~ • disco~rs.e that it is a comic spectacle is an ultimately tragic sense. Ulnnutely, n IS on admission of defeat, of its inability to do anything to the world of injustice, leaving this world regrerfuUy as it fo und it.

The Theatre ofJustice

Humour, I take it, is a W2Y of inverting the world, a way of escaping from what is undeniably and intolerably true. I shall begin my textual reading of Kamar.ltiint• ,.,.;th a gesture of inversion. The text ,has three pans: the dapt•r. his diaries; his letters to the editor of Bangadarsan. an~ a last indescribable piece in which Ka.r nalikinto rakes on his favounre

34

Humour Gncl 1M Prison

The Unhappy Consciousnm

enemy, the judiduy, his eteoW and favourite object of derision, called Kamalilcinta's deposition (Kanialiileiinur Jobdnbandi). In this peculiarly compelling scene of the court the whole theatrical 6eld is set out with dnoutic cbriry, so that we can, if we look closely, see what is involved. The event is fonnally a judicial process, in which there is a gteat theatre of dispensing a just verdict; but what it actually achieves in the end is a stpnge combination of solemnity, injustice and farce. The whole colonial dispensation is present there in a rr:msparent code; it is a powerful condensation of all colonial rebtionships with a miraculous authenticity. Inside this arena there are two dramas going on at the same time. There is of course at the sur&ce level a judicial case, with its plaintiff, defenc:bnt, pleaders and judges; the plaintiff is Prasanna, the milkwooun of Kamalilcinta's puticubr acquaintance; the defendant a hazy under-determined Muslim (nttfr), the witness Kaoulilcinta, and we have the entire theatrical personae of hiikinu, moldiirs, muhuris. But it is easy to see that there is a second judgement being prepared; in this deeper ease, the people who get judged to their detriment are Kaoulilcinta and Prasanna; and those who do the accming and judging (crucially together) are the other set, from the judge down t?e line through the bwyers (on both sides, because both show an equal mcomprehcns•on of Kamalilcinta's logic), the perry officials to the bckeys of the court system. Thus K.amalikiinta is offering a defence in a b~er sense. Subtly and indirec tly, he is less the witn.ess, more the accused, or if he is witness it is to a defamation of something brger, incomparably more significant than the individual and trivial cow. Actually, the scene shifts subtly from the theatre of this everyday courtroom to the general theatre of history where Kamalikinta with the occasional help from Prasanna, is concerned, with his mc:agn; resources, to defend an entire civiliz.ation. Why is the court his favourite enemy? Why do K.amaliikanta the essayist and Bankjm the novelist always choose the system of justice for the1r partkubr ironical att~noon? Why not something else that is equally undeniably British, or equally clearly unjust? Bankim, it appears, has a reason. Surely, there ore other, perhaps gteater, theatres of injustice than the British courts. But in a sense, this institution particularly deserves travesty. For the syst~m of justice is itself a parody in the first pbce, a distinctly un-Naoroji-like idea.' Courts carry on the systc1112tic pracoce of injustice in the name of justice, and the moral and institutional in1provemem of colonial people. That is why it is the real centre of colonial ideology and is an eminently suitable candidate for the unmaskjns of its pretensions. Earlier we have heard of Karnalikinta's wish, disclosed in • fit of confidentiality, to the BangaJadttn editor, to write a sequel to Don Q«ixott: We c2n write novels qulte well; although we. thought instead of writing trivb;l fiction w~ would write a ~qud to Don Quixol.t or Ci/ B/45. Unfortun2tely.

of Rtality

35

we have nO< yet been able to read either. Would it serve your purpooe, Sir, ~n appe:ndix to Macaulay's esuy; Cor that too is a novel, after 311. 10

i{ we write:

Here, at the end of his fictive career, he does e)tactly that. Or indeed perhaps more: for he does nO< write a Don Q«ixott, but turns into one and takes on cultural monsters. ll could be done only that way, only as parody, as a caricature of the self: in the world of colonialism, it was not in the realm of the possible. In a sense, there is thus an ambivalent dioux, both a high point and the low point of Kaoulikinta's idiosyncratic narrative: for he realizes here, in a formal symbolism of the theatre what he had earlier merely suggeste~ battle between the colonial rationalist system and its accomplices, and the single, vulnerable, unaided native, fortified only by the double conviction of his helplessness and rightness. Appropriate to the double-valued structure of the narrative, this high point is indistinguishable from its point of collapse, for here the text · changes, its tone degenerates often into pure farce. It is literal denouement, for Kam:iliklinta docs not appear again. KJ>osnavis, the babu chorus on his activity, dismisses him with finality: Jtkhiliim miin"!tii klltpiG giiicht: 11 I realized the man had become completely, irretrievably 1112d. K•malikanta realizes himself by going over a boundary of some kjod, beyond the possibility of compromise and transbtion. From the point of view of collaborative colonial rationality, he was lost beyond redemption. in this lonely battle Kamal:ikint>'s manner of fighting is interesting. Notice his weapons. There were traditional argum~ts with which conservative Indians had f.ashioned a kjod of defence, the argument which said that Indian society was different, and western lows, though abstractly tine, did not fit this sociery. 12 K.amalillnta spurns such weapons. He goes directly into att•ck, not with 'our' weapons, but 'theirs'. He is out to show-not that western arguments do not apply here though they are sound as arguments, but th>t they arc inconsisteut. Rationalism, when questioned from presuppositions different from its own, breaks down under investigation. But to do that, you must be a Kamalilcinta, acceP' loneliness, to have the radical courage to tum his own trial into a trial of the court. This fardcal ending of Kmnaliileiinta contains an intrigu.i ng questioning of the problem of identity as rationalism conventionally constructs it. On my reading, it also does something &r more interesting and fundamental. Kamalikanta w•s a subtle observer of the complicity of philosophy in bnguage 2nd soci•l practice; arld it did not escape him chat rationalism claims to usc a peculiarly dear language, a language of the literal which holds in unambiguous forms its objective i1112ges of the world. Science speaks th•s clear,literal language, and so does judicial process and law,the tield which, like science, claimed 2bility to rca~h undistorted truth. K.amalakanta's. critique of rationalism must therefore begin 2t the beginning. in this literal

36

language, in which beyond the judge and the lawyers, beyond even the legal system, his object of ridicule is the linguistic pretence of rationafum. It shows the vacuousness of its concept of identity, a concept or principle taken to be self-evident. His brush with the court here is unusually violent: but that was hardly his fault. For in the first scene, the court; representing western theory, is peremptory and •ggressive. It asks Kanl.alakinta to define his identity, before the actual business begins. Kamalakanta is brought in as a prosecution witness to identify the vital cow, on the basis ofPrasanna's weU-judged contention (she does not know how weU judged it is) ch~t 'this Brahmin never teUs lies'. 13 As a malle-r ofrourst, the court asks J<.lmalakinta to identify himself. Obviously it considered the question of identiry .a minor routine one, to be inattentively taken for granted. It does not realize the enormous significance of asking a thinking person 'Who are you?' Kamalakinta violently refuses--deconsrructing, undermining, ridiculing the concept of identity implicit in the court procedure. He converts this from a mere empirical datum to a philosophial question. It is in tim sense, though not •esthetically, a climactic point of interrogation and refusal. 'Who are you?' the lawyer asks Kamalikiinta, disastrously underrating his victim. (Literally a victim, 'badhya', to be destroyed: in his incarnation as the lawyer his legitimate victim is the litig.mt.) 14 Kamalilinta refuses, and begins to play with this most commonsensical of questions. How do we judge a discourse unless we know who it is that speaks? How can Kamalakint~ question this question? How can he see, or pretend that he sees unreasonableness in the most routine opening of a lawsuit? I believe this is the crucial centre of his enterprise. From the critical point of view his approach is unexceptionable, indeed, the only properly critical one. As a lonely critic, in a strange world in which even those he is spe•kmg for are not with him, "he realizes that to be a critic is 'to go to the root of the matter' and to go to the root of the nutter is to get behind the self-evidence of wofds and objects. Behind Kamalilinta's apparently casual style there lies thus a deadly serious progranune of critical replies. In this we can hardly do better chan follow the contest literally. Konuliikiin~:~ W3S put into the witness box, andsurted chuckling.

The attendant took him to usk: 'Why .re you laughing?' Kamalikinta said with folded hands, 'I have not done anybody any hann, why are you boxing me up like this'' The attendant did not see his point, shook his head and said, 'This is not a place for jok~ [tamQJQ, a cle>r double entendre for it me•ns both the art of joking and an object ofjokes, something tha~ is farcical or corruc). Take the oath.'

A muhuri :hen bcgon to read out the oath: Say in the direct knowledge of the Almighcy .... K.

M.

Humour and tht Prison of Reality

The Unhappy Comciousnm

(astonished] What was that you said? C.ri't you hear me? With the direct knowledge of the Almighcy . ..

K.

'With the direct knowledge of the Almighty! wh:at

37 ~ presumption~·

The JOdge noticed that the witness was co using some trouble and asked. 'What presumption?' Must I say that I had direct knowledge of the Almighcy? \Vhn is wrong in that? T hat is the fonn of the o>th, 1fter all.

K.

J.

You arc a gre2tjudge indeed. sir. h could perllJps be excused iff ~id some minor lies in coUrse of my deposition, but should we begin by

K.

such a mas.s.ive untruth?

J.

What do you C.nd untrue in this? Komalil
could guess'. Aloud he remarked 'Your honour. I always h:ad the impressl~n chat God was not an object of direct knowled~ . J h;~ve never yet seen hrm

cle•rly, directly, bur that could be be<:ause of poor s.ight'.' 5 The judge, to m•ke mmers brief, s~id, 'give him a simple affim1ation'. Kamalakanta is now asked to say 'I swear', which h e refuses on the Austinian ground that he could hardly say I swear without kno':"ing wh~t he would have to swear to. It is, in other words. a perfonnanve; and 1t was rather like getting someone to sign on a blank paper, which, he says archly, is a common practice under the colonial administrarion. 'I knew this was done outside court all the time, but did not realize this was court procedure as well' 1 6 Beginning his interrogation the lawyer asks wha~ is his name, and what is his father's name, leading Komalakanta to enqUire if even depositions must have genealogies. 'Which caste are you?' which, reading it literally, he answers by asking how could he, an individual, constitute an entire aste. Which categocy? Which Vama?

Of the Hindu category. Very dark (because Varna mean$ both colour and

caste). Have you got a caste? Who can take it away? (Asked his age, Konulilrs, cwo months, thirteen d>ys, four hours, five minute$ ... • What nonsense. Who

wants your hours and

Why? Old you not rrukc me swear just now that I would not withhold >ny information?

minutes?

Do wh3t you will. I c>n't handle you. Whe.re do you live? 1 mean where is your

home? Where do you stay, .then?

Nowhere. I do not h:we a room to c:tll my own, let alone a house. Wherever I c.31\.

38

Humour and tlrt Prison

Tht Unhappy O>tutiouJntss

Don't you luvc an address o( some sore~

I did w~n Nulbibu w.u

Where ne you now? . Where were you last

Why? In this courtroom! In a shop.

ahv~.

no mo«.

night? The Judge buued in :and ~id, 'Let us stOp this dcb~te, Jet me write down "ljvc-s nowhere".'

Wfut is your profouion? Am I • l•wyor or a prostitllt< th>t I must have • profouion? I mean, bow do you Usually, mixing rice with 401. using my right fund maruge to e:at? to tift it. and direct it into n\y mouth and down 1ho throoL How is that nee and d.ll If God provida them, nol dse. provided for? Do you earn anything? Not a penny. Do you steal. chen?

J(l did,l would have sought your assisunce sooner, :md you would h:avc got your sh:are of my earn..

ings.17

.

The bwyer foils. He gives up and tells the court he would not be able 10 question this witness. Syn,bolically, intransigent helplessness wins over power. For all the nujesty ofits power, the rationalist system of the court foils in its main dromauc purpose: it cannot bring K.amaliikinta to submit 10 its discourse, 10 speak it, to answer its questions the way it wants. Rather, what happens is just the opposite. the questioning of the victim, Kamalakiinta, breaks up the court's discourse, destroys its two cruci,al pretences of objectivity and consistency. The discourse of colonialism, and its supporting discourse .of European Enlightenment, are shown to be hollow and eventually vulnerable: its majesty holds only as long as its power exists, only as long as its interlocutors do not question its assumpt.ions. Colonialism admits of no rational defence. Ol!icials of the court nuke an indisunct crowd, formed partly of a judge, the lawyers, the transcribers, the ushers--all of whom are seen partially as in a painting of a crowd: their thinking and speaking are hazy, and they are entitled to only the haziest of existences. Ag.inst them, figurally, Kamalakanta stands out clear and undeniable: only he who takes responsibility for his words, who goes to the primal quolity of their meanings deserves to be noted at oil. The qualificacion for being a serious critic is set out sharply-a critic has to give to his vocation his life. not his spue evenings. Criticisn1 i.s not a way of saying 1hinp, bu1 a way of being in the world. We realize immediately that this is a particularly powerful inStrument of caricature, for it makes fun of the fundamental claims of rationaliSt discourse. Caricacure of thos sort docs not merely show gaps or infelicities in rorionolist doc1rinc from the outside; it does something more lethal.

of Rtality

39

II is an inex1ricable part of the rationalist project to clarify language, and through bnguage its rebtionship with the world. It sees itself as a fore~ that deanses language, destroys superstition, and is entirely internally con.s•stent. To show that rationalism itself Slealthily commits what it condemns in others, to demonstrate that it is not adequate to its own dedarations, is a particularly damaging criticism. Kamalakanta's criticism of the enlightened court is mostly of this fom•. The theatre and conventions of colonial judicial practices were meant to induce belief that the process going on was unbiased, an entirely rational judgement about a case. These conventions are derived from prevalent philosophical doc:~nes, suitably dramat.i ud and abbreviated into a popubr language. The JUdiCial procedure draws its claim to inununity and eminence from philosophical theories of truth. Kamalakanta 's early remarks reveal that this language and the philosophy that confers respectability on it, •re full of unexamined propositions. Thus a theoty which prides itself on its freedom from superstition begins with superstitious beliefs: a theory which ridicules tl1e proctices of others has ridiculous praCtices of its own. A system which declores its objectivity is biased in its own ini6al moves. Examples arc carefully constructed so that utterances have a routine meaning within the court language, 18 but ouuide the language of the cou~ they s~ill retain enough of an identifiable meaning, but a meaning thot "offens1ve, laughable or goes wild. The whole scene illuStrates how, although they speak ceremoniously to each other, and are scructured inco the same face to face situation, they are not able ro effectively communicate. Kam:tliikinta's perverse consistency in misunderstanding wh2tever the lawyer says underscores this lack of conununicarion . A word like 5ambandha (relation), 19 with a purely neutral connotation in law means a simple acquaintance. In ordinary discourse of Bengali social !if~ it could mean a maribl, 2nd in special innuendo, extramarital relation, the sense in which Kamalikinta takes the word, to c:reate on excuse for taking offence. A lighter game is played on the word .!Qrnlii 20 indicating indisnnctly a bbck cow or the lawyer's gown. This comedy of e
40

The Unlu!ppy Ccnsciousness

At the end of the episode, Katru~lalcinta is back to the question of colonial conquest in a reference that is at the same time explicit and travestied; the minor affair of the cattle theft is regarded as a small but typical example of the historical principle involved which mak~ aggrondisement and justice indistinguishable. Long ago a brahmin said to King Syenajit.a, between the owner and the thief of a cow whoever drinks itS milk has a stronger claim. For others to express any attachment to it is importunate. This is the law ofthe Hindus as expounded by Bhilmadeva Th;kur; this is current European intemation.J Llw. If you wish to be regarded as civilised and advanced, you must match things away from

so

others. Whether the word me2ns the earth or the cow. she is destined in either case for the enjoyment ofthieves. All thleves from Alexander to R;najit

Singh illustrate this rule. If the right of conquest can be a right, why not the right of then? Therefore, 0 Prasanna, act acc!>nding to law. Follow the lessons of the hiStory of diplomacy. Let the thief take the cow.21 If his answer to the court is not read as a series of no-sayings, like stating I would not say where I live, or more radically, I do not stay anywhere, or connecting all such non-answers and thus undermining the court's conception of rationality, one perhaps finds something more interesting in the meaning of his madness. His intransigence could refer subtly to the condition of being aniketa,22 someone who refuses a parochial home in order to live in the world. It is then a positive philosophical statement, which the court, because it is unacquainted with Indian thought nusunderstands in a way both comic and infuriating. The ideal of the aniketa even though translated tO the hakim, would only elicit the astOunding mistranslation nib4s nai.23 This is typical: it is both a literal transliteration of the word and a total incomprehension of the concept. It is inadequate to see him as merely non-stating, playing a farcical game of'wrong answers; in fact, he is playing a game of a far more serious and deeper kind with the. court. There is an underlying system of description of the self, but so coded that it might be missed by its two audiences, the internal audience of the court, but also by people like us, to the extent we are like clte people inside the court. The appellation· of madness by the dominant discourse is a way of creating a privacy for oneself. Within his game, it makes perfect sense to say and not say exactly what he does: that he does r.ot have a profession, no residence, no income, none of the fixed bourgeois references which are supposed to constitute a man's humanity. They do so contingently, only in this social arrangement, and do not have any transcendental title to truth. Kamalakinta asserts, in effect, you may know a person's income, profession, address, the entire list of characteristics which, on this theory, constitute his personality, yer not know him. By this, he is creating space within language to say both 'things, an enormous terrain of defence and interrogation.

Humour and tire Prison

of Reality

41

Through this indecipherable complexity, a language in which we are never able to reach the bottom, he is perpetually absconding within these words.

The Babu in Synchrony and Diachrony l)~scrip:ions of a society could be of two kinds, which could be known/ recognized by two languages. One was the description of the society in an insider's language; which simply produced, enlarged and extended its ideology, its self-justificatory consciousness. Another description could be through the language of an outsider; not a natural outsider, who simply stands outside a society as an alien. The right to speak the ttuth belongs to a person who has worked his way tO the outside; he has become an outsider, to him belongs the right to see its truth. In Kamaliikanta, there are, apart from the unclassifiable corruncntator himself. who does not speak the language of any particular group, some other characters. Between them, they describe the social geography of colonial Bengali society. There is Prasanna, the symbol of the feminine, with the complex addition that she also represents the popular. There are the indistinct collective portraits of the court men. These are of course paradigmatic babus, displaying their quintessential features. The characteristic that distinguishes the babu in Bank.im's time and ours, is cruciaUy the acquired unfamiliarity with one's own culture, its language and its discourses under the misleading belief that one has mastered the superior ones of rhe West. The men of the court are insignificant superstitious rationalists (rationaliSts without knowing why it is good to be a ration.tlist), which is their coUective structural property, quite apart from being, as inclividuals, disingenuous rascals. But beyond the babu one gets an occasional glimpse of the third element of Bengali society, the typical British colonial administrator. It is between th~e three figures that the entire social geography of colonial Bengal is laid out. I shall treat these types in succession: first the babu, the real object of description and travesty in the text. Second, we shall open up the conC!ensation in the character of Prasanna, and treat her two different characteristics distinctly, the symbolism of the wotru~n, and rhe role of the popular characters in Bankim's humour. Although the popular do not erupt in Bankim's descriptive world too often, when they do, they appear as representatives of a laughing people. The great object of attention of the Kamaliikanta text is the babu. He is the constant object ofBankim's humour, in all its various moods, from the vicious, to the gentle to the forgiving. And, not surprisingly, the babu

Tht Unhappy ConsdouJntsJ

42

is not a new theme with Dankim, won for the chzzling show of wit in Kamafiikiinta: indeed, he is in this somewhat wry sense, his first love. Two of his earliest pieces of humorous writi(lg inm1ediately and unerringly identified this abiding object of his sarcasm, the babu. the collective type with whom the author has such • fertile rebtion of contradiction. He is undeniably • pan, and at the some time, he could not accept he was a part, leading to the founchtion of the great tradition of Bengali literaty self-irony. JngriijJtotra (hymn 10 the Englishnun),14 helpfuUy subtitled 'tnnslated from the Mahiibhiirata', the aU-seeing chronicle of India comprising its past and future, at once established both the form ond the content of mis humour. The SlOira would undergo unending experiment at Bankim 's hands, running the whole gamut of sentiments from the ridiculous to the sentimentally uplifting. zs He was indeed to resh•pe this most func:hmental form of invocation in the Hindu tDdition tO startlingly novel putpOSCS. To be a stotD a composition must howeve.r conform to some purely formal properties of style. Incomparability of the deity is conveyed by the mannerism of descriptive excess. 26 Stotras usually have • circular, repetitive style, coming back afier each cycle of excessive praise to the signature phrase. In Bankim's early travestied uses ofthe stotra form there is • ceruin debasing of its style which c•n come only with an easy and shrewd C.miliarity with its formal properties, just os a successful cartoonist would cre•te laughter by ex•ggerating credible features of a face. Early parodies like the l"grajstotra ore therefore convex satires which pour sarcasm on the Englishman, the object of the incantation, the babu, the reciter whose discourse it encapsulates, but also, subtly, the doctrine of excess in the Stotra form. r-omuUy, it immediately affiliates itself to Bankim's favourite, the ala~tkiira of vyajastuti; and its content is a double description; a description of the Englishman in terms which vividly describe the describer, a self-characterization of ascending/intensifying servility. 0 ont: who c.a.n divine what is going on inside our minds! whatever [ do is meant to win your he•rt. (Though the Bengali verb '6huliiibiir j<myya' is more

double-edged, •nd means equ:ally, to deceive you; so the corre
:310d

table, please luve pleasure on me. I shall renounce my mother tongue to speak your Jangu•ge. abjure my •ocestnl rebllJon and •dop< the Bnhmo faith, instead ofbabu use Mr as prefix to my name, be: plcued with me.

'~~·~·

"' ............···-=-'. . . . . _.. ·j

H11ntour a..d tilt Prison

of Rtality

43

fed uncil I have some forbidden meat: I make it a point to have chicken for

snacks, therefore, 0 Englishman, please keep me ac your feet. Please grant me wealth, honour, fame, fulfil all my cksircs. Appoint me to high office, or a raja, or ~ m.ah.anja, or a riibihidur. or a member of the Council: if}•ou eannot gnnt aU th:u, invite: me, at least, to your at homes and

dinnen, nomin~tc me a member of high committees or the ~nate, or make

me a jwtice or an hononry nugjstnte ... Please attend to my speeches. please read my essays, give approbation-then I would not pay attention to the denunciation of the whole of Hindu society.27 Clearly, there are two levels of meaning in this false hyrrm. At me first level, there is a caricature of both the babu and the Englishmen who confer honour on him. Characteristically, Bankim goes immediately to the heart of the matter, cutting mrough the pretences. Only in appearance is colonial society a 6eld of career open to talent, on achieving society; at bottom, the colonial administrative system does not encourage meritocracy. The Englishnun can give anything; it is the arbitrariness of his conferments which is emphasized, and which makes the babu 's supplicatory self-abasement a proper complement to it. High honour under colonialism in Bengal is not recognition for desert, service o r ability but for competitive self-abasement. Clearly, colonialism confers on the Englishnun a mystical power of nominalism; he can name anything into anything; and the nuin point is to be so named by the right authority. The English can rename all socia.l and moral descriptions: and most teUingly of all, the babu's adoption of refom1 and rationalism is revealed for what it is. He is a rationalist out of opportunism, and entirely unclear •bout how a rationalist argument is grounded: he wo uld do all the right things--accept modernity, break tradition, adopt altruism, not because he can ground it himself in reason, but because the English would consider it praiseworthy. The babu's acceptance of western rationalism is fundamentally t:tinrcd by this heteronomy. Thus two types of acts can be behavouristically indistinguishable: but whether it is an act of altruism or. servility can be found only by looking into irs rational authenticity. The upside down ch;.racrer of the colonial world is etched in brieOy and powerfully duo ugh this supplicatory refrain: I will do .wrything you ask for, turning the right actS into wrong ones. This is why colonial society is such a proper field for a sarcastic demystification. Even seemingly highminded action must be probed by this sarcastic mistrust, until they reveal tl1eir true motives. It is the unapparent, indistinct intention which can teU on act of kindness from an act of imitative servility, or simply verbal posing from genuine inteUectual curiosity. This was on early piece. Compared to the subtlety ond power of his later caricanues of the babu discourse, this piece appears unrefined. Irs si~ficance lies in tloe fact dut it sets :i p•ttem, a funchmental descriptive structure. 411nd it is interesting how little the nuin point of the stru:cture

44

Humour and the Prison

The Unhappy Consciousness

· ofbabuness would change in his rrund. In sheer literary quality it is not of the standard of the first, an elegant essay on the learned tiger of southern Bengal who delivers a public lecture on his anthropological observations of human society when he had strayed out of the forest and spent an instructive period in the Calcutta zoo.23 But later, in Lok. Rahasya, he writ"' a piece of such sustained accomplished irony that I doubt if even Bankim ever matched its vitriolic exceUencc. 29 Like the hymn, this too is purportedly taken from the Mahiib/rarata, using it and travestying it at the same time, turning its claims to aUseeingness against itself Vai$ampayana, the sage who recited the epic at the court ofJanmejaya is caught in the early partS of his epic performance; .and the king, a man of great historical curiosity, requests the sage to recite to him the qualities (gu1Ja) 30 of those who would adorn the earth in the nineteenth century and would be known as babus. This piece is particularly resistant to translation because of its heavy reliance on the fonn of vyaja.stuti manipulating the ambivalent associations of phrases and straight double meanings of terms in Sanskrit. Though Ban kim used such pieces of modern vyiija.stuti later, few indeed would come anywhere near this unparalleled intensity of humour and ambivalent denunciation. The author and reciter of the Mahabhiirata enjoy the reputation of being sanJadar.;l, all-seeing. And this is not in vain; for he compresses the histo?cal characteristics of the babu into an unsurpassable ch~cter constructron. It founds something like a distinct genre of praise-abuse of the self of the Bengali rruddle class bhadralok.l 1 Only the rise of more serious nationalist politics puts an end to this humorous literary tradition. An approximate idea of VaiSampayana's characterization of the babu could be found in some of the passages. though a ttanslation would miss the insistence of the series of adjectives in Bankim's use: Bobus are invincible in speech, proficient in foreign language ond hate their own; indeed, there would appcor some babus of such amazing intellect that they would be altogether incopoble of conversing in their mother tongue ... The l:>abus are those who would save without purpose. earn in order to save, study in order to e·a m and steal question papers to do well at enminati?n$.

Indeed, the word babu would be many spleodoured in its m.eanings; those who would rule India in the K•/i age and be known as Englishmen would unde..und by the word a common clerk or superintendent of provisions; to the poor it would mean those wealthier than themselves. to servants the masr~r.

I om however celebrating the qu:ilities of some people whose only purpose rn life would be tO spend • fittingly babu existence. If anyone tokes this in any 32

other meaning, his hearing of this ftttalr4blt0tt1ta would be fruidess; in his later existence he will be born as a cow and constitute a pan of the babu's dinner . . .

Anyone who is devoid of ony poetic sense, with an exec~ble . musical sensibility, whose only knowledge is confined to textbooks read rn childhood, •nd who reg>rds himself as omniscient is a bo~u. . . . Like Vi~~u they would

of Reality

45

always lie on ~n eternal bed. Like Vi~I)U, they too would have ten incamal:ions;

detk, teacher, Broh!"o, broker, doctor, lawyer, judge, landlord, newspaper editor and idler. Like Vi~I)U, in evety incarnation, they would destroy feorsome demons. In his incomation as a clerk he would destroy his orderly. as a teacher he will destroy the student, as sution master the ticketless traveller, as Bnhmo the small priest, as broker the English merchant, as doctor his patient, as lawy~ his client, as judge th_e litig>.nt. as bndlord his tenants, as editor the orditwy' gentlemen, as idler the 6sh ·in the pond : . . Anyone who has only one word inside his mind, which becomes ten when he speoks, hundred when lie writes and thousands when he qwrrels is a babu_. He whose strength is one time in his hands, ten times in his mouth, a hundred times in his back and absent at the time of action is a babu. He whose household deity is the English.rnan, preceptor is the Brahmo preacher, scriptures are newspapers, and place of pilgrimage is the notional theatre is a babu. One who gives himself out as a Christi•n to missionaries, as a Bnhmo to Kdabcandn,33 as a Hindu to his father and an atheist to the Brohmin beggar is a babu. One who drinks water at home, alcobof at his friend's, receives abuse at the prostitute's house, and kicks ot his employe.r's is a babu.... He who hates oil while ulcing his bath, his own fingers when eating, and his mother tongue in conversation is indeed

a babu ... 0 King, the people whose virtues I have recited to you would come to believe that by chewing pan, being prone on the pillow, h•ving bilingual

conversation. ~nd smoking tobacco tbey will regenerate their country.34

Janmejaya, apparently an astute observer of men, had a fairly clear idea o( what sort of beings .t he babus would be, and requested the sage, '0

sage, let the babus be victorious, please tum now to some other subject•.35 I have on several occasions mentioned a stylistic feature of Banki.m 's prose-his deliberote use of Sanskritic tropes, and his general nearness in language use to the classical literary tradition. Nowhere does this come out so clearly as in this piece. His humour is inextricably related to the pleasunble discovery of the idiosyncracies of language, the capricious associations of its idioms, nouns, verbs. Entirely dissimilar things sound linguistically, or rather phonetically similar. 36 This is stuff out of which poets would conventionally create the end-rhymes of their verse. Classical poetics realizes shrewdly that there is a place for such play of phonetic sirrularity within prose styles too, creating startling sound eff'eq:s and pleasantly e>prici6us affinities. Banlim literally revels in these startling resemblances. He loves to explore, as the musician. does in the case of notes, the internal continent of the language as a world of constantly changing, constantly surprising resemblances--of meanings, sounds, of rhythmic patterns. Bankim belongs to a period ofliterary .Bengali heavily modelled on classical Sanskrit literary nonns which is soon left behind. Puns become distinctly less reputable in a few years within serious prose. Humour, by the time we come to Tagore, is nearly all semantic rather

46

Humour ami tlrt Prison

Th U11happy CciUdousnm verbal. 37

than The locus of the ironical is shifted &om the sounds to the meanings, from the sensuous rustle of the bngwge to the ideas connoted. If we analyse aU his characteriz.ations, for Bankim, the babu's primary feature, which is instantiated in varying ways, is inauthenticity. The babu is a sudden •nd non-2utochthonous •rrival on the social scene. He was not implicit in ony earlier development in Indian or Bengali society; be derives his sudden •ppearance ond immediote eminence to colonial conquest. So the bobu is not the resu.lt of his own history, in a sense; be is simply • contemptible corollary of British conquest of India.n society. lnouthenticity is rdlected in dilferent aspects of the babu's existence, and two fields are taken up for special 2ttention; the babu's pretensions of power based on • rationalist conception of the world. ond his cultural existence, his claim to be cultiv2ted inteUecrually. The ratiorulity of the babu which allows him to declare his flimsy rebellion •goinst traditional Hindu society is derived from his conversion to • lcind of discourse, mode possible by the new, western educotion. But there •re two senses in which this rebellion is hoUow. lnteUectual rebellions too hove their political aspects; the babus did not work through the logic of • rebeUion agoinst Hindu society. They were the products of the gTe2t externality of Indian history. Their rise did not lie in anything internal to the process oflndian events. Affiliation to British power made them both vulnerable and irresistible. They could change everything they wanted in traditional Indian society, not by their own power but of those for whom they hod chosen to become c ultural broke~. This peculiarly vulnerable, shaky omnipotence of the b•bu alternately produces mirth and indignation in Bankim's literature. Danlcim lived at a time when the ambitions of the babu were primarily cultural and reformist; but he could see that it was already becoming political at the edges, something Dankim could only laugh at. He found even pretensions ~f reformism {of the Drahmo variety} ridiculous; no wonder h e would consider the idea of mo re adult political ambitions of this dependent class a sordid joke. Politics, he implies, had two gTcat sources; it could arise out of real power, or out of a genuine, brge, historic resentment. Babus were mere heteronomous agents of others' ideas ond othe~· acts. Consequently, they lacked either the power to really restructure and rearrange rheir own society. for that kind of renewal too needs courage, the sort of courage that the politics of the Enlightenment demonstrated in European histOry; or the responsibility of being the focus of a society's historical suffenngs. Both these could arise out of being part of the society's logic of politico] or economic reproduction, what could be coUed, in a different way, gTeater authenticity. But this class lacked both these distinctions. As a result, they were vulnerable &om two sides; they did no~ know where they stood with the British, and their position could change drastically with the merest change in adminisrrative policy

of Rtality

47

of the colonial power. They did not know where they stood in te~ of th<;i~ re1otion. with the indigenous society. Not accepred as part of the Btnuh coloncal power {culturally}, rejected as part of the society they had voluntarily disowned, they represent the pure form of heteronomy. For such a heteronomous gTOup, so obtuse as not to sec the racial basis of colonialis~, . not quite ln_d!ons, politic;s was a ludicrous proposition. Narurally, at IS hartUy surpns10g that with true suicidal instinct, the editor of &mgaJ~rian requests K2nulibnu for an article on a political subject.38 The editor asks for an article on politics because apparendy he would use this. as .pan of his political strategy; as a fearless Bengali journalist, he always IDVJtes othen to fight for the principles be holds most dear to his h~. 'Under the new laws, there would be a sbonf.aU ofsupply ofpolitical wnnng. from other sources?' and K2malikinta is asked to provide some from h~ uncensora~lc pe.n . Kmulilcanta morts with indignation at the suggesnon, and demes aU connection with the world of politics. He does nor, h~ asserts, belong to the directory of politicians. His rambling letter then b1furcot~ two ~e.6nitions of politics, one that sees it restrictively (the babu way; t.e. poht•cs as what happens in meetings, speeches and newspaper articles}, and the other which sees it as unive~. something that is inescapable and goes on everywhere (the non-babu way). Am I a landlord or a sycophant or a (rood or a beggar or an editor rhat I should

sun writing on politics? You h~vc I assume read my joum.U. Where did [ display s~ch imb~cility that you ask me to write on politics, of all subjects? True, I did OCC>szonaUy Omer you to secure my supply of opium; stiU, I have not degenerated to such a self-interested sycophant that 1 should write on poli.tics. Fie o o yo~r _editorship, fie on your gifu of opium, you have not

reahsed that Kamabkinta Sannii is a highminded poet, not a mean-spirited dealer in polities (politician). •o ~ut ~anulikinta is a prisoner of his second sight, which cannot stop seemg; It reveals the truth {or the logic} of the world, even when he turns ~\~ay .from it. Exactly this happens to him when he rums away from the tmtatmg prospects ?f ~litical journalism. Turning away from the subject, he looks at what he amuaUy regards as an ordinary everyday village scene--a courtyard o~ the house of a poor oil-presser (kolu}; his cortle feeding from thetr resp~cuve pots of hay, his son noisily prosecuting his lunch, his wife genenUy m charge of the peace of tl1e household. This ordinory sight changes.- •nd he rnokes a startling discovery. In his reverie he continues to thm~ absen tly of polittcs and is reminded of a famous ditry from a folk plar (;atra), a rravesty of a cla~.ical slolta:"

the dumb wuh<S to break anto words the bmc washn: to ntn ~bout you likewise wuh th.Jt l~ming .should occur to you r~nurk~bl c

wuhcs! ccc •Z

48

Humour and the Prison

Tht Unhappy Consciou.snm

Interestingly, we lind something that we sh~ come across repeatedly. The voice of truth is a moclcing, ironical voice, and the privilege of speaking it is accorded to folk. We can h.alf guess the historiQJ reason for this. Through the unfonunate history of his society, the high culture has become decadent, nearly mute. The new cuiture is a culture of the inauthenticity of colonialism, it simply cannot have the right to spealc what is lnle. That can belong only to the folk, the voice, the mockery, the ironies of itS people. Besides, in the original slob 'miilur~ lea10ti wla'!'l fHII!gurfa~glrayatt giri'!'', it is a made of the omnipotence of God that he can make the mute garruloui and the bme cross a mountain; and obviously, through the slide of associations, for the bal>U this can be done only by the Englishman who acquires through colo..W culture a power, • equal to God, of making the impossible happen, Thus, he continues: We similarly wish to do politics, politics every week, everyd>y, every hour. But exactly like the wish of the dumb for oratorial excellence, the desi.., of the bme tO tnvel Wt, of the blind to see painting>, like the wish of the Hindu widow for the afl'tttion of her hwband, like my wish for the love of a devoted wife~ it is ridiculous, never to be realised. Brother dealers in politics, I. Kamalillnta Cakravarty, am advising you for your own good. even the impossible can happen, but a nation that allowed itself to be conquered by seventeen cavalrymen, can never achieve politics. 'In the n.amc of the Lord,

give me some alms'-his is aU the politics they can ever have.43 This passage and its tone is typical of Banlcim: its mixture of sarcasm and a certain mebncholy. It announces the impossibility of politics, but the dialectic ofhis thought immediately sees the opposite. After this intense discharge, he keeps looking at the scene in the oil- presser's house, depressed. Under the influence of opium, he saw something else metaphoricaUy inscribed on the scene: a dog sidled up to· the boy and started wagging itS tail with demonsttative loyolty, and the boy duly rewarded him witlt a bone he had picked clean. Kamalakinta realized now that this dog was a politician; every move of his was political in character. The dog found that the boy took no further notice of him; so he moved up closer, started wagging his tail and putting out his tongue began to gasp. 'Loolcing at his emaci.ued body, empty beUy, beseeching eyes and quick gasping, the boy felt pity; talcing a piece of fishbone he sucked it clean and threw it to him; the dog's political agitation thus met with success. The dog. beside himself with joy, started munching. liclcing. ~owing and digesting it. His eyes closed with pleasure'.« The dog grew bolder, and alice a time started whining and moving forward slowly. The boy then ran through the fish and threw a gob of rice at him. The boy's mother came out, and finding a strange dog sharing her son'slunch threw a p iece of stone. 'The politician, thus hun, gathered his tail. and to the loud accompaniment of various classical ragas made himself scarce with

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49

gceot speed'. •s At the other end of the courtyard, a more stout ox than the oil- presser's bod come in and started eating his meal. The oil-presser's wife took a stick and chased the intruding ox. Without moving, the ox lowered its horns, and 'intimatc9 tO her the strong likelihood of his horns entering her heart' if she persisted in her pursuit of justice, upon which the bdy retreated and !eli him to conclude his unfinished if not wholly legitimate meal. 'I thought this is politics too. Actu~y. I was shown poliucs of two different Jcinds; lone a politics fit for dogs, the other for oxen. Bism.arck and Gorchokoff are politicians of the ox variety, and from Cardinal Wolsey to our own Mucirim Riy Riy Bi!Udur are politicians of the dog version'. 46 For the colonial mind, denied the liberty of spealcing about politics, it spreads across the world in a gigantic and ineradicable metaphor. Kamalakinta does not speak about politics, but sees politics written across the universe, and is endowed with the vision to decipher the hieroglyph of power in everyday life. Political ideas had defensible and rational definitions within the structure of western rationalist discourse. But the babu's adherence to them was purely and peculiarly external. He acceded to them not because they were rationally justifiable; indeed, be would have been found wanting on the first principle of rational justifiability, which can be established only through an initial admission of sceptical doubt. The babu did not know how to defend the rationolisf corpus rationally, on his own; he took the entire •pporatus of rationalism on trust, because the Europeot> believed in them. He had thus, an entirely irrational belief in rationolist theory. Not surprisingly, this travestied rationalism gets a hilarious critique from Kamaliik3'ma in one of the essays. Learning: it is difficu1t to determine what learning really is: To some people. it is the ability to read and write. Others believe th.:at to be: learned it is not ncccss::ary to read and write a great deal. all tlut one rpust le-arn is to write books and publish in newspapen. Some othen difl'er, arguing tha< if someone does not know how to "'ad or write how could he possibly contribute to newspapen? I consider such debate insignificant. Young crocodiles jump into the W2.tcr the moment ihcy come out of their iheUs; they do not hl,ve co le;)m swimming. Simibr1y, to lkngalis learning comes naturally. they do not need to learn to =d and write in order to be learned. lnteUect: the amazing ability by means of which we on regard iron >s eoaon wool, and coaon wool, iron. Lil:.e the hoarded riche. of the miser we c-an always sec It, but jt is invisible to others.. Of ill crated dUngs. this nlUst be the most plentiful in the world. for I have never beard •nyone say that he has leu of u than othen. ubour. tO partake of propedy hea1, followed by .Jeep, followed in tum by talcing the air, smoking the pipe, conven>tion with one's wife--strenuous activities of this kind are ~neally c3lled bbour.

50

Tht Unhappy Conuio1unoss

Power/strength: Long-wind<:d stntenccs. Ousb<:d &cc:, great vema! noist:, a constant shower ofHindi and English words accompani<:d by spit, gesticulatong kids and blows from a reasonable distance, md untimely exit at tbc slightest move by the advcnary--.ud> things are generically called sucngth.47 •

The lheer penistence of two themCl in Ban kim's rejection of the b2bu is remarkable. Fint, the inauthenticity of the entire intricate structure of the babu 's thought, its rootlessness in his own experience, something intensely, obscenely, infuriatingly &lse, but for which we have not as yet been able to 6nd any appropriate name except the very abstract one of heteronomy. Theoretical constructions came on from the outside permanently marked by this flimsiness, this insigni6cance of exteriority, of not being a result of reOection of a deep, wide historical experience, but a dishonourable result ofcultural imitativeness. The same idea, an identical sentence, spoken by a European author meant one thing. when spoken or rather uttered by an Indian babu something culturally quite dilferenL The two sentences may be exactly identical; yet one is a caricature of the other. The second remarkable feature is the constitution ofthe babu almOSt ennrcly by his speech. The babu is not a creature of practice, but of words. After devalui;,g his stock of words, the destruction ofhis form ofbWl12nity is complete, for he never left, in any ase, any practical residue. I have said earlier that I would not treat KAmaliiltiinta as a text in the limited sense of the single book. Text means a weave, and things could be woven into visions in endless difierent ways. I have also tried to show earlier how difficult the author found the conclusion of Kamaliikiinta; it had sever:tl endings after which it began again. Since Kamalakanta is Bankim's oblique vision, a crooked way of seeing to which the devious world reveals its truth this vision irrupts everywhere in Bankim's work; for he is his other authorial self. os inseparable from him os a shadow. KamaliilSSimilate unrepen1:2ntly in1o the larger text of Kamaliiltanta. By this I >SSimilate two other texts into its typical w~ve; the short sluts of lAit RahaJya and Mudtam Gutftr ftlltJnLarit, as they are visions of coloni•l life produced by the same eye, the sel( of which he had declared: 'I am an oeium-eater; my hearing, unden1:2nding and writing are all out of tune' . (Ami aphingkhor, MUIO iur~i, bauro bujhi, bauro likhi.)'8 However, one muse note the deeper, cruder, angrier tone of the travesty in Mucitam which separates it from the much 6ner texture of Kamaliikiinta: and this =kes it. in my judgement, inferior to that more complex, less organized text. The satire in Mucirim is radicalized in one sense. It is surely a more explicit, intense and brutal parody of the babu: however in !lecomin_g harsher it also becomes Jess generoUy applicable. Obviously, the hcsit:ations, cowardiccs. invisible

betray~ls

in Kamaliikiinta a.re small

Humour and fht Priso11

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51

enough to be seen as the secret crimes of all b•bus. The overt larcenies ~f _Mudriim arc less widely applicable; and thus, by radicalizing the mdictment, it acquits a majority of the defendants. All babus were not frauds of the Muci~m variety, and therefore if Mucir2m is held up as a P?"ra~al of the ordinary babu rather than the broken images of KAmafiil
The Babu's Others: Women The spec~c:le of 1<4maliiltarUa has three major protagoniSts; the babu's c~ct.er IS construct~ di~ogicaUy, through a series of descriptive and dtSCun~vc contrasts wtth hiS othm. From the artistic point of view, the figure ts not compl~tc without setting out his relauons to his othtrs. •• We must therefore devote some attention to the question: who arc the others of the babu? What are the principles of their construction in Bankimchandra? Th_cs~ others _of the babu do _not have a merely conceptual existence. Oankim s art 1mnors the hmoncal situation of his period of transition. These othen of the babu are not brought in and creoted for the purely P"!losophl~ purpose of illustrating that there were other possibilities of extstence, other waysofliving one's life. They were his historical neighbours too; actual soctal types who surrounded and interacted with the ~abu, ~nd in real life he had to con~end with them . They are permanent,_ merad1cable p~nces in his world. The lint othen, less important for ~ur purposes, ".of coune the dominating 6gurc of the British, presented 111 a _d?uble cancature. Sometimes, the British are presented as civilians, admintSt;raton w~o are ~ell-meaning, but whose efforts at reforming from the OUtside a SOCiety whJCh they merely dominate but do not undentand end invariably in &rcical results. Often however, the British arc also presented in their oth~r jn~amation. the anthropologist .1nd indological sch?l~r ~ho kno~ thiS SOCiety better than its inhabitonts themselves 3 nd IS giVmg 1t a lusroncal chronicle for the first time. so Let us however tum to. the other others of the _babu. They are, lirst, his womm, mostly his wt~e. tl1e most mnmate of his enemies, who represents in Ban kim's world • d1fJ~renc cultural principle, a dilfereni discourse, quite different standards of ranonality and intelligibility. Besides, against the babu in the space of

Hunwur and the Prison 52

the transitional society 9f Bankim's l3engol stands the 6gure of the popular masses, the average lower ocder individual, stiU bearing in her the principles of the cultural world before the •dvcm of coloni>lism and the babu. Since both of these types, women and popular characters, represent negations of the babu, it is not surprising that often they merge into individuals who dispby both these traits. The best cx.unple of this is of course the 6gurc of Prasanna, the foil to 1<2malmnta in the text. Prasanna is not the only .represent•rive of this principle i~ Bankim's work. In his novels, especially those which I shall call novels of praxis, we shall come across 6gures whose 6ctional attributes are different, but who share this cultural principle of non-b>buness, and its connection to _praxis. N otice the sharply non-babu, i.e., indigenous education given to Sinti 51 and Oevi Caudhurini,S2 and that training, unlike the crippling, immobilizing consequences of babu education, assists them in political p raxis. Thus, quite generally, the woman represents • diffe.rent principle oflife--more spontaneous, popular, indigenous, very close to the resources of the folk, against the cultural inauthenticity of the babu. In several novels, women are the enemy of babuness within the ho me. Consider lndiri and Suhisini in the house of the babu bwyer;n or differendy, Labangalati.5' This is brought out far more sharply in rhe sketchily drawn women of his sati.re, particularly I..Dk Rahasya. Think of the sceptical wife of the converution on the enhed occasion of the EngliSh new yeor, the wonderful play on the comicality of imi12tion (notice the stroctural panUel, whic h is the essence of every comical or satirical homology, between the stated imitation of the son in saying exacdy what his father has said, 51 and the unstated structure of the babu saying exacdy what his superior says). Speeches of superiors change their meanings subdy, inescapably, when they ore used by subalterns. At best they tum into lisping imi~ativeness, or grotesque insults as it happens in the case of the son.56 Or consider the dialogue, whose parallels must have been going on within every Bengali home of Bankim's time everyday, about the native languageP Indeed, few other writers of his genention show Bankim's sense of a moving temporality, the changing present, already giving way to something that is a differently struCtured social culture. Few others have this fine sense that the least noted elements of rocial life, its language, its clothes, roles, stereotypes, possibilities of lifestyles are decisively changing. Indeed, I have argued earlier, the babu (or the heteronomous cultunl principle) gradually conquers the social world; and the first token of this is his success in the 12ming of his women. Wives increasingly come to be cultural counterparts of their husba ntls; they exemplifY the same cultural principle, the same norm ofcultivation, only in a different, feebler gender. They feel the s:ame sorrows ~nd joys and express them in the same bnguage. l n~eed, the world of language becomes far more sundordized, uniform, with even serv:ants in Tagotc's fiction •nd afterwuds speaking

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of Reality

53

1M Unhappy CottSCiousnru an unrcolistic and disappointingly chaste form of middle-c:bss prose. The authors require, of course, some semiotic markers of difference between the language spoken by the master-babu and his servant; but this is shown as a lack, as a failure of the servant to speak the chaste Bengali of the babu. This i.s an entirely different situation from the one. in which his language is not marked by a laclt, but precisely by a fulness, by a great spontaneous competence. The women in B>nkim do not speak the bngu•ge badly; they speak drtt){/rtr language uceedingly weU. Its expletives do not orisc from a fumble at not finding the right word;. rocher they arise out of a vocabulary that exacdy m>tches their experience, a point Bankim makes quite explicidy in the essay 'Old Women and the New'.58 Ben.gali wome~ in fiction in the nineteenth century undergo a tr.ansformalloo of the1r choracter parallel to the mythic Riidhi's. From aggressive, self-assured, rural individuals (who ore not weighed down by feelings of inferiority to their male ncighbours), they tum like their husbands into delicate urban parasites. Once that transformation is complete, they are unable to become the focus or the fictive symbols of a critique within the household, often extending to their rationalist spouses when they are prone to excesses of a subaltern rationalism, the criticism of household w copons. 59 N owh ere in Bankim's novels is there room for • woman of the new type, who increasingly represents the new cult of feminity.i>O Rationalist influence, ironically, turned women from subjects, albeit unrefined and abusive, into objects of admiration, ciphers of • \Y>iling vulnerability. .Cankim's heroines uc mosdy powerful, aggr,essive, masterful women who arc able to take their own decisions, and work their way against a usually unreasoning and ? ppressive society. In ~~tu3l Bengali. soci~ty however, be was conscious, there was a fast transmon tO d1e VICtonan fcnumne. The battle th•t he helped women win in his 6ction they had already lost in society. Bankim's consciousness shows twO aspects of the historicity of such change, interestingly combined. There is a sense of the shorr-term inevitability of this change, a clear-sighted apprehension that such bad things are going to happen. But it is also marked by a sense of their contingency, a point th.a t is crucial to his last nqvels of historical praxis. It is this combination of ceminty about their happening, and his moral confiden ce that they are retrograde, a kind of reluctant helplessness in face of this historical process, which makes the rejection so passionate, his s:arcasm so vicious. He takes refuge, in a way, from th<:_ stage of ongoing history on which he is entireiy powerless, to the stage of discourse, a world made entirely out of the referential quality of language/words, in which he can 12ke victoty away from them. a world in which he can resist history, because he is its c.reatot. This is h~ wo~ld. Here he can name things into existence, and out of it. He uses thls tragic sovereignty of language to avenge himself and his people on history.

54

The Unhappy Consciousness

~n fact, lWO ways of this stnnge revenge are possible t~rough savage sanres and coumerfactuals. One way is to show what has happened as a tragedy, as bad for his people; the other is to emphasize the contingency of this 'neces:Jity', pick a suitable break-off point and c=te an alternative trajectory of history which gives moral comfon. This is, to use a phrase that is both so iUegitimate and so apposite, Bankim's way of 'rubbing history against the grain'.61 Prasanna in Kamaliikanta or her counterpans in the novels arc not depicted as examples of an existing prototype of women. Women were objcct.s of history. For all their symbolic association with the nation's power, they are also undergoing a crucial transfonmtion . But Ban kim's theory of this tnnsition is interestingly different from the trarution of Naoroji. Naoroji represents a trend of social reOection which believes in the rationalistic transferability of social irutirutions and types ofinruvidual character. The criticism of un-British rule in India could begin o nly on the prior assumption o f a possibility of British rule in his sense, which is crudely, ruling India me way Britain is ruled, establishing in reality me parallelism promised in coloni21 ideology. What is remarkable in Bankim is his strong
to use more modern language. a structure; and the inequality that hunun

Humour a"nd tht PriJon

of Reality

55

persons experience in their life world arc overdetermined forms of various diSCTete types of inequalities. lUI hunun beings luvc the same rights- dt.is is the essence of the doctrine of equality. I h>ve discussed the inequality between the landlord and the tcn•nt as an instance of the infringement of the principle of equality. Now 1 wi$h to dtscuss the inequality between men and women as a S«ond cnmple. All hu~n be~ngs have equal rights. Women are human beings; therefore, they rnust enJOY nghts equal to those of men. Whatever are the activities to ":'hich men h~vc a right. it is re-asonable that women h:.ve an exacdy equal nght to those. Why should it be otherwile? . . . 6J Dankim bricOy discusses the conservative argument that rights are related to capabilities, and since the capabilities of men and women are naturally different, rights cannot be equal between the two sexes. This i.s seen as unconvincing. ' First, we reject the idea that if there arc difftural differences between men •nd women, there are exactly similar differenca between Englishmen and ~enga!is. The Englishman is J?Owerful, strong. the Bengali weak, the Enghsh brave, Bengalis cowardly; the English hardy, the Bengali fragile, ~nd so. on. and on. Ifsuch diJferenccs in disposition had justified tever is there, is due to the bad effects of soctal customs. The object of the theory of equality is to eraS here; nowhere is the uneducated as obedient to the lherate· the exrent to which ~udm and other lower castes are subordinated to th; Brahmins nowhere else arc believers so subordinate to religious preachers/the clergy: Nowhere are the poor so repressed by the rich; 3nd nowhere are women so subordinated to the will of the male'.66 This is because inequalities do not sta.nd scp~rately, unaffected by the relation between different provinces of socJal relattons. lr follows therefore that 'if you are not able to provide

!I \o 1~

!

i

! f I il

l

56

Humour and tlu Prison

I11e Unhappy Comdousness

for equality in ~u spheres completely, you shill not be able to provide for equahty m any one field. For the principles of the doctrine of equality ar~ clo~ely Interconnected'. For his times, this idea, that all inequalities remforce each other, and the destruction of one requires the destruction of all-is hardly a common doctrine. It is remarkable that when he moves to the plane of humour, the drift of Bankim's argument docs not change. Often Bankim is negligently characterised as a conservative, an extraordinary judgement by any standards; for his arguments are not against reform, but against its pretentious hollowness. 'Our social reformers are somewhat more eager in establishing reputations than in analysing the processes of social devclopment'.67 Indeed, he is in uvour of providing secular, independent arguments for the reform of women's lives instead of the derivative one that this is what has happened in the West. Development of men leads to the progress of society; but so dpes the development of women, for they constitute exacdy half of this social whole. To S2Y th;at the .major objective of society is the improvement of one sex. and of the other only to the extent it serves the fint, is an immoral idea. But the bwmakers of society, in aU times, have fallen into this error .. . In fact, it is

impossible

<0

find any field of action in which license for women can be

~onsidcrcd worse than male licentiousness. After aU, both actions 3re equaJJy ammon.l. Just as men have a natural right to a faid1ful wife, women have an cnctly equal right ro :a monogamous husband. Yet, jf a m;~n transgresses this rule that is considered modernity (babuness}; if a woman does so, this desttoys

all the joys ofher world, she is rcgorded as the lowest of the low. and considered more untouchable dun a leper. Why? Chastity ofwornen is necessary for male happiness; but for the happiness of women sexual restraint by men is equaUy necessary. But of course men

are

society, women are nobody.

Despite all this discrimination, however, women in his early humour perform an aggressive and critical function. There arc particularly two bnef sketches at the end of LR which, though unremarkable for literary quahty, illuStrate this critical principle with great effect. The first, cilled Appr~ciatio11 of Bengali IJteratu.rt (Bangia S
-~ -

----

--

of Reality

57

at teatime after unspecified exertions in the office, that mysterious mechanism of law, justice and power, by which he reputedly controUed the world_ He finds his wife reading a Bengali novel, which happens to be the Visavr~a. and asks why she perSISts in reading that stuff; 'why do you read that Bengali garbage (c.hiii bhasma)? It is better not to read anything', because those are 'immoral, obscene, filthy'. Since these vitriolic adjectives are in English and inaccessible to the wife, she asks for a transbtion. The babu takes the characteristic route of aU textbook and external knowledge, he cannot break out of the circular paths of a resounding tautolpgy: immoral is explained as that which is against morality. Since this remains equally unClear to his wife, he exclaims: 'No, no, do you know ... now where do I get a Bengali wond for it? ... Actuilly, that which is not moral .•. there'; and further down: 'It is impossible to explain to that extent in Bengali language; but the main point is, to read Bengali books is bad'. When his wife explains that this is a book which has been translated into English, this revives the value of the work for him somewhat, but he admits that he thought it was an English work which was tl.'anslated into Bengali, evidently because that is the single direction of transmission of intellectual value. It is also interesting that when his wife asks him to explain the plot of Dante to her, for she is about to read a Bengali translation, all he finds remarkable about the poet's life is that he held high appointments in Florence. He declares in the midst of the conversation: 'Bengali and such stuff are read by people of.-the lower class ... We are from the polished society ... those are written by inferior people to be re.td by inferior people ... those have no value to the English (though the text uses: siiheb Ioker kiilhe o sabtT dar nei, in which siihtb lok can be translated equally well for Englishmen as for anglicized babus) : .. how can such things pass in polished society?' 69 The principles of the encounter between Riimbabu and his wife are identica1.70 Conjugal lives are constantly beset by translation problems of the Winchian sort, bringing the painful puizlements of relativism into Bengali bedrooms. Consider the predicament ofRiimbabu, whose fiiend visits him on the English New Year and shakes him by the hand, and says 'how do you do?' His wife takes this, after Winch, as a mild form of physical assault, and an invitation to play a childish game of hadudu, inappropriate at their time of life. With great patience R3mbabu explains to her the mysterious ways ofenlightened etiquette; what his fiiend uttered was an advanced form ofgreeting, not a game; and she was misled because of the unforturuue indistinguishability of the phonetic form. But Rambabu's attempts at social explanation are not more lucid than his predecessor's. It is npt hadudu, he says, but h'iidudu, that is how 'how do you do is pronounced. Wife What does that me>n? Ram

It means, how are you?

Wife IUm

Wife

But how could tlut be? He asked you, how are you?, but you did not answer b.i.s question; you simply asked the same thing to him in return! But tlut is modem civilised mannen. To say the same thing is modem mannen? That meons, if you ask our son, 'Why aren't you studying, you ntl', he would say to you in return, 'Why aren't you studying, you rat?' and this is regarded civifued mannen?11

The wife implores Rimbabu not to adopt such a civiliud attitude her. 'You ore al~ys sick, and I have to ask you five times a day, how are you. Don't send me away with a how do you do. It does not matter if you do not adopt civilised behaviour towards me'. 72 The b•bu after a few more, equally imsuccessful sentences, goes in search of a lawyer to find out if Hindus are pennitted by law to divorce their wives. Clearly, the structural similarities between these two short sketches and the arguments in Kam41iikii11ta are remarkable. At the most obvious level, there is the asymmerry of symbolization; the babu unsymbolically represents himsel( but his interlocutor is someone who bears in herself the sign of nativism: she is a woman, who speaks the vernacular, she is the unreconstructed principle of indigenous culture. The babu knows, without reading texts, that they are bad. a miraculous power conferred by Macaulayan education. He holds anything indigenous in principle in truly Macaulayan contempL By contra$(, his wife does not take an indigenist position in culture. She is curious to understand western literature; only the babu fails to explain it to her. She does not represent an equally uncompromising rejection of western culture, and the beliefs it has got to offer. On the conn-ary, she represents a legitimate questioning obout what could be the grounds for such a proposed poradigm·shift. In these parables of incomprehension and rranslatioo-uilure it is instructive to see the erict relation between the babu's powers and incapacities, because this is a sign of something much larger and more significant. Interestingly. the babu intellectual can state-but merely. state-ntiooalistic propositions. Equally signi6candy, he fails to give grounds for his belie&, or indeed, to explain, i.e., to show what those beliefs consist in. Thus, these words, th~ magic words of rationalism. by the enunciation of which one babu recognizes another, take on something close to a ritual character. Unfortunately, however, even women as a social group are subject to historical change. Banlcim analyses the consequences of social change on the position of women with very mixed feelings. In this discussion too there is a phrase that is directly reminiscent of the celebrated temple scene in Anandamath: there the discussion is about what the mother was and has become, here it is her more mundane counterparts who are the object of analysis, but the logic of the rransfonnation is' similar (bdngiya yubdtirii) ki chikn. ~~~· lti /r4ittdrm.7J It is true, Bankim admits, that in some W2ys to~rds

Humour and tht Prison

'I"k Unhappy Consdousnus

58

of Reality

59

women's taste has improved. Dut there arc serious charges against their. rransfonnation into modernity. 'Their foremost vice is laziness. The old woman was very hardworking and was highly sl:illed at housework; the new woman is a gtnt babu. Like the lotus on a sheet of water, she spends her day looking at her own beauty in the mirror in utter stillness. The whole burden of housework is left to hired maids . . . I consider it a hateful way oflife if lif~g expensive carpets is their only way of exerting themselves. Human beings are born in order to contribute to others' happiness. A woman. who comes to the earth ro loll on the bed, ~ her hair in front of the mirror, roll up cupets, read 'The Exile ofSita' (Sitir vanavas), and give birth to children, who contributes to the happiness of none except her own, may be marginally superior to animals, but her womanhood is worthless. We counsel such women to rid the earth of their useless weight by applying ropes to their ncclcs'.l7 4 For Bankim, clearly, the main disappointment is the conversion of women into female babus and in a society like the nineteenth-century middle-class Bengal, inevitably, when turned into babus, women's lives were bound to be more parasitic than the men's. But characteristically, the humorous presentation of the women's question does not end here. The essay is foUowed by three letters allegedly wrjrten by three women. Obviously, they represent the need for lending a voice to women, because otherwise they remain ironically unrepresented in the discussions about their own condition. Again, the point of the critique is turned instantly at the babu. The first lady essays on a symmetrical comparison between d1e old man and the -new: In only one way I 6nd the new men superior to older ones; you have lca.mt a bit of English. But who have you benelited by learning English? I can sec thot learning English has helped you learn how to be clerks, but humanity? Let me teU you what the diffe.rcnces between the old and new are. The old type of men looked after others' interests, you look after your own. They spoke the truth, you only what pic.,.,._ They rnpccted their parents, you do homage only to your wU"e or mistress. They worshipped the gods and the brahmins, your gods arc the hybrid Anglo-Indians, and your brahmins •rc th"e goldsmiths. True, they worshipped idols, you worship the bottle ... We are idle; but you are not merely idle, you are babu. The English rulers lead you by the nose, ond you follow d1em because you have no strength: we too lead you by the nose, and you follow because you have no intclbgence!5 The second correspondent simply accepts the cha.rges, but adds innocently that these are due precisely to what men have done to women and taught them: 'you are preceptors, we are disciples'. The main thrust is reserved for the last letter which suggests a role switch between men and women:

.\

Humour and the Prison

of Reality

61

60 You wish 10 tie w down by the bonds of rdigjon. 1lut clo<s nO< nutter. But u that extn bond nec...ary over and above tbe bond ofwu and rituals? You toke the mpoJUibility of the 6.sts and we would be only too willing 10 tic thcJc religious bonds more tighdy than ever. I wish so dearly to exchange existences with you. Before you surt •busing us, ake a good reckoning of

j:

i I'

che respective pleas-ures and p21in. When we die, you would fast in our everlasting memory, you would not cat mear. you would wc~r n:gs; when you go to heaven we would savour a second conjugol life; when you arc alive,

you would bear children, supcrvU< the kitchen, or ceremonies, you would draw the veil over your mowcachcs and with the plates over beads, do the rituals, engage in womanly humour in the hd<ar room; your happiness wiD know no bounds. We would go 10 college with our boob in our adolcsccnce; in adult life put the turban obliquely over our coilfcurs and attend office, and make speeches in the townhaU to the accompaniment of jingling ornaments ... Stop boasting and do that. You come into the household, let us go to the office. Those who •rc c>rrying others' shoes on their hc•ds for seven hundred years, •re they men? Don't you feel ashamed to speak?7 6 By iron regulariry, the babu had lost this engagement as well.

The Babu's Others: The Lower Orders

Despite the great variery of imposing women in Bankim's fictional world, Kamaiakiima, it may appear, has a different structure. The only woman in its story _is a goa/in~ the mill<wonun Prasanm, the object of!Urnalilinta's verbalizing attention. Unfortunately, due to their prurient interpretation of the universe, babus read this relationship in an amorous fashion. But Pr:wnna u, I wish to argue, hardly neglig~l>le, and she shows features which are entirely companl>le with the structure ofBankim's fictive world. Prasanna is no otdinary woman. She condenses at least two principles of otherness to the babu at the centre of the fictive sbge. She is a woman, but she also belongs, finnly, not in any oblique way, to the world of the popular. She represents the people. She represents the feminine principle I have discussed earlier. She u, like her social superiors, spontaneous, completely self-assured in her world, not assailed by any doubts about effectiveness and authenticiry. Whatever she does, in her briefappearan= in the story, is wonderfully and self-evidendy effective. She does not, like babus, even the critical ones, have to make an effon to be what she is. Being herself comes quite naturally to her. She is wholly vernacular, and more interesring!y, untouched and unimpressed by the discourse or institutional theatre of the colonial administration. Unlike Komaliikanta, when she needs to confront the judge, she does so \vithout subterfuges,

without the assista.nce of any subtle, bidden discourse. She is the embodiment of practical syllogism. She does, of course, reside in an urupecified village in British colonial Beng;al which comes under the laws of colonial administration, but she shows a wonderful incomprehension of the laws by which she is governed and being civilized. Practically, when she loses her cow, her means of production, she unmelodramatically takes recourse to • court of Jaw, but is generally unsentimental about the qualities of colonial justice, does not expect too much out of it, and treats it with an admirable commonsensical irreverence. But there are ways in which she is strikingly unlike her more socWiy exalted counterparts. She interaCts with colonial Jaw out of an external need. Otherwise, in the general administration ofher life she is presumably unaffected by colonial culture. At the cost of her illiteracy, she has defended her culture and her self- respect quite successfully. The court scene reflects this quite well. Of the entire range of characters who figure in its hilarious confusion she, and in a very different way Kamalak.inta, are the only ones who do nor compromise themselves, or get tied into knots by their own unmastered rationalism. The text naturally divides very unequally berween the verbal ~akanb and the reticent and active Prasanna. She has practically no share in the verbal content of the fiction, which enhances its historical truth, for she came from a group which was similarly unrepresented in the great verba.li2:ation of nineteenth-century Bengal. Prasanna does not have such affecutions .of middle-class digniry. She belongs to the folk, the popular-an entirely different world that is self-sufficient, with its rules, norms, imagery, language, even itS special, freer form of abuse. This is a world that is gradually marginalized until it pa.sscs out of high literature--to the great derriment of this literature itself. Later literature would capture and reflect less and less of socia.l spau, and retreat gradually into interior of interiors. Increasingly, babus, when they condescend to look at the popular would merely see an undifferentiated blur, people designated not by proper names but by sociological (unctions. Prasanoa, despite her sketchiness, thus turns out to be a sigllificant figure in the artistic and social sign.i6cation in Baokim's literature. First, her relation with !Umalilinu mirrors accurately the relation between p•rasitic inteUectuals of the upper class and the sustaining lower strata. It is not surprising that she supplies Kamalakanb with food, with nothing in return. Ordinarily babus would ofcourse claim that what they get from the lower orders is in exchange for something. Kamalakinta is the inverted babu, endowed with a self-critical and self-revealing sight, a person who accepts and actually utters the truth of the babu world. He therefore sees the relation between Prasannam•yi and himself, a parallel between the rentier orders and the lower produ.:tive strata, as one of unrequited support. But this raises a more gener21 question. Bankim's thought is not partial,

62 or ronunticaUy admiring about what we now call the popular. How docs the popular figure iii his imagination? I shall discuss this in two sections: some of the features of his depiction of the popular in this section; and other ;upeca of his depiction of nuss-popular actions later when we discuss his historical novels. It appears plainly counter-intuitive to suggest in any sense a strong presence of the popubr in Dankim's art. After aU, Bankim's whole intellectual enterprise was the creation of o high literature in Bengali. For this literature he created a new bnguage that did not suffer from the wooden formality ofVidyisigar's excessively Sanskritic prose, or from the vulgar limitedness of the babu colloquial. It was unmisukably a high literature, a literate, deliberately cultured Bengali longuage; and it is rather odd to suggest that there could be something strongly populu inside its deliberate cultivated accents. It is eosy to ignore the existence of the popular in Bankim's fiction because these elements were not present where we usually look for them. We misjudge its silt, its manner of existing. It existed at the level of the forms he used in his writing but not o form that W2S immediately avoiloble in terms of the deliberate strategies of narr2tive or literary construction. There are two ways in which this occurs in his fiction. First, the soci.tl and fictive world that is depicted h2S a place for the lower orders in their own terms, and they are treated as subjects, not 2S part of a passive social landscape or as objects of ridicule. Secondly, travesty is o form of humour tlut is inextricably connected to the subaltern and much of the tone ofBankim's humour has the ring ofrravesry, and the sound of whot Bakhtin h2S coDed the laughter of o thouS>nd years. Later literature captures less and less ofsocial space, and retreats gradually into the interior ofinteriors. Literally, the babu becomes totally narcissistic. ·Mental or psychological novels, and romantic poetry which a gradu2te male usually oddresses to undetgnduote females, become his paradigmatic literary norms. In these two fornu of literature the literary babu could see portrayed the linle tempests of his middle-class soul. A poetic heartbreak followed by an unromantic utilitarian marriage was his idea of the limits of the enduroble risks of human life. Internal spaces of the novel fail to record any large or hi$toric social conflict wonh the name, occasionally offering mi;leading and melodramatic pictures of Bengali terrorism, expressive of a perpetual fascination of the coutious middle class for the risks of revolution.try existence. In Bankim's novels too the babu dominates the narrative, sometimes nusquerading •• characten in ocher quite inappropriate centuries."' But he is olways seen in rebtion to a whole world of people, others who ore not babus: his wo men, his servants, his milkwoman, his vendors, the entire lower orders who constitute the market-place of his everyday. The question of what to do with these others does not figure in the theoretical consciousness of early Bengali literature, but since it is a rea} social problem

Humour aml the Prison

of Reality

63

it finds insidious ways of coming into literary represenution. Calcutta is a Ia~~ decorated isbnd in the sea of illiterate, unillumined rural Bengal. lnd1v1duals from the lower o rders are present inside babu households, often in large numbers 2S servonts and other types of ossist:mts. But their social place in this society is such that they do not deserve literary speech or subjectness. Bankim shrewdly observes the connection between cultural patterns and work rebtionships. Productive organiz:~tion within the m.iddle-cbss household changes. Women become educated,; unfortumtely, in his view, they become babus 2S they too withdraw from housework; •nd the households of urban upper closses are invaded by an am1y of silent menials. Gradu•lly the work-based distinction between the babu and his wife changes too, to her detriment. FomJerly, the babu symbolized parasitism; by contrast his wife W2S engaged in useful work at home, which wos, apart from other partial explanations, the reoson for her invincibility on occasions of domestic skinnish. With changing work regimes within the Bengali home, the wife comes to acquire a new kind of worJ:Icss leisure, and she turns into a greater parasite than her husband, for internal productive work is given over to a retinue of servonts, and external 'productive' work-the exertions involved in the earning of a prinurily renticr income--was for social reasons monopolized by the husband. Upper-class women GIU quickly into a leisured heteronomous existence which was historically quite novel, probably not enjoyed (or suffered) by anyone except royal concubines. Until the Bengali woman breaks out of the confines of the home to the great liberati9n of the office job, she is condemned to a life of decorative superfluity. In this new urban world, the lower orders essentially mean servants ond other dependents, held in various forms of the relation of subalterniry. Interestingly, by conttaS(, they play an important role in Bankim's fiction. There ore some complex ligures who are not easy to describe in these terms, like Dimali 79 or Indin in h er fallen state in the Calcutta household. Perhaps this is a technique of double significance which 2S much debases. the particular individual as raises the state of servanthood into a kind o f salutary ambiguity. More outhentic subalterns (servants}-Digvijaya, Girijiyi,10 Rangam,11 Miniklil,12 Rimcaranll-constitute integral parts of the social world. Bankim's stories show, often, the dependence of the protagonists on their subalterns, and their parasitism. In subsequent literature, by and large, if servants do enter, they arc hardly more than sh•dows. They never ever speak, arc hardly ever parr of the proceedings, except as instrumentalities. Speech here is a major sign, a mark of the autonomy, of the existence of a subject. Denial of speech consequently debases them into a mute objectivity in a world in which the babu--garrulous and fi:lctious-alone has the right to subjectivity. Even the b
64

Humour and tht Prison

11rt Unhappy Consci11115nru

It is of course possible, and I think correct, to suggest that this pbce of the lower orders as speaking subjects in Bankim could be a dual fe>ture. P>rt of its inspir.ation could in f>ct be dr.awn directly from Europ~n liter.aturc. In the babus' contact wid1 the West, liter.ature played a major part. This was not only due to the natur.al curiosiry ofthe new middle-class i~telligentsia about western liter.ature as a mirror of western sociery. Lllenture portrayed cwo features of western cultute which they considered signifacant. First, novels, because they were mainly realistic, provided a reliable picture of the mechanisms of social relations. Secondly, the novel was also an expression of a r.ationalistic liter.ary fonn; it was part of r.ationalism that the representation of sociery in art was nude in the • ~nalytical forn1 oft.h e novel. The new Bengali intelligentsia therefore went mto western literature with great enthusiasm, ofien to • complete neglect of their own liter.ary heritage which carne to be regarded, superstitiously. as unrcadably vulgar. Exposure to English literature involved occcptance of the liter.ary nomlS of criticism and construction. Contempor.ary litenry fomu could be nude sense of only through their history, and Bengali intellectuals' reading nnged equally over the classical and the modern liter.ary fomu. R.en>issance litera.ture therefore constituted for the Bengali babu the highest cl>ssical e>nons of literary excellence. I am not concerned here with its general inOuence, but only wirh the question of how it affected the depiction of the lower orders. Evidently, the internal social composition in the high litenture of Europe had a dual structure. In Shakespeare, as much as in Moliere, the gentleman is nearly always accompanied by a man-in- waiting, a servant who is also a friend, a Sganarelle to a Don Juan. Obviously. this is a double technique. Only partly is this a mere depiction of the social rituals of noble sociery; it is narratively far more signifacant as the use of a different eye, and a different voice, which plays against the eye and the voice of the master. By the nineteenth century in European litcr.ature, such closeness and dependence berween the gentleman master and his servant is already rare, and replaced by a fom1alized bourgeois social distance which does not allow the lower order persons to play a speaking role in the story. They go away to live primarily in the murky margins of polite sociery as servants or criminals. Occasionally, they come to have a literature of their own, os in Zola. This could certainly be one possible liter.ary source of the lower order figures in Bankim's novels. But it also has another unmistakable function within these norratives. They contain • reOeerion of the social and symbolic order at that historical point in Bengali society. He lived at a rime when modem class distances, though already instituted and beginning to be codified, had not crystallized as they would in immediately following decades. However. I think it would be an error to put their abiliry to speak dowrr only to the survival ofEuropeon canonical forms, or the state

Ii

of Rtality

65

of offairs in the Bengali family circle. It is because Ba~k.im has a dual, contradictory relation to the culture that the babu world was creating for his country, which makes him tum repeatedly to a lower order (or perhops better, a non-babu) voice. It is not its frequency that matters, but its symbolic significance; not how many times this happens, but when. It is in people of these lower orders that Bank.im finds • directness, authenticity ond unassimilated quoliry that can act as a foil to the inouthenticiry of the colonial middle closs. What I wish to suggest is tl1at in Dankim's art the social world seen in temu of people who are considered admissible within the boundaries of this respected, enchanted, sacred space, is wider ond consequently more realistic. Of course tile babu dominates this world, both inside fiction as well as outside it, but, because his world has not been so irreversibly fonned, so strongly and irreversibly structured with tl1e stamp of his dominance, he still lives in close neighbourliness with tl1e lower orders of people. Servants are almost always on attendance on their babu principals, not silently in dem~ning postures of serviliry, but with the ablliry to speak. And this abiliry immediately confers on them • different idcntiry and vision, a distinct social sight. This sight is not different simply in terms of social perspectivaliry, but also a different kind of subdcry ond p~rceptiveness. Not only does the arrangement of the social world appear d1fferently ~o them; because they are free ofrypical higher order inhibitions tl1ey are able to see a whole number of things which their superiors are either not able to see, or admit they have seen. In European literature classical dnma is the great illusrr.ation of this technique, particularly Shakespeare and Moliere, in whose work tho underside of things figures constantly and comes up for explicit discussion. Occasionally, lower char.actors are used to observe realiry in a related but different register. ~hile ~in. protagonists wo~ olten register a complex and vague •mpresSion like beaury, they m~ght olion redescribe tho same person in tcnns of derailed anatomical observation. The bodily attr3ctiveness of people, the materiality of the universe, and the slovenliness of social relations figure largely in their observation. Their presence in the narrative is not just a liter.ary excuse, not just a ma tter ofdnnutic empiricism---2 technique of physical porttayal to make the setting credible. They are not just milieux; they are vital to both the srrucrure of narrative and speech internal to the dnma or the novel. For the point of the dranu and the novel is to reveal the truth of the world. They bring a counrerpointing commentary, a counterpointing experience of relatiotlS and objects, a gr<2ter earthiness of speech and ob<ervation to balance, to complement, to fill out the absence and the inabilities of their supe riors, who are encumbered and deceived by their own strucrum of censorship in preception of the world. Servants' voices. or of lower class figures represent voices and visions from outside lht region of the

66

The Unhappy Consciousnm

repre5$ed. Surely, such literorure does not amount to a conscious cdeb.rotion of the culture of the people-of the folk, the grot~ue, the bodily, the licenuous as docs the !Ubdaisian moment in European litenture.84 Still it shows an interesting equipoise, at least a critical sense of this ad.dncing repression, the closure and disqualification of whole bronc~es ofexistence, whole ternios, on the ground that they are unfit for aestheu~, liter.ary representation. The classical vision shows a strong sense that ~hu excluded world is part of the world, and that without some representauon of this, the picture of the world would remain untrue. Between the idealism of the master and the materialism of his servants, the hterary world achieves its fictional truth. In the play of formal clements in Danlcim's humour there is a strange and ofien unrcmarked mixture. By form I refer to two aspects whteh arc analytically or theoretically distinct. One aspect of formal atti6ce co~is!s in the use oflanguage to create literorytropes. In terms oftropes, Bankim s favourite u the ironical pr.aise (or praise abuse), a piece of aU."?kara tahn straight out of classical Sarukrit metori_c. Ala.l!flriiri< pby of thu rype can obviously be appreciated only by the highly literate, who can understan~ the rich vocabubry of classical Sarukrit, and the still greater resources l.t gives itself by rules of grammatical rnan~puluion ~nd samiiuz and sandhr. Sometimes, as in case of the habu stotra, 1t creates Its humour by usc o~ a high bnguage for a low occasion, giving the habu's less exalted pursum the ceremonial description of high ritual. None of these features can be called popular. But form does not merely refer to srylistic •. but als~ t~ the philosophical tone, or way of relating to the world. In wntm,g, thJs IS the equivalent of what tone is in spoken utterance. And Dank1~1 s manner of relating to the world all through is travestic, and travesry anses out of an urge to commit social sacrilege. It emerges tl~rough ~ popular .u~gc to desecrote the high rituals of a constituted SOCJery wh1ch the cnncs arc powerless to challenge or transform. Those who lack the means of power to recreate the world according to their preferences, or answer everyday insulu, take their revenl:" through travesry, the rypical weapon o~.the powerless &nkim's art, if we read it in this way.. achieves a, ~nous mixrurc of the use of humour and satire by the tradinons of the ehte and the populu, while the bnguag>' in whiclJ it speaks is elite, the way the world is brought into representation inside it i~ travestic an~ po!'ular. This is one of several ways in which Banlcim s art stands suU fatrly close to earlier 1raditional forms of literary entertainment. Liter>ture is still pre-eminemly a form of play-its play with language, -Mt~ •ts audible pleasures and idiosyncracies, the enjoyment of the wh1~1cal. play of sounds. Subsequent Bengali literature would lo?k upon thts w1th shght contempt, as, unworthy of serious and subtle wnters, and the cnJOyme~t of language would rum more on a play of meanings thai'! of ~unds. This also reveals rtselfin the qll2liry ofi!l bumou~he rawness, directness and

Humour a11d tht Prison

of Reality

67

non-sryli~ed character. Bankim's novels, or even his essays, if not like a market-place in its noise, laughter, lack of formal structure and severiry, its unstructured enjoyment oflife ~ke Bakhtin 's RIJ~Iais, is at I~ a much -Mder, open world. By the time we come to Tagore, this laughter, this openness, this vitaliry has gone out of the novel form. The history of Seng<~li literature afierwards is • hi.nory of a great narro-Mng of the social world.

The Narrowing of the World

The world becomes narrower because of, and in exact measure with, the babu's conquest of it. Literoture, or the world to be presented in -it, runs increasingly through a double filter. a filter that is •esthetic ond ot rhe some time surreptitiously social. Nowhere is this reOected more thon in the internal complexities of the language. Certainly, in • sense, d1e language becomes more refined, capable of handling greater shades of situotional and emotional tones, more developed as a litenry vehicle. At the same time it becomes more one-dimensional. It becomes exclusively the language of the babu, the language he would have considered refined, proper, fit for enjoyment. He imposes in other words the history of his class as a restrictive format on the language of his culture. Other languages are marked by a shamefucedness, and gradually disappear. Other languages, still present in Bankim, are most severely filtered and censored out of it. Consider in contrast to this, Bankim's manifesto: 'You must express clearly what you wish to say: you must say all that you have to say; use whatever language is required for that purpose--English, Persian, Arobic, Sanskrit, rustic, savage, whatever language, take recourse to onything except the 5 obscene'.' This linguistic programme would become entirely umccep., table within two decades. To relate the actual use oflanguoge and choice of words of • writer to the sociol world is a risky, if nOt misleading activiry. Still, it is an int\Utive truth that there are reo] and immediotely perceived frontiers across the spoken and used l•nguage. 86 In the language that a writer uses, there is sometimes • dcliberote strategy ot work. Indeed, since the writer's production is related to words, no writer can have • purely unthought-out relation to the language in which he writes and the longuagc which gets represented in his writing. Even though he docs not have a wholly deliberate strategy, either through design or half-indiiTcrence, a writer lets some parts of language and some speakers and some modes of speaking co figure in his work. This could be used to discern his rebtiou to the social world.

68

Humour and tlot PriJon

Tht Unlrappy Cotuciousneu

B•nkim's bngu•ge is not only wonderfully innovative, but abo strikingly open. The idea of openness means simply that it lea the. Bengali world, before it becomes ordered and arranged according to a predominantly babu ·taste; to be represented inside litera lUre ..It is a linguistic world full of tensions, of alternative possibilities. One cannot say due Bankim uses the hnguage of the nurl<et-place. But one could use the market-place as a metophor. If one wished to sec the whole social world, to listen to it, the nurket was rhe proper place to do so. A market is rhe great social crossro2d, where different cl:asses come and interact and can be themselves. It is i.n the market that one can hope to hear.all rhe accents, all the social dictions of rhat society's language. MarketS are rherefore microcosms of the social universe as nothing else can be. Occa.sionaUy, 'one hears something like a nurket-place effect in Bankim's writing. Of course rhese languages carry their dense social marl<ers. Bhadralok speak Bengali differently from rhe lower classes. Bhadralok speak differently when they speak to other bhadralok and when rhey are speaking to their inferiors. Within the bhadralok household the women represent a linguistic opposition. Loter, this is repbced by a dull unifomuty ofbhadralok language. There could be gre~t divergence of political opinion in a drawing-room conversation, but rhese would aU be expressed in the same drawing-room dialect. Depending, therefore, on what you hear or set out to heor, the conversation could be varied or uniform. To someone like Shaw's Higgjns,17 it would be unbearably flat. He would s.oy we are doing the wrong kind of listening. To tum this uound, a piece of fiction that is moderate i.n terms of the opinions explicitly expressed could be astonislungly varied and popular in terms of the sounds it allows entry wit!Un ia fictive circle. Modem literary listening in Bengali, in this sense, is impoverished and one-dimensional. We have been trained now to listen to meanings, and somehow do not hear rhe sounds, reducing language to only itS senuntic register and entirely obliterating rhe phonetic one. Language for Bankim in any case is a rheatre ofwar.l8 English culture, in its imitated babu form, is always the addressee and the adversary. A.nd in this, Bankim seems to offer a solution to the problem of the linguistic crisis ofBengali which went right against rhe predominant t!Unking offered by rhe rest of Bengali culture of this time. Comparison wirh the English language rhlew rhe Bengali language into a crisis; for it was clear that it must, in order to compel attention, offer resources of expression which are comparable and equally versatile. But rhe standard solution, which was historically accepted, was to integrate uses of English syntax and vocabulary, and to affect an increosingly refined, inteUeclUalized style. ElementS of the popular were generally excised from its id.eals. Bankim's solution is to take the entire world of spoken and used language and use it against rhe invading English syntax. Because of that theory later literary

of Reality

69

language becomes flatter in terms of social tonality, more impersonal, more fornuUy equal. Bankim's artistic practice therefore shows a certain adequacy to his ~esthetic theory. Kamaliikanta shows this aesthetic quite clearly even rhrough its tone of half-seriousness, an aesthetic ecumenism which uses rhe historical avaibbiliry ofseveral traditions to fashion a creative synrhesis, rarher than an impoverished WC$temized solution. Unlike later authors, he allows rhese different traditions tO speak in rheir different voices, and he has the anuzi.ng, practically unique, ability to select and mix rheir strengths 8 '. Later rhese diverse tendencies are excluded, censored, debarred. In the culture of Tagore, for instonce, tlte high classical tone derived from Indian influences mix easily with high western aesthetic in a self-conscious and deliberate theoretical construct. But the element of dle popular, rhe carnivalesque, rhe market-like is missing. Of course in a certain way, rhe later culture is more refined and cultivated, but it contains an erasure which is worrh analysing.

The End of irony

Kama/iikiinta e.nds cluracteristicaUy. I deliberately s.oy characteristicoUy, because it displays rhe almost casual nature of the ending common to much of Bankim's non-fictional writing. It is an end that hangs loose in terms of form, an end that lacks the finality of a denouement, an ending after which the narrative can never go on. Fiction and non-fictional pieces have very different conclusions in Dankim's work. Endings in his humorous writings show a less deliberate quality. Surely, both the humorous essays and serious fiction are commentories upon the world, but they accomplish this conunent in very different w:.ys. Novels, through their deliberate form, nuke philorophic statements about the nature of the world and the destiny of men. Humour comments on the irrationalities of rhe everyday; in • manner which also has a bit of the everyday in it; it has the everydayness of form in its relative lack of boundaries ..It can be dropped for rhe time. and can be resumed in a nunner rhat is less theatrical. Yet I feel this formlessness carries a symbolic effect that is hardly less powerful than the Got!Uc endings of his b..,u..,r novels. Probably satire is left like that because they provide a commentary on his life, his sociery, the entire ongoing busin""' of his world; and perhaps there is an untheorized adequacy berween the unconcluded nature of this humorous conunent and the u.nconcluded nature of the world. The colonial cvcrydoy experience, the sound and fury of the Calcutu babu's intellectual life, the inconsequentialiry of his existence was a comedy rhat was still going on,

70

Tht Unhappy O>nsciousnm

and therefore it would perhaps be inapproprute if its humorous accompaniment g:we a 6tul conclusion to it:sel£ The text of K4rMfiltiinla thus shows a peculiar recursiveness; it ends after the daptdT, then Banlcim adds on the letters, then a~in the deposition, and finaUy, the appendix. It ends several times, without actuaUy ending. Ba.nkim alW2ys finds some excuse, some peculiar continuatory form. to justify a ro-opening of his hostiliry with this world. ' Despite its provisionality, K4mafiltiinta, alas, has an end. In this last scene, his interlocutor is an imaginary speaking cockatoo. It says things that are rather similar to the ideology construGted and repeated by the colonial administrator and his aUy, the rationalist inteUectual; but this is olfset by the bird's pleasingly disconcerting habit of declaring platitude, as a sort of autho ritative conunentary on his own discourse. There is no way of knowing whether this is said about what others say, or what he says himsd.( or whether this enunciates a deeper and more fundamental theory of discourse under colonialism; i.e., it is only platitudes which have a title to be stated ceremoniaUy. At the end of the piece, lumalik2nta notices a crowd ofsmaU creatures who in his blurred vision resemble ants. But the bird explains: 'True, these creatures are very smaU, like ants; they loolt like ants too, but they are not ants reaUy. They are caUed Bengalis. Look, a small drop of milk just crickled down from my perch; and the Bengalis feU over it and started 6ghting with each other for a share.90 They do indeed live on stny drops of milk dripping from my perch occasionaUy; and srill you have the nerve to say that I am not a benefactor to them?'9 1 When Kamalaxanta undergoes an awakening from his opium-induced stupor he finds himself uce to face with Prasanna, his foil, wimess to his secret helplessness. Karnalilinta now 6nds a heap ofants on the ground. His delusion, the overbp between literal and metaphorical reality, between Bengalis and ants, his second sight which enables him 10 see as no one else can, has not quite left him. He still propheticaUy confuses between the ants and the Bengalis and asks Prasanna to take a broom and 'sweep these Bengalis away' (oi jhantagiitMii dia b
Humour and the Prison

of Rtality

71

limit. After reaching that limit, to move forward, Danltim hos to invent a different people by inventing a different history for them. This account must be different from what actuaUy happened, a ·terrain of imaginary history. Kamalakinta thus represents a break in the evolution of Banltint's thought. Atter this, the discourse of the ironizing self would not be enough. It would be necessary to invent another self which would be able to break out o f the prison of history--not in humour, but in truth.

I

3

The Myth of Praxis Construction of the Figure of ~tla m Kr~ttacaritra 1

My relation to rtligion is no mcrtly n
Feutrbodfl

Cl:wic~m is not a matter of rotiquity, but ofform. ld= become cbssical not through their continuity in real time, but in an imagined time, submntially and interestingly independent of real history. A figure is turned classic not by a period of long uninterrupted existence, which allows a constant process of refinement that pares away everything except the most fundamental attributes, the most essential outlines, and achieves what appears tO be an unsurpass<~ble economy and ideality of form.l A classic figure, curiously, need not be constructed that way at all. It can be constructed quite suddenly, by the requirement ofhistorical circumstances .in which an intelligentsia might invent a dassic tndition for itself in a matter of a few years. What matters is not its existence and continuity in real history but its appearance of doing so. Sometimes, in adnUttecUy the rarest of cases, it could be consiiUcted by a single text. A consiiUction of this kind is what Bankimchandra 's K~>Jacaritra (KC} seeks to do. It is a commonplace in the history of ideas that the past, at least the past which lives in popular imaginotion and acts upon history d1rough popular behaviour, is a constnJct of the present, the past tlut the present would have liked to have had. which 11 considers appropriate for itself, its self-created lineage. It is the past out of a range of possible ones which would give to the present and its self-image the greatest degree of coherence, dignity and justifiability. In Bankim's KC we find this imaginary' past in a rare condition of plasticity, literally in the process of being formed. \

1'IK Myth

of Praxis

73

Bankim's 10.'!• is the Almighty's latest hermeneutic form, quite clifferent from this god's commonly known figure in Vidyiipati, Can<,li~. Caitanya, Jayadeva or the Pllriinas.4 But there is an even greater, deeper difference. This is the 6~ Krr!!• snught to be created by a genuine historical argument, that is not poetic, which se.lf-consciously follows a method quite unlike the unrigorous procedure of narration of the P~
On Textuality

The Indian and western intellectual mditions seem to be quite different not only in the content, but in what could be called,fautr Je mieux, rhe fonu of their texts, i.e., not only in what the texts say, but in what they are. The main point os not that lnclian tradition is prcliterate, that it does not know writing. Obviously, it does know writing, but its attitude towards writing, I shall call this its theory, is clifferent. Much of the internal cultural transmission of significant ideas in the Hindu traclition is oral; but this is obviously different from the orality of a culture which does not know the apparmos of writ.ing. Its peculiar attitude is perhaps better

The Myth

74

of Praxi1

75

Tiot Unhappy Ccrudousntss

expressed as the orality of a culture which knows writing but mistrusts it. h follows that its attitude towards the text is different: texts are a weave of word$ into something aspiring to a peculiar objectivity. .Between the text and the authorial signature (or >urhorial individuality) the Indian tradition sets up a distinctive relation . In the westem tradition, in comparably classical antiquity, and increasingly in the period after the Renaissance, a text bears an inextriable relation with the author's person. Although there are similarities in form between hymns and stotras, medieval Christian texts too are marked by their individual authors.' A text is the author's creation, something for which the author is an efficient and irreplaceable cause. A text is unthinkable without its author, for he supplies it not merely with accidental attributes of style, form, internal srnocture of argument, but its entire way of looking at and making sense of the world. Texts are therefore traces or monuments of individual waY1 of sedng and constructing the world. So, although the author admittedly creates this world within his text through public or social resources, nonetheless, it was the individual's way of looking and making sense which made it valuable, irreplaceable, which gave it an appointed and ineradicable pbce in its hinorical universe of discourse. The function ofthe text in the Indian tradition appears to be significantly different. Of course authors who somehow survive the crasu~c of rime, like Manu or Piinini wrote what were never intended to be nusdass1ficd as a celebration ~f the individual's way of seeing, whose value lay in the peculiarity and the indelible mark of his personal .vi"."': Rather t~e ul~nt of the author consisted in a kind of erasure of the md1v1dual, not m takmg an interesting individual line which contested, competed with others ~r repbced them by virtue of its greater truth value~ but pre~tSely m hiS ability to make himself transparent and glassy. and his text po1nt-of-v1ewless as it wcrc.s Texts that were crcoted by this lcind of peculiu authorship acquired an objectivity, but in a sense different ITom the usual mean in~ of the tem1. There is, it seems, • deeper theory working beh.nd thiS culrure which cbims a special -objectivity for the mark, the tr3ce, the inscription. It is a general quality of inscriptions to objectify, 1o render on idea timeless, above subjectivity; and writing had this quality irr~pecuve of whether it was an inscription on a brittle piece of paper. on stone, or the very paradoxical medium of coUective memory. It w~ no! the loc11S, the medium, that was important but the mode--mscnpuon Itself. Only things which rose above the contingency of the subjective were entitled to this significance. Consequently, Asoka's inscriptio':' ?n stone and Panini's on less durable material, shared a common asprranon towards a m~erate eternity. This is why texts arc so few, and so ~xtrcmdy important. . . . . . In the Indian tradition, the text not only h1des the md1v1dual (winch it does mOre or less in c:vuy civiliz~tion: we know very little of Plato

except his books), it erases him. Perhaps it could be put still more strongly-it was only someone who could erase himself who qualified to be a writer of such fiightfuUy objective of texts. The pretence. of a collective mind in the act of inscribing is exceptionally strong. The author is not the text's creator, but its instrument. He is almost an amanuensis of a structure of ideas enriched, perfected, economized and sha.rpened by an impersonal tradition. This is what leads to the dual and interconnected forms of the surra and bhDfya, this combination of extreme compression and extreme elaboration, of economy and prolixity, carrying to their logical limits both functions of word$. Textual hermeneutics stretches therefore from the level of overarching structures of philosophical meaning, to the seriSC, to the reference, to the literality of what is said--.. hermeneutic detail necessary to bring under control the discursive and mnemonic tradition of the sutra.9 Texruality, fixing some idea into the form of a text, is therefore alwaY1 two-valued and ambiguous. They objectified and fixed utterances, meanings, gestures or memorable acts. This fixity however was nothing more than an assurance ofconstant remembrance--dl3t the object would recur endlessly in relevant discourse, but it could not ensure that it would mean the same thing or be remembered in exactly the same way. Giving fixity to something abo simultaneously invited const:lnt interpretative change. Religious texts which celebrated and narrated the life story of avataras were texts about texts in • mannec of speaking. These rendered into the objectivity of written words the message of the great figure, or inscribed on collective memory the other, more fundamental sacred text of the saint's or hero's life. The Girii is thus an inscription within an inscription. Acts of~a inscribed the me.aning of goodness in •life-text; but the Girii is olso a spoken text inside this life-text whkh explicates unnlistakably what ~~a's life means. It is a conunent:lry on his life which is part of his life. Riima's life by contrast is relatively non-discursive. The way such lives are lived or executed, is similar to the process by. which an is crcared; in its deliberateness, its choice of means, its search for a place of inscription which is indelible and changeful, as the word or the colleCtive memory. Some of the major features of the Indian tradition arc reb ted tO this problem: they arise not out of what is written, but what is wrinen on, the srrange tablet of memory of coUcctive ~nugination which e!Eaces and retains, which annot retain an image without changing it consuntly. The life of a great figure is • text of pure interconnected acts. It is unlike the weak texts made out of words. These lives convinced men not by the abstractness of moral concepts, compounded by the symbolic absmctf\CSS of words, but by the resplendent direccness, the incontrovertibility of the act itself. by dispensing in a sense \vith secondory interpretations. Such non-discursive texts are not a novelty of the Indian tradition alone. Practic.:ally all religions, or movements which

76

TI1t Myth

7ne Unhappy Omsciousneu

had to convey ptactical ideas to luge uneducated m>sses, produced such .figures. The life ofjesus is a text as much as the life ofCaitanya was. The life of~ is also a text ()f this sort.

Exegetic Principles

Hindu theology has a considerable Jjtetature on the intricacies of incarnation; there is therefore a good deal ofdiscussion which analyses in detail the exact nature of an avauta, i.e., the exact sense in which he represents God. All avau.ras are of course representations of the absolute, but they are so to different degrees, and in different ways; avatiras olien represent some >spects or some proportion of Him, 'part' of a god, or his ansa,IO The general argument about avatirn is fairly maightforward and well known. If God is absolute and infinite, and if at the same time He is the most preferable object of knowledge, a problem arises. Hum•n minds arc after all finite, and this leads to the familiar problem in all philosophic reJjgions-how can finite minds know an infinite object?11 The Hindu ttadition chooses a simple answer (though some would perhaps point out, plausibly, that it is not •n answer to exactly the same question). It s•ys that the Absolute wishes to be known by others, •nd for the vaisnaiJil tradition, by HinlSCI( and He simply (and economically) arranges for ·this by making av>ilable a represenmion of His self in a finite form, an occasional avatita. Apparently, this is the Absolute's answer ro the famous puulcments of indetemlinacy of interpretation. In His fulness, His absoluteness, He is unkno:mble. It would be a pity of cosmic proponions if this infinitely joyous presence in reality is not perceived. Tl1at is why God seeks adequate representations, metonynlic renlindcrs o'rHis powers, or of what He actually is. Among the ov•ucas themselves, ~~a is in a class by himself. For he is a metaphor of himself. if this ide• nukes any sense. His incarnation is quite often put on a different footing from all other •vatitas ofVi~~u. Do the ten avatiras represent a relativistic scheme, that is, is there an internal principle of adequation of the avatara lO the mturc of the calanlity he helps the world overcome? Who else but a gigantic fish could carty out the tasks he ~lad during the pralnya? Who else, given Btahmii's thoughtless g..fi of near lllllnomlity to the evil Hira~yakasipu, could have destroyed him except the logically uninvalidated fonn of the n(Sif!1ha? 12 Later, such peculiarities of the crises and their specific deliverers and the evident aninlism implicit in the early avatata figures give way to more anthropomorphic forrns.13 Surely the adequ•cy of Rima to his situation is not of the same' physical kind? Finally, there is 2n argument in tile vai~~ava

of Praxis

n

tradition that Krsna has a different status from all other avatitas: wh1le they were partiai ';cprescnt3tions or segments of the Absolute, K~~· is a represent~tion in full {which again raises the question if he could be called a representation at all). While others were avatitas ofVi;J:lu, K~~a is He himself. Is He on avatora on the s.1me level.,, say, Kalki or Rima? Or is He his unmetaphorical self? Jayadcva, perhaps on such philosophical grounds, composed an intriguing tl~iivatara invocation in which the usuol avot:ira ~!)a is quietly taken away from the series, and replaced, oddly, uncharocteristic•lly, and I think beautifully, by the figure of the Buddha: nind:1si y~gn3vidhcrah;ah.3 Srutijibrp socby•h!d•yo d•rlit• p•sughit•l)'l

kei>vadhrta buddh•brlra joya jag>dw hare."

B•nkim does not get involved in such conventional debates of vai\~ava theological doctrine, understandably I suppose, becouse his point was not theologic•l but poliric•I. He sutes, blandly, th•t he believes thot ~~· is God himself (K~!•!•stu b/Jagaviin swayam), without showing the grounds or details ofhis belief. There was another problem-partly theological, partly philosophical, which he h•d to address at ~at length. Although vaiv!•v•s could agree with Bankim about the direct divinity of K~l)> . this did not settle all disputes. For the main purpose of God's coming to corth is to cmphasile tl1e possible univcrsolity of good life •mong men; and there ore at least two theories in the Hindu tradition •bout this universaJjty, God and men could be linked universally through two d1fferent types of argument. Two attributes of nun are considered universal, and therefore p3rticularly suited tO be nietaphors of the divine, although their theological implications were significantly different. These two were the universalities of love, or more nurowly of sexualiry, •nd of reason. The K~n• cult th3t was available to Bankinl through the powerfi1l vai\!)ava ttadition of Bengal, was predominantly • cult of love o r sexuality.' 5 In both theories it was maintained that the touch of God or the way to H1m must be universal in principle i.e., if it was not alre2dy present in all men, it should be attainable by all. To identify God with reason (gnana) or to soy that reason is the path of attaining Him, is to immediately set up a hietarchy; for although men share rationality as a common attribute, as European tationalists never tired of repeating, they do not h>ve it to •he s>me degree. The trouble is that rcoson or its accomplishments arc compatable. By contrast, to identify the universality of bllakri with the universal availability of sexual pleasure was to m.a.ke the doctrine of the availabiliry of God more open. It wos the most universally •vailablc and accbimed of pleasures (iinantla) and introduced •n intriguing element of incommensurability into the nutter. Eventually, flankim's

The Myth

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78 Ktstu would be very different from the ~ 6gure available through th~ :..aisnan cutes of Bengal in which this principle of sexuality predominates~ Krsna too familiar, too folkish for his liking. too obviously invested, tho~gh lovingly, with the frailties of a mundane eroticism, a mdition in which eroticism had lost ics origin:al metaphorical quality. 16 Eroticism turned gradually literal, and poets especially revelled in their descriptions of ics suspiciously materi:al sounding raptures.t7 This was a proceM begun, in Bankim's view, by the sensu:al rnateriali~ ofjayadev~'s great epic, and carried on by lesser poecs of Bengal. 1 ~ ~~nously'. Bankim does not observe thatjayadeva's poem :also has a cl.wtctzmg quality about it, :although it was a clas1icizarion of eroticism. lcs form shows this, for it depicrs essentially a cycle of timel=ness. 19 The Gitagwinda is not a sto'! in the usual sense. Ordinaty stories hold our interest because of theu contingency, the accidental quality of the narrative they portray: we wish to know what happened next. In a 'story' of the classical form however, what 'happens' does not allow for such idle curiosiry; for we already know what is going to happen in a quotidian sense. Separation is followed by reunion. An initial infatuation can be riven by philandering:s and crossed by other infatuations. To be deep and to attain ics truth, love must be crossed and enriched by suffering. 20 In a strict sense the poem does not consuiTUD2te the curiosiry of the prurient. The constant and endless recursiven= of descriptions shows a rypical feature of the classic sryle; to attain the unattainably perfect description-the ultimate criumph of bnguage over the elusiveness, indescribability of reality. . The classicism of Knna that Bankim would try to construct IS very difTerent from it aU. At l~;.t on two poincs the difference is sharply evident. First, he mistrusiS scruuousness, even as allegory. The ~!)a 6gurc cannot be represented sensuously because of the thinness of the division between classicism and semualism, the presence of the insidiously obscene behind the evidendy cbssical. Bankim mistrusts still more the tension and insubiliry in the figure ofRidhi whose metaphorical quality can dissolve suddenly into an unmet>phoric:al and unmediated riot of sensuality. Secondly, as a resuh, this new dassic:al figure has to be rarion:al and inteUectu:al. He is seeking a ~!)• who is not an object of a supplicatory form ofbhakti,2 1 but a symbol of praxis, and before we can go into praxis we must cognitively master the world. The K~l)a of his making cannot be the Krsna of the touch or of the afTectivc, it has to be a figure of pre-cmin~~-t intelleet.22 We can see now the fuU complexiry and contradiction within Bankim's inteUcctu:al project. At bouom, there is the 23 text of a divine life; for the life of~ is lived precisely to be a teXt. Ktsru's life is meant to fix the pattern ofideal human behaviour, ofhurnan ~~nility developed in ics totiliry, to prevent i~ principles from ~com­ ing vague and sullied through doctrin:al conte~uon. That text c;>fhis ~fe. however. to be saved from fading out of a wlure of mnemoruc devtces

or through the insidious decay of interpretation of words-because of the indetenninacy that comes in when the directness and concreteness of acts arc given over to the abstractness of discounes-ha.s to be 6xed in a medium of written texts. These texts are the epic and the Puriinas, but the Purattas in trying to fulfil this purpose aetually undennine it. Bankim's own text -is about these intervening texts and mainly about what to do with their cheerful inconsiStency. It tries to dig through the 'distortions' ofKtsna's life in these texts to the life 'icself. To do that it has to displace and ~~Ject the texiS lying in the middle. Paradoxically, and faultily, he y.rishes to recover the life stoty of~a not as a mythical or fictive objeCt. but literally as an object of history. -if Ktsna is God himself what could be more appropriate or uplifiing than a ~~mtant incant>tion of his name? If the everyday life of Beng:al is already inscribed by His name (though perhaps absent-mindedly) should this not be sufficient for the origins of a regenerative process? To Bankim that seems unlikely, for the name ofK~I)a is remembered falsely, and his life is perversely interpreted.2' Consider the events of his life: if the folk culr is to be believed, K!1r:t• wa.s a thief in his childhood, an adulterer m adolescence, an imposter in maturiry. Are these acts consistent with the nature of the divine? A possible argument, with which Bankim would have agreed. could be that people comtructed the character of their gods according to their own; and the popular figure of K!'lJP IS more an approximation of the general character of Beng2lis than of the _nat~re of God. In a conventional way, one could ascribe these acts to HIS lila; but this would still seem perversely inclined towards 6ivoliry if not actual baseness. Would the Divine Being, when He adopcs human form tO instruct hurnaniry in ideo! behaviour, engage in such par>doxical consist!'ncy ofpetry to mcdium-si1ed vice (papacaran)?25 His western education, Bankim claims, has reinforced his belief in the direct divinity of ~!)a; but obviously this requires det>iled disputation and judgement, for it is only a reconstructed ~!)> to whom such rational respect c~u~d properly be rendered. 'At the present time ofintense religious debates, titS necessary to an:alyse the figure of K~rya in detail. If we have to retain what is old, we must find out ifit has something worth preserving; on the other hand, even if we have to abolish tlic old, we must analyse ~!)a because you cannot abolish the old without abolishing him'. 26 Religious debates arc thus the front for something else, something deeper, more disturbing and undeniable and Bankim reads it quite correctly--debates about religion . about knowledge, about aesthetics, arc a.U inserted into an unpronounccd debate about colonialism. Bankim thus regards K~r:ta's life as a 'master narrative' in the pu~cst sense 21 a narrative construction that, precisely through the exaggerauon provided by 6ctionaliry, reveals and ~xemplifies ~e. central organizing principles of a culture. Narntives of thts kind are S'8"t6cont because they

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are nor the creation of a single author; they contain the process of a sl~w rnosa1c ~f a story through long-term refin"""'nt and presentation of a culture 1dcal ofhumanity. 28 1t alienates into an object, to usc Fcuerbach's phrase, and t?us _objectifies what it considers to be the essence of hunun ~onduct ordinarily unattainable within the ambit of ordinary human hves. ~ J:lad this ~tory been a single individuol's creation, it would have been 1d1osyncra11c and fallible. But the 6gure of Krsn• came to be construct~ through something like a massive collective ~;;lpture, through a long senes of texts and textual practices like retelling. Its outlines its cmpha~es a~d irulections were thought, corrected, rethought through a collective lustoncal process that is not entirely unmystical. This is what lends this peculiar and intense seriousness to a judgement on Krsna's tharacter. For what is ~ingjudged is not a poet. not a sect, not a religlon. but th~ se~f-presentauon· of Hin~u civilization, what Hinduism has thought of Itself. . · Si~ce ?od is infinite and infinity is not conceivable by finite minds, God m hu own nature cannot be an ide•l th>t can be practically pursued ~y ordmary mortals. The ideality of God, his absoluteness, therefore stands m need of metaphors, metonyms, or some other translation into a human seale intelligibility. Thus the ideal of the Christians is Christ. of the Buddhtsts, the B~ddha . .Ban kim asserts his belief that no other religion has such a nch senes of anthropomorphic ideals as Hinduism does-'they are detached even when rulin~ empires, they enquire into religious trutl1 even when lifting the bow, WISe even though kin~. loving to everybody even th~ugh po~erfu_I'.JO Particularly, in Hindu theory there is an ideal of such 1deals wh1ch g.ves unny to this tr•dition theologically, philorophi cally and narratively. This is the figure of Krsna.ll In support ofth~ th~~ Ban~m advances a ~~ewhat curious argument. ~ maste~ narranve s ab1hty to Integrate a civilization does not depend on Its actuaJ~ty, thro~glr and in or her happen in~. The fundamental quality of the Ckdipal stones does not require that Oedipus must be a historical figure. lnd~ed, one could say th~t to be an ideal, Oedipus, like the mode of production, ~ad better not be an actual historical fact; for his task is not to be true ht others, to be true in every ~· and he can eXISt m every hunun being without existing in the or~nary sens~. Any ideal figure, on this log.c, can do his work without bemg actual; mdeed, it could be argued that he could accomplish his task better that way. For then the debate about rhe meaning of his life could nOt be displaced into an unnecessary contrOversy about whether somebody called K\11)3 did :ver exist or not; and whether the historical ~l)a pursued a hfe that IS entirely free from •II conceivable blame.J2 It could then be a more straightforward companson and moral measuring of one ideal of humanity against another. I think Ban kim did not take thot more obvious line of celebrating ~I)•

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>< a pure ideal because he was caught in the colonial reprise. His celebration of K~a is in one respect entirely different from earlier theological disputes internal tO Hindu or Indian religions. His celebration of KHI)• is not aimed against other, Indian or Hindu constructions of this ideality, bur the ideality of Christ; and Christ was a historica/6gure. Bankim must therefore argue the historicity of K~~. not only his ration.>! superiority as an ideal. Bankim's strategy in this enterprise is simple and severdy rationalistic. Events in the life ofKrsn.a are recorded in the Mahiibhiirata and nine out of the e.ighteen Purim~: ·Indeed, the ext:>nt ve.rsions of the Mahiiblriirata themselves point out, in a move of intert.extuality common to Hindu religious texts, that the later partS of ~l)a's life are recited in the I larivaf!Ua (which is known as the Khilaparv11 of the epic) and the Bhiig<~~~11ta. Bankim notices, without appropriate wonder and without critical sympathy, a rather curious fact about these allegedly interconnected legends. A primory difficulty in reconstructing the life of ~l)a is the evident discrepancy between the accounu we get in the Malriibhiirata and the p,.,;;,as. Bankim's analysis reveals a pattern of narrative construction in which later poets rake advantage of the underdetennined segments of the earli~r narrative a.nd insert interludes which serve their doctrinal intereSts. In the Mahablratllla ~l)a appears as an already grown up person, a wll{rior with an apparently uneventful earlier life, at least, not significant enough to be recounted in great detail. Scraps of detenninate features are available: his lineage, his living in V~divana, his undoubted prowess dunng his unreported adolescence. later. the Puriina writers take adV3ntage of the underdeterrnined adolescence of K!'ll)a to place the story of the gopls and V~ndivana within this empty space of the narrative. As no one could be an adult without being an adolescent, and since ~·· adolescence was underdctennined in terms of facts, this was not, at least in ~ literal sense, objectionable.» The insertion of this sub-plot into the narrative of ~~· was however inunensely significant for bter vai~~ava doctrine. This second, erotic narrative was to grow raprdly into an independent segn•ent, and since this was laden with theological and doctrinal meaning, this made it possible to shift the whole philosophic centre of the ~a story in a new, emotivist direction consonant with bl1akti movements. In course of time the Krsna cult would come to embody an emotional religion of bhakti and -~~oticism. Gradually, this erotic tale about ~l)a and the gopls undergoes constant elaboration. But MalrDbhiztllta, Bankim argues, is unmistahbly the first and the original stratum of the K!'ll)a story, a pre-condition for all that was to foUow: other texiS merely 'fill the gaps in the story structure of the Mahablrarata'. The Mahiiblriirata is therefore the original or pnmordial (rnoulik) and constitutes the fundamental and the earliest $tr.lturn. 3< Fully presented, the argument about the authemic\ry of the

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Mahiibhiirata runs os follows. The Mahiibhiirata story gives the fundamental and true account of K~l)a's life. The story is fuU of gaps and leaves lal'ge empty intervals, but is still true. If later writen fill in these gaps in the narration, there could be nothing wrong in principle, but, in &ct. there is, because the kind of stories with which they fill in these gaps, tend to shift the philosophical balance of the story from his later life of practical action to his earlier life of abandon. These changes make it not only a much lo nger story, but a story of a different kind. Only formally is it the same Krsna in fact, he hos been rumcd into a symbol of a very different doettin~ ·~f. life. Still, it could be said that th.e historicity we are talking about is the historicity of the accounts, not a historicity of ~')a-what the accounts are · accounts of. Bankim does not stop to consider this. Is the Mahiibhiirata really history? Obviously, this is a question where the answer would depend on what counts os history (itihiisa) in this case. The Mahobhiirata possibly contains a great deal that is fantastic, impossible, plainly ahistoricil; but that is not a decisive argument. Fim, there is a theoretical statement in the Hindu tradition about what is itihasa. Jhannartlsakdmamo~dn4mupadtiasdlnanvitam

putdV!ftllkathdyulttamitiMs~ praa}q41~.)S

/1. subtle and evasive definition of'history' which rums what rationalism regards os historicity into merely its minor clause in the definition: it is a story taken from chronicles of earlier times which gives instruction o n dhanna, artha, kama and mo~a. It is an interesting definition of what 'history' is, particularly in its' frank avowal of the idea that 'history' only partially records the post, at !cost equally significandy it provides the present with justifications; but this is hardly compatible 'vith the strongly rationalistic version of history which Bankim invokes, in which the claim ofhistory to respect as 'positive' knowledge lies only in its qu:al.ity ofbcing true. Dankim places great emphasis on the rationalist cognitive criteria of the historical enterprise. In ancient India, although people knew the art of writing, texts were generally disseminated and preserved through an onl tradition, and Bankim "'ther curiously thinks that modem rationalistic techniques of discovering inaccuracies in copies of written texts could be un.,rot>l<m>ticaUy applied to 'oral texts'.36 Apparently, this phrase was US:d to mean that there were some texts which, though written , depended for their transmission on the oral tradition. Ordinary people would know about the Riimiiyana and Mahiibhiirata not by reading them, but by having them periodically retold. through a continuous and intriguing web of repeti tions. It could be an interesting q uestion to find out if all cultures allow such retelling of teXtS or whether some of them enforce Stricter

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acquaintance with the o riginal (e.g. the Qwran and dte Ttttaments). For Dankim, to find our the 'truth' of~l)a is not to find an artistic truth in which one reading does not dispbce 'the truth' of other possible and very divel'gent readin~, but a saicdy cognitivistic truth ofernpiric:al. facts which would dispel facrual errors.37 If what we are seeking is this cognitivistic historicity of the figure of ~a it foUows that the text likely to be the most reliable would be one thit is nearest to the life of the actual ~t.ta in time. The Malriibhiirata offers the most undistorted account of his life story. However, it hos been a particular victim of the c reativity of the oral tradition, and Banlcim suggests that rwo types of stratifications could be found in the commonly available text--a historic:al. and an artistic stratification-which, although ~ing different criteria, reinforce each other. The original Mahiibhiirata has a fairly detailed parllasarJgraha, and whatever is significant for the story structure but is absent from this could safely be identified as a later interpolation. To criticaU)I separate the original stratum from the encroachment of later deposits and inauthentic interpolations thus becomes the crucial wk. Not surprisingly, the criteria that are used for selection are strictly positivistic; indeed, these are explicitly derived from ordinary scientific practice. •/I.U activities which constitute human life can be accomplished by depending on the logic of proof. We require stronger or weaker types of proof depending on the type ~f case we are going to judge ... That is why for different types ofsubjects or occasions, different types of proo6 have been recommended. For example, for law courts, the law of evidence, for science, inductive logic; similarly there is a distinctive logic of enquiry for the science of history'.)S Bankim is entirely conscious th•t he is applying principles of proof from this external (western) tradition to understand the truth of an Indian epic. Contrast this, incidentally, with Tagore's defence of a non-
ramu janamastlt4n •yodhyiir
(Truth is what you create/write; whatever happens is not always true, poet, treat the land of your imagination as more real than Ayodhya, the land of Rami's birth.)

/1. non-cognitivistic theory of truth like Tagore's (or if you prefer a similar modem version, Gadamer's) would have gone in some such direction; but Bankim's strong cognitivism takes an entirely different course. On the application of such rigorous criteria rather a great deal of the Kt;1t)a myth becomes historically suspect. Particularly because the

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cognitive controls Banltim specifies are lexically ordered: an episode, to be held true, must pus aU his seven recommended tests. We are urged ro reject whatever does not figure in the parvasa~JgrahiiJhyiiya and the anultramaniltii and aU murually inconsistent episodes. Artistic cre:ations of great authors usually dispby some strong stylistic signature, Bankim argues, -:and anything inconsistent with such peculiarities of style are intetpObted. If anything is irrelevant to the StOty, and shows any of the earlier &ilings that is tO be rejected as weD. 40 This formal apparatus of exegesis when applied to the Mahabhiirata (which Bankim does not show us in detail) shows the epic to be unhomogeneous and stratified, and reveals three clear strata in its art. The fi.rst str;atum, the origitul, wu probably quite brief; confined simply to a recounting, without much luxuriating symbolism. of the life of~ and the Panda vas. There is astnrum overbid on the lint with entirely distinct stylisti~ and artistic attributes. Some pariS of the Mahiibhiirata are morally serious and uplifting. their depiction of human aCIS undistorted and natural, a.n d of poetic quality of a very high order. Other parts bck this high tone, but are deeply connected with, its underlying me12physical doctrines, and therefore poetically unnatural, although certainly not without some poetic quality.'1 At this level poetic ingenuity is basically involved in showing the miraculous 'possible'.'2 Without the first byer the Malriibllarata loses its narrative coherence; if the second is taken out it does not lose anything vital except some decorative frills. The most significant difference berween the two layers is shown by their treatment ofKrsna: on the fint level, he never reveals or uses his divine omnipotence and ~~~omplishes his wks by consistently human means. In the second he is clearly marked and worshipped as an incarnation of Vi~l)u and is himself inclined to·.making this not exactly modest announcement rather oftcn .•J Curiously Banltim overlooks the obvious difficulty that on this view of stratification of the epic text in the entire Hindu tradition, the Citii, his favourite text, would almost certainly be disqualified'' The Mahiibhiirata also contains a third stratum: 'whoever ever composed something and felt pleased with his work simply squeezed it iilt~ the Mahiiblriirara•,•s an extraordinary proceeding by my standards, and hrnung at a different theory of textuality. By the ordinary rules of reading and preserving texts, this would be a strange way of showing regard for it. But Banltim is not alone in taking this exegetic line; R.ajsekhar Basu, in his influential Bengali abridgement of the Mahiibhiirata, offers a sirnil2t theory about Kumbh®ltdS, an i!werted plagiarism."" The Mahiibhiirata was a major source of inStruction for common people and the Hindu tradition, accordmg to Bankim, was given to systematic translation ofthe met2pbystcally abs~ into the me12phorically attractive; and the ~i~d byer_ of the epic is merely traditional Hinduism's deparrment of public mstru~uon. to be discounted in aoy serious analysis of its philosophic or aestheoc truth.

A consequence of this selection is the resolution not to accept miracles for we cannot justifiably believe in supernatural occurrences. 'We o~ght not to believe in supernatural evehts even though we seem to have direct evidence of these. We cannot believe in them even if we see them with our own eyes. For our senses can make mistakes; but contravention of a narunJ law is impossible. Only if you can prove to me that what I regarded :as supernatural is something possible within natu~ b~ shall I acc~pt it'.47 Most significandy, there is a final conundrum: If he IS to acco~plah his deeds through divine powers why did he ass~e hullWl form m th_e 6rst place? To destroy a few demons (asura) or corrunon monsters a evidently not a difficult t2sk for the omnipotent. If he has assumed human form he could not have intended to use his extraordinary powers' .., Thus we get a oomplex mix between a ~ry of the avatira,_a translation of the absolute into human scale, and an umge of a Cartestan god. 1n the fim theoretical part of the ~ntra there is some consideration o f the last question, which shows explicit influence of E~opcan~style rational theology; 'Is it possible for God to exist on earth? Ordinary Htndus believe Krsna was an avatira of V~l)u; the educated consider this wholly unscientifiC; and ChriStian missionaries consider it laughable'-'9 In his response to these doubts 82Jl)cim divides the question into rwo: first, whether God could come down to earth; and second, if so, then was Krsna an incarnation of God. Politically, this division is really • stroke of gr~a"t force, for this utterly neutralizes part of the Christian oppositio~, as they must went to the first possibility, as o~erwise Jesus could ~ot ~xtst.50 Bankim then undewkes to answer agnosuc doubts of the SCicnufic or philosophical kind about the second question: .. . Some maintain that God does not have attnbutes or qualiues (nrrgu~). for to have ·qualities means to be finite. At the same time only a God with qualities or at least a God willing to assume qualities can have incarnations. 'I cannot conceive what a qualityless God would be, and therefore I cannot solve this difficulty. I know of course that a large number of teamed and religious people regard God as being \vithout qualities. I am not a learned man or a seer, but I suspe~t that these philosophers and mystics too, like me, are unable to concetve of a God without qualities, because man does not have a cognitive &culty by means of which he can possibly know an object without qualities. God may well be without qualities, but we cannOt know such a God'." 'Of course we can say (as opP<>sed to conceive) that God is \vitho~t- qualities,_~d we can also consrruct a whole philosophical theory on this tdea. But II nmply does not follow that what we can utter is also something we can mentally conceive. It does not destroy our tongue to say "a square circle", but we cannot unders12nd what it could possibly mean . . . If we say God is without qualities we lose the creator'. There are sciU others who hold that God is with quabties bur with.o ut form (nirakiira), but this objection is

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easily answered. IfGod is really omnicompetent even though He is usually fonnless what prevents Him from acquiring form if He so desires? Anoth~r objection could be that if God is able to solve His difficulties by H1s powers why should He undertake the endless suffering of a human hfe? Tltis forgets (a) that since the nature of God is different from our (senuent) natures, He must be beyond suffering and pleosure; ond this sort of solicitousness about His possible suffering simply arises out of a mistranslation of His nature into our terms.S2 Particubrly, because (b) what is a whole lifetime for man is an instant of His time, though, strictly speaking, if the first argument is right, the second is really redundant.s1 1n fact, the necessity of God's incarnation docs not lie in the minor irritations represented by a l, therefore it requires incarnations of God to show what perfection of virtue means in human terms. It is God's way of circumventing the cognitive finiteness of the human mind. Possibly some could object from a Carte-sian angle that it is true that God exists, it is also true ch>t He has <:reaced and governs everything, but it is irceverent to think of him as running tbe wor~d 'in the same way as a coachman runs ltis coach'.S6 He has simply created rome fixed laws for the existence of the world which are both immutable and sufficient for its continued existence. To believe that God would occasionally luve to appear as a moraJ repairman of the universe is unseemly. ~rrcction of its ills ought to be lelt to a rorr of mor:alltidden hand. Even thts a~ent does not appear decisive to Banlcim. Although the laws o~ creanon are immutable, it contains a law wltich requires constant change m a preferred direction; it is part of the laws of this world that the world would improve (tmnati). Noclting in chis world is in such a state that it could not be improved by God--a Hinduism with a clearly Spence~an flavo~r: _'If improvement is sriU possibk how can we say that there 1s no poss1b1llty or necessiry of divine intervention? Apart from creation, preservation, maintenance and destruction there is another natural funaion'1 in the world-improvement'~ And God seems to be very deeply involved in this new eternal process discovered (or begun?) in the second pan of the nineteenth century. On cltis point,s9 as Parrha Chatterjee suggests perceptively, we muSt look at the subde transbtion ofd1c functions of the H.ndu

God in rerms of rationalist and evolutionist thought of the nineteenth century. B•nkim conceives of the irreplaceable function of the ·ancient incarnation ofVi~r.tu to be energetic preservation of the laws of Cartesian rationalism, Darwinian evolution and Comtean sociology.60 Finally, the task of the avatara is odequately specified: there are, it appeor>, two circles or levels of causality, one for God in His absolute and infinite self and another for men; and one quality that God shares with western philosophers of the Enlightenment is love of consistency. He tries to figurate dh2rrna in His being in a human form; He shows what it is to live 2 good life. Bankim quotes a wonderfuUy playful passage from the VJ.!~upur.ina on bow God dissembles a human fonn-'Tbe fact that He shot a great number of weapons against His enemies is parr of His playful pretence in accordance with the human form. W'hy should otherwise there be such enormous exertion on the part of one who can create and destroy the univer>e by thought alone? As He is following the practices of men, He would make peace with the strong, fight those who are weak, use the techniques of equity, gilt, division for justice, and (to make the performance credible) He would even flee on rare occasions. These infirmities of the human type were done by His own wish following the rules of human conduct'. To show wlut a good life means is literally to show it; not to suggest it through the abstract and symbols. He shows good life unmetaphorically by the directness 2nd presence of His acts, through the non-:obstract and, in a non-literate culture, universaDy under>tandable text of • life. His life, emphaticaUy, is a text; because it fixes, objectifies, makes incJjsputable what to live a good life is (not what a good life means). He does it entirely consistently, within the terms He has set for Himself It would be co stipulate a limit on this omnipotence to believe He cannot puc limits like these on Himself Since He has taken upon Himself the implicit rC$Oive to stay within the limits of human causality including, if the VJ.!~upurjjna is to be believed, an occasional flight to produce credence, He must remain consistent; for otherwise, this would simply mean deluding H is potential foUowers, inducing them to take on" ircational risks. Otherwise, would it be consistent with His infinite wisdom thar He is incapable of under>tanding the virrue of the simple rule of consistency?

The Construction of K~t:~• Wlut follows in the K~~af4rilra, after the procedural preliminaries are over, is a systematic reconstruction of ~a's figure in tltis double polemic, through the shifting of its centre of g
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and erotic to the rational. In Bankim's hands his reincanution is so consistent and complete that he emeq;es as a more eligible candidate than Christ for the usk of preserving order in a C=esian universe. It is essential to reconstruct correctly the tenns ofhis question. Bankim's vindication of~l)-2 is not aimed.tgainst other Hindu or Indian constructions of idealiry, but the rational theology of Christian.iry, the idealiry of Christ as corucrueted by rationalist Christian discourses of the nineteenth centU<)'. Christ was a historical figure. Ba.nkim must, or at least he thinks he must, argue the historicity of~ not only his rational superiority as an ideal. What is interesting is not only the explicit debate, but •lso the silences: it is not only Christ and Buddha who •re historical figures, ·but also Moharnnud, who does not figure in Banlcim's list. It is not always easy to read such silences. It is at least possible to argue th
poeuy of the world, but •lso the poeuy of words which evoke and celebrate it." C.itanya, at the some time, interprets premabh4kti in a way that nukes it less and less dependent on intricacies ofleamed telt1S, arguing implicitly that the bhakfury lies in the &ct thot it can be read wiiliout knowing how to read. Writing tJUngs in words, on this view, is more a hiding wn a revealing; because special techniques are required co decode them. SocWiy. this tends to create a cla$s of broken between God and His devotees. God could not have wanted to write His message in such an eiitist and inaccessible code. If He is stunadarii His code must be •vailable to everyone, the most universal code of pleasure. The un.ivenaliry of sexualiry docs not divide human beings into minute uneqwl fractiles; it is the forrn of pleasure th2t is most universal, most available and also, interestingly. the most lnconunensurable. SexU
The earlier alienation of Ridhi from the self of God is explained by an argument at once poetic and philosophical And this contains a philosophic explanation of the necessiry of Ridhi within the necessiry of Caitanya: sri r04h4y<Jh pranayamahimo kid(fo viinaym.d swiW/yo ytrtidbhutanuJJhuritrW ltid(fo vd rruufiy~64

Quite independently of Caitany•'s own predilection for the erotic metaphor,65 the Ridhi figure emerges out of a powerful tr2d.ition of erotic poeuy; and Caitanya. for his own purposes. instead of condemning it for its sensualiry. simply adds to its poetic and metaphysical power while advising the disciples th•~ these are of a metaphorical, not literal statw. In Gau<;flya ~va theory. ironicaUy ~is vadually relegated to a distant

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eminence; and the whole metaphorical ground is gradually occupied by an incre.~singly resplendent Riidhii. The cult of eroticism undergoes a subtle internal transfonnation-the love, and its many stores which •re described become increasingly the states of love of a feminine figure. instead of a male. This is a signifiunc and largely uninterprercd change; but for all its going unnoticed, it is quite unmis12hble. One is tempted tO cbim that the classic tradition sees this ttansaction of love as being dominated by the nu.le, the folk tr:~dition by the female. Although that might be an untenable overstatement, in the Bhagavala, and more proximately in the Citiig<>OJincla the mole and female figures are equally active. An address like the C.mous passage spoken by ~'·'" in the tenth sarga of the Ci'liigovirrda:

..1..,1 yaii ltirttiiapi danlanuilutumuii Mrati tl4m.ti,u"r4m4tilhot4m tk.

becomes increasingly rare. In Vidyiipati, Can~i4is and other padiwafi poets ~~· becomes literally a literary excuse, and disappears from the active verbal and descriptive circle. Now poets Still describe happiness, sensuality. suffering and sorrow-but these are all Riidhi's states of being.66 It is particularly important to appreciate Bankim's intellectual daring in this undertaking, and we can underst2nd the immensity of his task only if we see what is at stake. An entire artistic, or cultural, tradition hangs on this story, particularly in its popular fonn; and it will be a false simplification to believe that it is merely a folk tradition that is centred on this narrative. As the story assumed purity and refinement of fonn, and its peculiarly Oowing and joyous structure, it became the centre of an increasingly large and uruubstirutible tradition in classical and scmicbssical music, folldore, and a deposit of imagery and symbolism, which mediated the ordi.n ary Hindu's approach to his world. Wlut is interesting is Banlcim's simultaneous dcline.~tion of an equally inexorable line of distinction between his view and that of the modernists who would look upon all this with contempt, or dump them as objects of anthropology. To try to get awoy from one's past by turning one's back to it is simply to misunderstand the nature of the historical reality of the present. &nlcim's actual reconstruction of the ~a figure--what he would have called rest0r2tion in the strict sense-follows a dual strategy. Fortunately, the two operations converge in their result. ~!)a's figure, Bankim thought, must be freed from all supernatural e.lements of l?orinic lore. This would mean rejecting an enonnous segment of the,figure as it re.~lly existed as a cultural fact: His ability, in many different ways, to do impossible things.67 Strictly speaking, lhese impossible accomplishments were of two types---nuterially impossible acts, and exaggerations. Exaggerations are now generally seen as an inexttiuble part of the popular

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tradition. Not surprisingly, ~~)a's powers were exaggerated in two spheres that mattered; in the field of war and combat, he can conquer anyone, and everyone put together, and in the field of love--in which again he can liter:~Uy conquer anyone {including Radhii, the symbol of erotic perfection) , and eve.r yone put together (in the rD.satilii). On the night of the risalili he manages to cavort with no less than sixteen thousand gop is, if the fluctuating estimates are to be brought to an average. The ~~· myth is thus subject to one of the most constant and powerful of popular tendencies-it becomes a celebration of excess. • This doctrine of excess is turned by Dankim in a typically intellectualist/rationalist direction. Obviously, for serious intellectual argument J in the post-Enlightenment ninereenth century, such excesses unnot be taken litenlly. Whatever socio-cultural needs these exagger:~ted exploits had ful611ed in earlier times, they had >ioce disappeared. Rational reconstruction implied, consequently, that such exploits of~9a mUSt be taken metaphorically. Bankim finds a different principle for restoring the integrity and integrality of the ~I)• image. We believe, then, that his life is described in two clitTerent registers, of the literal and ofthe metaphorical. Descriptions of what ~~· does in the literal register do not go beyond what is humanly possible. Other 'acts' which find place in these narratives are me12phorical descriptions of his nature, &lsely perceived as literal by poets of lesser ability. Not to believe in these exploits could not indicate lack of devotion for the Infinite, for the Infinite Himself undertook to restrict His acts within the circle of human causality when He undertook His avalira . To emphasize the supernatural acts as marks of His infinite powers is both a moral and a cognitive error; a moral error because it is a mark of conceit to claim that we can underst2nd the divine in His infinitude and a cognitive error because a large number is not infinity. Thus the differenl criteria of devotion and of r:~tional belief coincide beautifully. Bankim's ~ can thus' appropriate the ~~ of popubr joyous excess by deconstructing and retranslating him into a very different figure--from a figure ofabandon to one ofheroic action. He is transformed from a lovable popular figure of eroticism, excess, transgression, playfulness, a subject ofboth admiration and admonition, to a cbssic figure--calm, poised, rational, perfect, irreproachable. From the god of playful villagers and their folic festivals, a god who has to help them son out small, everyday problems, H e has been transformed intO a god ofa dependent nation who b.ad to help them c.ross, nullify. reject and tnnscend in practice the historic indignity of subjection. My attempt to consttuct a more or less rigorous argument out of Bankim's essay should not be misunderstood. It docs not mean that he was in fact able to offer an entirely rigorous argument of the kind be was seeking. Nonetheless there are two reasons for us to syst1::matize his views. First. there is enough of an argument of that sort to be reconstructed.

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1k Unhappy Ccnstiousntss

Secondly, it is precisely where the argument. is nor good, that we can understand him and his enterprise better, by simply shifting ou.queslionfrom 'is the argument right?' to 'why does he think like this?'-an elem.entary interpretive ~rinciple, unfortunately not observed very often. Making sense of a text IS to understand not only its ttuths but also its errors. Th~ way Bankim criticaUy excises elements out of the popular ~I)•

story u actuaUy more complex than his r.ther severely simple criteria would suggest. A tradition is not infinitely maUeable, and pl~ces limits on the pennissiblc ~ent of intenul change. Bankim ukes the entire gamut of &hwtic stori~ of the 8/tQgavata through a double reduction-lint, a na.w_ralistic reductioil in tenns of a rationaUy accepuble occurrence; often this u aided by a second, subtler reduction that is linguistic and meuphorical. ~nterpreution dissolves an unnatural event into a meuphoror aUegory. Whtle the Yama/atjunabha~Jga is naturalisticaUy read as an unspecucular display of credible strength, the lcilling of Piiuni is reduced to J<wJa's surviving a children's disease, the taming of Kaliya into an aUegory ab~ut the 'serpent' of time, the lifting of Govardluna into a metaphorical rejection of animism. Understandably, the ~l)a mytl• which Bankim wished to att2ck and recc:nsttuct is its erotic core-the story of 1<wJa's life with the gopis, pamcularly IUdhi. Here again Bankim uses a double argument foe reassu~nce. First, it is quite easy for Bankim to·· foUow his theory of srtanfication of textS and criticaUy excise the erotic pam of the myth. For .the Mahiibhiirata has rare and C:.irly non-committal references to Krsna's relations with the gopis. 'This doctrine of the vrajagopiJ is absent fro,;; dte Mahiibhiirata; in the Vi~•.upuriitra it exiscs in a virtuous form (pavitrabhaw ~che); in the Harivan,ua for tl1e first time some amount of sensuality enters irllo it; the Bhagaval4 expands on the element ofiidiriJJa (sensuality); 6oaUy, there is a veritable deluge in the BrahmavaivartapuriiJ!4'. 64 Three elements of the gopi story are reduced; by reduced I mean either entirely excised as an interpolation unworthy of the text or translated into a different register from literaiity-i.e., either into a meuphor (riipaka) or some other form oflinguistic reduction. Whetl>er it is seen ~sa meuphor or otherwis~, these are see.n as s~tements. w~~ do nor 'To'ean wha~ they say, at least hteraUy. I CollSlder tiltS reductlorust mterpretanon of rehgious belieiS a distincdy modem phenomenon; it is an attitude present only in people who, like Ban!Om, have accepted a disenchanted view ofthe world consttucted by sciencc:. 69 Since they find a literal reading of these belieiS implausible, they rystematieaUy dellect religious belief into two other possible registers: ~ register of ethics and a register of aesthetics, which are both, on the modem view, sufficiently independent of scienti6c language to .have independent criteria of acceptability of their own. I think there is a serious anachronism in the view, often met in modem times, that

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ancient people, including makers of ancient religious and philosophic doctrines, thought of religious ideas as metaphorical in thi.s strong sense. Seeing religion as primarily meuphorical is a product of acceptance of a certain material primacy of scienti6c discourse; it is the mark that the presence of scientific discourse leaves on religion. It is hard to believe that people ofeariie.r times had such metaphorical ideas about religion, because they lived inside a discourse tinthreatened by scienti.6c theories. What is attraCtive about Bank:im's treatment is that he admits candidly that prior acceptance of the validity of natural science forces him to interpret religious themes metaphorieaUy. The first dement to be reinterpreted is the episode of the erotic lili between ~I)a and the gopis in the descriptions of riisa; the second, the uncomforuble story of the stolen clothes, and .6naUy, the absent centre of Bankim's reinterpretation, the figure of Ridhi, the foremost of the gopis, the irreplaceable node of va~va aestheticism. One of the major factors at play in aU this is of course a concept of literary taste that is partly of western origin, in which Banlcim assents to the babu 's unquestionin.g acceptance of Victorian marital ethics, although in other places, as in his humorous masterpiece, KDmaliiltmtta, he shows up its double sundards, the tenuousness and uncertainty of its ceremonious distinction between public and private, and a hypocritical consigning ofsexuality to the private domain. In S4mya as weU he has intensely indignant passages on the iniquitous consequences of this morality for Bengali women. Despite these and his occasional defence of the uninhibited literary styles of tradition2l poerry (as in lswar Gupu) against babu Victomnism, the ~ myth is uken through a rypicaUy babu criterion on erotic wte. Bankim does not deny the poetic or aesthetic exceUence of this myth, 'but we cannot pause here to taste poetic exccUence, we are engaged in enquiring into C:.r more serious theoretical matters' . It could be suggested that these elements of eroticism and uninhibition 6ltered into the myth because of the gpdual mixt_ure of transgressive stories of desire from folk tales into the highly classacal inuge of~.10 It is also historicaUy possible, as r have suggested, that the actual social rransgressiveoess of the ~va tradition emphasized the rransgressiveness of the Ridlli story, although this no doubt helped them to c01fl0lllllkate through its meuphor of intentness some purely meuphysical1
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Tltt Unlrappy Comcio1mttss

Tagore, despite his obvious sense of physical beauty, passages of direct physical description ue rare; occasions for physical contact in his novels would be stotistically insignilicant. However, in this case, Ban kim accepts the bhadralok equaliution of the common obscenity of battala literature and the material eroticism of rdrgious myths, and the task is obviously to exorcize the clement which orTcnds the taste of a colonial Victorianism. / Bankim decides to treat these motifS as a complex and interconnected - structure ofallegories, panicubrly nuterial allegories ofindistinguishability and surrender-which are beautifully expressed through an erotic symbolism not only in vo~~avite Hinduism, but many other rdigions.'J If he is •~lc to get his reoders to t.r ambte bcxh r2sa and rati as mere pby, on whtcb he quotes the authority ofSridharaswimi, the impoct of the excesses is considerably reduced, translating the wildly orgiastic into the excessively pbyful. There is an undergirding philosophical argument here. Of the four V!fliJ or 'faculties'' ' (Bankim himself suggests this translation in the Dlrannatatlva}-after the physical, cognitive, practical, dte lin•l one is aesthetic (dllaranjini) and the r2somi is then a meuphoric:al assertion of the idea dm in God the obility tO get pleasure from the aesthetic availability ofthe world is infinite. To be one with God, conversely, individuals must .._. cultivate their aesdtctic faculties, no less than cognitive and moral ones; to be able to participate in the joyousness of existence (iinonda) •nd aesthetic enjoyment is a w>y of being with God. Accordingly, the rasa takes ploce in a flowering rC$plendent nature. symbolic•lly, on an autumnal full moon night, and this could be reod as •murc's manifestation of its union with the Eternal. In the case of vastralrnra11n, Oankim cakes an entirely def~nsivc posture, and regards tl;lis as contrary to canons of refined taste. This is an odd idea precisely because so much of the t:urrcnt idea of taste is drawn from th~ European tradition, and the b•bu culture could not have been uno.:quaint<'d with the ubiquity of the nude il'l European painting. Pcrhops he is ddemive about the clement of sexual fantasy often choracterizing depictrons of the episode, particulorly tn the Blriigavara.7S Phtlosophically, th is simply signifies. through an unnecessanly lurid ntctaphor, t_he conquest of shame, the l•st vestige of self-consciousness. Only those who have tmly conquered even the lalt, even the most winning vesti~:cs of self-awareness -like sh•me in women--con asprre to know God. Although Jayadcva does not describe this episode, Oonkim IS portkululy severe on J>yadeva: 'what is still• deep rclrgious doctrine in the 8/ragavata has become a festival of sensuality in the hands of Joyadeva Goswann',''· and the 'V3Y dtc Purimc •uthors depict the vrralra of the gopis remind' him. I think quite ri~;hdy, of the enurely material vrraira in Kiilid3s:~'s secular poetryn

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The Figure of Radhi

Banldm's final reinterpretative elfort has to take on the most powerful of all such 6gures-Ridhi, obviously because without Ridhi, or with • linguistically reduced Radhi, the figure of K~~ undergoes • completely antierotic tramforTMtion. R.idha is the fin•l metaphor of vai~~ava religion, • figuration of bhaltti." In vaif~ava doctrine Ridhi is not only the symbol of devotion. Ridhi is the olienated self of~~·· his S,lui, his powers in abstraction. K~~·· to extend the metaphor, is opparemly subject to the poradoxical limitation of all selves. 1\s undemanding. even seeing is a conununicotive oct, the self can see itself only if it sets up a relation with itself of an other, the way the physie2.l body needs • mirror. !Udha in that sense is the miiTOr of his self. The Caitanyacaritam!fa says that it is bee2use of the need for self-knowledge thot 'dthablrtdam gatau tau', Jhey undergo • split into cwo forrm: for the doctrinal purposes of the CaitanyDlaritamrta of course this is p>rticularly helpful, because what it wishes to say about Caitanya is wonderfully enhanced by this theory. In Caitanya, K~1_1a reincarnates himself to understand exacdy what llidhi feels about him. He is the sublation of their duolity. That is why Caitanya must be riidhiiblriivadyutisuvalita lt~~asUMrnpa. Bankim is less centrally interested in llidha: he is more concerned at what happens to K~1_1a when Radha is around; he is seen as dlriralalita whose characteristics lrt disastrously recounted as follows: vidagtflto ttavatOrunyal! fMril•iisaviJiirnda~• tiiStimo dltiralolita~' JyOt prOya~ prtyasi1-alnl~. 19

For Bankim this is a sure recipe for disaster, as this K~1_1a is not too dilfcrent from the babus produced by Hindu College. The role of the avatira is to show a complete form of humanity, and thts will me•n thatthe ideal will dissolve into a life of un,ontrolled sensuality, inactivity and purposelessness. Thus, although the traditional vai~l_lava argument that Ridhi is the alienated self of God created in order to understand his own nature is philosophically unexceptionable, Bankim prefers a rather different route. This is a route of linguistic reduction. The tale ofllidhii and ~I)• in v•~t:t•va theory must indi~tc something more obout the noture of accident and necessity. Otherwise it is difficult to sec the logic beh1nd a comtruction in which the lord of all creation. who creates not only the world's deterntinations but .also the necessities, was not able to get round sc.ch accidents of deprivation~ being born younger than his beloved, or not being lawfully entided tO her h>nd in marriage. This is an extraorduury failure on the part of the Almighry. Evidently, the lord of all created thin~ could have manage(! His birth a

96

The Utrhappy ConsciousntJJ

yeor or two earlier than He actually did, or been born into a &mily from wh1ch He could have courted his alienated self with greater legitimacy, or at lea.st prevented her vague but regrettable marriage to an unspectacular cowherd. Curiously, He did neither of these thin~. and decided, unaccountably to undergo the sufferin~ of forbidden love. · If His t~k is to present the world with an order. it is hardly the ben way t~ begm by transgressing one of its most fundamental moral norms.I!O Bankim seems particularly bothered by this problem about the Bhagavata story, and conseq.uently tries tO excise this part from the biography of K~l)a. This IS obv1ously on the view that the lawgiver cannot be a petry_ bwbreaker without considerable strain on the internal consistency <Sf thu n~ral order. As time passes, assisted by the non-written quality of the trad1t10n which does not lay down clear narrative boundaries the figure of!Udha. like most similar ligures becomes more complex and less coherent." Initially, .there is reaso~ to believe that she is seen entirely as a metaphor, as • figurauon of. bhak11; ;he mystically disappears with the other gopis ~fter he_r mention m K~l)a s pougandal'ila. They figure in the story massively JUSt th1s once, and then sintply and irreversibly drop out. Though apparently remarkable, this is also easily expwnecl If we insist unre>senobly on a realistic everyday reading of the story. the gopis, one must presume, went back to their ordinary, quotidian course oflife after the period, o_r th': sea~n: or the mght, touched by divinity on the occasion of the rasahla. Radha could hardly be consigned to such unreported anonymity, after. the conferment on her of tlte more abstract and therefore purer quality as a !igure. Thus, her suddenly but decisivdy dropping out of the narranve structure of tl1e myth does not do much good to the consistency of its internal fom1. Some aspects of the relation between Radlu and tlte other .gopis from whom she gets gradually differentiated, are ambiguous and still r.>ise problems o~ cons~~n~y. Initially she is merely the 6rst among the gopis. Th1s Will s1mply •nd1cate that gopi's collectively are the symbols for devotees, who gradually through surrender of their se!Jhood, become real devot~es of
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the attribute of not having the basic ontological detenninations mentioned. These missing determinations are not trivial ones lilce shoe-size; her birth, her own family (not her husband's fam.ily which is monotonously emphasized) are usually deeply and uncomfortably vague; as is her own pecul.i.ar &ding away after the story of braja. She is not mentioned in a m<Mt r:adical way: she does not die, does not undergo any of the experiences reserved for common mortals. She is a metaphor; after the resplendent sexuality of her youth, it is only someone like her who can so easily, simply, 6nally cease to exist. That is her privilege as a metaphor. For the whole structure of Hindu religion, of traditional indian artistic sensibility would collapse if she is allowed to be anything except her r:adiant self, if she is allowed to age. Even ~ himself, although not shown ex.acdy rheunutic by age, is understood to age, and to be under the considerable strains ofstatecraft at the time ofwhat must be regarded as Indian feudalism in its particularly bloody beginnin~. Only JUdhl does not 6gure in the world in this way, and is minculously free of its limitations. Some later v~va authors were seemingly dissatis6ed by her sudden disappearance, and brought her perilously close to mortal sorrows. They invest her with ontological burdens of existing in the nuterial sense. A real woman, unlike a metaphor, must have a before and a beyond; although she still lives within the temu of art, of 6ction, she tends to return to ~':'a's story at various points, and is made thus to have a linear life. But because of the loving devotion of the poets she is exempted form the indignity of an actual old age. It would be inconceivable, indeed a disaster for the entire vaisnava consciousne3S to encounter an old Ridhlwithout her beauty, he;. youthful sexuality, her resplendence. ln later vai~I)OV3 poetic theology, however, there are some beautiful slokas in ' which a new kind of wistfulness is created through the experiences of her later self When she meets ~l)a afi:er the war of Ku~etrn she yearns in a wonderful Sloka for her 6rst union with ~l)a, against the necessary line>rity of time: yo.IJ kaumarahara~ sa tva hi vara.stti tva CAiirakfapdJtt dronmllitd rMI41iJllrobMy•IJ prau4-IJ boJambani~ Jd tdivismi tdtltdpi t.dlrti Sutllt41V(Opdralilavidhau rtViJrodhasivtttJSitarut.k at.IJ s•mutbonthyott.82

Although sad and beautifui in a diiferent way, these are yeamin~ which only persons with ordinary empirical detenninations can have; metapbon cannot really have such sorrows. Historically both the Radha and ~a figures get gradually transformed until they become unrecognizable incarnations of their earlier selves. In the coune of this transfonnation Knna seems to suffer more than Ridhii, for although she is gradually inte,.P~eted towards a 6gure of

71rt Mytlo 71•t Unhappy ConsdootSntu

98 ex~cgerated

tl1ough picturesque weakness, K~')~ declines into complete on~rticubteness. Literally, the bter K~9~ hudly ever spc~ks; he is of course spoken ~bout, but he becomes less and less a source and a crc:11or of doscoursc. In the C:itn, he is at the height of his discunive self-in) to the kavya (i.e., if oil th3t is reported of him is true). his speech must be folse. I do not deny that through gaudiya v~~I)~V3 theology we might be ~ble to restore to his speech some mcuphorieol ond meuphysieol truth; but thot itself proves my point th~t theor speech in Gitagovinda is osynunetric. Whot is importont is dut the later Krsn~ is reduced to discuuive nullity, little better th~n on excuse: his only ~~i;tic raison d'ttrt seems to be dut he is the remote but nccCSS<'Iry object to~rds which Radh2's possion,laments and her increasingly tragic sense of the world is directed. The greot str~m of pathos flows towards him, making him in • pcculiu sense both essentiol and inesscnti>L However, the basic artistic fact sccnu undeniable. This is K~l)a's rt>duction to silence, K~1,1a's increasing distance from this luxuriance of sorrow in this tragic discourse, perhaps because it is considered inappropriatc to depict the lord of all cre.rion unbecomingly broken by separation , >nd in on ~ct of self-abasement. In some w•ys the change in the figure of Ridh5 is more paradoxic•!. She was 2bsem from the Mahabhiirata story; but by the time of the Gitagovinda she has already become its central figure. Yet ir would be seriously misleading to mggest that since in • sense she remains the centr>l figure of the K!¥.1• story from joyadevo to T•gore's B/oamui'!l"~ Paaavafi, _she rern21ns t.he same Radhi. Her tnnsfonn;ation is no less drastiCor >stomshmg. When she isstiU nuratively indistinct in the_e•rly p,.,;;~DJ, the narrators 2dd spice to their stories by speaking of • pan1Cular gop1 who IS ch>racterized •s darpita, too arrogant •bout her gift of extraordimry b~uty, who doe1 not stop from scolding, rebuking, or bullying God Himself, because of the omnipotence of her gift. She is thus portrayed with a mixture of indulgence and rebuke: for the w>y she treats the lo.'d of all creotion is astonishingly immodest and wrong, but >t the same ume, m som_e subtle way, interesting, appropriate ond beautiful. As her figure bloom.~ mto the later Ridhii it is these aspects of her which are emphasized. She is seen as d(l>tii, self-respecting, assertive. often, with good r~ason, obusivc towards K~l_l3, mdnini. kafahdntaritd.

J strong

In rhcsc early texts she JS h3rdly :ver without self-respect, never representing an ovcrpowenng, though

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picturesque weokness. After oil, one must not forget she is the self of God theologicolly no less imposing thon the Lord Hirnscl( Indeed, she is purer in • sense in which He is not, in the w•y in which the qu>liry of redness must be considered purer than an object dut is red. Gradu•lly, in the Dengali va~aV3 tradition, her n>ture chonges in • strange manner. The ch~nge is so drastic th>t in the narrative the V!Jtdiivana episode is gnduoUy overshadowed by the p>rt designated as miitlmr;13 it is a h~rder, deeper, more tragic separation, which be•rs a prefiguration of•n etemal and unending ~lien~tion, unrelieved by realistic hopes of• reunioil. In Vrndava11a, on the contnry, sep>rations were simply preludes to • deeper reunion, much like what happened tO Ki lidis.•'s ~nd

ya~as-

dnantlottJram nayanasalialam yatra

nMtyaimimittar'~

nanyastiipal! kusumawajadi~t
n.a

t11

khalu. vt~yo/] )'DIIWittddattyallastt'. 8·4

uter, the figure ofRidhl, from • me~:~phor of the joy oflife, becomes a figure for its sorrows, its perpetual longing for an unattain>ble eternally elusive happiness. By the time of the bter v~i~~~va poets like Gninadisa we find her a one-dimensional wailing figure, perpetually on the verge of sep>ration and despair. When Tagore recreares the padivall form in our own times, she has practieolly merged into rhe te>rful helplessness of middle cl•ss femininity; she is shown ~s #kula riiJird rijluz ari jarajara j1rarai nayanaJau anukluuUJ jlumzjhara85

whose only recoune now is death.16 In this poetic incarnation she is more like the tyrannized Bengali middle-class widow rather than the forceful, proud, aggressive and above aU joyous heroine who celebrates life throug,h her resplendent sexualiry, irte$pcc;tive of sociol propncty, which confers a radi2nce on everything it touches-henelf, ~9•· nuure, and the lives of distant •udiences who can only h~r dm astonishing story retold by inadequ>te bards. Despite monopolizing the discourse internal to the story, Radh2 goes into a decline as an >rtistic 2nd met>physical figure becoming a onedimensional, weok, if poetic, bore. Actually she comes to merge into • different cone
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developing a cult of her helplessness, her lack of subjectivity and her sutus as. the ultimate victim. The damage is much wider and deeper, because woth ~erself she carries the entire class of women into it. She can only get thmgs for herself by invoking pity, exagger.ating her dependence on other people's acts. From the cencral figure of the autonomous feminine ~he had turn~ into an ideal of the cult of heteronomy. From a figure of mcomparable JOy, she has become the symbol of incomparable sorrow, from ful6lment to a waste of womanhood. BanJcjm's rejection of this evoluCJo~ of a wan and martyred womanhood is clear; in his novels he clearly ~es to ~eassert the other, earlier type-sensual, positive, with a forceful ofoccasoonally fiustrated joy of life. His heroines are in this respect closer to the earlier Radha, or rather the features ofRidha are tlistributed ~mong his ~emale characters. Also the Sdltta conception of the feminine ts. br~ug~t onto the primarily va~o:oava i~nography in a powerful combonaCJon on the underground temple in Arwrdamath.87 . The later Ridhii is c.learly uncongenial to Bankim's theoretical intexed rwo dissimilar things: a metaphysical theo.; about devo11onal merger and th~ imaginacion about the pleasures and risks of illegitimate love. By excising the figure of Ridhi through linguistic reduction, Banlum

~Myth

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seems able to reverse or restructure this whole historical process. His work should be seen in any case as an explicit rebellion against current cradition in the name of a more distant and doubtful one. Each one of these successive historical changes is sought to be reversed by Bankim's argument. By calling Ridhi a rn¢re idea, the attention of religious thought is brought back to K~o:o• hirnsel£ SeconcUy, Bankim systematicaUy disent~ngles eroticism ofthc folk from metaphysical arguments of self-estrangement. This still leaves a ~who 'does a whole lot of things which arc aK~o:oa', in Tagore's phrase, acts which are un~like or unworthy of ~!}a'S c haracter. We are advised in such cases to be indulgent towards them only as ltavya, poetic license, not serious religious doctrine. We must, if we accept Bankim's theory, excise these folk elements from the story and return to the first, deliberately classical form. Although Bankim does not say it in so many words, there seems to be an underlying suggestion that a people construct their god in their own image, and deserve in this sense the divinity they get. Lazy, purposeless, inactive, sensualist inidcUe-class Bengalis, not unnaturally, worship a god who does nothing except chase women. This answers the question about the possible purpose of the classicization of the K~o~a figure. Subscitution of the universality of eros by the other universality of reason, the painstaking excision of folk themes, its associations of sensuality and playfulness. leaves us a severely classical figure. It is, first, a figure of sufficient seriousness to contend with others like Chrisr Krsno's most serious competitor. It is this figure which can serve as a ~boi ~fhistoric action, of practice. Pr.acrice of swadlramra could create preconditions for the strength of the nation. But Bankim requires a recondire and exceptionally indirect orgument to arrive at this conclusion.90 Self-preservation is the ultimate and indefeasible right of aU living beings, and therefore presumably, also of Indians. Defence of one's &mily and community is a simple extension of the basic right of self-defence. A further extension of this right could cover one's nation. Dhanna is not religion; it is the right to be oneself. to express what one most fundainentally is. One cannot do that without defending and preserving the selt: If to defend oneself, and one's legitimately extended selves is a part of dharma, it could also be part of one's dharma to organize and improve the strength of the nation to which one belongs. People must know what their dharma is, but this should not be confused with acquiring formal education; for a person who is educated is not necessarily knowledgeable, nor is the reverse of this true.91 Education in Bankim's society is organized on essentially modern European principles which push to their extreme ntles of division of bbour and specialization. Educated men are consequently exceUent half-men, or brilliant fractions, but less than complete human individuals. Development of a human personality means cultivation of aU· the four f~!itis, something that, on this showing, can never be accomplished by

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The Unhappy Consdousntu

acquiring a west~m ~ducation. A truly r~hgJous ~rson is one who is able to live a complete life which is the some as living a life modelled on the example of God. Thus, suddenly and surprisingly, what could initially ap~ar as a learned, occasionally abstruse d~mtion on Hindu theology, takes a sharp curve towards a theory of contemporary praxis, • political theory in a particul.rly transparent code. This way tht underlying link between this sustained reconstruction of the K~r_u figure and the proctical energy of the vai~nava warrion'ofhis later novels becomes opparent . These people are surprisingly aggressive and violent for standard vai~I)>V>S, and they all incongruously march into violent battles singing vai!•.oava ch~ms now turned into slogans, which would ordinarily have only the quietest ring. This theology was actually a political field and was the subtle point and preparation of • grC>t theatre ofimaginory proxis.92 Throughout this gospel ofpraxis-left vague. amboguous, opportunistically interpretable, but unmistakable nonethcless-there is a btent imerpretation of the Cira and the life of Krsna as essenoally just and practical;93 and there iJ ofcourse the-customary s~;;tegy of sharp but unsustained critical humour about the English and their accomplice, the babu. Here the contesution iJ not about rcfom1, or legislation of a new plan for society; htre the terrain is the more crucial and subliminal one of mythology.

A Myth of Praxis

What is the consequence of this classicitarion? What is supposed to happen through this long exegeric exercise? Fomul definition of classicitation is notoriously difficult. But the difficulty of definition do~s not nullity the genre. Clmicitation in=ses the distance of the object from the giver, from the way it is generally" encountered in experienc~. the ordinary, the fanuhar. It is often by its unattainabiloty that it becomes an ordering concept. The purpose of the ideality of God, it could be argued, lies precisely in the unattainability of H is perfection. Excessive availability would defeat the purpose of having an ideal figure. Bankim"s own po$ition is rhe somewhat curious mixture of an oven theology that 3$$CrtS ~~as/11 bhagavii" swaya•t• and a Feuerbochian idea that God is a constructed object, all •ordering concept, His life story a master narrative that a civilization constantly recites to itself because it wishes to believe certain things about what it itself is. 9 ' It follows then that if dus n•rrative is reconstructed, if we tell ourselves • different stOI)" about what we are, we shall eventually be different. Thus the harrarivc of ~fla has to be reconstructed not for settling an

of Praxis

103

•nriquarian point about the past, but actually to strive in a particular manner about the future. The fault with its p~nt form is its eroticism, its Jack of rationalism, the fact that it encourages an attitude about the world that is contemplarive and not practical. There is also a point of contest between the folk and the cbssical forms of Indian heri~ge. Folk forms bring the ideal t90 close to the quotidian, to the imperfection and untidiness of the everyday. The ideal of ide•ls of the Hindu civilization must be rescued from this ordinariness, from the entanglements of eroticism, and given purer inteUecrual outlines. That is why ~fla must suffer a separation of sorts; he must renounce a material R>dha in order to be united with a conceprual one. At the heart of this reconstruction of the ~I)> figure, this richly complex mixture of theological doctrine, history and hidden politics, Jay the great tronsbtion problem faced by the colonial inteUigentsia. At a subtler and deeper level, there is a connection between the humorous bewilderments of Kamalikinta, his conundrums and thiJ serious enquiry into the master namtive oflndian culture. In entirely ditfercnt, occasionally quite antithetic ways, in utterly divergent genres, they wonder about. confront, and try to 6nd solutions to the same cultural puzzlement. They are nor two answers to the same question, but two aspects of the some answer. I do nor consider Bankim's construction of Krsna 'orientalist' as Partha Chatterjee has suggested.95 That seems to me ;;.; interesting and fertile exaggerarion. Fertile becouse, although it seems to me false in its extreme form, a serious criticism of Chatterjee's position hdps us raise questions about Bankim, and more generally about nationalist thought, which would have remoined unasked orhet\vise, and these questions arc more complex and quite different from the usual certainties about Indian

nationalism. Orientalism, no doubr. was p_erfectly known to .Bankim, because it was endemic in the Bengali culture of his rimes. But his rejection of orienta list conclusions seems to tum on a fundamentaUy non-orientalisr distinction between rationalism and rationality. R.2tionalism is a western doctrine ../ historically bound to rhe specific trajectory of the Enlightenment, ro the contingencies ofEuropean hUtory. It is part of the discourse of rationalism, its delusion and ideology, to see its own discourse as transcendental, as being true at all times, a discourse in which the origin is a mere accident. which does not, as in other cases, determine its inner structure. It is part of d1e delusions of western rationalism to forget its own historicity. Bankim questions this absent-minded, self-evident equation between human rationality and its conringcnt fortn in European rationalist theory, an equation accepted by the ordinary babu. Bankim appears to const,r ue what he is doing here as a rational rather than a rationalist construction. I Rationality does not consist in accepting as infalljbJe the historicaJJy contingent, fillible, ethnocentric conclusions of a certain type of western

The Myth 104

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of Praxis

lOS

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phil050ph!al theory out of which the ideology of colonialism arose. Macaulay s CS$ay, he remarks in Kamaliiltiinta, is indeed a work of fiction.% ;rruth does.notlie, on the other hand, in asserting that not only rarioJU!•sm, but rauonality too is an alien product, that ancient Hindu civilization can defy ratioJU! crit~. ~at ratioJU! procedures of thought and practice are unnecessazy and mapplicable to Indian culture. A rational solution to J the prob~erns of colonial existence was to produce a double critique--to ~ke ones culture thr_ough an uruncrciful reconstruction of this sort, and sunultaneously .by unng tools of ratiorul discowse against the &lse and J ~xaggera.ted c:b.uns of.Europe2n rationalist colonial ideology, by discovermg and mvennng ranonal ways within one's own tradition. f~r B~ this_results in a deep intcllectualloneliness. This figure of a ranonalisnc wamor-~~ bereft of Ridhi a<:tually showed and confi~ed his peculiar isolation in his age. In his dialogue, Dh~trmal~tllva, the discipl~ expresses this anxiety, and warns his preceptor that 'Hindus are not gomg to accep~ your Hinduism'."' Conscquendy, although in different ways, the theologtan of K~tJ4<4ritra and the opium-eater of Kamaliiltiinta are equally rnargiJU! voices in nineteenth-<:entury Bengal. Like several othe~, RimaJcwp, the Brihmos, the traditional conservative Hindus, Bankim too .had to look for some implements for making arguments general, making them part of a general consciousness of sociery. In most Other cases of reconstructed Hinduism the weapon of doing this was a ?'ovement, a sect, an organization of some sort. In this case alone, these •mplements are actually spumed. He can afford to do this because his :movement' is the Bengali language itsel£ If he lacks propagators of his tdeas among the members of Bengali bhadralok society, he has a per?'an~nt ~y of actors propounding his theory in the terrain of the babu's •rnagtn•non through his novels. Although he did not structure the babu's daily social realiry, he had perrnanendy structured a part of his dreams his literature. ' I have sugg~sted earlier that Bankim took a sort of personal revenge for the c~Uecnve tragedy .of~ people by his humour, his double irony, by mocking at a self which IS much wider than his sel£ In Krsnaa~ritra there is an ~ttempt a~ a further step, to tnnscend this helpl~~ess. to ato?~ for th.JS .coUecave collapse in front of the practial syllogism of poliacs. He pomts to the ~dden resources of the civilization, to symbols that we~ neglected, despJSCd or falsely aestheticized, symbols of praxis, of avengmg, of creaaon of self-respect for his coUectiviry. Through this myth there is a suggestion as to how to transcend the pe~ding serue of liust:ration. History can never be free from a mixture, an undecided tension ~twee? what happened and what ought to have happened. Invented history IS a ~y Of m~ci%ing the collective sci( extending it in all kinds of raaonally unpenrusstble ways, giving the present a worthier past than

it actuolly had. Oramotiution and mythiciution are constanr parts of men's lives; they are falsehoods by means of which people often try to cope with the overwhelming nature of realiry. Thus Bankim's rantiins are seen constantly stretching their forces mythically, mythicizing themselves because they wish to believe something which they know they cannot rationally believe about themselves. They turn themselves into myth in rwo ways. In the thick of battle, when the fortunes of war seem to tum a!l1'inst them, when they look behind they see not only their fellow s~ldiers of tl1e day, of tl1is particular battle. Stretching behind them into an infinite series in the endless expanse of time they must 'see' the ranks of all simihr soldiers of history, finally transfigured by the subtle presence of ~~a himself. For ~~· after aU is the reassuring sign of a fundamental order, the ultimate indefeasibility of justice. Even if the soldiers fail, they are 98 already enacting the paradigm of martyrdom, in Victor Turner's phrase, so that even in their failure they cannOt absolutely fail, so that even their failure is a success of a kind. Actions of the martyr have a prior guarantee of success-either the triumph of victory or the triumph of death. This is rendered possible by a second element of myth: they look upon the present battle as an incident in a long and essentially unfinished process in which today's fighters may well lose, but someone else some day must win the war for them. The idea of K~~a himself being present is not C.cctious or a delirious iUusion in the panic of the battle. The ~~a myth provides precisely for a device of such generative recaU. Does the Gitii not equate ~~t;ta with the principle of retribution, of justice, as • decisive answer to nameless injustices in tl)e future? On the field of battle he spoke to Aljuna of his millennia! anger: p4ritrdndya sDdhUndm viMidytJ CJJ Ju~krtam dlaannalD'!'Sthiipa"iirthiiya S<JmblaavOmi yug< yug<99

Yct, on a strictly rational reading there are problems with this curious reassurance because evil is everyday and the Lord's revenge is merely epochal, which must on ordinary logic leave a great deal of evel)'day wrongs unavenged. A devotee may not, simply by means of this theory, get rid of Leibnizian worries about the univcnal balance of right and wrong. StiU, it is this reassurance of his subtle presence, which nuy not rake, especially in our f.illen times, the form of an avatira, but of his consunt encouragement to the side ofjustice, which convinces the warrior that ~~a is symbohcally and elfectively ,yjth him. rhat he is fighting Krsna's battle. )inandam4th and the three other later historical novels, I shall a.rguc, should be seen as constituting a single presenution. They ought to be seen as accomplishing just such a condensation of the symbob of praJOS

-

~

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.. -.

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Tlrt Unhappy OmsdousntSs

(an~ilan), for cr.:ation and participation in a myth that is essential as a focus of a brge coUective historical action. Banlcim's ~a ought to be seen as a Sorelian myth, an ideal condensation of energies, a focus of national-popubr mobilization. This is especial.iy revealed by the unremittiQg use of metaphors and fictions of mobilization in the bte noveb, its series of mytlu-the myth of a people, the myth of an army, the myth of a w:ar. And this shows both the daring and the infirmities of his time and his cbss in its deep ambivalence--We myth is one of political praxis; yet the praxis is only mythical.

4

Imaginary History History, on an influential recent view, is a series of narntives. Apparently, this is a relatively simple and unsurprising statement. In fact, however, tliis is one of the strongest and most f>r-reaching of attacks on the positivistic conception of the historian's art. If history is a su~t of aU narntives, it dispbces the criterion of historicity in a crucial way. Fiction is also narrative. Thus history instead ofbeing distinguished by the trueness of the story, is now distinguished by the storyness of its truth. What distinguishes history then is a form, a way of colligating events; but the events so coUigated can be either true or imaginary. This historiciry of history does nor consist in the fact that ir states things which actuaUy take place, bur that it sets them out in a particular structure. In the complex, diverse, noisy discourse of nineteenth-century Bengal, there is above all a new sound. This is the sound of history. The claim of rhe newness of history is literally true. In Bengali discourse o f the nineteenth century 'hiStory' breaks out everywhere, a most remarkable occurrence for a culture which had traditionally treated h.isrory as entirely dispensable. Life could be lived eminently well without the trouble involved in giving it a history in the modem sense, and setting up the controls which would ensure that this history was empirically reliable. ' But it would be wrong to treat this tcnn absent-mindedly and assumt that it meant simply a present craving to know about rhe community's past. Wlut this innocent term means to the first generation of its Bengali worshippers i.l a complex affair. History comes 'to be the great symbol of the new age. It is a symbot with a double significance. In th21 culture, it is the name of despair and of hope. Yet, this is not a literary paradox; it is true in the most literal of senses. Every colonial inteUectual understands the ironical, dual gifts history offers h.im. The word history, as they well knew, meant two entirely different things: it meant the course of happenings in time, the , seamless web of expencnccs of a people; bur its great promise lay in its second meaning. the stories in which what had happened arc recovered and explained. 2 Even this dual meaning of history was quite inadequate for all the different things that were done under its nome. But this dualiry of meaning, without any mysri6cation, is constantly exploited by Bengali m.iddle-dass intellectual$ in various innovative ways. This is their great theatre of truth and amaginatio.,, of thought, of social explanation, of

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'1'k Unlt•ppy Corudou.sMSs

philosophy: theology, dreams, politic:al progranunes, of their ingenuity, defiance and betnyals. Slowly, history becomes the great terrain ofpolitics. Because history is a way of talking obout the collective sdf, and bringing il into existcnct. To say with Europe.on orientologists thot Indian civiliution locked in linear conception of time, ond therefore had no conception of history is misleading. 3 Actually, this does not, in a strict sense, indicate a lack of historic;U sense. This would imply not • lack of historical sense, but an obsence of its precondition. European orientolism made a charocteristic eX2ggention: in fact. traditional thought had • linear conception of time but with fuzzy ends. If traditional thought hod some sort or commonsensically linear vision of rime but still lacked a conception of history, this makes the absence more interesting; because the lack is then of the idea of history itscl( A culture which had treated history with such indifference, suddenly erupts with a great historical discourse.4 Western education surely had something to do with this, and the initial search for history must have originated putiaUy from the ntionalist imitotiveness of the Bengali babu. But it seems inappropriate to attribute this discourse only to cultural imitativeness: sjnce .Europeans had a great tradition of history, so must the people educated at Hindu College. The relation between European instruction and what they actually stort discussing seems to be considenbly more complex. If judged in rationalistic terms, their efforts often fell far short of the European ideal of constructing a reliablt account of the people's past; in 9 some other ways, in giving an imaginatillt unity to it, it went fur beyond. They invested history, in other words, with a very different function within their cultural discourse, from what it had in European rationalism. Fundamentally, the colonial asynunetry between the European and the Bengali made a sjmple imitotion of the European manner of doing history impossible. To discover the truth ofhistoric;U objects and connections is the ironical J1rivilege of the subaltern. One of these truths was the consrructedness of history, what we today with a language full of finer insults would express as history being ideologic;U; in aU history, there is a contamination of interest. Colonial intellectuals of the nineteenth • century spontaneously discovered this truth about historical 'truth'. History is not a realm of truths in that bland, stnightforward, positive sense; it is a realm of truth estoblished by belief. In other words, history was not a purely ac:adernic, but a./pragmotic science; its wk was not to leovc the world as it found iL The past was an inuge creoted in the interest of the present. History was, in nujor respects, the myth of a people, its consrruction of its self. It was necessary in this urgent sense. What actually happened, what was, so to speak, 'empirically true' was another matter, much less significant . .By telling the history of India, Europeans were construeting·an essentialist image ofa subject people, whose whole history

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109

destined them for British conquest;5 just as by telling their own story of Europe they created a myth of what they were, destined to rule the world through the somewhat long period of preparation since ancient Greece. The lion is always shown as being ~_feoted, Banlcim would argue, bcause it was nun who painted the picture.' By an extension of this logic, Bengalis initially, but later Indians, must win the right to their own history. They • must assert the right to narratives of the self. The empirical stretch of events in history is in any case infinite. To tell a series of infinite incidents is impossible. The conversion of an infinite material into a finite form, which alone could be toltl, is to tum it into a narrative. It appears to the intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century that they must exercise this pre-political right to the narrative of their own people.' Gndually, Bengalis, and later, for identical reasons, Indians in general, became a people obsessed with history, with these narratives and the crucial oontrol over them. They appear tO be obsessed with history in every form-history of their own country, history of others who could be as yet only tenuously linked to the~lves in a collective we, history of aU its periods, of past, and prosent, sometimes indeed with the history of history itsel£.8 Eventually, they would go beyond even this impressive register of real histories and cross over into what can only be termed after Bhudev Mukhopadhyay 'imaginary history'.• History means so much bcause it shows a world in the making, in its contingency, in its open, • probabilistic form. It shows not only how the social world became the way it is, but also how close at times it was tO being quite different. And it is in this margin of historical possibility that fictional consciousness, like Bankimchandra's, could have free play. History shows how this world, which so structures human experience and action, came to be. By the same token, it can show how close something that did not happen was to actually happening. By an extension of the same logic, it could show.how it was neither unrealistic nor illogical to believe that what was was not something unchangeable, eternally given like nature. History, thus, gave an expla~tion of the experience of subjection, and also a rationol ground for hope. It was possible to change the past in the future, simply by maldng it the past of a different present. 10

The Peculiarities of the Discourse of History

The magic that history held for the nineteenth-century intellectual is quite unmysterious. It brought together, rationally, defens1bly, two aspects of his life, two poles of his people's complex mentaliri. They began to write •n enormous amount ofhistory, much ofwhich was respectable in modem

110

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The Unhappy Consdousnm

academic terms, but much besides dut wis 'fraudulent'. 11 'Fraudulence', the term GeUner uses so force.fuUy, captures only pan ofwhat is happening. because it implies too sttong a nonn of objectively true historical accoun!S.12 These accounu represent what can be linked to 'the imaginary constitution of society'. 13 A pan from the conunon classification of dif.. ferent kinds of history according to its subjec!S, there is another distinction which is, from my point of view, quite crucial. This generation wrote histories of what happened, and also of what never happened; and the imercsting thing is that they saw the laner as being part of the enterprise of putting together a historical narrative. They saw through the Macaubyan enterprise of British education in which one was never entirely free of the other. 14 AU histories, despite the ideology of positivist objectivity, partly 'describe' some things that did not 'happen'. Indian inferiority, seen racially or otherwi«: essentially, was not part of what happened; racial superiority of the British was not something that could occur. Yet, through the inevitable transmutation of the historically contingent into the narratively necessary, this was part of evety standard history of India. Racial superiority or inferiority cannot be even!S, but concep!S. They do not figure in what is strictly happening at the level of occurrences; they are concepu through which the otherwi«: meaningless plenitude of evenu is given some significant order. In this simple and tragic way colonial intellectual$ under>tood a vital truth about the empirical disciplines of society. Narrativiution occur> through theoretical structures. There were simply no non-theoretical narratives. Oankim is especially critical of western writings on India: 'of all intellectuol sins (malo~pap) this was the wor>t, the most irredeemable. Of the many ways of reducing oneself to a verbose stupidity, no other was as effective as the devoted study of western criticism of lndion texts'. 11 He clearly perceived the outlines of what we would today call a definite discursive structure. Surely, European interpreters disagreed among themselves. There were liberal and conservative, English and German, materialost and idealist histories, histories that deplored the Indian's unmanliness and histories that adsnired him for his devoted spirituality. Such differences. he often says, are not = I . But in the manner of a tradition of ideologiekririk, he finds among such diver>ities deep structures of common presuppositions. He finds in them that interesting combin~rion of untruth, pbusibiliry ond internal consistency which would be regarded by a more r::c!:c~l tr:dition as the major marks of an ideological structure. This great apparatus of indological scholarship formed a powerful ideological system, a way of steing the truth of Indian civilization and history in a manner that conferred ltgitimocy to something that was app•rendy unrelated to such scholastic issues: the cultural structure being created by c~lonialism. These were chus, to use on •rgumcnc from Edward S••d, no< re•Uy proposiri'ons or •• least rruths of lndion history. Their

Imaginary History

Ill

context of coherence by elsewhere: they were necessary itenu of belief 0 in ~n enom1ous structure of historical oppropri~tion of other societies that would serve ~ certain construction of the historic~) self ofEurope. 16 These dod not tell ~ny truths about Indian history; yet they contained historical truth in • more complex sense. As disploced truths, truths found at • wrong oddress, they made sense. Clearly, there was soniething deeply true about these remarks and representations; but they were not true, as was commonly believed in those times of confident positivism, about the purported objects in regard to which they were made. They yielded, if reod that way, some deep truths about the manner •nd methods of the European consrruction of its other; what European thought must believe •bout the other if it was to believe what it wished to believe about itsel( Thus Bengalis, and later lndi•ns, become great histoty writer>, though not necessarily great historians in the more academicaUy restrictive sense. Their larger, abstract concern about history gets articulated in two kinds of history-that of the real and the imaginaty; recreation of the past through laborious ocademic research, 17 and through the diJTerem inspirauon of the fictive imagination turning towards hinorical subjects. What they call history consists of these two asymptotic lines. There are many interesting ways in which this peculiar du~lity is reflected. One of the most curious is that individual author> undertake to write histoty of both types. Banlcimchandra18 would belong to this rather odd liSt along with Romesh C handra Dutt.' 9 Ralchaldas Bandyopadhyay20 and many others. Why should they do both? Should not, according to the great uninfringible classification of rationalist theoty, the devotee offam, of the narrow truth, look upon fiction, imaginary happenings, with an appropriately Platonic scorn? Would not rhe creative writer be uninterested in the irrefutable presence of historical archives, of undeniable &cts unbendable by the imagination? Yet, although they arc odmirer> of rationalism and its ideal of an unsurpassably classified world, with remarkable regularity authors go on doing both, ond evidently see them os being in somt sense deeply compatible. In fact. sometimes in their thinking the second sort of history appears to be a continuotion of the first by other means. Novel$ ore • continuotion of histoty, uttering what history could not. • Indeed. we can hordly say dut the first rype of history is serious and the second is nor. Novel$ had a deep inttmal relation to historical work, for they helped spell the same ideas, only in a different manner or style: they tried to spell, as much as serious history sought ro do, a self-respecting relation with the community's past. The Europeans' histoty of India amnged the events and trajectories in universal history in such a way that Indian subjection to Europe-Britain appeared as a necessity of the historical world. Historical novels and historical treatises by Indian inteUectuals sought ways of saying that this was false. by showing the constructedness of chis norration, denying its positivist semblance of

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objectivity, and asserting the contingency at the heart of the historical process. Whether a battle took place on a particular day was a matter • of empirical evidence, but whether this showed European superiority w•s a matter of construction and narrativization. Fiction which touched upon such questions naturally tended to celebrate history, against the positivistic grain. as a realm of contingency. What happened in history is not always necessary, or if necessary, not in that finalist sense. That was why the writer of history was also, without any internal rupture, the writer of historical fi.ction. In colonial culture, discourse went through massive but simple ruptur<s and was subject to • great ineradicable repressions. But precisely because these were repre<sive structutU, i.e., there was a certainty, regularity and repetitiveness about them, they could be side-stepped by codes. Conclusions, theoretical statements, speculations about history's non-mrrative meaning, got displaced and erased out of the academic part of historical reflection. These sought refuge elsewhere, and were disp~ed into this other discourse of fiction, which foUowed it like its shadow. And if the audience was co make out irs meaning properly, they had to put its two disjointed parts together, only then would it begin to speak. History's hidden discourse, irs great we:alth of conclusions and corollaries surf.lced in this ocher terti tory, across the frontier ofscientific realism. Both the writer and reader were therefore creator and taker of not a text, but of a discursive order. It is in this ocher, necessarily par:allel discourse that one could hear the • hidden •nd exiled truth of che straightforward texts of history. Such homology, proximity, mixture, is too numerous to be exhaustively recounted. This combination was given, in the case of different individuals, different temperamental emphasis; some were more story writers, odiers more historians. Yet what is remarkable is that most intellectuals attempted both. B~nlcim<:handra, in irtitated and excited intervals between composing the imaginary history of an as yet•unnamed people (we shall see why they are unnamed), carne back obsessively to an attempted history of the Bengalis, or of the Hindus, or .of the lndi2ns, • on the ground that in order tO graduate from being merely Bengalis into human beingJ, his people needed this obligatory narrative.21 That he could not complete these tracts should be traced. I suppose, to a reason deeper than sheer illck of time or interest, to a lack of wth. It is to be tnced to his dark certainty that an academic, rationalistic history of Bengal would not provide him with what he wanted--a series of symbolic events of defiance, of great acts which this people could be exhorted to remember, •nd when the time c.ame, to re-<:nact. Bengali history, from this point of view, was disappointing;22 but this was less true of a possible history of the Hindus, and even less aue of the Indians,23 which showed different payoffi for where one decided to draw the line of one's belongingness. There is, remarkably, a great tentativeness, about this people (fott) Banlcim

would like to coli his own: he seems unable to make up his mind about which people to belong to, and sever:al choices seemed open to him. Often, this 'natural' conununity, or more appropriately, this 'natur:al' we opens up irs boundaries and moves towards a greater and imaginary one. 2' Interestingly. those who write such imaginary history often take advantage of a conceptual indete~nacy. Human beings do of course live in communities, and the language of every group has words or concepts which designate the community to which an individual is supposed to belong. But often such language WOlks on a peculiar presumption ofselfevidence designating that 'comrnuniry' by a generic tenn. This ap~rs to be true oflanguages in societies which have no consaousness of etther the optional or constructed character of communities, or the layered nature of the community in which people live, in which, depending on the context, one can designate the neighbourhood, the region, the nation (if one is available), the religion. In such languages, the conceptual edges of the term 'conununity' are fuzzily drawn. Indeed. one could speak of • a double fuzziness: (i) the term is indeterminate becween its vary;ng, competing meanings; besides (ii) even when given a single meaning, on a single level, irs boundaries remain to some extent undear.2S They. are not used to the modem manner of living with clear enumerated defirunons of community, in a world which is, from the modem point of view, very unsatisfactorily classified. In times of historical conflict these crucial undetermined frontiers get sketched out, and put in place. This indetermmacy 6gures in Bankim's work in twO ways. It is clearly reflected in his uncharacteristically ambiguous use of the word jati for all these • communities, starting from castes, to a regional people, to religious convnunities, co the nation. But it is also used in a second way: 6ction writers used the fuu.iness of this idea of a community to give their • audience a community which had not existed before, by gradually conceiving a community c:alled the nation, or selecting the appellation of the nanon for one of these communities. The complementarity of the two dissimi12r narratives of history is illustrated by the literary careers of many Bengali inteUectuals, but the two obvious examples are Banlcim and Romesh Chandra Dutt, t~e author of the &onornic History of lmlia. Dutt produces one of the seOllnal texts of anti-colonial political economy, yet he writes, alongJide, his c:-:o famous historical novels with the dearly counterpointed ntles: RA;put FI(P" Sandhyii and Malrir~ra F•"" Prabhit, strange generic titles for what tre essenti•lly romantic stories. This extends Bankim's idea of ~realting up the idenn6cotion ofthe collective selfas Bengali, and openmg tt ourwards, letting the history of other peoples figure in the narrative of the Benga~· • we. These •rc therefore crucial moves tn the direcnon of an authennc . nation• list history of btdia. True, British historians ~d earlier written histones of lndJa. But, foe them, India was essentially a terntory, the

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Unhappy OmStiousnw

colony British imperialists h•d occupied, interesting for the history of itl past. What these colonial authors anemptcd wu a very different history-in its nunner, a!ms and even its object. They enter a history of India not externally. but internally, through the process of making an India th•t wu not there. If we analyse Bhudev Mukhopadhyay's phrase, swapnalabdha bhiiratva~ itihiu, the qualifier swapnalabdha relates tO both terms, not only to itihiis, but also bhiiratvatfa. It is not only the history (narrative} which is • product of • dream. India, whose history this purporu to be, is as v much a creation of dreams. From a geogrophic entity, Indio is becoming through such tragic moves of inclusion, an imogined conununity. It is wrong to S3Y that this history is a different history of the same objcet; it is, ratJ1er, a history of a different new object, an object which is interesting for the history of its future. It becomes in Dan kim, probably for the first time in Bengali liter.tture, something emphatically other than simple " neutral territory, a profane space, but sacred 'ground' (with all the great complexity of this mecaphor} of a community. Space is invested with saer.thty in a literal sense nuking transfer of a moral language possible. It wu not something which was fit to be geologically surveyed, but to be offered a political fonn of worship. From a neutral space, India becomes an evocative symbol. female, nutemal, infinitely bounteous, invested with the complex and convex symbolism of the feminine in the Hindu tradition-<~ sign simultaneously of vulnerability and invincibility. Remarkably, it was a little inappropriote to speak of her as a symbol, because she was also, for them, literally, unmetaphorically, this land, and therefore not representing something other than what she wos. Outt and Bankim thus illustrate in their perfect complementarity the complex dualism of the new historical di$course. Each history is incomplete without the other. Bankim cannot tum Bengalis into fuU human beingJ without conferring history on them. 1\J much, Outt cannot convince his audience of their collective ability to defend, to defy, to act for justice, only on the rather prosaic !»sis of his economic history; he requires an imagined counterpart. However, it is not imaginary in the sense of being illusory; on the contrary, it can convince simply because it is, in a different mode of writing, something fundamentally tru~. The novels are so important precisely because they state elsewhere what can only be called the unassencd rhetoric of the &onomit History. Surely, Dun in h.is &orwmic History speaks, twenty years after Banlcim, in truly moderate tones, of measures which re~=tfully 'woo kens the Empire and impoverishes the nation'; yet, within this guarded, upper-class moderation, something of enormous signi6cance has already happened. Something called the 'nation' with more of less clear bounere is another w>y in which the two sets of writings have a common point. The political economy of the History polemicizes against

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the apologetic political economy of coloniolism. In colonial culture, there >re also brge cultural constructs of the 'effeminate Hindoo' or the lndion pemunently fearful of battle, a? eternal slave to the aml$ of invoding ~oples, drownmpered and self- 0 mdulgent group concluded that they must be Indians.

A Critique of Essentialism

Histoncal and fictional narratives are allies in the same enterprise, because they s~are a common adversary, and this adversary speaks primarily in •n cssenualm bnguage. 211 Some forms of essentialist ideas were of course very common, and were the general currency of British Indian education. Portho Chotterjee has recently shown how much ofcolonial administrative >nd political thought dispbyed an tss.trtialist form .Z7 Esscnttalism, as he poin~ out, could assume twO distinct fonns. A first form wou ld deny the existence of history to a people, simply because the rhythms of its evolution might be quite different from what is common to Eur~pe. A more sensitive fonn of the essentialist argument would not deny hutory 10 that deep sense, because of evident rcstructuration of a
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The U11happy Constio11sness

this surf.ace level dunge by pointing to a supposedly stable s!nlcture of chnocteristics which are transcendent, to which history can only give foml, can variously refigutate, but cannot ~t~lly alter. Cl~rly, this metaphysicol register. or essence is simply an abstract construct taking the most general features out ofhistory selectively. But such forms ofthinking are only too common in colonial India. Examples of the first fom1 of essentialism were the stereorypes of Indian effeminateness (and it is interesting how, despite some ambivalence, Banlcim rums the feminine into his constant symbol of power), 28 oftheir depending on cunning rather th:m force in dealing with the enemy, the unchangingness of Indian society, of either the exclusive licentiousness or the exclusive prudery of the Indian civilization. Assuredly, essentialism had other, more retail applia6ons. While it was impossible to find obedient equivalents to the economic, politico!, social, it was, conversely, equally difficult to find translations of dharma,2'1 evidently not equivalent to religion, arrha, . immeasur:~bly wider than the mere economic,JO and kima, very inconveniently related to love, passion and desire. A more sophisticated form of essentialism treated historicity somewh>t differently. Ban kim is acutely conscious of this version, as is apparent from his constant abrasive references to Max Muller, the most eminent perhaps of the spokesmen of the second form. This form of essentialism did not deny the phenomenal fonn of history, that societies of the Orient tOO underwent significant change in historical time. But this change simply unfolded, restructured and reformed a fundamental essentialist alphabet. Religious doctrine in India would not be seen as unchanging. Rather. the great historical interest of rhe Indian civilization would lie precisely in the enormous variery of religious life-forms. Nor would these forms of religious doctrine be seen as historic•lly static; histori•ns would often analyse and clutt the ir historical trajectories with great care. But these allowances for historical change would srill be formed and held within a general premise that Indian civili:zotion was essentially spiritualist.• and consequently, the evidence regarding the history of this civili:zotion would be run through an elementary censo~hip or erasure. Some varieties of essentialism were very common, and formed the general diet of western style higher education. Western education was • deeply con~r.~dictory experience in many ways. It involved exposure to the rationalist stock of knowledge, an entry so valuable to his genetation into a disenchanted world, a wodd of causalities, no longer of meanings. And this world of e>usalities, its inner algebra, its methodology, was open to one by the simple fact of being human: rationalist knowledge, seen through this generous humanist construction, was a great principle of enfranchisement. But the identicol processes of western edue>tion exposed these intelle~ruals to, if not forced them to accept, the idea of European superiority on some subterfuge of race, or culru.re. The <:ommoncst form

of this essentialism about Europe was of c:ou~e the triumphantly linear, cheerful history of Europe, which constantly gerrymandered tl1e boundaries of this privileged continent to l:eep up the optimistic story of its culture, to confer on it a retrospective inevirabiliry of movement from Greek antiquity to ex>lted imperial status in the nineteenth centuty. Bank.im has an acuter sense than most of his contemporaries that this history is equally constructed, that western rationalism, in its colonialist form, cannot afford to be truthfUl about its own history as much as about those ofothers. It is not only oriental history which is an imaginary history in a derogatory form; its account of the European record is equally an imaginary history, though there it tells a positive f•ble. Occasionally Bankim is surprisingly close to assening that history is not a field of 'knowing that', but of'nuk.ing sense'; that history has no purely objective substratum, but is essentiaUy this construction, this puning into useful , form, of the malleable infinity of the past, of the great, complex. always unexhausted, inexhaustible resources of events which are available for recall. But his eventually rationalistic intellectual form>tion pulls him back from the brink, from the sttain and exhilaration ofliving in such • factless, ., unobjective, underdetermined history. His d eep sense of subalternity, of an unjust principle of power overriding the enfranchising principle of ./ reason, however, constantly temptS him. Insight into the fact th.a t the European history ofEurope and its other are narratives, insecurely different from fictions, enables him, and aurhorizes his generation to do a negative construction on the same principle. History is always deeply, ineradicably fictive: and therefore explicitly fictive principles of organizing a history of one's corrununiry could not be a priori condemned a.s iUcgitimate. Banlcim'• language rings constantly with such declarations of symmetry between fact and fiction . He bas already announced this equivalence. and created this space in Kamaliikiinta. This would be, strictly speaking. on the same level as ntionalistic or Macoulayan history, because 'that is fiction too' (tiihiio novel bate).l1 Their mistrust ofhistory-its claim ofobjectiviry and rationali~hows · outlines of an interesting line of thought about what history is, how it is organized, why people so insistently give themselves histories of themselves a11d of otl1trs. Representations create a sense of power. History is an • empowering discou~e. it gives reasons, justifications for important proctical initiatives: to fulfil its appointed purpose, it must become a history of it.s people ;, the owrld. Thus a re•l history of it.s own people, of its coUcctive self, must also include historical narratives about others-dtose who arc different, strange, unfamiliar, subordinate, threatening. The discourse of history, is composed then of two distinct but related elements. The first could be caUed the level of empirical facts, the solid bits of infonnarion-
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TlrL Unhappy Cmutiou.sn<>s

histocy, properly so c•Ued, is an ordtr of facts, and this order cannot be produced out of the facts themselves. To stretCh their argument analytically, even the chronological order, the minimal, the most indubitable, the most elementary of orders, depends on non-factual judgements. Chronological telling of history is committed to recounting the next fact in the chronological order, a y which follows a chronologically prior x . Yet the judgement that y u the event that f.aUs in the same class as x u one that is not nude &om within grounds that lie entirely inside x :u a fact. It u • a narrative judgement which can tell the historian that y is an event of the same class as x, and is therefore the eligible candidate for the empty place after x in the narrative that is being unfolded. Colonial intellectuals argue that history could be false or ideological at both levels: the elementary determination of events could be fiaulry and often w:u; the n•rratives could be ideological, for aU norratives ue. Therefore, the point in history is to choose be~en the narratives on offer not because of thdr truth, but becousc of their ideology. More reliable informotion on a battle berween the British and the Mar.ulus might or might not dispel confusion or intere\ted misreporting. The battle however would always be available to a second order of discourse, however reliably the numbers and dispositions are determined. It c•n always be seen as 'one of the last signs of resistance to the triumphant empire, or one of the first bottles of resistance against it. Events of 1857-59 have in fact undergone similar narr>tive tranSformations: from the bst desperate kick of the effete Mughal empire it h:u slowly become the first war of independence. The history of the British went, opportunistically it must have seemed to this embittered generation, from nineteenth-century Britain back through the history of European renaissance--not all of which w:u British-even more interestingly straight to the antiquiry of ancient Greece. Genynundering of historical identiry of this kind w:u too blatant to go unchallenged or unridiculed. Understandably, the stntegy ofcriricol intellectuals was to point out the untenable character of this cultural ancestry. Many of them pointe-d out that the cultured Englishman's presentation of his forbears among renaissance Italians :tnd ancient Greeks involved neglect of the more racially intimate Cdts.32 By the middle of • the nineteenth century the battle of the fotbears was weU and truly under way, each side pointing to the weaker elements in the others' construction of their beautiful historical self. Thus, while Max Miillcr warned that the sacred texts of Asiuic religioru must be seCJI with their share of honific and silly belie&,» Bengali writers took delight in a comparative cultural chronology of the rulers and the ruled. Not surprisingly, references are extremely corrunon to a time in which, though :tncient Indians were perhaps writing texts in which much that was valuable was mixed with much that was downright silly, ancient Celts were engaged in delights of a predominantly non-philosoph•c kind. Max Miiller's insistence and

scholarly anxiery that ancient man should not be glamouri1ed, was turned around, and implicitly told that the points of civilizational com~ansons should be ternporaUy synchronous, satisfaction drawn out of an tmplictt compatison between ancient India and modem Europe was deeply anacluonistic and methodologicaUy Oawed. It is important to remember the groat asyrrunetcy in this debate: European ideas were more speaking than spoken to: the debote for them was not truly dialogical: For Bengali inteUectuals too it was monologic in a different sense: they listened to the discourse of Europe about &ia, analysed and stUdied those constructions carefully, but inequaliry of power stopped the discourse &om being diilogic, because there was no way in which European scholars could be made to take notice of what their garrulous subjects thought of what they said. This stnnge parallax contributed to the curious structures of this debate. It constantly tried to prevent changes in hiStorical geopap~y, keeping the frontiers of peoples straight or constant through_ htStoncal time, preventing England from including Greece and Rome wtthin tt:self. Alongside, there was also the gradual radicalizing of this debate and tiS arguments: not merely were rwo contem~orary peop~es seen to be involved in this contes.t, but rwo pasts, thetr cultures, literatures, even their literacy characters.J.< Few other arguments could be :as total :as this, and as essentialist. Small infelicities of this kind-an occasional ge~phic opportunism, or accounting for the few centuries of the middle ages--could cause .no embarrassment to the cheerfully linear history of European reason which saw the whole of European history as a preparation for the European mastery over the colonial world. No structural irr:u:ionaliry of other societies could withstand the principles of the enquiring reason. Ideas of this cady anthropology :asserted that all historieal societies could be arranged in a rationally defensible hierarchical order; th6ugh, the classi6eation of'irrational' societies tended to be somewhat perfunctory when compued to the great red line separating modem Europe from the rest of time and space.3S Interestingly, cognitive relations between thcs& societies were one-way- while higher order societies could enquire about and rationally explai.n or understand lower ones, its re.verse w~s no~ true. Lower societies were opaque to tlte concepts of thelf own mhabttants, and gave up their structural mysteries only to knowle~e produced i~ a higher form, anthropology in particular. The European Stde of the colonial discourse is therefore full of amateur and professional ethnologists who had undertaken, for the abstract love of knowledge, to demystify ~he mythology and religious beliefs of colonial peoples. It is not s~rpnstng that the intended beneficiaries of this operation often resented then labour. Some versions of essentialism implicitly used the dualistic tradition of European philosophy to patroniu Indian culu.~rc. The materi~l and the spiritual were two transcendent categories in which aU hunun thmgs could

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1M Unhappy Consdousnas

be classi6e~. and although the Europeans were better at material enterpriJe · and. the sae~ce of nature: they could always le:arn from the spirituality of anCient India--once ag.un a curiow =ccion across historical time. Bengali inteUectuals often resented this form of cultural appreciation; and no doubt, this would have made European orientalists wonder about the perversity of this inteUectual group. For apparendy, they could not take E~r:opean admiration of their culture any better than they could European cntlcum. T o the subordinate gyoup and its inteUectuals, the surprisingly ~ experience of ~olonialism invested everything with a political meanmg. deep!~ felt preosely because it went unannounced. This appreciation o~ the spmtual exceUence of Hindu culture and philosophy was read~orr~cd~ and wrongl~--by the local intelligentsia for its 'absent' political tmp~catlon. As matenal en~rprise ruled the world aod European supremacy m technology undergndcd the whole structure of colonialism this provided, just as much as did the 61'St theory. a justification of col~nial domination of Asian societies. . It :"""s ~ible to bre~k out of such mental prisons only by thinking /J~st~ncally. Dt~erent wnters mOected this injunction in different, ind:i~~uaUy spcCI!c ways. But there.was an a~osphere ofh~nger for history ~tltlt":'~ubhu~~ as Tagore put 11. One lme of 13cngalt inteUecrualism t~p.bcttly clauned that Indians were alwoys superior to Europeans in spmtual matters; although they required much European succour to claim this superiority. A coruerv>tive Brahmin reasoner like Bhudev Mukhopadhyay could argue37 that the principle oflndian history wos fundamentally diffe~ent from the European. 'It is essential to reject the superstition that the hist?ry o~.U c~untries wiU be similar. An expert in the biogyaphy of Rothschild nught, 111 the case of Christ's life, caU for Ius financial accounts and office records; and if he does not get them, he might evince contempt and say what is the we of a biogy>phy of a man who did not earn a penny? Similarly, those who feel disappointed when they do not 6nd royal ancestries .and chronicles of victories and defears from India's ~fficial archive, and assert that there is no history where there is no politics, stmply .l~k for the w.:ong kind of thing'.,. European history expresses the pnnctple of conOtct of self-interest; Indian history expresses the principle of 6nding unity among dissimila.rs. l9 Although the ~esponse to European ~otialisms led 10 such popular and poenc essenttalisms of • negative sort, some intellectuals saw history as the answer. To get out of such traps, it was essential to see Indian subjection •nd English supremacy as historical. This was why history was so deu to the oppressed. History t.h w revealed to colonial intellectuals iu gyeat philosophical secret: history alone aUowed us, provided us, with 2 c•tcgory ro break out of the fomu of essentialism. Even on that cby. even under rh>t dusdaden sky the Oow of birth, death

Imaginary History

121

b2ppiness 2nd sorrow which Oows through the homes of the village-for men, even though it is covered by dust. is the principal thing. To a foreign cnvetler however this storm is the primary reality: its cloud of dust covors everything else from his eyes. for be is not inside the home, be is outside. Thus, in the histories written by foreignen, we get only the tales of this dust, of this storm; nothing about the home. Reading dut history it ap~n as if this India did nor emt, the only thing tlut existed was this thundering storm of the Mughals 2nd Pathaos spinning its c_21umn of dry leaves from north to south, from east to west ... But when foreignen existed, the natives existed as weU ..• Our deep links arc with tlut India which lies outside the textbooks of today'.mmatically, as 'we'. As a consequence, as they are the victims, not the victors of their modem history, they are far more intuitively conscious of the problematic character of the pre-narrativized event, a pre-theoretical faa, a pre-constructed incident, which has happened, but is waiting virginly for its true account. Their sense of subaltemiry irrunediately problematizes the concept of a pre-theoretical fact. They come to feel with the sharp sensitivity of the insulted that there is no fact in this ideological terrain of history which is not part of a narrative design, which is not already contaminated by a larger governing story and its hidden prejudices. A second type of material for the construction of bistory comes from litenturc, or to use a more fashionable term, the high discourse. Recounting of actual events is rejected on two grounds. First, the little that is avoilable of this history, is the history written by the unsympathetic, often oggressive >lien.•• Histories of.Bengal written by Englishmen42 are actuated not only by a curiosity about the Bengali past, but an impulse to justify· its present. As Tagore declares, this is a sort of history-of India in which Indians arc absent 43 Indeed, this employs a line of reasoning fairly corrunon to all Indian writing: one centro! difference between Indian and European history was seen to be the relation between society and the State. The State, the pc;.litical order, it is commonly believed, is organicaUy

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Imaginary HiJtory Unhappy CotUd<>UJnm

related to the social form; so that the state has the ability to deliberately direct and restructure social orders.•• Consequently, political upheavals usually have social consequences; and convcr5ely '.if th~ social order is tO be altered, it requires an assault on the state. Indian history, Tagore. and othe£5 a.rgue, is marked by a marginaliution of the _state, ?f the poliuc~l order at Ic:ast in its narrow sense. Tagore turnS this thesiS to mak~ h~ fundamental critical point-
123

not obediendy foll~w the historians' record. It is not so resourceless 2nd passive. Often it would take the basic material from the historians' record, bur construct out of it something entirely its own. In such transformation, in this historically crucial bending of the actual in the direction of the plausible, the popubr mind often t2kes help from the writc£5 of fiction. It is important to understand the precise nature of this transition from the 2ctual to the plausible, and the transition from inteUectual to popular beliefS. The historians' grounds arc what is archivally credible. The principle of popular imagin3tion is an enhancement of the present. · Evidence seems to point towards something like this happening in nineteenth-century Bengal: this could be called a reception theory of historical narrative. •• There is no end to d1e odd ancl downright siUy things that people c•n believe about their historical past. Middle-doss Bengali imeUectuals found ways of lielieving, against fonnidable evidence, their indisputable descent from the Aryan write£5 of the Vtdas. Although race was • stable biological feature, his complexion had only somewhat darkened, his srructure somewhot shortened, his nose lost some of its aquilinity due to the ravages of tropical weather. Otherwise his racial purity was self-evident. Sometimes their beliefS about what hoppened in the past were wrong. But tven if their inuge of what the Aryons did was correct, what was doubtful was the claim that it was dztir past. In the business of stitching together Bengalis with 2 certain past, they were also doing something deeply understated-stitching Bengalis to othen in the present..., Bankim is paniculorly important in this search for a collective self, for he made a powerful proposal to his contemporaries about what sort of a collective memory they should have. This relaced to • shift in Oankim's . own development. After Kama/iikiillla his reOections seem tO have undergone a change. Kamaliikiinta had posed a recogniubly historical question. 50 Later, he speaks of history more often, less ironicaUy. Laughter is stiU spark)jng in what he writes: there is sriU some sense that the world is •n object of irreverent mirth, but the distribution has changed. He is nQI writing in order co evoke laughter; he is laughing in the intervals of doing something else. Along with humour, history is the great theatre of 2lternativcs. Bhudcv Mukhopadhyay invented a famous phrase, used as a title of one of his weak novels- Swapnolahdha Bhiiratvan;rr ltiiW-2 hiscory oflndia revealed or found in a dream, a dream history of displacements and condensations, which spoke in a language of fancosy about the most unforgettable problems of their everyday. Ohudev had invented only the bare ide2 but he lacked the power of imagination to make proper use of his discovery. It was Ban kim who staned creating in his novels tl1e theacre of utopia and wish fulfilment, in the realm of his artistic sovereignty where he could legislate With impunity against the known historical record, an alternative history oflndia. It is in his bter novels that he begins to choose his nation.

Imaginary History 124

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The Discourse of Factual H istory Like m0$1 of his contempor:aries, Bankim's search for history began in a curiosiry about the empirical past, driven no doubt by the belief that to live without knowledge about the past was uncivilized. But this progr:amme was one of the pursuit of an elite bildung, of becoming properly c ultivated which included being properly informed. It is not surprising in view of this that the early, intense consciousness of history, 'this hunger for a history' was plagued by a curious indecision. Of'toune, it was cle.a r tO these intellectuals that they must have a history. But who were this 'they' who must have a history? Where, and how, do they dr:aw the lines around themselves? The factual history that Banldm initially sought was out of an immediate consciousness of the group, or people who faced the British in the colonial situation, and needed an intcllcctual solution for their indigniry. They were 'the Bengalis'. Certainly, there was at work, even in this 6rst elementary move, a certain mythicization, and as always happens in myths, an appropriation. The indignity of colonialism was felt very differently by other Bengalis besides the babus. There was no obvious reason why they might agree to constitute a people, indivisible and one, along with the disgruntled bhadr:alok of Calcutta. Reasons for such stitching together were provided by the essays on equality' ' and, more particularly, on the 'peasantry ofBengal'.52 In an exchange of agonies, indignation and humiliation, the loquacious babu was made to give their sufferinS$ a voice; the blurred mass of the non-babu poor would own tl1e very different sufferinS$ of the babu. This, if accomplished, would yield an imposing combination of a people of Bengalis, to be seen now as indivisible, whole and organic. 'Biingafir itihiis ciii, tuJhik Biingi4i k•kh•no manu~ haibc HO~:Sl the Bengalis must have a history, or else, they would never become hwnan bcinS$. It is as simple and funtbmental a relation as that. Part of the answer to our riddle is hidden in the sentence iaelf, in the invisibiliry of its gpnurur. in the violent present tense in which it speaks. This need for history os not the academic's or historian's need; no cognitive need can produce such violence of language: 'sahtbro pakhi miirit< jim tiihiiro itihiis likhita hay, lrint11 biingaliir itihiis niii'.S4 Europeans (but here used in the narrower sense of Englishmen) create' history even when they go duckshooting, but between themselves, a whole nation of Bengalis have not achieved a history. Clearly, there is a typical inverting of sequences here: the 'nation' of Bengalis are considered to precede their history: the community is pre-existing. It exists in a 'historyless' state, and requires a history for itself. The actual relation is as we shall sec, the obverse of this: it is the commonness of this narrative which would constitute the GOmmunity. . Bengalis need history, not because tl>ey are assailed by an urge tO know

what happened in their past, say, how much tax bu~en was there on t~e medieval peasantry, or how many years the Pala Kinf!S had ruled, or, m M.N. Roy's words, exactly how many sacks of ~ishmulo the great Aur:n~­ zeb had consumed in his illwtrious life.ss EVIdently. they can exiSt tn passable happiness without k,nowledge ofsuch technical stuff. Indeed, they require history for quite a different objectiv~corrung ~uman ~ongs in the present. What a combination of a.rnbiguiry, compleXt~, anx•.ety of the elite intellectual! A history is reqUlred for the Bengahs not m the ontological sense of history, which Bengalis, without ~mch special exertion on their p>rt, surely h>d. What they requue u an a((oomt, mortifying and uplifting; they do not lack the events in their past, but tl~e mrrative to put some significant order into t~em. What a str~ng P,ropO~I­ tion of the connection between narrative and collecnve 1dent1ty (humaniry)! . . . The truth of history that the Bengalis need IS related to the or achrevement o f self-consciousness. Consider the asymmetry between the Bengalis and the British inside this contemptuous sentence. The British cannot help creating history, they crute history in spite of themselves, absentmindedly. The Bengalis cannot create .~tory despite the ~srorical e~er­ tions of an entire people. That the Bnttsh aod the Bengal• are held m a relation of subjection and domination appears in some way conne~red to their relation to history. If we tr:anslate the rwo somple codes m the sentence, the English rule--they have power, because they have history; the Bengalis are ruled, they always lack power, because they do not. History has come to be wlm myths explicitly arc--stories that societies tell about themselves whose points, inevitably, are not in the paS! but in the present. . : In a great many fragments, Bankim returns tO the qucsuon of wn11ng a factual, scholarly history of 'his people', the Bengalis. All of r~e~ are marked by a peculiar fragmencarinc:ss, which seems to me to mdu:_ate something more basic than simple bck of time. R epearedly,·th·e resolut.oon of writing a history of his people is taken and forsaken. T his tS, I suggesl, because this history is not able to deliver what he wanted, a history, however disjointed and idiosyncr:atic, of de6ance, occasions of rebeUiousness against invasion or injustice, metaphorical counterpartS in other words for the predicament of modem Bengalis. One cannot speak of the ancestors of the modem Bengali people tiU fairly recently in historical rime.S6 The advantages of this discovery, the compensations of the sacri6ce .of a~cient glory, are considerable. A gre>t advantoge is spelled out by Banki"':l himself in a wonderful passage warning against the dangen of anachromsm: When we set de down to "'ad the history ofBengal. we read thor the P:ob and Sena dynasties were rulen of Oengal: Bakhtiyar Khilji conque"'d Bengal; the

Pathans came oo rule Beng>l etc. etc. All these ar< erron for, at rhe time of

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the xnat. Paw or B>khtiyn. there W>S no kingdom known ullcngal. Then: w.s no ocher n>mc for this llcngal of today. The Scnu and Pabs were rulers of Gaud; Bakhtiyar K.hilji conquered Lo~maniV>ti. Gaud or Lo~univ•ti ore not ancient names of Bengal. No people {n>tion) caUed Bcng>lis inhabited that land. . . . fint was religious uni6catioo, linguistic uni6ation. bter this

came under • single, uniCoed rule and turned into modem Oengol. That political unification has happened comparatively recently, during British rule. The Muslims were never able co unifY the land of the Ben gills. The Mughals did co 2 large extent, but even they could nO< become the rulers of modern Bengal. Thus, the sense in which Greece h.s a hisrory, or Rome, in ch.c sense, Deng:>lu have no history.57 The obvious advant>ge of this line of thought is that if the modem Bengali people did not exist at the time of the early Muslim conqu~r?rs, the claim of some British hi$tOrions, but more than that, the essentJahst stereotype of a people forever subordinated, faUs to the ground. It was widely believed, on the authority of Dricish historians, who uke it from a Muslim historian writing sixty years ofter the event, tli.t Bengol, ot least. the capital of the effete Sen.a ruler, was conquered by seventeen e>valrymen. To Bonlcim. this appeors to have been an obsessively symbolic myth, to which he relates contradictorily, using it sometimes to bente the babus, destroying its evidence, angrily sometimes, but always with great passion. He asks educated Bengolis, convem to western ration>lism, how do they believe such • rationaUy, materiaUy untnlstworthy story, and answers: 'This belief has no other reason, except that the British have written their histories in English adopting Minhazuddin's story. To read history makes it possible to get jobs. Why should you not believe?'58 His historical scepdcism comes to touch even the edge of the founding event and myth of British rule. 'It is said in history in the Battle of Plossey a handful of Englishmen and their native soldiers destroyed thousands of native soldiers and won a wonderful victory. This is pure fiction. There was no real battle at Plassey. There was a mere pretence'.59 To state this in other words, these are myths required by conquering elites in order to spread a native superstition about their invincibility. These myths are to be destroyed by rational history. 'There is no history of Bengal: what exists is partly fiction, partly the biographies ofr?e alien, insubstantial, oppressive rulers of alien religions. We need a h!Sl~ry of Bengal, or else Bengalis are doo~ed' .60 This lin~ ~f re~~ning ~bout h1story is 2 result of dis>ppoimment With the Bengofu pOI!UCal hiStory, and " scarcely di.ffi::rent from Tagore's more poeticaUy expressed_plea ~ favour of • dispbcement towards a history of the society.61 Polincal history :s disappointing, because Indians have • long history :of subjecti~n; for Banlcim, except for short interludes, this includes the nme of Mushm rule over lndia.62 Indians, Hindus, Bengofu were subjected so easily because of the lack ofphysical strength-in the essenti•list myths ofcolonial Bengol.

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Only put of this, about the Dengolis, is true. Tales of the military prowess of Bengalis in ancient times •re simply self-indulgent rumours. Although the Ben go lis have •Iways lacked milit>ry and physical strength, this is not true of lndi•ns in general. From the times of ancient Greeks, moSt invading generols have com.mel'ded the milit::ory counge of the Indians. Even the English, who always spe<>k of the effemin>te 'Hindoos' have suffered military reverses against the Maratlus and the Sikhs. Why then did the Indians, or Hindus, &II under subjection? It is difficult to establish the milit>ry glory of the Hindus because of their peculiar forgetfulness, because of rhe bc:k of chronicles. Chronicles which do exist are written by others, which were essentially, as shown earlier, part chronicles, part n.atntives of self-mythicization of the rulers. However, if Hindus and Indians are not the effeminate nee of colonial myths, in a sense the quc;JtiOn becomes more difficult to answer. Why are they so vulnerable to others, why can they not overcome subjection? Answers to this question must lie, logically, in a social principle. 63 Indians, he declares, are noturaUy (swavabat•O devoid of a spirit of freedom. Ordinary people in India never felt that they would allow themselves to be ruled by people other th•n of their own race or 'comrnuniry. There was an equal likelihood of good or oppressive rule by own or alien rulers. Therefore, let the ruler tty to defend his k.ingdom, or fail; 'we would not hurt our finger' for either of them--
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This is small consolation for it simply rhetorically protects Hindu society from historic~! defe;~ts. 'This ms brought us to !he second re;ISOn for the long history of dependence of !he Hindu conununity (Hindu jiici). That reason is the disunity of Hindu society, !he absence of an emergent sense oi community/nation, w.ant of a national spirit or whatning of what this word means. If it is to carry clear meaning in all its places/syntactical positions and not collapse imo a mass ofcontradictions, it means something generic andcmpty,lil:e 'conununity'.

Ambiguiry of the meaning of jiti in Bankim's essays the~efore is . an index ofa historicol difficulty of discourse; his trying to stretch ots meamng in an unaccUStomed direClion; making it spell something which it W2S nOt accustomed to spelling out. This is why such a master of open and closed language. someone who is equ~'(at home in the use of exaggeration and inflection, still runs out of hiS considerable resour~cs, ~nd says, external to the text in a footnote standing in self-Gonscious osolat10n, that for the purposes of.this essay, the tennjiti .means 'national~ry' o>r 'nalio?'! Evidently, be is attempting a gerrymandenng o_f !he meanmg~bo~nd:mcs of this concept, cancelling its earlier indeterrrunacy, and funng 1t on to the new, unfamiliar meaning. . . . . Thus rhe termjari in its new meaning ofthe nation rema1n~ mteresungly empty. It is empty in the field of concepts_ o.f natural consc1ousness. ~t 1s external: Europe:m history teaches us what 1t IS for a people to be a nation. However in Bengali it is riot yet a descriptive term: o~ the contrary ~e other meaningJ ofjati----
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conOnion of then with t<>rks subtly: In Enghnd 1here is a spccio.l use of(the terms) politkal ~berry, but we are not obliged to u.se thlit mt.llning. Because thac meamng ts ~ot re.levant to ~he pre-sene ana.lysi.s., We shall use it in the Jot'n~ m which Indians undcnbod Jt.. I(

people from another country come to rule • bnd, this leads. to an

infi.rcuon. T'hoK- who are of the ruler's c.ommuniry enjoy gmttC'r C'rrunence

thon the no11vcs. This leads to oppression of the people by • foreign race. Cases in wh1ch there is such distinc-tion between subjeccs of the native nee and subjects of the ruling one we would call unfree. A country whi
free. For ex•rnple, Hanovnc~, Engbnd under the Normans; or Indio under Aurongzeb. We regard lnd1a under Qutabuddin unfree ond colonised; and lndn ruled by Akb.r free and independent. However. andcnf Jndja w~s free ~nd 1ndcpcndcnc. modem lnd1a is unfree an·d colonised. 79

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B:anlcim's argument, rernarltably, does not give my encouragement to usual forms of chauvinism. Ancient India did not luve absentee foreign rulers, but arbitrary and authoritarim ones. Althougjl there was no ncUJ oppreuion in ancient times, it lud an oppressive system of castes whi.ch was in some ways far worse. 'Some people may say, tO coll'lp2rC EngliSh dominance with tlut of the Brahmins and Ksh.atriyas is iJu.ppropriote; for, Bralunins and Ksh.atrif2$, even though oppressive towuds Siuiras, were of the same nee, the Engmh are alieru. One wished to answer to this that to those who are oppressed, oppression by their own or aliens is similar. It does not appear tlut oppression by one's own castes somewhat sweeter, and by others more bitter. But we Clo not wish to offer this mswer. If someone has a caste for oppression by his own people, we do not object. Our only point is that in pbce of racial oppression in modem lndi~ there wos caste oppression in mcient India. For most J>cople. they are the same'. 10 All his varying moves show on this point a strange cornbin2tion of urgency md lack of decision. It is crucial to become a nation; but there are several descriptive identities alrc.dy available to coCJSciousness none of which seem to fit. Castes cannot become nations. Bengalis caonot become a nation, especially with their dinppointing history. Hindus nuy become a nation, but they are not the only ones who live here, and they are irremediobly divided •goinst themselves, impossibly segmented for any possible coUective action. None o( the pre-existing identities cao become • nation. The nation, then, has got to be invented. The cask o(imagining a nation, however, h:u great implications for the project of hiStory writing, conferring on this possible community a common welding history, a narrative of unity. Before this community is united by acts, it must be united by norrative. O bviously, there is a great internal problem o f consistency; the narrative would show as alrc.dy united a conununity which actuilly needs uniting. This is the bosis of its temporal switch, putting narratively in the post wlut is believed to J>: possible in the future, in other words, simply showing the future os past. An imaginary conununity can only have an imaginary history. The actual history of Hindus and lndims could, by definition, never capture ~h21 was wanted of it, a history of united mobilized action. Only a 6cnonal . history em show such reconsuucted Hindus o r lndims, putting men of the future inside events of the past. That is why the cask wanted of this historical discourse could neve.r be accomplished by a discourse of facu, but by a ducourse of truth, or poetry, of the imagination. This discourse thus moves, out of its internal logic, from the rational discourse of fact-gathering to the mythic discourse of the novels. Already, within this rotional discour.;e of facts, there • re luge cracks through which mythic corunuction shows its unmis~ble fonn. One symbol is particularly significant. Despite ill the confu.!lon and second

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~oughts about the people who might corucituce dili =gical 'we', there

1s a constant-the symbolic and licccal territoriality, the great sign of the land, the country as the ground. Increasingly, in Banlcim's discourn: the rerritorUI identification ~then strength over the demogr-aphic one; the people may be problemanc, but the land is certain, unquestionable, ever present. She turns into a feminine symbol ofsustenance, "the Mother. The M"t114ram is ~ot statistically communal. Mus.Wns provide, on any senous demographic enumeration, the majority of those twice seven crore upl.ifted hands, or the arithmetic of the sOng coUapsei. If the land is the mother, it becomes difficult to distinguish between her children. hod a more consciously secular poet could say, years Iacer, 'who dares ask: are they Hindus or Muslisns? Hehnsman, say they are men who are drowning, sons of my mother' (Hindu na orii muslim ti jigniise /ton jdll? Utuliiri hal<> Jubulre miinUf, SJJntan mor miit). 81 • '

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Imaginary Hiscoty

To_ ent~ into the last novels ofBanlcimchandra is co enter a peculiar time. It IS a nme constructed in imagination confused with the past. These novels are vital for an understanding of his mental world, because these ~omplece in so far as such a thing could be completed what was begun m the myth of ~~a. That was a myth of a single figure, a symbolic person of heroic action; here we see developing a wider myth of a people. Before the advent ofration:tlistic historic;s, history simply meant calei worth reme~beri.ng an~ reciting. The purpose of such history is deeply Durk.j hemmn--n prov1des for social cohesion, ic gives the society of the present ~merimes an entirely fictive 'memory'. Thus, what a society 'remembers' IS not always what has actually happened; or at simes, it believes in one of its many possible memories. Curiously, Banlcim himself said in his pre&ce to !Ujsinlro that be had never written a historical novel before.82 This must mean that in his own mind he was crying to do something quite different in these novels. In them we see gradually unfolding a landscape of i=ginary effort against corucituted historical injustice. hod they enunciate, as Banlcim hinlSelf clain1ed, a theory of anti-colonial bildurtg or anus71an. AU these are novels of contestation of injustice, and persons becoming what they wish to become by intense willing and praxiLa.s However this depends on a successful coding in tenm of time, and alerting his now devoted audience to its artifice. It is a sinlple code of a complicated time to be reod otfby the ideal reader through its device of &lse indexing. Ostensibly these events occur in the past, but they always point to their possibility in an

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i=gined futute. Without dili, the theory of anufilan would misDrc, creating, instead of optimistic praxis, a deep historical pessimism. Time is clearly linear. and d1e occurrence of glorious events is a result not of providence but of praxis. A certain principle seems co govern Banlcim's choice ofpoints in history where these narratives are inserted. In a relation between history and historical fiction, there is a crucial position of some .lcind of underdetermination. In the novels Lulcacs discusses, especially Scott, the novel usually selects a chancter whose features are underdetermincd by known history, and dili malces possible a fictional pby ofincidents, which weaves in and out of the lcnown cracks of historical events... The lives of the Damays and the doctor's &mily has this relation with the known, and inside the novel, inexorable course of the French revolution. as Ivanhoe's fictive life similarly weaves in and out of the life story of Ric.hatd I.86 At one level, Banlcim's use of the historical frome is similar. He chose the less lcnown, vague, factually underdetertnined events from the historical record: the tussle of a lesser R.ajput Icing with AuranFb. the historical rumoun of Bhabani Pathak's robbery, the less unknown sannyisi rebellion, and the little known broken chronicle ofa smaU landlord in Bengal. Two structural devices are used to create dili &vourable historical cli.nute for the novelistic story. First, of course is basic narrativization, the sovereign decision to choose the points ofstarting and ending the story. This is how the R.ajput Icing can be shown undefeated by stopping the norrative ot a point, while, ifit continued, there was great danger of his or his successor's succumbing to Mugllal pressure. A similar device is used in AMnJamatlr, where the story break! off at a possible point of the rebel's victory, as opp<Med to the more melancholy.ending in the historical record. Secondly, it is the factual spaneness of the record which is utiliud, exploiting the softness of the evidence, so the coumcrfactuals ofcbe fiction do not appear conceived. But the purpose of the fictional narrative is exactly the opposite of what Lukacs found in the European historical novel. These do not try to fill out, give a concrete sense of a historical period, heightening its historical truth, a point thot Manzoni in his long essay made earlier. 87 The point of these novels is precisely to •wruy• history. They rry deliberately to probe and use counterfactuals, to extend those lines in the tree of eventuation which were not actually followed up, explore the peculiar terrain of history's nonactuali.zed possibilities. They cannot, in most cues, &Isify historical events themselves, but by placing fictional narratives in their midst they seek to shift and displace their mean.ing. One of the main techniques in dili is the creation ofdili double-valued time, a mixture of the past and the future, a time that is grammatically indescribable. There is a clear line of development from Kamafiikiinta towards both the Krf~aritra and the later novels. No reading of l<Jima/iikanla is complete if it reads merely its sparkling humo ur .=d not the dark anguish which

- - -- - ----L------- -- ----

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134 forms its background. Banlcim is, to perpetrate a pun on Banhes, the ~rest unluppy writer, who does I)()( forget to remind us of our duc:y, responsibility, until the world is made be~r. ofunluppiness.84 Often the link berween these passages in K4maliilt4nta and those of !he bter novels is quite literal. It is interesting to find dut !he famous scene in !he underground temple in itnatulamath, in which not just M2hendra but his countrymen are first shown !he identi6cation ofthe molhcr and !he bnd, is not begun inside dut novel but in KAma14/tiinta. Why did I take this ovetdose o( opium? Why did I take opium? Why did I go tO have a loolt at the idol? My Ji4 lsn wluzt I _ , sMII? Who showed me this magic? This is what I saw: suddenly I was Oooting helplessly on the great stream of time Ooocling the horiton. I saw-in the eterrul, endless dadr. great waves lashed by a great sco~casionally lurninom stan rise md go out and rise •coin. I was entirely >lone. I felt a£r.id o(my loneliness, entirely lonely, without a mother, colling for my mother. I had come to this su of time se-arching for my mother. Where is the mother? Where is my mother? Where is Bengal who had given life tO K>milikinta? Where arc you in this terrible ocean o( time? Suddenly a heavenly music 6Dcd my cars. a bright red light lilte the rising sun broke out in the horiton, • gcnde breeze swtcd blowin~d I saw in a gre2t distance over these rumultuOU$ waten draped in gold an idol of the s4ptami day. It was bughing. Oc»ring on the water, radioting illurnin>tion. b this my mother? Yes, it was her. I recognised ber, this was my mother, my counrry, of this bnd, in the form o( this lmd, dccltcd with infinite riches, but now submerged in the waten of time. Ten arms decked with jewels were Slretched in ten directions. arrying V2rious powen as different we2pons, the enemy destrOyed ot her feet. the powerful lion under her demolishing the enemy. I would not Jec thi1 fonn now. not tolmost idential pasuge in Anandamatlr, whic:h I shall discuss later. And what is remarkable. but often Jess noticed, is a movement of a new language of sentiment, of poetry even here, although Bankim was an astute enough observer of language to realize dut his poetry was bad, as indeed it rem>ined in !he Barul~ Mataram.90 However, the point is not that the poerry is inex>ct, but that it is poetry. And there is the same, renurkably mixed language in this poem,9 ' which I consider a lineal ancestor of Bond~ M4taram. Sa.nskrit provides !he initial moves creating an atmosphere of sombreness and grandeur. and the main cast into which sentiments •rc poured; but the breakdown, or if you like, !he quick transcendence of that formal Sanskrit is equally significant. Us'c of Sanskrit is obligatory, because it is the mandatory vehicle of classiciution; but its correct mould is bre>ched-to the gre>t annoyance of purists--by a more

intense, sponuneous Bengali. though rem>rkably the proportion of Bengali to Sanskrit in !his poem is much less. Sanskrit purists nusjudged the question of linguistic com:ctness, did not realize that the question of 'correctness' was wholly displaced here- -a question of not being grammaticaUy b. 1 politically correct. Indeed, the ungrammaticaliry was in a sense perhaps constitutive of !he intention behind the poem. because it set itselfa contrary, conventionaUy impossible task. It was to classicize and popularize an idea at the same time, thus it must not be something so arcane as to be meaningless to ordinary people. Ordinary people custom>rily used stotras after aU, ond it would be wrong to sute that they did so entirely unc~mprchendingly. In trying to achieve !his contradictory speech-Sanskrit and the vernacular, grand ond sponuneous at the s:~me time-Bonkim transgresses aU linguistic norms; and under the pressure of rising sentiment !he bnguage breaks into vernacular and • kind of low Sanskrit accessible even tO corrunon people. But since I see the anticipation of Bandt Mntararn in this poem, some comparisons berween the two would be in order. The: Kamaliikii11ta song is evidently the prefigure, the seed of Bamlt Mntaram, but quite different on some points. Its movement is, internally, from lighter to heavier Sanskrit, and from general terms to technical doctrinal identifications from ll>e twenty-second line, where it merges with a quote from the iiryiiJtotra. In Bandt Mntaram the internol movement is in the reverse direction--from clear Sanskrit to even clearer vernacubr. Indeed what is gramm>ticaUy a false step is clearly a step of genius in the btcr song-it is the point of symbolic conuct between the classical and the popular. That is Sankim's popular slip, giving us a glimpse of Ills 'political unconscious' . Bondt Miitaram accomplishes the most extraordir12ry transformation, on unprecedented mixture of discourses, moving quickly and magisterially from the form of the stotra to the form of a slogan. from a private incantation to the public, collective chant of a people in movement. Finally. the two stotras derive !heir meanin~ from the immediate dis- • course which frames them, in Anandamatlr, of on ascending seriousness. in Kamaliilciinta •n ineradicable · lightness of speaking. and these are irucribed in the poems. The Kamaliikiinta stotra stiU bears the inimitable, urunistakable coinic signature-the fiivolous line: jay mii Kamalakiintapizliltt (glory to the sustainer of Kamalilinu). What a peculiar conserv>tive, who rbres indulge in facetiousness wich the divine mother herself! In Anandamatlo this humour, this possibility of double meaning is erased; for it is of a deodly seriousness that it is possible to read only one meaning m that song. The attributes of che goddes< ue significant: like the discourse of reconstructed HindUism, she is new, reinvented, a political goddess. Even the language displ>ys the tense instability, experimentalism. the newness of what it says-a string of suspect SQ1,.4sas--navtJrDgarangini, tttwabaladhdn'ni tlavada'J*"darpini, turVQJWtJpttadariini. It is unclear whether

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s&c sees these new dreams hcnelf or m2kes others, her seven crore progeny, see them. But what does it nutter? She is a Durkhcimian goddess, • sacred n2me of the collective self. Her seeing these dre2nu and making her children see them are the same. Thus the poem fashions an ungrammatic phraseology of poetic perfection, adequate for the sentiment building up in them and sce)cjng ~xpression. From my angle the essay Amiir Durgotsav provides the critical connection. Of aU the pieces in Kamatakiinta t.his is the least funny. It already pres.1ges a new enthusiastic style of writing, a Bengali style that has appropriated the repetitive, intensifying manner of the usc of adjectives in Sanskrit, a style that allows BenS'U to appropriate the s«>tra form, and briak it down into something that can be easily spoken 2nd included in prose. T he enormous distance in tone and signification between the two songs is above •II by • single word, a single discordant sentence. That single word is the seemingly innocent, appuendy unrcnurked iimiir (mine). In the first stotra the figure of Durga is invoked by the standard chant- sarvamangalamangalyt, si~ iimiir sarviirthasiidhikt (notice the shift of the stava into unmetric Bengali prose): but th3t single interposed word iimiir disrupts the identity of the stav.r, it does not remain what it was. I consider this irreverent pby crucial tO Ban)cjm's pessooal thought-because i! establishes a right to put trad.itional fonns to wholly unconventional use. Thus the stava can become a matter of fun and humour, just as the playful, erotic K~J?a can be turned into the unaccustomed centre of a political ideology. When, in his second movement, Ban kim suppresses that iimiir and comes back to the stava in its serious form, this does not index 2 movement from an ironical to • tradition•) srava, rather a movement on the same plane from 2n ironic•l individual salv2tion to • g)imly serious collective one. A sirnibr point is =de by inserting the Une jay mii Kamal4kiintapiilike, 2nd later its 2bscnce. Kmulikint:a's stance-of being obliquely rcbted to the world, of 2 delightful, pleasurable wrongsidcdness (~111 bujlri, ~suro suni, oouro likh•) is shown as an unstoble equipoise which was meant to be disrupted. In an inverted world, Kamalikint:a with his gift of truth, rnturally had to see things upside down. But the next logical step is to tty to invert the inverted world, and the preliminary skinnishes with coloniolism, though a battle in discourse, is begun by him in the court scen e. To continue that it requires a brger, more tragic, less verbal theatre, which the novels provide by creoting the great thc2trc of wu. The transfomution of the jester has begun, he is already turning into the priCS(.

In the oonvcmional historiography of nationalism, Ban)cjmchandra's fame, and to wcsternist secularists his ignominy, lies primorily in his responsibility for dreaming up the icon of the nation- feminine, matern2l, tcrritori•l, natural, but offensively Hindu . To 2historic2l secubrists, this gives him a fair share of the responsibility for the P2rtition md some for the frequent communal riots of the present. However, •s Tapan Raych3udhuri has shown reccndy, :olthough these symbols 2rc taken from the repertoire of Hinduism, thC)! ore 2ctually h ighly unorthodox. Since this icon is constructed most eiJ'ectivdy in Anandamath let us devote some attention to ex2ctly how this is done. The song Bande Mataram _is fint. sung b~ Bhavinanda. After the first three lines, Mahendn, who 1s walking by hts side, is confused. M21hcndr2 w:.s somewhat ntonishcd by the song, could not understand it~rhis mother endowed with water, fruits, cooled by spring winds, vercbnt with crop, who is this mother? 'Who is Mother?' he asked

W11hout replying. Bluvinancb went on singong, subhn jyotsni pubkito yiminim, phullakusumita dromacbla~obhinim

suhisinim sumadhunbhi~inil'n sukhodim varadim.mitaram. Mahendra soid: ' But this is my country; this is no< my mother!' l)haviruncb md: 'We do nOt recognise any mother be.ides herjana"i jar•nud!hwmiiu swatg04api gariyasi (one's mother 2nd one's motherl:and are nobler than the heavens). We say, our motbe.Und is the mother, we luve no mother, father, brothers, friends, wives, sons, houses, fanlilies, we luve only her who is endowed with water and fruits, cooled by the winds of the spring, green with corn ... Then M2hendro understood 2nd said, 'Then sing once more'. 92 The dialogue between Bhavin2nda and Mahendra is clearly a transposed di:ologue between the author and his 2udience, e•ch of B•n)cjm'~ re2~ers, because to sec the countty 2S tbe mother is highly non-standard •n Hmdu mythology. It is 2 transpoSition, using traditional figures certainly, but to purposes th•t are highly innovative. .. . .. The most obvious sense in which this is untraditlooal ts the pohncal message. One of the most curious elements itl the histori~l career o~ ~· Hindu religion h2d been its unwillingne.s co be turned mto • polmcal

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creed, and its apparently happy 'acceptance of all political authority as a nurg;nal but necessarily evil aspect of social life. Mahendra is ushered into an underground temple, and presented to an ido l which is rcriurkably di£rerent from any that practising Hindus could have accua!Jy wor1hippcd.

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.. . slowly he could see a monumental image of four arms (c<>tutblruja murtr), carrying sankha, cakra, g•da and paJma, with the emenld karrstubha adorning the chest; the wheel s11darfa"a pbced as though spinning in front. Two large .evered heads, blood-spattered, placed in front representing Madhu and IUiubha. To the left nood Laksmi, with her hair let clown, with a g:orland of lotuses, but apparend y frighten~. To the right, Sansvati, surTounded by the book, musical instruments •nd figures of the ragas and riiginis. O n the lap of Visnu was a muvcllous forn~he wu more bc-~utiful than La~mi and Sarasvati. with more grandeus than either. The gondh•rwtS, kinrwas_. gods, r•k!ru and demons were wor>hipping h..-r. The hennit spoke to Mahendra rn a very

Tean streamed down the hennit's eyes. Mahcndn a.sked why docs she a have sword and scythe in her hands? H. We are her children. we have given her these weapons. S>y, Bandt Miit•mm. Mahendra said Bandt !vr.taram and bowed to the Kili ido l. The hennit said, 'come this way', and scaned climbing a second tunnel. Suddenly, their eyes were d.>uled by the rays of the morning sun. Sweet singing of birds sounded on all sides. They saw a ten-armed golden idol in the middle of • marble temple. laughing in the light of the morning sun. The hermit bowed to her >nd soid, This is wh>t our Mother will become. Ten anns are spread i~ ten directions; in each a dif'rcrent w~pon, • symbol of a difl'erent power, her enemy sprawled defeated >< her feet, the lion she rides 011 mauling her adver>ary. hmu spread in different directions . . . '

Have you seen the 6gure on the lap ofV~u? I have; who is she? Mother. Who is Mother? She is the mother whose children we all arc. Who is she? You will recognise her when the time comes for you. Now, say, Ha~ Mother (8a11dc Jvr.taram ). Come along and w>tch.

Then the hennit Jed Mahendra into • second chamber. There Mahendra saw a wondem.J 6gure, of j ag>ddiUui' (Mother of the Univer>e), rich in every limb, decorated with every possible ornament. M•hendra asked: Who is she? H. What our Mother used to be. M . What is that? H. She had tamed the aninuh of the forests, the elephants and the lioru, and in their h•bu:at she had en>blished her own abode. She was adomed by all ornaments, laughing, beautiful. She was gifted with all the riches of the earth, the colour of the rising sun, Bow to her. Mahendra bowed with gre>t emotion to the motherland in the form of the JapddiUtti, and the hennit showed him a dark runnd and satd•. ·~me this way.' The hennit led the woy, Mahendra followed him tn treptdanon. In a chamber deep under the ground. there was some strange rourcc of meagre lighL In the faint light he saw •n imoge of Kili. The hennit said, 'Look, what our Mother has become.' Mahendn whispered in feor, 'Kili.' H . Kili--=overcd by darkness, of a black colour. She has been robbed of everything. that is why she is nude. Today the whole country is a gr:avcyud. that is why o ur Mother has :a g:ubnd of bones:, dead skuUs. She is tnmpting her own wdfuc under her feet. Alas.!

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Satyananda wos overpowered by emotion and spoke through tean. 'Anns spread in aU directions. carrying various we.apold, overpowering enemies. rising on the lion, &te as La~ on the right, on t.h e kft Samvati the giver of knowledge and science, ><:companied by Kirtikcya, the symbol of strength, and Ga~eh. symbo l of succe$$. Come let us both bow to the Mother. Then both of them looked upwards, ond sang with folded hands,

solemn. very awed voice:: 'Dn you sec everything?" 'Ycs,' said Mahend.r-.1.

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S4Twmang4/amangoly. ii~~t S<WiJnhasadlulct UratJye tryamtJakt gaUri MrDyani namolurutt. When they got up after bowing to her with grc>t devotion, Mahendro asked with emotion, 'When $lull we sec our Mother in this form?' The hennit answered, 'The day aU her children would call her their mother, she will be pleased with us. ' 93

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Several disloc2tions are c:tisccmible in this text, which would be of interest to us to measure. Let us tal.ce up the questions internal to Banlcim's texts tint. ln,contnst to the joc ular tone ofthe Kamaliikii11ta stotns which uke surprising liberties with tradition, these return to a m o re serious tone. This is not, howevc;r, a return to an unaltered past point. The K.amal.ikanl" stotras could be written only by someone in a str:mgely ironical proximity with Hindu ritualism, someone who is wholly at home in them, becousc his way of parodying, perhops all parody, requites a gre:ll adeptness. Parody defiles by the slightest of deflections, not by a frontal attack; and thus needs to be done by a cultural fifth eolumnisc. This piece parodies the swtra foml, but at the same t.i me points to the private and lonely, non-collective noture of the mok!a, the deliverance soug ht. The traditional Hindu would of cour1e abjectly debase himself to his deity to seek mo~ for himself. Sometimes, he might include in his app~ation for spiritual preferment his inunediate family; but there arc philosophical argum ents which suggest that such journeys arc best undert>kcn alone. Ka lava kii11tii, kaste putralr? • Who is your wife, or your son, to claim a share of your salvation? So tloc

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Hindu supplication to his deity an be m>de as part of a community, but it is an intensely lonely ptaycr. Kamaliikatrta parodies its intense selfishness: the glory of the mother is seen to lie not in benevolence towards the world in genetal, but having a special and declared bias in favour of Kamalilinta's desires (imir sarvirthasidhike). Selfish accumulativeness of rhis kind is not at all uncommon in Hindu prayers. The parodic use displaces the stotn from its ttaditional appointed place in ritual schema, and makes it into something that is av:tiloble in a new way, a form which could be turned to new, unprecedented use. It is because of the earlier parody that the later political appropriation is possible. What is truly remarbble is the great innovativencss of this free form and its new use. Earlier, the devotee, though sitting in a crowded temple was essentially alone, ptaying for private and individual favours. The temple crowd was therefore a devout sack of potatoes. In Bankim's new invocation, the utterance is collective. It is not just an accidental use of the plural verb, it is a theoretical use which underlines that if not enunciated by a plurality, by all who arc figuratively represented inside the song, it is in a sense meaningless.94 Apart from the collective pronunciation, the community becomes the object of an almost classically Durkheimian self-adoration, excep< that the indirectness, the rnaskedness of the object is dispensed with. The community. the children of the mother, are initially invoking her; but rhe more her attributes are enumerated, she becomes the same co nununity under> different, ideal description. Initially, she is represented as the land, sujalii, suphala, malayaj.Sitafii, sasyaiyiima/ii. But the main point of the song is for this figure to act, and it is the people, its inhabitants, who can bring about such action. The mother's attributes gradually become collectively anthropomorphic; S4plaftotiltanlluJitalaJt4/dniMdakarii/d, and her features all become action features; bahuvaladhiirini. tiirini, ripudalabirin~ At this. point, the elabotate form of the mother, the clabotate ritual, is simply a mediation of the collective self to itself. It would be false in this sense tO sec the icon that is created as a conventional or traditional Hindu icon. Its attributes do of course come from the traditional diS<:ourse of Hinduism. Nature is often seen as a sustainer and th~refore deserving worship, from the Upani~dic hymns to natural deities to the more mundane and philosophic doctrine of the aesthetic availabil.ity of the world in bhakti movements. Still, this is something similar but fundamentally different. The bollnteous nature of earlier religio n was not appealed to for large avenging actions. 1\lso the distincmess of human beings !Tom nature as the object of wocllip was clear in those earlier forms. In the new religion it is not only possible to worship, offer prayers, sing the glory of the self in a mediated form; this mediation, indirectness, masking of the .-ollectiviry through its own

metaphor must be seen through, and dissolved: thus rhe worship should, to be successful, move historically from a prayer to the metaphorical to the literal self. The destiny of this doctrine would be fulfilled only when, halfsurely at first, but with increasing passion and decision, the community comes to treat itself as eternal and offers itself its own prayers. It thus transfers to a modem identity a traditional form of emotionalism. I wish to claim that far from being a move that was possible within traditional religious discourse, this is possible only on condition ofa certain unprincipled use of Hinduism. Yet, in the act of doing this, there is an implicit and decisive recognition of the nature of the elasticity of a tradition, of the fact that a tradition has such great longevity precisely beause it is internally diverse and it is possible to stretch its resources to make it accomplish tasks it bad never undertaken before. A tndition of eternal repetition cannot survive historical change. It is significant that Bankim was not among those of his generation who stayed within the received Hindu tradition, and attempted to fashion intellectual defences in its favour. He was a person who returned to a position that was of a reconstructed Hinduism very different from its traditional form, and from that point ofview, rightly regarded with suspicion by those more devoucly inclined. On at least two points, this reconStrUcted philosophy diverged sharply from its conventional form. The apparatus of argument it used was almost whoUy rationalistic, and it was prepared, a little too easily, to surrender as nonsensical a great deal of the deeply held certainties of traditional religion. 95 A traditionalist could therefore ask what was historically Hindu in his construction of philosophic and ethical doctrine. A vai~t;~ava could object on similar lines to a vai~t;~avism which so =ually dismissed Caitanya.96 13ankim's answer, stated explicitly, was that this was the only way Hinduism could survive in history.97 Secondly, there was in this reconstruction a great deal of personal idiosyncrasy with which more traditional believers would be out of sympathy. In one of his passionate sequences the guru in Dharmatattva tells his pupil:

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This voi~~,..., J/1omto recounted by Prahbu. the lord of the universe. The person who lw come to realise the consciousness fuU of knowledge and joy which is the soul of all things; he who considers all being as his self; he who ;. above all distinctions, or 2 ~rson who strives to attain .a state or mind o( thn kind :alone is a :and .a Hindu. He who consantJy shows malice: towuds others, does hann ro others, quarrels with othen, who is engaged in ostrae:ising people for deviating from Cute practices. I would no< call him a Hindu even though he voJ'!'!-a•JtJ

may have a whole bunch of sacred threach on his neck, a mark covering his

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cnti"' forcheod, • pipal on his hcod, • niimwa/i dnped >round his body 2nd consunt in<::~ntorion of Hari on his lips. He is 2 m/t«ha wonc than .U mkairas; .a J-:lindu loses his Hinduism even by eontac·t with him.98 In one of JUs direct expositions of this reconstructed Hindui.s m, Bankim was still more explicit about his heterodoxies. He dccl3res that 'it is my fim1 conviction that without a revival of the religion of the nation there is no good possible for India'. But the fint quC$tion is what is the Hindu religion? We find llWlY ~ of Hinduism. 1\ Hindu doc:s no< go on • journey if sneeus; ..ys "true, true" if • lizard squeol:s; snaps his finger> if he yawns. Is .U tbis Hinduism? You should not sleep with the he>d in thor direction. or e:u facang the other. not go out after seeing 21n cmpry pot. nor shave on a particular day, desist from some other work on 21nother. Is all this the Hindu's religion? Many would admit th,t s-uch things are ,,or Hinduism. simply the rituols of rhc stupid. If this is Hinduism, I should like ro decbrc clearly du.t I do not W20t its resurrection ... I know • umindar, • Bnhmin by astc >nd punctiliously Hindu. Summer or winter, every day. he would get up very c>rly >nd t>kc his lnrh. He would ~n his wor>hip ri&flt then >nd continue with them tiU bte in the morning. He considers it a great misfonune if there is >ny hindr>nce to hi$ pr>etice of ril m-rvonces. In early aft< moon, he sit> down to • £rug>!, strictly vegetori>n meal. 1\ftcr lunch he tokes on the work of his zomindari. 1\t rh>t time he concenr:nrcs on whocb ryots he would ruin, which helpless widow's propcrry he might confiscate, whose lo>n he would leave unp>id, who Ius to be sent to the jail by forging documenu, for which case folse witnesses hove to be amnged. We hoppcn to know thor rhe regard rhiJ gentlcm>n l»s for religious rituals, god$ and 8£3hmins is entirely genuine; there is no clement ofpretension there. He inc>nt> H ari's n>me even in the act of forging documentS; indeed. he believes tint if he rememben H>ri •• thiJ moment, hi$ forgery mU$l bear Jruit. IS this man • I londu? . Let me speok of >nothcr Hindu. There iJ nothing that he dOC$ nor ear; he tokes evcryshing except what is bad for hc>lth. And though • Bnhmin he is a moden.tc drinker. He t~k~ food from all castesi does not refuse dining with Muslims and C hristians. He does no< observe • single ril 9f wor>hip. But he never reUs lies ... Urucl6shly he gives to other> 2nd tries ro do good to them. He controls his senses :as far as he can, :md honours God inside himseJ( He never deceives anyone, does not covet other's goods. He considen his senses and objects like the sky to be expressions of God and of his power :.:tnd beauty. and thu1 p))'$ c.hem mcnbl homage:. Since he considers the image ofKrishn> >< recounted in the PNr•ttiJS the complete exp~ion of ill-powerful God, he calls hims<'lf a ..,~...., 1\ccording to the precepu of Hindu religion. he rreat> his dder> woth regard, maintoins his &mily with love 2nd a rc, is kind to aninWs. He: is a.bo\tC ang~r. and full of forgjve:ncss. 1s this m:an a Hindu? Of chese: cwo who i) :. Hindu in reality? Or is neither? lf neither, wh;at :an: they? If we· do not get Hinduism in either of them, then what doe:s HinduUm ~ne

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Tllt Unloappy Co11SCiorm.n1 consist in? One h>< srr>yed front Jl"'nna, the other from "'ligious ritu>ls. 1\rc the rituili religion, or is Jh•rma rdigion? If ritu>h are no< "'ligion, but Jh•rm• is, then we h>vc to call th>t man who has Str>yed from the rituals the truly religious person. Whn :.re the difficulties in soaying t.his?99 The rationalist who has returned to Hinduism cannot return tO a religion which is idcnticaiJO the one he had rejected . If there is indeed a world inside fiction created by 311 inversion of the referential power of words, the world of Bankim's last novels is quite strange. It is a world of war>. If it could be turned visual, this would present an endless seene of armiC$, moving people, clashes of grot collective violence, a world from over which the smoke of battle never wafi:s away. This is not simply because it is a world of the past. Bankim could have painted pictures of p>esc novels. For his purposes Bankim needs incidents which are f3ctually underdetcmlined. Inside thC$e stories themselves there is a peculiar disequilibrium. The oppressors are historical, the rebels are fictionally created. AU these arc cases where there was a true, constituted statt of injustice, o r a ruling power which face (in the world of his fiction} a surprisingly small bl,!t invincible army ofjusuce Gghting>just war. Of course they are invincible because the narntor is their ally. A significant second feature is the emergence of a new actor--:> col/utivt acto r in each case, a m o vement, an incipient people. S urely rhere is still a play on private and public destinies, of what happens to the individual and to the collectivity, but the balance berween them is inverted. The collective becomes m ore powerful, 3nd comes to the front. In all these StOrie$, there is an amted people who avenge themselves. On the surface, H emcandro's story in Mrniilini iJ also •n avenging story, bur it is still• priv:Jte battle.Jag:auinlu docs head a real anny;. but it is not a popul>r am1y, an am1y of JUStice. This is a strikingly unusual picture for contents of Bengali novels, produced and consumed by the educated comfortable middle-class enjoying rhe colonial peaee of the late nineteenth century. Novels in the

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Beng.ili bn~a~ were _typically and st~ndardly about romances, loves and heartbreaks, mmgues, odeas, at worst, business failures or bankruptcies of l~ndlord estat~. Its setting is basically interior-inside homes and gardens, coty streets, '?'Ja~e bnes, rural wells. In it, an educated woman taking an ~na.ccom~aru~ JOUm~y on a crowded steamer is consideted the ultimate ~n ns~-ukong on a hostole world. 100 It is in a world ofsuch smaH dimensioru, on pnvate spaces, that Bengali middle-class lives were played out, and novels ~thfully reOected them. Banlcim's world is quite ditfetent. Where does this world come from? Although there are pecu!Wities of namtives in each novel, 1 see them as pulting a powe.rfully stated single argument about subjection and history, about the relation between leaden and the people and above aU berw_een the pas~ and the future. Banlcim himselfsuggests at various points a unoty of aU his later wo~-K~~ataritra, Dharrnatattva, the unfinished commentary on the Cilii, AMntlanUJth, Dtvi Cautlhuriini anti Sitiiriim· 1 stretch this and include R4jJinloa, its bst and practically rewritten edition_;oo We have se~n earlier !•ow Bankim invokes the strongly mythicizing, non-ratoonahst conception of history from the Indian tradition: Jha...wthakim4mq/qiiniimupadda ,,.,,.,..,.,;tam p14rdvrttakatlr6yukl.otft iriMlam pnzc:alqyatel02

In ~ al_rea~y 12ct-related criteria are relegated to the background and th~ nnagmanve, ~ythical element of history brought out. According to ~h1s v1ew, . the pnmary purpose of history is to irutruct, not infom1; but ot can O~Vlously instruct in two ways. It can instruct in its factualist form. be_cause 1t can tell us, through analysis, why what had happened happen. H1story however was not just that theatre of what has occurred but also of what will--1he undetermined future. Societies, he had established in the J0~ritra•• give coherence to them through stories they tell about thems~ves •. bec~use p~ople can graduaUy become what they believe they are. T 1_me on history .'s an unending possibility for doing so; thus, this becorrung of the self can happen any time'. Rema.rk d1e oddJtess of the phrase-its gawkiness and force-bdngalir niip manasilt <Jbasrloii jt ltt>M sama~ haite piirr:. 103 That could be done only by an imaginary theatre of conOated past and future and making men and women act there: in other words, history si'_"PIY cannot p~rfom1 its function unless it is dual- in part what happened: m pan what did not, but could in the past, to be replayed on the future-on this charged, peculiar, beautiful time that defied characterization as tense.

In many works of this generation, we find an absent, unpronounced centre, ~d the ~~ are su~ject to a clearly readable tl&ala~. Questions fom~ed on Kamalakanta are g.ven •nswer.; in R;,j1inha. Strange connections bond the Econom•c Hwory to the amorous adventures of adolescent Raj puts

Imaginary History

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and Ma.ratha.s. Who in his senses can see the Economic HiJtory tflntlia being supponed by two noveb? But who in his interpretative serue, can indeed miss this? Imagined communities like natioru are of course 6ctioru in a seme; but the process by which this fiction is created it real and not unamenable to critical examination. Banlcim's -fictive imaginings about his nation are of special interest for two dilferent but rnutuaUy reinforcing reasons. Undoubtedly, he was one of the first i.io India to move in this direction: in order to 6l! the evident inadequacies of the Beng.ili character he began to look for and construct a more complex and much larger 'we'. Since others in other regions were driven by puallel self-doubts and agony, they were driven to similar devices. Secondly, precisely because Banlcim is one ofthe lint to undertake such imaginings, its logic--both the pressure which drives it forward and the anxiety which accompanies it--is particul•rly apparent in his works. . What it significant in R4ftinha is hidden on its surface-not the plot, but the choice of the theme itsel( FormaUy, it is quite dilferent from the hazy familiarity with Rajput warriors in Durgeinandini or in M(71iilini. 104 As, because of accumulating evidence, thinking a glorious history of the Be ngali 'we' becomes impossible, the boundaries of this 'we' are gerrymandered, and the 'we' opens outwards tO include those who would have been conclusively regarded as 'then:o' by an earlier mode of thinking. Todd's annals and antiquities of Rajasthan 2dd a wholly new dimension to the Beng.ili imagination, and decisively 2lter the structure of the inner world of literature. Bengalis graduaUy appropriate this 'glorious' history with eagerness, and begin to see, imaginatively of course, this history of distant, unrelated people as a sort of'prehistory' of themselves. How many alterations this required, for this supposition to work! Evidendy, this COOllection had no wamnt in history in a narrower sense: it could not be a causal or even a. lineal connection-i.e., the chronicle, lineally--of people living in the same geographical area and, in that sense, the 'same' people. Such connections can only be imaginative or artistic. But the problem of 'truth' involved in them is subde. Quite often the 'historical narrative involved in these stories is not simply 12lse. The history of the Rajputs and tlie Ma.rathas or the Sikhs may indeed be true; 105 what is not true in quite that srraightforward sense is the assumed idea that these are 'natural' ancestors of the modem Beng.ili. This becomes plausible through the growth of a clearly different 'we'. This 'we' is both a fiction and a reality. Assuming that it it a reality in the present, 1t was stiU a ficrion when entrenched into the past. Using its ineradicable advantages, the present always gerrymanders the past's frontiers and identities. This is not unusual. It it a constant fearure of aU societies, though the fonn of such story-telling may differ. Myths, legends, literatures, chronicles, novels, poems, anthems aU tell these most

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social.ly urgent of ules. History ceiling is iiS most recent, and for the 13St two hundred years, most accepuble form. But in the excitement with such historical stories, in the celebration of their truth, analysts arc apt to forget a most significant aspect of these. This 'themselves' of which the stories arc told, is constructed partly by these stories themselves. Presumably, R.ajputs in the sixteenth century would have been surprised to be cold that their exploiiS would delight fucurc Bengalis; just as Bengali contemporaries would ruavc been to learn that bter R.ajputs may be proud of whatever these early Bengalis may have done with distinction. Both R.ajputs and Bengalis would ruave simply considered each other as distant, unconncettd people. Had these past R.ajpuiS or Bengalis written their 'own' histories (and as Banlcim never wearied ofsaying. no one else writes histories) it is highly unlikely that they would have included the others' accomplishments in their narrative. Today, not only these but many other groups routinely do so, and it is regarded quite proper for any 'Indian' to feel proud of the achievemeniS ofsuch a composite past. These histories are therefore really, t:angibly, changed. EveniS of a locality become the events of the history of a larger nation, and in that sense, they do not remain the same events any longer. RajJirrha begins this play with time. On many levels, this is a story of a new type compared to his earlier novels with a historical background. In Rajsinlra the story moves in terms ofspacc outside Bengal, and becomes in a more real sense a historic one. This docs not mean historical factual authenticity: for its exulting end is due to the closed nature of a narrative. Within the fictive world of the novel, Rajput power is not humiliated;I06 but it is in real historical record. RiljJinha, then, shows a number of features which are not atrributcs of the historical figure. He is partly a mythic figure, partly a reconstruc·ted babu, a symbol in whom several clusters of features mix and severa.l models intersect at a critical node. He becomes, in precisely Banhes' sense a 'mythic symbol', partly babu, partly warrior, partly created by the novelist's dream of an alternate sci( He is not the petty chieft:ain of an obscure segment of R.ajput history; he is a figure corning to us out of the future. It is not surprising that many of these heroic figures, in their moments of comparative idleness from heroic action, beruave in a woy extnordinarily similar to the manners of nineteenth-<:entury Calcutuns. This reflectS, in my view, the founding movement of conct:iving a 'national' C!)nununity, the historic beginning of an imaginative intt:gration. The process is no doubt heavy with ironies, and it is a mixture of trends both likeable and unworthy. Ftom one point of view, it simply shows the confidence of the educated Bengali's chauvinism-a process in which the Bengali aggressively appropriates the other. Bengalis do not as yet see themselves as part of a larger whole; tht:y simply append India tO thansdves. 'They go out on a great imaginative journey across the

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subco~tinent op~ortuniStically selecting episodes from other people's hlStOnes and addmg them entirely without reason to their own. At the samt:.time, this implies a faint, unch•racteristic admission of inadequacy, ofbemg unab~e to cope \vith British colonialism singlehanded. A peculior alchemy of rrusunderstandings and rnisperceptions sets in. By looking for the atrributes missing in the Bengali babu he begins shifting the boundary of his 'we'. Ultimately, it is through this process, reciprocally carried out from all groups, that the imaginary community of the nation gets formed. Also, this expbins the peculiar fajCination of the sedeneary Bengali middle class for the horse-riding, athletic, extrovert Rajput (this may not be the historical Rajput, but truat matters little really); why ht: so dominates the Bengali fictive imagination. T he Bengali cannot shake him off, because he is his other, wlut the Bengali knows he needs, but what he equally knows he lacks. However, there was a parallel search for heroic episodes inside tht: history of Bengal. and the next rwo stories in Bankim came from such ro~antic legends. These are great dramas of anusilan, of believing somethtng about oneself, and becoming th>t tl>rough great >cts of the will. But this willed tnnsformat:ion is not of the individual, but of a mobilized collectivity, of the leader and the people. Within tlrt trarrativt, in all these novels, the war ends in a victory of the am1y of the people-of the armies of Riijsinha, Satyiinanda, Devi and Sitiriim, led by their popular leaders. After victory, however, in each case, something inexplicable happens. Victorious armies simply melt away; their leaders tum to an uncharacteristic domesticity or exile--botl1 anyway are exiles of different kind,. The main protagonists do this on the weak excuse tl1at 'the time' has not yet come. They are told by higher voices, . thinly disguised voices of history, that the British would mle for yet a long time to come. But the difficulty with this literal reading is evident. Although these prophets confer certificates on tl1e English for their just rule, after Kamaliikiiuta witJ:'out forgetting everything he showed through his sarcastic vision, a.~ audience may have doubts about this judgement. Within these announct:meniS themselves, acquiescence is made clearly conditional; and if thest: conditions ue not observed, the historical situation could be regarded as open once more, where the contract of political obligation can be rcnegotiated. 10? Bankim's narrational technique clearly used coumemetuals, which, while marking the fictive olffrom the actual, kept them in logical cont:act. It was a dream history of India, but more meaningful than actual history. Indeed, through the misleadingly religious looking doctrine ofbbakti he had suggested a theory of mobilization. Clearly, in the last novels there is a suggestion about bringing together an organiud people and a directing element through their conunon allegiance to an ideal, a common object ofpolitical action. So, the wiUingn~ ofthe conunon people to be directed

Ima~inary

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is not based on a feudal principle of subjection to leaders of higher rank, but a recreated principle of exemplary allegiance to an ideal commonly held. Note some indices in the novels of anwilan. Nearly all who become leaders are actors who are outsiders; !hey are n()( feudal status holders who tum against external oppression. Indeed, lhese indices seem to change fundamentally in the last novels. Earlier, Hemcandra and Mir Kissim were status-holding protagonists. They WI, because HeJDC2J1dra misreads the task of resistance as that of an individual warrior. Mir !Gssim relies on old traditional ties of lo~ry-men:enary or patronic. Hemcandra has no army; Mir Kissim's army melts away at the time of crisis against superior European organization and sense of purpose. Resistance against oppression and unjust external power requires, within Dankim's fictional world too, a different solution. If this reading is right. !hen, despite lhe fact that they depict different times and spaces, the battlefields are, as a sign, identical. It is through this identical metaphorical field of resistance that Hemcandra, Mlr Kissim, Prat:ip, R:ijsinha, Saty:inanda, Oevi and Sitir:im undertake their individual journeys of violence. The results are vastly different; all believe in violent rerriburion, but they organize violence differently. Let us briefly look at their principles of organization. Except for R:ijsinha the last three do not depend on rank; they are leaders risen from the people. So the right of the leader to the unquestioned loyalty of followers is not based on primordial lo~ty of any son; it is a right accruing from their ability to represent in an exemplary fashion what the ordinary members of the movements also cherish. Thus comes into play a rrianglc ofleader, people and god, the geometry of a successfi•l ideology of resistance. It implies that the leadership is not an arrributc of the person, but of a structure of relationship. The leader-people structure is ruptured the moment the leader !eaves his vocation, as Sitirim does. He misreads his own status, and rries, in the period of his narrative decline, to trarulate 11\s populist kin~hip into a titular conventional o~e. Actua~y. he is not a conventional king, but a leader of his people; and this trarulanon consequently fails. Only when he wishes to resume his populist title is he, for a tragic moment, back into an active position. It is more compatible with traditional thought to see the ordinary mona! as following, halfworshipping a leader, avat:ara, or seer, who in tum is a follower and reflection of God. The leader is to them what God is to the avatara. Hierarchies of approximation and emulation are &idy central to Hindu religious thinking. Bankim however is suggesting something far mo"' modem, which is captured by a triangle of the deV()(ee, the leader and the deity. Other figures and their destinies too confum this narrative logic. Rijsirtha was n()( the only feudal ruler in R2jputana. but he goes through an election by history, because he alone responds to the challenge of

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collective ignominy. Like Sitir:im, he is able to defeat the constituted am>y of injustice because he is willing to be transformed from a mere royal figure to a leader ofhis people. One cannot, thus. inherit leadership ofjust battles, one has to be elected, undergo an appointment by history. Such popular loyalties, won by organizing just resistance, art:icubting the sense of injustice of a people, cannot be maintained except in a theatre of action, a continuing popular movement- These leaders come from indistinct, at any rate non-aristocratic backgrounds, with nothing extraordmary in their p revious lives; they are moulded into their roles by their acceptance of a challenge they read written in their history. It foUows then that this leadership cann()( survive the dissolution of the movement; once they leave the lighted an: of action, they descend into a historically unremarkable domesticity. The presence of the people in Dankim's novels ought to be discussed carefully. Two points at least must be made. First, we musr not erase !heir unminokoble presenee; neither R:ijsinha, nor Satyimnda, nor Devi, nor Sitir:im would have become what they narratively were if they were not able to mobilize, through unspecified appeals, the great numbers who stand indistinctly behind and fight for them. In the novels, this crowd is not individuated, their &ces are hazily, ifever, seen; but quite surely, they constitute an enormous 'absent' presence in these novels. Secondly, no doubt criticisms against Dankirn's neglect of the popular could be advanced frorn anachronistic angles. But if we do not find a manifesto or manual for popular insunection in Bankim, it is a fault of our expectations. However, lhe endin~ of his novels of historical action constitute a rnore serious problem. In the question of the missing manifesto, we ask, why did Dankim not write like this? But here we are asking a question about narrative reality: why did Bankim write endings of this kind? In the last four novels the contradiction between the climax and the ending becomes acute. We do not feel disappointed when, after a spell of individual heroism, Hemcandra leaves our narrative field of vision in search of an elusive small kingdom somewhere in the east. Pratip's death, despite that great passage in which the voice of the author breaks in a tragic oracular performance, is still an individual sacrifice, and takes on no deeper philosophic meaning. For his death is not the death of an idea, or a movement, larger than himself. In the last novels, great imaginary actions rise to !heir climax only to come to strange but recurrent dismantling; Satyinanda leaves with the indistinct maJWpu,... Santi and Jiv:inonda move away into a strange unspecified anonymity which could be death or domesticity with equal case and irrelevance. Oevi, more interestingly, returns to domestic life, but not without some signs of narrative struggle. She cann()( esc:~pe her heroic identity so easily, and has to flee from it for the rest of her life, showing a certain objectivity of that image. Yet she is recognized from the back, the wrong side, by Siigarbau,

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Tht Unhappy ConsdousltW

cleaning utensils at the domestic pond. Silirim similarly moves away into obscurity, from the lighted srage of a few years. What is emph:asized is the irrelevance of such non-political existence. They might all, like Devl or PraphuUa, live a long and happy later life; but it is a different life, after a sharp rupture, and they are, like PraphuUa, in a sense, fugitives from their own histoty. Repeatedly, great imaginaty actions come to this strange end. They are not defeated by their adversaries; they are defeated by their author.

The Double Endings

A literal reading of these ends would be false; and this would also go against the evidence of historical reception of these novels. The logic of the narration and the logic of the narrative may not be entirely symmetrical, or in a different way of saying, the logic of the writing and the logic of the reading; and it is possible for the writing itself to invite this displacement. This happens often in great art. And is it entirely accidental that long generations of Bengali readers have read Bankim wrongly, not accepting tbe endings in their lite.ral fonn, but extending them in their reading? How can Devi, despite her narrative coUapse into domesticity, remain a figure of resistance and hope? Are there indexes written into the texts which disobey or transcend the narrative conclusions? Two points ought to be nude here. Fint, for Bankim, there is a very serviceable doctrinal argument which could be taken from the Gira, explicated in the WnOUS phrase, lfatmatJye.tadhikQraJI< ma p/ra/~u lfadacana. 101 Actors luve a rigbt only to the performance of right actions, not to their consequences. To a modem sensibility this might offer an interesting docuine of act-morality in a world of unpredictable, surely intractable consequences; a theoty that moral judgcm~nt of acts becomes impossible and twisted if acts are to be judged by the consequences they lead to. Therefore, it is more cognitively justifiable, and charitable to the actor, to judge his act distinCt from what it has brought about. However, Bankim is uninterested in diis side of the implication of the phrase. What occupies his entire exegetic attention u a whoUy different point, but vital in the context of the classical Hindu tradition of naltltarmya.'"' On a powerful interpretation of the tradition, the doctrine of rn~4kannya ad,•iscd abjuring action, at least of action which could generate attachment to its consequences. Of course, some traditions of Hinduism are quite tolerant to various mixtures of tbesc injunctions, or relatively unorthodox practice of its tenets. Householders could, if reUgiously inclined, practise a life of non-attachment by nor being seriously interested in domestic or

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commerdal pursuits. Doubtless this must have given a religious aura to much simple domestic incompetence. For Bankim however it was this interpretation of classical Hinduism that had proved the undoing of his community. The meoning of moral existence must be displaced decisively. Instead ofmeaning a turning away from action, abdicating the undecidable moral quality of acts to God's infinite wisdom, it must mean, to this new view of Hinduism, an acceptance of responsibility for rnoraUy justifiable acts. Thus the person who would be known in the jorgon of later years as the k4nnayogi (one who practises his yoga through and inside action) would ask for the right kind of action, acts which would be conscquentiaUy moral or justifiable. In a sense he would continue a principle of tra~tional morality in a reinterpreted form. Traditionally, nai~karmya was advtSed because ltarma o r worldly action involved the principle ofself-love. Selfish action could be abjured, and individuals could lead a non-worlddirected life only if they withdrew from the world of normal action. In Bankim's interpretation of the principle, so cruciol for Indian nationalist political _models, the accent is shifted from other- worldliness, to being nonsclf-mrerested. If other-worldliness in itself is not the value which is pursued, but is an instance of nonself-directed living, this creates space for other possible inte1prerotions. If there could be panems ofaction which are not selfish, but in some defensible sense other-directed, then unselfishness need nor always take an other-worldly fonn. Surprisingly, the nature of Bankimchandra's argument runs practically paraUel to Max Weber's more renowned, but somewhat later version of a similar thesis-"O Capitalism failed to emerge in India, Weber held, because although India had traditions of religious asceticism, these were primarily other-worldly, ond counseUed renouncing the actions of the world rather than their exemplary performance. In a strikingly parallel argument, Bankim asserts that Hindus, or in some cases Indians, failed to develop a sense of political nationalism and resistance against foreign invaders, because of their other-woddly asceticism. His positive doctrine, naturally, was to look for a principle of a this-worldly asceticism, particularly an asceticism 1>faction. This moral principle was stiU an asatic one, bec.>use it required an abdication of acts in the interest of dJC individual self. It was also ascetic because it advised frugality, exemplary economy of personal needs and pleasures. But the privation of needs was not to abjure the world, or because the world was unreal in some metaphysical sense. Rather, it was b~cause of the fundamental signi6canu of the social ~orld, the sigmfi~nce and reality of itS social and political order, and the imperative for rts perfecnon. It was because the world was real, and its order must be improved and nude less unjust, that people must undertake energetic but unselfish action. Unselfish here meant in the interest of a collectivity, of an extended self, • sense of a community which is still halt:.spelt, and half-seen in Bankim's times. which would-later be caUed the nation. Thus

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there W2S a strOng, ineradieable link between the corning of the nation and people acting in a particular way. The nation, nationalism, was not a mode of being, but of acting. . Therefore, the new doctrine of anusilan, so wonderfully conveyed not by fallible actual figures but by the perfect actors of fictional discoune, is not merely a gospel of •ction, but also of giving up: men should be 2ble to make sacrifices for •ction, but at the end, sacrifice the action iuel( A doctrine of ltannatyiiga is •MOunced •t variow clinuctic pointS of the stories-in the nuhipurufa's instructions to Satyirunda afier the battle, or the more droll abdication of action by Devi, or the tragic and complex betroyal in Silirim. But I wish to argue th2t Banlcim's texts are more complex than they seem. Some signals for a canceUating of this ending, a dream of these interrupted actions being begun elsewhere again, at other places and times come up at every end, so that these ends themselves take on an ambiguous and non-final character. Figures of popular movements, though these are movementS worlcing in the fragile tenain of dreams, go back into domesticity, a trend that causes snorting iridignation among Banlcim's more radical critics. H owever, this appean to me to be an inattentive reading of the whole 6eld of signs that Danlcim creates and uses in his fiction, in fact, too literal a reading of the endings to be quite accurate. Domesticity is of coune a field that is of extreme significance in Banlcim's view of the world. 111 Sinti is the active face of the feminine, as Wcti, K.alyini the peaceful, sustaining face indicated in an artless simplicity by her name itsel( In a powerfully condensed sentence in AnanJamatlr, there is an intimation of a similar retreat into a fundamental domesticity, the everyday, urupectaeul.ar life of the people. This is a journey or a shift that Oevi accomplishes within her own single biognphy: from Sinti she becomes Kalyinl. At the end of Delli CauJhurani there is an explicit enunciation of the principle that domesticity is a sacred and solemn circle, • fortress, a place of refuge and strength, clearly a rejection of the ordinary babu dichotomy of a complex office and an insignificant home.m All thls might appear extnordinary to othen, but not to Praphulb. For she had practised the religion of non-attachment. After coming bock to her home, she became • real renouncer. She had no desires of her own, she constandy looked for work to do. Desire means search for one's own .happiness, work means search for the happiness of others. PrapbuUa w... Mthout desire, but constantly ~t work; that ~s why Pr:a!'hnlb was a real sannyisini {rcnounCier).

Whatever 5hc touched turned into gold.IIJ The last novels did enunciate the doctrine ofanuSibn, of this golden touch. Indeed, Dcvi's retreating inside this 'fortress' portly c'llplains the invincibility of other women, aU the way to the apparendy comical victory of the critical Wife over the handshalcing rationalist.

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:"II of t~ese novels tum on a sort of narrative irony: the story ending twtce, or m two ways, and the write.r maintaining an ironieal evenlundedness towards them. Endings are both open and closed; they luve one ending according to the authorial voice, and quite another according to the narrative voice. To put it yet another way, they have different logical and empirical ends. There is a mdition of literary and political interpretation ofBankim's art which sees in this simply political hesitation. But I suspeCt it is a better gucs.s to see here an authorial device. Rijsinha's victory too is a victory of narntive. This is the weapon by which the historical story-teller gets the better of the actual process of events. By narrativity, the simple act of telling and not telling, the rurntor can gerrymander events-1\ot by direcdy falsifying them, but by the most unanswerable of his narntive weapons, his right of closure. In history Rajsinha's victory aga.inst Mughal power mwt luve been the me~t of reprieves. In the narrative, Rijsinha's victory stands out indelibly. This difference is simply because history does not have an end the narrative has. In history there were other acts which reduced the rigni6cance of Rijsinha's action; in the narrative, afier Rijsinha's victory, there is not~g. By \viping out the beyond, erasing the historical sequel, the narranve can alter the significance of events without actually teUing an untruth. It renu.ins a truthful distortion of the truth of history. If _we look ~ little closer however there are all sorts of problems with the literal ~ding of the endings. In terms of intentions, a disnW ending of defeats Stmply does not square with the author's lcnown intentions. These were novel. of an uplifting message of praxis (an.Uilan), and it would be ironical indeed if dtey ended showing dte inevitable defeat of ente.rprises of de.fiance. ~t any rate, it is evident that there is a paradox in malcing and ~ng of the sto_ries _in these novels. Of course, the paradox can be given ~ srmple resolunon m one of two one"sided ways. It could be soid, for rnstance, that the principle to be invoiced is the one of authorial sovereignty. Seen thinly, the story does say that Oevi orial sovereignty, this view takes

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ove~ute the opposi_te case and uy that Banlcim wished to give the standard ·

clanon call_for nanorufum. Actually, this reading runs into far gccater problems, SJmply because to contest wlut is merdy interpretative is easier than to contest wlut is literal. As an author he could luve given s.impler

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victory to the prougonists of anu!ilan theory, a victory not in danger of being effaced. Surely, there was then something vitally wrong with his belief that all four were illustrations of anusilan theory; after all, the lit~ral line of narrative in at least three of them seems tO indicate that anusilan could not succeed without a favourable historical conjuncture. How does one account for, within a single explanation, the undeniable line of the story and its equa.lly undeniable reception that appears to go against it so completely? Can one, or should one say that the reception of these novels is f2lse or that it is true? An interpretation must also come to tcuns with the historical reception ofa text which, as jauss has argued so compellingly, reveals and constitutes its truth? Is the truth of a text to be constructed outside of its reception? Is a text so completely cleansed ofits historicity a text any longer? Docs not writing itself involve historicity? Is it not the ambition of every text to be moderately immortal and open itself out towards history and its attendant risks? To understand the texts in their history, the apparent divergence of their saying and their meaning, and still restore a certain integrity to it, some kind of a distinction between two levels seems necessary. The first is the level of narrative syntax, how one event follows and relates to another, and what the adding of tho last item does to reveal or disp~ce the earlier configuration of the story: (This is most apparent in the thnller or detective story, but seems to happen in aU narratives.) tiS Fault de mitux we could c.U the other level, one of narrative structure or ensemble--the coming together for configuration of crucial dements or signs, which override the narrative line, because these stay as pictures or gestures in the narrative unfolding. This is similar to a process that happens more discernibly in the viewing of acted narratives, in the theatre or in films. All created narrative objects require interpretation as constitutive pans of themselves. Stories in films or fiction are not objects that are distinguishable from interpret:ttion, whole, un.interpreted obje~ to which interpreution comes afterwards. Interpretation is constitutive of them: to take an extreme position, a chapter following offers an interpretation ofsorts ofwhat earlier chapters have narrated; and there are some fo':"' ?f stori~ in which. the sUrtling indeterminacy of the constantly recumve uuernal mterpretanons is what makes tbe distinct mark of the genre. Quite often, when the story is of a foiled revolution, of a defeated protest, tbe poster would iconically thrust forward tbe radical gesture, a transient moment of triumph. In a sense that attemptS tO freeu the meaning of the story there while the narrative simply goes on. . We can thus make a distinction between the surface level of rurranve where its literality lies, where the story makes its meaning in terms of its actual acts or states, and another deeper one. A.t the second level. th~ meaning is not made through a story in che same sense; ac~y. there IS no story at this level, as structuralists would say. Instead, chts,. a level for

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the assemblage of act-elements or forms, and these are taken through processes of combination and recombination. It is from this level, apparently, that stories find the resources to annul what their surface says, to successfully carry a message which seems to be entirely opposed to the narrative, which yet passes clearly to audiences untutored in literary theory. Both success and failure of radical acts G.SSert the possibility of radical acts, and create, to use the term in its 1\ristotelian sense, a radical rhetoric on the world. 116 Let me now try to make this point textually. In &ct, in Bank.im's work, . there are explicit markers in the texts which soem to invite this transposition, points where the text, by a shift of tone, shows the onset of narrative irony. I mean by narrative irony a deliberate position between two possible constructions of what the story says at its two levels, the literal and the figural. In ordinary conversation too, irony is often a matter of tone: 'x is y' means something quite different, sometimes entirely opposite when said in a different tone. The tone in this sense overrides the literal meaning of the sentence. There are similar devices in Bankim's narration. There are double endings not merely in the sense that endings can be read in two different ways: they are also in a more literal sense double. Stones end twice. And Dankim often uses the standard device of folk tales: dividing the norrativcly significant and insignificant parts of the lives of the characters by temporal or narrative disproportion. 1\s in folk tales, heroes might, after their reported bbours, live ever after in unreported (or unnarrated) happiness. Bankim's characters do the same. Rajsinha, we might hope, enjoyed conjugal bliss with his disproportionately young queen in such narrative oblivion. Oevi spends wh•t appears, by all indications, a lonll and productive life in her family after fading out of her fighting role. Anandamatlr ond Sitnrnm use a more severe style: nothing is said about Sitarim after the denouement; neither do we know anything about Santi and Jivinonda or Sotylinanda; they are not allowed tO detach themselves from their historical- fictional role. However, this is not all . Th~re are other interesting devices tbo. Consider D&i Owdhuriini, the novel in which these markers ate the most explicit. Oevi's story ends twice. After she decides to come away from her heroic role with Braje!war, when .she abandons her role, that is the effective end of her talc. However her life story ends again in the last chapter. But the narrative irony is indicated in Dtv1 Caudhuriini by a srraightforward shift in the tone to story-telling. 1\fter Dev-, 's decision, che narration suddenly changes from serious fictional prose to banter. When Devi comes to her vollage, someone spreads the word that Braje!war has come J.>ack. with a fourth wife, a woman of advanced age. What follows is one of the great passages of farcical description in Bengali literature, ·describing in Bankim's inimitable language the utter confusion in the viUage caused by che curiosity about this new, aged bride. 117 hs combina-

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Imaginary History

tion of Bengali humorous idiom and observation of household foibles nukes tim passage untranslatable. Thus, !he narrative irony is signalled by linguistic irony. Alongside there is another device which is read everytime these novels arc read, but which go unread in routine interpretations. After each of these endings, there are some curious sentences, quite unrelated to the narrative in tenns of !he novel form R4jsiniuJ ends on a comparison between William ofOrwge and che Mewar chieftain: 'In Europe William is renowned as !he foremost among patriotic and righteous heroes; chis country is bereft of history; so no one has heard of !Ujsinha'."' In Arra~amath, after finishing the story of its protagonists Sinti and Jivin•nda, Banlcim adds a characteristic line which confwcs !he tense and remporaliry of the n•rrative. · 'TI•m the two of them got up, held hands arrd disappeared into ttemity in that moonlit night. Alas, mother, would they com
self-evident that !he basic line of demarcation ran between !hose who hod reaso~ and those who did not, an arrangement which cbssified him. rogelher with !he English, on !he same lighted side of hununity. This great critique of his pretensions, the insistent, remorseless destruction of his discourse of self-deception shows thoc the crucial line is drawn at a different point in !he social world, between rulers and subjects, and thus, it pushes !he intellectual 10 !he surprising discovery, which he misuusts 2nd resists, !hat his natural fellow beings are !he ordinary people. By shifting !he line of distinction the author has pushed !he Bengali babu of the nineteenth century &om !he corrununiry of reason into a corrununiry of discontent. After all, !he writer of lhese subtle endings, of tim indefinable time, is Kamalikinta Caknvarti', in his altered and transcended self. It is not easy to contain or defeat this master of the dissembling discourse, ofsaying !he unsayable. As long as it is the terrain of discourse he is sovereign. It is not surprising that he could create just such novels wilh just such endings, such poetics which make it possible for !he narration co end but the narrative to go on beyond its end, thot ir stretches itself in such deep and nujesric anguish from imaginary hi>tory towards !he real one.

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Bhaboni Pathak happily went into exile.

Now come again, Praphulh. Come and stand in our midu-let u.s Ca$< our eyes on you once more. Stand once more in front of Ibis socicry •nd say. 'I 21m not new, I am old. I am n•crely those words. I have ~me so nuny rimes, buc you h•d forgotten me; so I had to come againParicriniya sidhiinam vinisiyo ca dulk!tim dharm~thipanirthiya sambhovimi yuge yuge'. 119

These are proposals about time, the time in 'l'hich the story happens and the time in which !he story is read, and the common time, or history, in which these two rimes are held. The narratives eml, but in each case there is an aJU!ogical extension: if there are similar circumstances in future, similar acts would be necessary. There is also a clear convergenee of the two times: the future pointed at by the story is indeed the present of the reading. The tense of the report and the tense of reflection are different: but these powerful, passionate, unnoticed sentences bring them together into unmistakable convergence. The point of all this iouginary history is, then, !he real one; !he point of aU this inugined past is the present. Meanwhile the world has remained largely what it was, mode up of people and groups usually found in Bankim's reflections. But the great literary intervention into the pic.ture of sociery had accomplished a task of great signi6omcc. Though !he world and its inhabitants remain the same, •ts lines ofdistinction and opposition, its crucial lines ofhotred and belongin.g begin to be drawn differently. So the political map of chis social world has changed fatefi•lly. Earlier, the Bengali middle-class babu cOnsidered it

Tragedy, Irony and Modernity

5 T ragedy, Irony and M odernity Irony could not develop before ihe age of reflection, because it is consttuctcd from something false which by means of reflection disguises itself behind a nusk of1n1th. Vi co

A civilization develops over a long history something like a grammar of vision, an optics on which its aesthetic practice is based. Artists and their audiences see objects in the world, the world itself. its various possibilities through that granunar of seeing. This can perhaps be clarified by an analogy with painting. It is like a palette of primary coloun which constitute a structure which restricts and forms possibiUties at the same time. Traditions of high culture develop in this manner a palette of feelings, sentiments, ways of describing, feeling, perceiving things of the world. There is no univenally admissible, neutral manner of seeing the social world, the view from nowhere; there cannot be a view that is not of a certain kind. This optics of the literary field is created by aesthetic traditions- usually a complex mixture of explicit and unannounced preferences, ways of shaping things by giving forms, names, destinies which >re always at work within the work of authon. It goes without sa)(ing that though these are deep structures, with all that this implies, these are not beyond history. Historical requirements affect and transform them, though these demands are neither constant nor linear, happening everyday or in a specific direction. Aesthetics are in the nature of structures of resources which are always available for individual crafting; and through the pressures of such crafting of resources to demands, new items are •dded to aesthetic structures or their forms are changed. The celebrated lndi•n term for this grammar is of course the theory of rasa: Indian aesthetic uses a palette of the nine primary rasas as its basic generative structure. But the grammar is a historical thing and presupposes a world. The theory of rasas emerged from reflection and perception in a certain kind of world, where objects and possibilitie~ were structured in a specific way. And the world that emerged from colonial contact, and the sensibility

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that this generated was fundamentally different. It is this peculiar position in a world that is being historically reconstructed which forced reflexivity upon artists and writen of the period. Bankimchandra was an artist of tradition in a very technical sense. His palette was a traditional one of the primary rasa structure. Often it is easy to describe his tropes, the specific literary operations taking place within his texts, entirely in terms of traditional 4/a~k4ra tenm--upam4, utpre~a. yamaka, vyajt~Siuti, even the most conventional of these stylistic features, the 4nuprii.sa. Yet his art was entirely different from that ofhis successful contemporaries many ofwhom had chosen objects, styles or compositions which, in a world of invading modernity, still sought to retain a whole, uofractured aesthetic tradition. T urning their backs to the historical changing world, they could take refuge in traditional composition. Some, like Vidyasag.u, experimented with a new language, though still seelcing legitimacy from its obvious kinship with sonorous Sanskrit. But none took the risk, the eno rmous danger of turning round, and facing the world of modernity with that traditional palette in hand. Vidyasagar's objects of aesthetic depiction and narrative were Sltii., Sakuntali, figures who were tratlitionally depicted by that palette. 1 Thus the characteristic poses, the moods, the emotions su ited the palette. Bankim chose figures of a different kind, either living in moderniry or thinly living in the past but already experiencing modem forms of suffering, a whole world of emotions, moods, poses, situations that were not formerly the task of this palette to analyse or portray. I think that was why Bankimchandta's an could find no -serious imitator or successor, 2 but srill has the power ofaU genuine origins, their ambiguity, their mixture, their duality, their intrinsicaUy transient character. He was neither of this world, nor of the other; yet his art was in 3 sense adequate to the complexities of both. His aesthetic can be set against that of classical Sanskrit literature, and at the same time, that of the modern. For most other artists in the Bengali language such a double comparison would be wholly inappropriate. Vidyasagar's characters experience traditional em.p- J tioos of viitsalya, k4rut;ii, etc., not the indescribable emotions ofmodernity. Tagore's figures not only experience the new emotions, but have found 3 new language in which to adequately express themselves. They have been given a new palette. Only in Baokim the world is new, the palette / is old. And this transient adequacy gave to his art an indescribable and incomparable dignity. This is why Banlcimchandra .fashioned the Bengali sense of modernity, because he was the first to teach them to wonder at this phenomenon of history reflexively. He was the fint to create something like tbe rasa of modernity, for which the earlier primary colours of the palette of feelings was inadequate. To contend with the structure of feeling that modernity created in this world slowly growing aesthetically unfamiliar, he had to mix and experiment with rasas. The eventual rasa of moderniry, if we can so call it, is fundamentally tragic, and it mixes

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Tragedy, Irony and Modtrr~ity

''

worried •bout whot they were themselves

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presented it to themselves

as an intellectual problem. Being something was taken for granted. >t least not considered problematic; it was the being of the other, how people

two primary colours which traditional aesthetics never brought into j contact. These are the moods of tragedy and laughter. In terms of narnttive form as well, Banldm relied quite openly and h~vily on the resources of traditional Indian aesthetics. His narnttives were called novels, but were actually structured more like traditiorul dramas or narratives. His irony of the babu and the world of colonial powerlessness uses consuntly and with conslllTUTUte skill the earlier fo~ of the vyajasruti. Even his material depictions of nature, or the phys•al description of women, come stra.ight out of an aesthetic canon which goes back into the ancient texts and is at the same time solidly present in the folk optics of nature and femininity, both prak(li to classical theory. At the same time, the taste of Banldm's aesthetic is unquestionably modem. In Banlcim's efforts to create this new aesthetic the most significant element, because it is also the mo5t contradictory, is his use of irony. Classial Sanskrit and early Bengali litenturel had long and powem.J precedents of poetic compositions of intricate irony. He assumed and extended this line in one sense. Yet, what he did with it, the way he J extended and added on to it, the way he made it perform new functions of meaning are astonishingly modem. Irony and self-irony are indeed very close and enormously distant. The literary or stylistic techniques are common, the rasa is radically distinct. Self- irony is both a crowning achievement of irony and an overturning of its conventional form. T~ditional societies often find the identity of others puz.z.ling. to puzzle about the self is an unmistakably modem form of reflection. Settled traditional societies were marked by an assumed sense of self which was rarely a matter of debate, and except in some rare occunences, never a matter of persorul intellectual JC:lrch or deliberate construction. To construct an identity is an essentially modem activity, and it is part ofa history which offers various possibilities of existence for individuals and groups. Jn a fundamental sense both individuals and groups can, under philosophical co~ditions of modernity. choose what they would like to be. Th~ modern absorption with the self has some interesting and cootradictory aspects. Thinking about the self is always ~dly narcissistic, ~t gives consideration of the problems of the self great SJgm6cance; b~t 1t also implies the necessity of a certain detachment. To look at a &ce tn a mirror is still a project of distancing and detachment; and detachment implies in its train the existence of different possible ways of constructing the self a.nd a life that tries actively to &shio.n the self's form. Formerly, intellecruals often described and rellected about why other people were different. European traveUen and chroniclers did not merely observe the strange customs of other cultures, but also made interesting hypothesis about its -reasons. AI Biruni, to take an ouutanding example from the Indian tradition, speculated about the Brahminic:al ways of the Hindus. But typically, neither the Europeans nor the Arabs or Indians

could be different from what people should normally be like, which raised problems. To tum the selfinto a problem, either philosophically or sociologically, is • whoUy modem idea. And to discover the self is a potentially tragic process. Through the process of retlexiveoess, the self is tormented by desire and &ilure, by its increasing sense of inadequacy, assailed by desires to become something other than what it at this moment is. It can be claimed tlut Banldm is the fil'st writer in Bengali, and surely one of the 6rst in any Indian language to tum the selfinto • problem and investigote its possibilities of construction. He is also one of the very cady thinkers to appreciate its historicity. the fact that people can become what they wish to be, and not merely stay what they immediately are. 1 wish to suggest that it is this retlection on the self as a construct which directs Banldm to his distinctive style.of humour. It is a commonplace that Banldm is one of the gre>t writers of humour in the Bengali bngu•ge. But humour can exist in literary works in many different forms; and to understand what it really does for • particular author it is imporunt to find out in exactly what speci6c way it exists in his art. In both the literary traditions that be knew, variety is greatly applauded. Modem western 6ctiooal traditions-which Banldm ltoew encouraged the mixing of humour both in rhe seeing of the world and the telling of the story. Classical Indian literary doctrine was. if anything, even more explicit about the great merits of mixed compositions. The theory of the Natyaiastra for instance encourages mixtures between different primary artistic modes / like dance, voal music, drama. It also encourages the mixture of the rasas with the injunction to respect the difference between the sth~yi ~nd ~ya­ bhitlran without which the work of art loses coherence of sogru6canon. Yet tb~e mixtures were meant for pl
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diJGovering the sci£ It is this predicament-<>f a self which could not be jwtified but yet could not be condemned simply because it is too close, inalienable, too dear, simply because it is the self.........,.hich rna lees him look for techniques of tnnsforming the earlier aesthetic of humour into the n ew, somcwlut
criticism by humour, because on both sides of the ideological divide. in the person who criticized and the person who was the object of this criticism, between the man who attacked and undermined and the man who felt undermined. in a sense, was the same self. in its two temporal versions. His youthful views were not rejected by another person, but by the necessarily ironical mode of a later seiC: His irony is the direct opposite ofVico's: it could not luve arisen before the age of reflection; but inside it is truth which expresses itself by assuming the disguise of falsehood. Although irony is so evident and remarkable in Banlcim's arc, its predominant theme is not an engagement with the snull embarrassments o f the everyday but the movement of histoty; and his general sense of history is essentially tragic. Evidently, tl1is lcind o f irony, though a form of humour and depending on the formal aesthetic of laughter, is quite compatible to the tragic sense of history so noticeable in his reOections on modernity. About modernity's dimensions, structures, and trends Banlcimchandra's historical thought is admirably clear and unhesitating; but interestingly, it does not pretend that it is at .aU dear about the future. Banlcim's considerable reading of contemporary European social theory~he was very familiar with Comte, MiU and Spencer, and knew of H egel and the French philosophel'f-had not persuaded him to accept any of the great philosophies of history and the assurance these uplifting narratives provided in face of the fragility of things that modernity had brought about. His acuity of analysis of the present did not tempt him to declare that he saw the future with any degree of clarity---something that later nationalists of much less historical perspicuity announced witllout hesitation. Banlcimchandra was therefore left with a peculiar vision of history. History was of the greatest significance, because all things social were maUeable, in Oux, rendered provisional. It was consequently necessary to achieve a rational understanding of tl1e process of the present as history. Yet it did not yield any clear picture of what would emerge in future, except images of improbable utopian colou~ captured in the complex symbolism of his obsessive dreams. There is particularly one sequence which appears ollen in varying forms, as a dream of some of his fictive characters, as a dream of his secret self!Umilikinta. This is the image of a splendid golden icon tossed in the dark waters of time, again a traditional image. but most appropriate to his sense of modernity. History, the way he reOected on it and made an object of serious reOecrion, was a wholly modem theme; but he had successfuUy derived from the great stock of images of the classical past its most appropriate symbolic image.

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On the darkness of history

In Bankim's writing, the question of British colonial administration was broadened, at the best points, into a question of modernity in geoecal. And the question of modernity broadened, at the best points of his performance, into a philosophic reflection on time. It has been argued persuasively that modernity alters the nature of temporality. 5 From a cyclical repetitive ontology of time, European theoretical thought and later popular consciousness emerges by degrees into a conception offuture time-as an opportunity, as a broad field of creative activity in which natucal and social things can be shaped according to collective human desires. The problem was not so much the plasticity of the social world, but rather the difficulty in arriving at some commonly accepted decision/project about what to do in that time. In a very genenl way, modernity brings in an identical change in India, from a time that is given to a time that is made, i.e., fonnerly, time was not seen as an opportunity in which well-<:onceived social or political projects could be carried through. Individual lives have to be lived, in dignity and humility, within terms which are forever set, over which human beings have no control, not to SJ)<'alc ofsovereignty. Over a period of about a hundred yean, chis wholly passive attitude towards time changes into a conception far more active, occasionally superficial, oversimplified, hasty, unintelligently optimistic. But the steps and exact context of this change were very different from the narrative of modem temporality in the West. The coming of the new time could not appear the same to Indians for two reasons. The optics or ontology of the world through which they saw the coming of modernity was diffettnt in conceprual terms. Besides, the content of this modernity, what it unfolded in front of their interpreting minds, was also quite different. While modernity in Europe was primarily an experience of liberation, in India its main element was a narrative of subjection. Bankimchandn's work is interesting precisely because he shows how the earlier optics of time slowly gives way to the possibility of another. In traditional Indian thought, time was a dark god, sometimes insufficiently distinct from death. Indeed, there is a peculiar indeterminacy, ambiguity in Indian thinking about the precise kind of reverence that is to be accorded to time. Time is evidently irresistible, its ravages inescapable for human lives; but this elicits a response that is more of awe than of regard. Time, ltii/n, is thus given a peculiarly fearful reverence, because of its affinity to death. In traditional lndi>n consciousness, the metaphors of time are chosen in accord with chis predominant sentiment. Time is • river, but a ~k river, carrying everything towards an inesapable destruction (l<~ya). finishing onnulment, non-being. But chis river oftime carrying

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everything along does not surprise people with destruction. It does not do anything sudden, episodic, frightful in thot sense of a catastrophe: it is the inevitable definition of life as a being towards death. The waters in the river of time are dark, a metaphor appropriate in cwo ways: the traditional meaning was that time represents intractability, impenetrability. What it does is beyond conrrol and comprehension. In Banl:im, history is often related to chis river of time. The dream sequence in /Gmt
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The Unhappy Omsdousnm

been temporarily ruptured; though, without doubt, this is often accompanied by a rcs«>rative rhetoric. But I fi.n d something else in Banlcimch•ndra 's :ut which is even more decisively a product of modem consciousness: the perverse attractiveness ofKamilikinu os an extnordioary individu21. Kamaf4Jt4nta, I hove argued, is quite cenmal to Bankim's •zt. because it puts the question of coloni21 powerlessness at the centre of vision, os a nagging, unforget12blc liocc. But his figure is interesting not only because of his subde and sublimin~ poUtics, but 21so for • purely 2rtistic re2son. If •rtistic •ttention is the rnork of a hero, then K.amalikiou is cerrainly one in Bankim's fiction; and it is also true that the whole business of the world in the daptar revolves around him. The world unfolds to us through his eyes. And hc is not only the master in this world of words, in the fictional world of action, in the court drama too he is the cenmal figure, because he faces the court in a doubly unequ2.1 battle. On one side, he is a single, entirely lonely individual against the whole structure of colonial justice. On the other bond, he is not alone, he h2S the support of a huge historic civilization, a.U its subtlety, intelligence, e-iveness, refinement is given tO him to exploit and embody for this single occasion, because he h2S made the terrible choice, to be its represcnutive, against all odds. On this level of coune, his adversarin anti-hero, a hero who is • congeries of to!211y negative qu2Uties, but this heroism being still •n act of deliberate choice. In lioct, he •ccomplishes the most anuz.ing series of displacements in the aesthetic of fictional figures. K.amalilinu is not a success in any conceivable S<:O$C •t aU in terms of earlier, more srraightforwud aesthetics. Indeed, he is unlike the heroes typical of cradition2.1 oamtive forms; unlike the colourful figures of Banlcimchaodra's own fictional wotks; unlike the more problematized heroes of later high Bengali novels including Tagore, unlike again some of the types created by ~tchandra Cluttopadhyay drawing upon the slightly inverse heroism of the terrorists-at once mysterious, dan.gerous, attractive to the middle cl2SS. The obliqueness with which Kamilikint2 stands is much more radical, uoamenable to the s12ndard technique of being redeemed by the love of women, representing the disinterested, uncorrupted higher intelligence of this society, os happened to the terrorists in the novels. Though shunned by rniddle-d2SS society, their ability to attract the admiration of women showed the possibilitY of s120dards by which they could be redeemed to more straightforward norms of fictive glory. TI>eir return to unremarkable domesticity, the site of normalcy and acquiescence in nonns, is simply narratively unreported. Kamalikinu is UJUJJKnable to this mildly

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deviant formula of Bengali fiction; his obUqueness, his ability to renuin uorecoociled, is far more radical than the practical violence of the terrorist 6gures, than their cult of radialisrn of the ace. Kar:oalikiou is wedded entirely to the principle of radicalism of thought, the radicalism of daring to think unlike everyone else. He is the single gx-eat hero of uncompromising critical thought that high Bengali literature of the early period produced-desolate, incomparable, inimitable in his peculiarity, ceoselessly bmenting the liote of subalternity, reflecting the darkness of history, but not a.Uowing that to reduce hiS enjoyment of the comic spe=cle of the everyday. He lives in a world oflaugltter framed in a subde and unstated sorrowfulness. He is a cluracter in Bengali lite.r ature without a forerunner or a successor, and in that sense the most interesting figure in Bankirnchandra's art. To understand Banlcimchondra there is no other way except tO unden12nd the laughter ..nd dark.ness in the world of Klrnaliliq!:l. Can we make some coherent sense of a.U that I have said about Battlcimchandra Chattopadhyay? What kind of a person was he? What sort of historical discourse did he live inside? Historical remembrance is a notoriously mixed lila: being remembered is a process of the accretion of meaningz on to texts. Texts ue not merely sec in history in a broad sense, they 2lso set in motion litde histories theCO$Cives. What sort of history did he set in motion, or contribute to? It is often seen os an obligatory !:ISk of the history of 'ideos co look with penistence for the 'coherence' of a mind. It is interesting to see why minds like Bankim's, with their opulent gifts, found .it hard to decide to be coherent. All history is contradictory, but not in the same sense or to the same extent. The histoty of colonial societies is ridden by contndiction in particularly fundamental ways. The puzzlements of colonial inteUeetuals arose from the unmerciful way history olfered them the gift of modemiry,' in a way in which it was inextricably rebted to a destiny of subjection. Unlike 2S in Europe, modernity came to India os a primarily external proposal os a theory and an external agenda os practice. The Enlightenment, for a.U its later complexities, had begun with a 'happy' history in Europe. Its authon were happy writen, for its prougooists saw the processes of modernity os one which spread liberty across social life. The historical situation of the colonial writer was tragic because of the unjustness of the choices liocing him. If he chose m!)derniry, he had to choose subjection as its condition, or so it oppearcd to him. If he chose outonomy, he had modernity as a nec
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The Unlulppy Consciousne.u

for both there was at least the assur.mce of an appointed discu~ive space, with the!f common arguments, languages, and set audiences. Some, like Bankim, &iled or refused to make the choice, and saw the structure of this choice itself as tragic.. Their intellectual positions were bound to be more lonely than the othe~·. Hemmed in between two large circles of discou~e which sought to deny them any space, what they u.id was constandy in danger of being assimilated into one of the two dominant forms. They had to struggle constandy against such assimilation. Their inabiliry to turn decisively away from the two sides of their history, their continual interrogation of both, condemned them to a form of'unhappy consciousness'. Their solution was to remain contradictory in their consciousness, for to be consistent was not to be open to all the human possibilities that history had placed before them. The gift ofh.istory, bestowed by a modern western education, appeared to them a deeply ambiguous one. They had learnt from it to think of their lives~ingly and collect:ively- in the frame of linear time, and in terms of the rational eapaciry to construct the present and future. But in their condition, this made a self-conscious existence more cl.ifficult. History must have appeared to them a strange mixture of disclosure and concealment captured in Hegel's phrase, the hieroglyph of reason. There is a peculiar relation of adequacy between the experience of this history and the kind of literary art that Bankim created. Alternating between a tragic fiction and comic commentary, a view of the world filled with darltness and a view of the everyday filled with laughter, attracted to both rationalism and its critiques, both enlightenment and religion, tormented by the choice between subjection and moderniry, he had discovered a way of dealing with aU this complexity in irony. Irony allowed the contradictions of the world to be retained without recou~e to a reducing consistency. Between its solemn.iry and travesry, its darkness and l~U;ghter, he had &shioned a language that was adequate to e>q>rcss the sense of the world as it appeared to his particular unhappy consciousness.

Notes and References

Chapter 1

2

3

M211in Heideuer. 'Orig;n of the work of an' Bali< Wrinngs, Roud)'> on the world ouOSide; but in Utenry m.dia the two things must be seen cli•tinctly. An excasivc emplusio on the idea that the artist is a voice of his times could make it impossible to see the specificity of the anwork. There is con:s:iden.ble litenturc on this problem; a recent and interesting enquiry

int·o these questions in Arthur Danc:o. Tirt: Transfigur11tion

of tJt<

Commonpl~~a,

Harvard Univenity PreS$, Cambridge, Muo.. 1981.

4 5 6

7

9 10 1

11 12

C£ Danro. I have tried to interpret his hwnour in the next chapter. For one ck6nition o( l.iminality: 'During the intervening liminal period, the state of the ritual subject becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there~ berwixt and betwc<:n 1ll 6xed points of classification ... in liminality, the symbolism almos< everywhere indicates dut che initiand. novic:e or neophyte is suuaurally if nor physially invisible in terms of his cultutt's standard dc6nitio0$ and dassi.6cations'. Victor Turner, Dr11m41, Fitlds, 12nd Mtt4plwn, Comcll Univenity Pm:s., lduca, 1974, 232. The sense in wruch I use the tenn cliJfen from this use. The conunon poin' is that l also sec the liminal ~ non-standard. However, I see the liminal as being outside, and not as a point rhat is tnnsitory between two Sbnclard sttta:. Noveh wruch raise such questions quite clearly ue O..rgr"lioi, V~"!lq•. JC!l~anUr w.a. j..gaf'angwtiya, RAdh4riini, C.mdrakkh«, A,.,d.rnratJr. D.ll Todorov. The Podia of Pro« (aans. Richard H owatd), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977.

The conflict arising out of a hW1Un attraction across a social line of prohibjtion is cle•dy emphaSized in O..rg<m.,Jio;, BR, i, 12-13, 15. P2SSion bas iu own justification. Given this, we come to confound thin~

appears like evil, evil like ~ood; good and evil appoar indistinguishable and difficult to identify. Several explicit 'inner dialogues• occur in &nkim's fiction:;: e.g. Krrnakiinte1 W.ll, BR. i, 499. 13 Th~ cbssic argumenr:s ~bout. the problematic hero appear in Luk:acs. 77teory of th~ Novel, Merlin Press, London, 1978. a-nd were pursued by others like Rene Girud. f>r<eit, D
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19

Pa!upati, whose: foltuna and initiatives hold the stOJo:e inco account sever:al thing.: (i) thac others may pursue moaves We one m>y 6.il to properly reod, (u) that there were unintended ~uenc.. of ntion:al adioru, and (w') that in politic$ luge popular forces often decide whac happem. ups<Wng imnualbcely bid ouc ntion:al pl>n~. A>trolop:al l'orecas~S have :alwaye cwo byen. Ac the lirsc Ind. there are for=su tmck in a very gener:al l'onn, >< the second levd there is the ask o( reading this ge~nhry inco individu:al incidenu in individu:al &ves. The sr0rrealy--o llve in the wesf. This is &lsdy read by the same guru as indialing the inuninenc soccas ofhis disciple who had sometimes disguUed bimsdf as a 'western m<.rclw>c'. Anocher prediction says thac Manonmi would die, when >UY. young. on the funer:al pyre of her bwband, which is what comes to pass. despot< her father's >!tempi to ward ir off by ~mng her identity. Simibr foreco.scJ O
20 21

22

23

24

the point o( the SCO<)'. Sigmund Freud, z.-ttUdo 4• Vind, JUndorn House, New York, 1966. Signi6c::am philosophical consequences follow from telling a story by four selves, instead of one na&ndve st!/ and three others. Ba.nlcim however U gel\('nUy uninteusted in such qucsOons~ and sec:nu 10 have tried this fonn mainly for the sake of novclry. In Bengali there was a clear distinction between what were usually known 2.$ sidlnt and cdl•'td hft4tQ, d.iffercnti:ucd HpcciaUy d~rly by the diffc·reocc:s in verb fomu. Any mixing between these hit?' and low fonn.s w:as denounced as gurucdnJJI dot,: symbolic mixture of dlC hishcst and the lowest c:astc:s. By this l indaate what seems to me a 1lmpte but useful distinction bt'tween the fn"r:~::!'Je:. narr.uor and the bnguage w.ed by those who figure ~ chnactcrs

26

'0

30

31

~·iftra~nlf. BR.

u, 104.

171

Ex;ampks could be found in the cotl.verution b~rw~en the lnbu hus~nd and his unbabu.Ged wife i~ 'N~ Year's Day', BR. ii, 47, in wiUch the wife destroys the solcmrury ol £ndu.h chquettt by a devlsuring coUoqu.W .Mcscript.ton in the vcnuculu. To attri~~e Si~'s rt)CCtiOn by R~ in the epic simply ro Lokdp«M.da or anxbrorusoaJJy m modem terms~ to hiS nu.le hudheane
O..p...Hni. 32

33 ~

35

36

37

38

BR.. ii, 200.

I aan Jelling out..elsewhere an 2rgument that &nk:im rtgl-rdt'd language as a theatre oCpowcr. . It would be a big and cruciJJ m.i.su. kc 10 bc:laevc tNt the coUoqui~ Bcng;ili of the kitchen 11 a me~ rcpcc:icion of the bhadnlok Mbus' of the Jrwto'"lkind. Bankim's contcmpc foe the ltut~ bn~J'.D'SC is cntirdy jusOficd bcQU$C it is b~ on an imp~cit distinction bccween twO quite diffe..,nt colloquialisms. It u :also linked co • social or culcur:al disonaion bccwecn the nuk and the fcm:ale world for •• this point of hiscoria.l evolution, the wooun in she bhadnlok househole coAoquiol hnttuage of the babus' lw;dwlrlt/tind is • vehicle of Wile, often prurient p p ; the colfoquialnm of the btehen is noc obscene, ic u dose co t.he nrthy pnetoeiliry of the popubr. Oboccniry is noc • produce of d>e popular UJU.fPn>bOn and belt o( "'6ncment; rather, it is a produce ofthe t the violet hour •nd his wife, whotn he 6nds ....d;ng • Bcngab ~-d. which
BR. u. 28

29

Banlcim is openly contemptuous about the low oolloqui:al. what he caJh the hW~omi Mi~a.

25

Notes and Rifenncts

Tht Unltappy Consciousness

39

40

41

I~ ~que comnt<:nc on. Hindu sexu:al. mor:aliry is :also inten:sting. A husband m>£" rebaon. Morally this is ~le. But he docs thts not out of Jny ~""?'". int~t., bur ~ co his imbility co live w.thouc her-
in a genenJ waywith lndiri or Lutfunnisi (KapQikundnta) the attribute of going ouu1de of sundud definitions. Exac~y hke th!' prophecy about H~mcandn, this tOO is a two-level prophecy-the Unc oouchcd m £(nenl tcnns whrch leaves open the difficuh se-cond level of its appli~ation to an individual destiny. Sri is shown in her horoscope as priyaptd~ttl• ltatftn--one who would c:ause deuh 10 $0meone dear to her. Sitirim's family conclude that u the deares.t person (scricdy, the mOSt beloved-priYd) for a wonun mu.sc be her husband. Sn was destined to cause: her husband's death. At the end of the novel it rums our Ihat she cauJCs ck;t~th to her brothe-r. C( &tot;;,., Chapter 9, BR, i, 8SO. R.imcond and Syimcind are. 1 suspect, babus anachronistically interloping into an cartier cenrury. There arc many such ana· chronistic chu-acrcn in B:mkim's nowfs-bJbu$ misplaced, for J>lrtly humorous. partly dicbak reasons. in other times. .. For recent anllys.is o( th.is point with referenGes to Amandam12th~ 1 novd 1 ha.ve gcn~nlly ncsl~kd in thas cluprer. (because it is excnsivdy weU known, imparting a mJ>Ie~nr. bt~ to the ~ub~ i~ge of llonJUm's lite~ a~). sec )asodhara Bagctu. Pos.ttlvum and Nat~otW.ism , R..ev~ew of Women s StudiC$.. Econ of the other, nch pmcrvn the virtue o( ochers. oblt~oons of ochen, where people sang od~n· prmc, OM does not Jove co die for anoc.Mr·~sake; leave for that pbce of onfinue grandeur. Even L~ough you get a :hous.nd SaibaJjnis ,. your feet. you would not have ohe desire to love thern. CA.tlr.snlt.t. BR. i. 424. In the story Pntip and Saibalini deserve each other, for both OTC handsome. are •n love- and CJ'C'W up t~hcr as chikir("n; their love as natun.J. Social convcnUons. rule out thor nu.magc. and they a« married ag11nst their own indim.tions., apinst their- own naru~s.. to Suncbti and Candnklc:har.

172

•2

0

'Tiu Unhappy ConsdollSti<SS We muse. rem~ber tlut B•nlc.im occupies • posicion midway berwccn lWO plulosophic tndi!Jons, between eutcm and wcstem philosophic theories. In his wooic~ reason ha< ~shifting. so~ctimes double. dcmUtion. !Utionality in lhc Hindu tndi!Jon •. u~ake on wo;stem philosophy, represcn<s a ccrrain stiUncss or fixity. ond ::~.: ~~~on; • dUSial cx:unpk oft1Us wo.Jd be the ddirUtion ofthe Sthot•projn• In B~nlc.im's fictional .w~.rsc the ~rri>gcs of~· M>tihibi. P.Sup>li.• ln.'!i~· Na~ndta. Govind&lil, Candralckhar, MubOnk. Mahendra, Brojciwu 2nd

>« it feel happinas.

Wbar is tbx to the Dower?

It is unhir to.~oruaiand her crcaoor to alllwrsimplistially • scbcming woman. Indeed, Robina s character

IS.

m a se:ruc, more complex and socWly intcreuinc

th:m Kuncb's simple innoc:cnc:c. Rohi.U's evolution shows the social consaut;tion o( person:olity. and the evolution oflwr scxu:olity is • co....,qucnce-nor ofiOilllions imposed on bcr by 50Cial norms.

47 48 49

so

Sl

S2

S3 54

ss 56 57

j

2 4

6 7

8 9

Limin:olity ond rn.uercssion hove moved to the ccn!JC ofmodem crilicism through do~ inlluence of Foucault and Ocrricla. ond the inspiration of both is ot least pardy

Nu:tz.schnn. Cf. h.is KC. BR, u. ~eipite his material accomplish.mcnu, 1Can)a is haunted by his dubious and unc:fuclosable anceStry, lrtd modem writcn have seen in him a symbol of unnlerited sorrow. Tagor~. (ot innance. in his 'Kan:aakuntis:a.m.V2d' in K4tM 0 JGiiin;. Sometimes th0$t stories tre S«iolog~"cdlly analysed to yield infomution about status or women, male domination etc. in those societies. I am concerned here with doeir li«r>ry and philosopiUcol point, rother than their soc:iologial bearing. Two polnts ought perh.aps to be nude about this. 1t is $00\etimes pointed out that the materiality and references co explicit sexuXity in this story arc derived from earlier folk sources. because popular imagination and story-tc:lling is less intUbited by nonns of Wc:ncc, tute ond ctiqueae. Folk narrotives. or folk -news o( the world touch wilhout inhibition on what Bakblin hu aUccl 'the matcrUI bodily lower s1<==. or too sensual 2nd thus miss lbnlc.im himself follows the commeo
T,.,...,

K.""'lioltiin"'· pul>l.isbccl lim as essays in Banlc.im's periodial, Ban.fourlan (80) bcrwccn 187~ 2nd 1875. wu brought out t~er as a >ingk wooic in 1875. Some appearing in KA~Mti.nta J).,pt# were ~ot wri.tun by Ba~ A sceoncl. rcvisccl and enbogecl cdiuon wu brought out •n 1885. 1\ occoncl edition of this brgtt worl< wos brought out in 1889. Balr; but it is no< e.sy to find such • second tam for him. There is 2 simpler c!Ujunction in the text itself. It is supposed to have been put together by a person allccl B~v K.hosmvi!. This is sugated dearly ln the intem:>ption of IUnuJikinta in the coun scene in /Gl,...Qinltt .J*nbondi (K}). BR. ii, 1010: BR. ii. 100.

o( the cw~

s

~8R,i,109.

46

Chapter 2

under consedcnbk scna.n. ~. . : e = l y poigruntly brought our in Kapilkun
S. T eU rnc. does noc the Oowcr awe hoppincso by bl~

173

I

3

K. Pcoplc wbo

4S

Notes and Rtforences

s;......, "" broken some way or ocher. cross. Hcmc>ndro, ~ P,..Qp. ubang.bti rom<

44

,

10 II

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24

I have u~ Naoroji as a symbol for another uend of critical thought in c-;arly rut.ionahsm. Naoraji was the author of the work, Povmy ttn4 UrtBtiti.slt R.ul~ in lrulitt. which enunciated the ·dn.in theory". and beg2n the: political economic: critique of colonial rule. Yct he represents a trend o( thought wiUch t.hlnlts !Ugh a.piW_U.t principles are cnactable in the colonic:s; Ba.nkim on the other hand, coruidc:n that kind of re-enactment impossible. Any attempt at re- enaconent muse dcgcncr.nc into a cnvetty. BR. il. 92.

BR. ii, 108. The tnosc erudite and convincing presentation of this :argumem wu pe:rh2ps Bhuclev Mukhopadhyay's Siimopk Ptabatodha (£$Says on Society) written between 1887 and 1889. For an account o( his ideas, !Uych•udhuri. Chapter 2. BR. ii. 104. Ttw was s.tated much ~arljer in the Wnous essay on the babu in LR, through the sage Va.isampay:uu's omniKient speech. BR, ii, 1t. for a dis.cussion, sec below. BR. io. 101. BR. ii, 102. BR. ii. 103-4. I usc the: tcmu language, g3me and life form nther than the more de.ar)y defined pnccice 0c social fonn, precisely because these are httie{. But a hazier tnJCNtc of chat kind an exisr only under • colorual dispcnsotion. It woWcl be wrong to deny tloot lhcrc is • certain theorctial quahty obout tiUs thinlc.ing. but cquaDy. to extnpobte a fuUy sttu
174 25

Noru and Rtj'trmw

1M Unhappy CorutiouJnw In lhis piece, :md the two following pieces in l..tJk R.aJuuya &bu ;md C.miJabh" (TI•c A'S), thcstotn form is alluded co more mtemuofthe~m.1.ntic:: and rhetorical

aspects. what Sanskrit rhe-toricians would caU in temu of the 41i•mkilrn used. Laur ~ $~rimcncs wlch a P.Cliticintion of the stoc:n (on]l. tint sorncwtut satiriartf m AIIW1" ~,..,, BR. u, 81. bkr mocc seriou.sly, in Al'f4lltlMNtll. with enonnous su«ns. AnOther point ut.u~y missed by ~dmi~.g commentators of the H indu religion is the gre21 cornpcuu.veness <~~mong Its deanes. Usually, conuncnuton poim only to 1he tolenncc rcwlang from the pantheism of Hindu religious bc-lic(s.: a wotthippcr o£ one god an now!th< wnc f>mily an wonlup dilfcren< gods. Firs<, of counc such poaibiliucs should noc be ovcr·vncn
an~ narrow l1m1U to such tolc!1ncc . .RJtual P.Dcticcs of the stricdy Yegt"Urian va•Htavos can hardJy be compaublc wtth the ntu:a.l slaughter (bdfi) practised by JOkt~ts. How~vt'r, the intolcr:ance is .sometimes $hjfted to the pb.nc of a str.m~ fonn of vert»~ mcasur~_nr. h 1$ conunon to. 6~ nocns to one deity whida would HK~ tfut ~r ckatscs :are: always worshippang ~ his feet. or more mystieaDy. 2 nuD100 bralunis would no< be able ~ of cxccu tS qutte often a part o( the stocn form. and B:ankim k'ts ~~ grear possi.'bilitid of tnvesty.

27 28 29

BR, ii, 9-10. ll(h•lld•gwLJ, BR. ii. 1- 9. Biihw. BR. ii, 1o-12, which I rcg>rd :as one o£ d>< best pieces of sad~ Banltim ever ~e. For i<> m.«oric>l ekpncr, pobtial potnt, wei w sheu fUry o£
30

Tlus n: ryptcll of t.he double me1.n.ings used in tndition'll writinc, fo r the term J!.U~a meoms both vtrtues and the tnore neutr.tl meaning. qualities.

31

For :a brief account. $C'C below. ~is is -a com~ phase used by religious texts. to tnvigibte their own int¢tprCO· cacm. The rrxt audf olfen alonpde a sort o( authoritative cornmcntlry. K
32

33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

ByiiRhr4<4ry<~

c•la c"ta calt~ ht, Cit116itan. 598. BR. ii, 92. lbod., 93. lboct. 93

43 44

45

·~ 47 48 49

51

·

CJR, ii, 93. Ibid., 93 lb.ct. 934. lbod., 94. lbod., 94.

~~~·d:~,;,~:.
in the sense that he rules over them; but that is not cquaJJy or in the same stalSt true of all thc5C ~s . They are called his others in the looser scn.st" th:at their experience of the workl was bound co be very differ<:nc, and they could chcrcrore, in satire. be seen as rcprcsc.nuciva. of other pnnciples. Ex>mples o£ the>< arc: A Crit
52 53

DtM
54

R..jmi.

55

Dlum•lliik¥. in LR. BR. io, 42--4. BR, ii, 48. BR, ii, 4,.._7, p,.;,;,u .....,; ,..,;,.; (Old Women and
56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64

65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

n

78

The
42

·

so

175

79

80

Ibid., 399. Ibid., 399.

.

Ibid., 399--400. Ibid., 250. LR. 8R. u, 44. Ibid., 4>-6. BR. ii, 47. Ibid. Ibid. A-«i'M twm ,.• .;,;;, BR. ii. 251. Ibid.. 252. Ibid., 254.

Ibid., 256. Mikhail Bakhtin, R•brlois••d His Wotld (uans. Helene lswolsky), lndian> Uruvcrsity Press, Bloomington, lndiam.• 1984. I h:~vc argued e2rlier that Bnjdwar in OtM Qudltur4n;, a.lchciugh a proa gonis-t

pbced i.n .l hiuorictl milieu 1n whidl the babu h2d no< am~. is as much a. h:~bu :as more IU'>igh< end of !he l!ory. . Mrn4h'ni.

81

o;;.; C.Ndhur4nf.

82

/Ufti•M.

~.l

Sol

85 86

Cuwl~.

This Ius been brough< ~ very powerfuUy by !he recen< cum:n<:y ol Mokh•ol

&khtin's work. BR, ii, 373. . Ways in which wch delicate opcr.ations can still be done, within the gencr.aJ ambit of nuncist theory. 111. Jhown in Volosinov, M,mci.tm 4ml lht Pltilo.wphy c{ L~mguagt>, {trans. Ladubv Ma«jb ond I.R- nrunik) H><'~>
1_76

87

88 89

Nott1 and Rifntnres

711< Unhappy Consciousnru IY.IIvc something _co do ~ith i~t:a.ngible ~ut fundamental things like word$ 2nd language tOO, ~sodesles.s m 12ngJblt ones hke production. It unot dairned however thai the analysts unckruken "an application ofthe theoretical i®ghu ofVolosinov. The ~nguUtic exp
unguage), BR, ii. 368.

90 91

92

1

9

10

Notice the pnctkaUy ickncial dmription of the nugjstntc's coun in Mua'r4m

Cu4
II

12

Chapter 3

K(11!"'"""•

Tlus chapter dUcwses Dankim's major theo~ual wort (KC). In my YICW Chit i$ a thcoretial more than a h.istoncal work; (or its 'hd;concaJ' argumentS could c.asily be .F.aultcd even by Rabindnn:uQ Tagorc, a person n#t4nMJdlt~ and SrirfW.I!hll«w.t-.1'14 which is an unlirushtd cotnmc'ntary up to Chap<bly, cf., for inmn<;e, •Dtww<w • H;N/u. dharmA'. And it is not surprising that some of his mOSt signifia.nt thoughts lbout how co behave torrcclly m dafferent situations arc co bt' found in h.i.s novels. As this paper conccntntcs on K~'!otaritra it simply outlines a part of what Bankim had to say on the nuuer of rdigion. 2 Ludw1g feuerbach, &st',.,t o]Cbristicr.nity, Unpr, New York, 1957. introduction. 3 The tenn cbs:s.ical is meant in the w:nse in wtuch art aiticism UKS it Ind«d, B~nk.im in my view carrits on a n)()fe or less expliac polemic ,.,;,h aU chnc texts which betw«n tht-.m constitute and sauaurc the a.norUc:al V:Jisnava tnditlon. ' ·· 5 This is a hermeneutic qutstion that arises out of Danki.m's argument, but one he chooses to ignore. If we s.how how &Kcrent the 6gure ofKnna i~ in the succCS$ivc · texcs, yet it is evident that they are noc: perplexed or un(fU1y tTOubled by sudt inc:omist~ncy. o.bviou.sl'y there ~ppr::us s ques:aon-why do they noc. think so? On th~ Simplat hermencu·uc principle tlut If we 6.nd something UIUC«pbblt and wrong. we mll$l enquire why oth
13

14 IS

16

ours.

7

This is the way of figure the IUdM is first interpolated, and gndu:ally come$ co dominatt· the story both theologjc.ally Jnd acnhc:tically. for instance, c:~«p~·y ft'ligious texts like gosp<"b and acts within the 6rst or-der u:xu ofChns.cWUnd n.om.s Acquoms a.e all sobdly anribut«<:to mdividuaJ aut.hon. in conf'r.tS( co eithe-r the celebn.tcd :autborkssncss o( tome texts hke the Vtc£u or the: Giti (wtuch tw a.n extrmtdy mtcrnting satus on the question of authorship). or the Oinuy atmbutioos of the M•Mbhir«• and

che 8

PurO~u

At least p:artly this is the reason behind cbbonte riruah of ~pbcing intentions by a
17

18 19

20

tn

to write a book-which requires a special individu·alicy. R.at.her they are appointed by someone to do this, and coruc.quently act u something bcrwecn an instrument and an amenuensis. Behind the d-tbon.tc convt-ntion of invoa.tions rh.is nuy be the real operative point. I< ouy nO( be accidcn~ tha< the scal's - · A second solution, found in Hegel. for jllS()nc;c, holds due: if there is any m.inimal order m this infin.ity. this in.finjty is kno~able. Hira~yakalipu had, on the common venion of =< or god. ei. Cod obvoowly in«rpre<ed UU. co mean half·X half. y which geu round < anchropomoy>dcva, with real geruus, suppbn<s ~by the Buddha. obviously'C.. is Hari himself. and it is tDVdfY of sons to s::ay due he is an .,...an,. As 2 rnuh the powerfUl appul of c.he Buddha is enluted in the service of . Cltagovi"da, canco t, simodadimocb.rah, sJob 13. He U quite consistent about h1s alternation of the cb.Sivatira. for a litde btcr he congratulates Kcsava for spreading com~on (Kmw,yQmOt.ona.att}, I, 16. Cit•gctl-'ind.o, canto l. 13. ~nenlly known as the pudiy> ~va tradition. For a~ account of chis. Sisir Kumar 0.., n.c M,../ U...., Eu4ys .., Mlly, 'Radha: A M:od Lover', 690'. For a more detailed examination, Sasi Bhwan DasguptJ.• sn~dltdt KramaviJtil (m Bengali). Rabindr.uuth, wic.h instinctive poetic sytnpathy. celebrates precisely this aspc:c.t in his 'Vaisnav Kabiti', s.,.;, T•ri, RR. vol. i, WB Covt., 1961, 367. KC. BJi; ii, 191, 4~. Although he does noc. UK the tenn •cbs.Sicintion•, Sudh.ir Ka.br male~ a smub.r pomt a~t che Cil'll"""nk S..dhir Kakar, 'The seer« pamoo. of Radlu •nd Kmhna' in Veena Ou (ed.), 1M W,../4 ••d th< WMI4. New Odhi: Sage Pubhatioru, 1986. For those with an uncompromisingly empirical bC'nt of mind, dus could be a tCport of what actually happc~ embellished by a grea[ deal of simply verbal luxuriance

..,,a1.4

Notes and Riferencts 178

21 22

23

24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34

35 36

37

about sex. Rabindr.1nuh would we his powerful dis-tinttion :md say that it is short on facts but rich in truth. The technical name of the idea ccntnl to th:at doc;crine is ptTmtrbl~td.Ui. I have <1rgued later, in dte next ch:~pter, th:at :10 identical antithesis is observed in the ch.a~cter ofSicirim--when he- acts on th~ bl$iS of reason he is c:apable of great historic action; when he fall$ into .sensuality. tJuough his attadunent to Sn. he becomes gr:tdua1ly incapable of hittorical or practical iniliative. As we shill see, Tagorc Ms a very different tlttory of the significance of the Krsn~ r.gure which he sets out with clarity and eloquence in his critic~ apprai.sai. Or Sankim's KC. O n his view, K~t.Ja's story is poetic and dlen::fore aesthetically true. It is doubtful if Tagore would have treated K~.t~a·s Life as a pr3cdcal text in 1he s~rne '!'ay as B~nkim: in ~ny em he would nO!- reprd jt as :a text c;re~tc:d by ~ hinoncal K~.,_a, but by a poet, n~.mtor, who tned to 6x ~tic:aUy the me:anins ofbeingan exceUent. complete hum~n being-pwru~ouama. For an intc:resting recent account o(the difference,-why Rima U nar(J(andrmna ~nd K~w.a puJ~otlama, s~

D.K. Matib.I, 'Ram Nmcandnmi, K!1~• Pu~U~otum, D
or

KC,410. KC..412 T::tgort's theOry of a poetic truth, if reconstructed system.-tically, would

40 41 42

43 44

45 46

47 48 49 SO 51 52

53

app~r

'In such cas($ the conjectures of a p~t could come much closer to rc:a.l hiMorical uuth dun thc.conjccrures of a historian . Facts, which arc called (actS i~ English, cruth is C:ar J:a.rgcr dun th:u. One h:u co cxtriate truth from the hea-p of faets by rc'UOning and by imag,cution. Quite often we~~ he-ap$ of dry faggots ofinfonnation in history. But truth is evoked in poetry by the poetic genius • . . . IfK~ry.a had a tU~tory. that would p~rhaps have conuinW a thousand incidents which would have no pemunent value even though perfonncd by f<.M:.. himself. That means thu these acts would not have exprcued the K~r)anes..c; of Kw_la.. Besides, since it is impossible to know everything, some o( these nuy have 2ppe:arcd to be even contr.ary to his proper nature. Every person doeS a gte3t number of things which arc inconsistent with what he reaUy is'.

or

an obvious problem of logical consistency. If the marl< of the first byer of the epic is that ~~·s godliness is not decb.red, and th~c: is what nukes it valuable and ntionally acceptable, this dearly goes against the Gtt.a. dearly his favourite among rcligiow texts. The Clt4 announces His godliness bl~tantly and const:a.ntly, 2nd it also t:akes recourse to the supernatural to compel bdief, since the· viS.WrUpa JarJM is not reduced ll'Uttri.alliticalJy Or rationilly tO 1 pOS'Sible hallucination o( Aljuna. Although this is crucially signi.6ant to his case, Bankim does not give tliis

KC. 427-8. Rabindr-1n:ath Tagorc. 'Bh d~4 0 ChtJndo'. On this point Tagore showed complete consistettcy. When he argued seriously in his artide on Somkim's book, he uk~ the same line:

KC, Chapter 10, 427-9, Praldipllmirvitcan KC, ~28-9 . 'aghal4nagha14nakau14l
very sim.ibr to Ham Georg Gada.mer's Ttuth 11nrl Method.

38 39

179

The Un!Jappy Con;ciousncss

54 55

an el01bonte: treatment claiming dut he would do it elsewhere. This presumably is his commenc::ary on the Cird which does not actually co1ne: upto this episode. KC, 429. . R
and Sons, Calcutta, 1356 (Bengali er:a). KC, 431. KC, 431. KC, 432. KC, 432. KC, 432. BanJcim docs not use another possible 1rgument here---<.hu this theory on top of being wrong is also presumpNow, becawe it thinks tlut it is our responsjbility to save Him from suffering. We cannot do this, because He ha.s more powers tha.n we have, also because He has more knowledge than we have. It could illustnte what could be called, misquoting Marx, the world-consuming pretens.ions of the babu, for he typically asswnes that he is a trifle more p<>werfU.l than the Almighty and a $hade more dear-headed tlun Him. Banlcim does not c:mploy the argument for reasons of economy, but I ~m sure he would tnve if he saw an occasion for making an additional dig at the ba.bu. 11\e first argument i$ more powerfhl dun the second. Argument B s:ays that even if God sutli!rs it must be for an instant. But A is more radial beause it shows He does not suffer. or to speculate whether He: sufferS is a mispredi~tion. and tbetefore the question of whether (or an instant or longer and the comparability ofHi.,..with our time does ncx ari$C. However the idea of a scale- relativity to time is intriguing. He assens that the rd:ation between God and men is like the size difi"erence berween Gulliver and the Lilliputians etc. Relativity of time can be constructed in seven.! ways-this way of doing it is rather odd. KC, 433. Tite form of this treatise i$ interesting; it is written as a diala;gue, 1 fonn that enjoyed great popularity in the Enlightenment rradition. Some of its purdy discursive: characteristics ought to be remarked. It does not pn:sem the preferred ideas with a false impression of ovc:rwhdming rationafjty, which implies that <11nyone who denies them i.s de6cient in rational thought. On the: contrary the dialogue form grant$ :.. certain rationality to the interlocutor, be~use he is -allowed to c::alk back and argue. which implies at least that there is :a possibiliry of 20 argument on the opposite side. RationaliS( autholl often s.how a strong: preference for a dialogical fonn in wh.ich in the course of stating the grounds of belief on both sides, the other viCw is underm.ined. Early Christian missionaries composed some religiou.s tteatiS('S in which Hinduism w:u: seen arguing against some form of Christianity,

180

The Unhappy Consciousness to the detriment of the Hindus of coune. Thuls Banlcim"s book could perhaps be

seen as an answer in kind. But this was a perfonnmcc in which, typicaUy, he uses 56

57 58

59

'~ 1

Notts and Riftrtncts

techniques of rationallit culture to undennine iii theory. KC, 434. Banlcim calls these-kind of people, who hold stricdy Cartesi>n views,

70

'Sdwara. Vaignin.i.ka•. theist sdentisa... The tenns 'mt:ur..!' 2nd 'f.lpction' are ob,."iously evolutionist. KC, 434. The equanimity with which Banl:im intrOduces this·doclriml chango is reilly astounding. For rhci 6nt thke laws of the univene are simply che three functions of Hindu theology ~nder'the 6imsy potitivistic gad> of'bws'-c:reation, maintenance and destruction. Bankim simply adds the Spt'n<eri.an idea ofimprovement as if nothing is more natural

72

71

73 74 75

Partha Charteljee, 'Cultur<: and pow« in the chought of Bankimchandra' in

Thonus Pantlwn and Kenneth Deutscb (eds). Pt>litk41 nought in Modem India, New OcUli: Sag< Publications, 1986. 60 • On the point of Con~tean sociology, Jasodlun Bagohi's work is perceptive. 61 That seems to be. the main point in the presentation of his ch:aracter in the CDitanyacoritdm!fa. 62 Namwar Singh, O.Uri Paramparii Ki Khoj (in Hindi), !Ujkarn>l Prakashan, Delhi, 1983. Singh follows up the search begun by Pandit Hazir:i PrasOl point by clainung that radials an ltave rwo possible :attitudC$ to their tradition. They can convince themselves du.t they are the fine nontonfonn.i.st or critical people in history, and the whole eulier antiquity was oppressive, dishonest, cowardly, jn which asc, they fate a whoUy monolithic tradition wh.ich has to be entircly destroyed. AhcnutiveJy, they can believe with ·Engds that there must have been nontonfonnist aitital people before them, and these trends h:ave to be rediscovered and respected. Singh, if I have understood him correctly. eloquently defends the sec:ond view. 63 C•it•nr«•ritom!f• (CC). I, v. 64 CC, I, vi. 65 See the CC passim. Especially the slokas which are recommended as his particular favourities; eg. the splendid slob in Madhylllil4. l. vii. In the uarulations appended tO the edition by Sukumar Sen, strangely. th~ slolw are often incornpreheruibly de-eroticiz.cd. For i~ncc, this particular slob from Ktivyapfakdi# contains a phrase 'kaum'Orahtttah' which is wanly rn.nslated ;as 'the penon who stole my mind' rathe.r than 'the person who stole my virginity", a somewJu.t different proposition. 66 Tagore, 'Vidyiparir Radhiki', Ad!tunik Siihity•. 63ff. However the variety that Tagore notices and interprets so beautifully are tU internal to the figure of R jdhi 67 Interestingly. the ability to accomplish the impossible and the exce>~ religious system of belie&. To detennine exaaly what was

76 77

78

79

80

181

regarded as meca.phoric:tl ~and what an unmet:tphoric:al statement thus bec~mes a v
Dlumnata#Va, BR. ii, 588. Characteristically, Banlcim refuses to provide a Bengali translation of the offending slob in the V4Straharatw episode in his own disc.uss.iop. bea use ofwhat he coruiden obvious sexual pervel>ity (rather than ·explicit r<:ferences to the body). Kakar emplu.sizes the fant:aming streak. in the Cit4_eovind4, C(. K.akar. KC, 464. KC, 466. For instance, the theory of pmnah/uJJ:ti in the CC lees Ridhi as an alienation of God's own self into anoth
lalpiigifi b
Tr:anslated blandly this. means:

You go to Mathura and become the king. you put on the red rurban on your heul., you exchange the Oute in your hand for the royal sceptre; from the lover you become the dispenser ofjustice; now if you do not punish the tnnsgre:ssions of Ridhi (or Radha che sinful wonun) how C2.n you s:ave your honour? This illustrates the problcrns; God cannot tnnsST~ the rules He is supposed to uphold; He cannot Himself do what He is suppos,ed to punish others for doing. The song covers the rru.in problem by polite ness: for jt neglecu to mention the accomplice ofR..idhi's transgressions. However, the sunz2 is (:a.scin-ating for another sociologial reason: jr is replete with an anuz.ing modem symbolism. Two symbols o( power :arc used; o~e i.s the u~rprising sceptce which both the king and the

Not<s and Rtftrtncts 182

Tnnslarions of slobs ruler ol the univer« C24 contce comables. f!om the British clays, and they W
Red turb~ns are indiau>n olpower not only i.n CaJa.ua scree-G. bur also in ancient Muhun, and by <xtmsion in the universe in gencnl. I 6nd this idea o(the almighty sharing lOme duncteristics with the Calcuta constable inesistible. It is not at aU illogical •nd may indicate a Ll>cnl conception of creation. For H e is afttt all the c;onst1ble of tht univem and shows c.h.e same mixture of omnipotC"ncc and supc:rOuicy. He~ ~ntiUiy the ~me thing though His beat it somewlut more extensive. Since then, alas. Ca.lcutu policemen have been divested of this :article 81

82 83 84

85 86

87

88 89

90 91 92

of clothing. •nd consequendy, of their similarity widt the Almighty. T hough chis is more $0 in the case ofiUdhi chan "Y Sit:i Jnd Dnupodi, the cwo ocher feminine ideals in the Hindu cr.tdicion. BuciUdhi's chancter is doubl~ged

utd tnrugrH:S.ive. h is in fact diffic:uh to prns her into service as an unproblematic idnl: obvioully she could not be an ideal wife, and the idea of an ideal mistress (ocwionally evoked in $Om< ~~va doctnn«) is itself deeply ironical in the monJ univene of the Hindus. CC, M.oJA,.tffii, I, 7. Mithw u the popular used in /Gr.,,. cydn o( that p>tt o( the story in which KntJ• con oway to fvluhun, and uodcr the prcasur<: o( umpccilicd business, bccorn« inaeassngly disnnt from his (ric:nck an V{R in the s.Joi1y4 AtokMy, ccbbon, 1982, rcprdcd 21 •uthoritocivc. My poin( is not the: autbeoticaty of the vcnc, but the conccpanl poinc it .makes. Tasore. BIY••1inh
=

14.

23.

35.

73.

74.

niiithobtla . .. '. When Mahendra. one: of the principal protlgonisa in Andntlamatlr is taken into the underground temple he finds three .6gurcs of the mothtr--wMt she W25, wlut she as. and what she will be. Her wonhippen however ue vai~o.avas, an extnor.. dm:t.~ sr..tc of aftiirs. From this point of view thi1 is ~ simple substirution of Ridha by S.•ti. BR. ii, 269. KC. BR. ii. 581. DT, BR, ii, 647-()0, gives ch< argument in full. KC ,612. The IUtkr argumc:nt is sc.t out in the- next dupe«. Htte rnislc2ding becwsc ~vism is normally associated with not>-Y>olcncc and don - lit the advo<xy of wu.WCe iOiucions. Afttr all, the CC odVlS<S v>isn:.IV>S to rolencc and forbear. l~pi nmWM Ult«iMI ~~de..

. 89.

91.

••

the Cft.i, BR. ii.

93

R.e~nforccd by his un6nishcd cbmmcnmy on

94

95

Bank:im somec:imcs uses this argument as wdl. P>rdu Chalt
96

KAmt~tdUntn

97

DT. DR. ii, 618. Victot Turner. Dr4mat, Fit!Js 4nJ Mttaphers, lth'Ka: ComcUUnivenicy Press., 1974. Citi, ca.nto IV, 8.

98 99

183

Th< Unhappy CottStiousnas

P41r•. BR, ii. 92..

92. 93.

cir~d

in Chapter 3

Mov~d by d~ep compassion, you condemn the Vedic way that ordains :aninuJ slaughter in rites of sacrifice. You tak~ fonn as the enlightened Buddha, l(nl)a. Triumph, H ari, Lord of the World. (Barbara StoUer Miller, Cttagovinda of Jayadcva, Delhi: Motilal B~nar1idass, 1984, 7, I. MiUer translates this more poeticaUy as 'until the secret passion of Radha and Madhava triumph on the Jamuna-riverbank'. (69). But it could also be more litenUy tnrulated as 'let Radha and Madhava triumph who thus play on the banks of the Jarnuna'. It is a namtive of old times, which contains instruction abo ut dhat7114 (religion/ethiC$), artha (nuterial affairs), kama (love) and mo~ (salvation), that is called hi5tory. The tnruforrnarioru of the love of Ridha and 1nts me; this night is like that first night of Caitra; the wind attics the fragrance of the same flowers; 1 am stiU the same m e; we an stiU enjoy our union. Still, why does my soul wish to go back (atuin again) our (fim) union in the arbour on the banks of the Rebi? Let your foot quell the harsh Jun Burning its fiery form in me to torment Love. (MiUer) Yo u are my ornament, my lif~. My jewel in the sea of existence. (Miller, 112).

184'

Notts 4nd Rif<m~LtS

171t Unhappy Consciousness ~hapter 4

20

21 22

2

f d? not ~ to .d eny chat. bist~ is only one ~mont many possible WJys o( ,s cnmg u.p an ~c.Uigent rdaoon With c.hc pasc. Myths and ocbef' rurntivcs o(u:0 accomplish a J.un.ilar.task. ft is hazardous to hlve a purely chauvinistic temponl pr<:ference in &vour of hlscory. They do""l>otscem to poaclSt <Jcistenlialsatanenu; while their. existence in an empry sense is not doubt«!, they ~nd p«u!iady on

23 24

25

accounts. There tt no entry into :any hlstoric:al incident except through the immense 3

vulnerability of :.C:CX>unts which teU about them. For s ckt>i!Cd snd pcreep
produces sU
their own

6 7

9 10

II

12

13 I~

IS 16 17

18 19

26

27 28 29

cas.e.

BR. ii, 235. Assenions to this genenl dTta are toO numerous in lb.nkim to be listed. I h:aYe rdencd only to the mon: colourful o( his sutements on this nutter. BanJdm 1s indeed a pioneer in this--Jeelpg hinory writing as a narntivi~ing aot, as a muthos, • theorclces after the constructive prineiples of famous utopias like Moore's. In a quite dnmys:.te:rious 2nd unrhd.orial sense. Hue J fuvc: simply followed Arthur Oanto•s argument about the nature o( rurntivc: stnlC'nccs. By eh:aocina the mm.bvc zero, we can alteJ" the values of all ilC'ms in the narrative series. A.C. Danto, A""lytica/ Phil•l4plty of Hist•ry, new edition pubbshed as Non.rion ond /(nqw/- entircgsn and ldi unlinishcd tess 0< hUIDOd JiSandhyi and M.hird~tta }illdtt Prafmat.

:lO 31 32

185

R>khaldas Dandyopsdhy;ty wrote historical novels on the huily glorious period in Beng;ali history, tike Dlwmopil and P¥!"" K..t!ti.. BR. ii, 234 (about lndis}, 336 (about Bengalis}. BR, ii, 33:H. BR. ii, 234-44. Banlcim is pan!y conscious of the many-vslued mesning of the term, BR. ii, 240. foe an interesting di.Scussion which statU off 1iorn 8artkim.•s rrnu.rb.. Asok M jcn. 'Sat koti kotir irilatha', VibhO,, Puja, 1987. I must make dear what I mesn by fuuiness. Those who use this way of scting do not nccesurily 6nd it cliJiicuk to cbsnc:ttriu iodiW!uals or situations dearly. Usually they luvc elaborate procedures which on alee oii only on • dear identification o( the asc. But there is no tdenti6cation whieh is overriding aU Others, and seconc:Uy. these communities do not fed an urge to enume,rate lhe:m· ldvu. Arithmetic caim paniculady indebt«~ to him for .Uowing me to read his work in nunusa-ipt. Nori.,..,lut 11oought ••lth< 0>/..U.I W.tld, Zed Preu, London, 1986. This move is turd to dtaDCtcriu: is it compliance or invenion? lu •n intelligent user o( b~ sud onncepu 8snkim t!Ucusses the conceptual dtf!'erence between dhanna and rdigion on teVenl oocssions. E.g. ~.,..._ Chapter 3, DR, ii, 589, and 1.ppencix 8, 672. Olumu is not any religion; but wlut i$ common tO them aU is·the: ruture of nun. And certainly not eotcna:inow: with 'nute:rW'.

MAr"4'•.

BR,ii, 92. Ba.nk.im., in coarsening anger. asks occasioru.lly what the ancestors

o( the British wer< doing when Indians~ c:ompo$lng their cady philosophical tcxu. Actu.Uy the line o(descent of the nineteen""entury Benph babu from the composen o( the VtdaJ was of course as unquationablc as that liOm ancient C"'eb to Viaorisn England. Such mull nuttcrS an: •pt to be forgeuten in the l~at of civiliz>tion:tl

contnu.

33 34

u,..

Max Miillcr, Soad Tats in Marx and W cber' Occasional Paper No. 53, Nehru Memorisl M-.un and Library, April, 1988. Tag<>«. 'Aitihisilc C.u.', /liM.

Ut1AY.,...,_.lL

35 36

37 .'8 39 40 41 42

43

This hunger for history is just • seod. We now teslise thu the Congrs<"'dm and Punjab, we wish as much to see the India of the past. SOmijik Ptol>.ndhtl, cf., IU,.m.udhuri, &r•p< R<eotuihrc4. Tagore, '8hirat\.-.qcr ltibis', /tiiW, 4 . Ibid. Ibid. On this point Bsnkim's argument and Togon:'s.,. slmast identical Only the tone is di!Tcttnt, Bankim's aud sod s.rdonic, Tlgo<"'l hurt and kntimental. &nkim docs not forget to mention that they have also ma& a modest sum oC money by writing their accountJ. BR. ii, 336. Togo«, /li/W, I, 2.

186 44

45 46 47

48

50 51

52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61

T:Jgorc is ~ p:.rtic.ulari.y eloquent rcpccsentacive o( this theory. d. tl.e first two mays in /tih~U. Ibid. BhWtwtst itiAi-"T ,u,;.•. ib•d. For a v~;y s.imibr ~IC· BR. Ji. 342. Ta&\)rc's justi6otion 2p-pears in a review •nick in Jrilr4J, 117. To dcccnninc what is uuc: in history and wfut is. &1se is a vc.ry dlfficulc usk.. WOnb grow OB like 2Nti'UCC ~>cine~; lhcy S0 Oft ch2ftging from > appcuccl to people: is 2lso 2 major object of enquiry. Thetcfore in the rwn11on o{ histonal events the W>Y the hunun mind mincks with objcctr"" inc:idc.....-.l~at is 1\istoriaJ auth. lu • tcsult o{ the wotlc of the KONUru Khool, copccW!y of Hans Robert J•uss •nd W olfgong lse<. Reception 2e rise to some very difficult probkms, and my own material ana argumcna would have co be cast in a different form if ( we« tO attempc: a consistent appliacion of the m:t'ption theoty. l wis-h mcrdy to succ th2t heft iJ cxcciL:nt SJOUnd for >pptiaoion of the ftcepoon JKOOI<""'ri.J""· A point clearly perceived by Tasorc in the rcm2tlcs quoted eorliel"--S •nd Bomb2y .,.. intimotcly connected with the will to fed a nearness. community with the put, with the Aryuu in this ase. fly implication, both these commun.iti~--of ch~ present an~ the put--are ll~:lgiru.ry. or nther these are pan of the umc process o£ conscNCUon. 1 have discu~.ed lhis in an earlier section o( chis wofk, d. Chapter 2. SOmy• (Equility), BR. ii, 381-406. &ngadntry of lkng:al), BR, ii, 287- 314. BR, ii, 336. DR. ii, 330. M. N . Roy. India in Trdn.sititm, Minerva Associates, Calcutta. IJQngW), BR, ii, 344fT. BQngJIn: fi>t insunce the &uncd opening pomgc of Tasorc's coAy on lndi>.n history with me

'· 63 6A 65 66 67 611 69 'I~

71 72

73 74

75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82

foUowinc;

Bu.t do we 6.nd any tust:orical il'atcri~ abouc: Bengal in all this? In our view not • single Ensli\b book c<m<.W th: rC2I history of Benpl AU thot th':"' c;onuin arc ~potts about those Mwlim n*lS who dcdccd thcnuelv.s w11h mcaninpu Odes o{ tWN>bs and subcdon ofBc:n~, by prone and unworriC11 •n their beth. n.... report the binlts. deaths. &cnotul squabblco and pt~<>. Tlut " ooc the 1\urt of tt. It be>" .,., r.:bnon w;th the history o{ Bcnp. It conains no history of the Bcng:ali people. DR,

u, 336. 62

Notes and Reftrtnm

Tiot Unhappy CorudoUJntss

Dcspttc '>C'aUt>rUI unn..qv hostile. lndivMf;,g) Mwlim ehu>c1nk. ~ (~bom, T~ ~ ~ rc>l "'Sic hetOlBC of Rip.nlu). But be considcn lndi> havmg btm "' sub;eaion foe SCvaJ hundtcd yan. His dtscomfOrt W'ttb this liDe ofthinbng is bowev« quite rut Cf. the pootl:><~ su~clon o{lndU. BR. ti,l41&: Since • (onn ofuninformed secularism iJ "'n'cndy in Whion (which bcbcvcs tlut t h e - uninfonncd you arc about the lndim

83 84

85 86 87 Btl

89 90

' tradition. the more secular you are) and it iee:s che confljct bctwe~n modem seCular and comrnun~ forces as st«tdUng endks.5ly into history. and c:bssi6es pm writers into :mce:ston o(modem political parties, it is ~rfups useful to quote dru posacripc. Since., however, such judscmenu are b~d on rumoun about B1nkim r.nher than a reading o( tw: ccxcs, ic i:s unltkdy co Mvc much cfr«t: that is the power of pofidc:al tumoun.. Howcvct, hete iJ what B:mkim "Y" The aum.« w.~nu c:o mike the humble submission that no ~r $hould think tlut rhe purpccc of this book is to indic2tc SOlD<' sort o{ diffen:n« bc<w<•n Hindus •nd Mudims. If someone ;, • Hindu be is not >ui:O (O< so auny centuries, lhcy must have b«n better in totcSnUnly qwlitics tlun contcmponry Hinduo. tn Otbcn, Htndus ablct tlun Muslims. Along with othct qu>litics be who lud the qualuy o{ dhonno on hH side, whcthct a Hindu or • M~, wu superiot. Even With other qwliaa, he who bcked dlumu, • Hindu 01 • Muslim, wu inf
H•r•pr.stri R«•n•t•r.gr•"" (ed. Satyajit Ch2udhuri). Akb'" S.hcr Khos Roz, DR. ii, 953. BR,ii. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Qui Nurul lslvn, IU~mri' Hunlik Prdacc co the fourth edition o( R;#inluJ, BR, i, editor's introduction, p. 40. 'I h,!Ve never wrincn a hiscon~ nOvel lxforc. Du~tt4nJinj, CatttfrajdtJr4t or Sitar-. c.annoc be re~rded as historical novels·. ; The two gr<>t <X>mplcs >r< $inti and Pnph.U.. LWa.cs shows this at erne length in n~ HiJtotit41 Novtl. In Didcens's A T•l< ruoru, Ott 'Tit< HiJt«i<•l Nowl (u. ~ndn Bc:munn) Univcni, 1984. Oatthn ca1kd VoJWrc •c:hc last h1ppy writer·. A,..;, O..'J"'UV, BR. ii, 791. Harapr>S>d Ius crw >rinc the sonc, It dtd no< ~ tight by 2ny fomul criteria. &rWm, S>Kri rcpom, was
s..m.

"''h

91

92 93

187

Notes and Rtfereuces Tht Unhappy Consciousness

188

94 i.e., exacdy wtut th(: hermit uys to Mahendra in their conv~nation. <;£ T . fuythaudhuri, CMfOJ'< Rewu.idtrt.d. Y6 AMnd•matJ., BR, '· 698. 9"1 DR, BR, ii, passinL 98 BR. ii, 643. 99 BR. ii, 776-7.

95

100 La.liu's JOUrney to C..:atcutta in Tagore's novd, Cord. 101 Though R#jsinJ.tJ was written btfore tJ..ie aouSilan trilogy, it W3S pn.cticaily rewritten in iu second edition. 102 KC, BR. ii, 410. 103 BR, ii, 213. tO+ Hcmc:andn: is not a Rajpur, but he is in the s:unc

c~t.

lOS Bank.im makes references about all these three groups in his em.ys but wroc:e novels:

106

·101 108 109

110 111 112

113 114 115 116

only about Rajputs. R.C. Outt indud<S the Mmthas. By the time Tag<>t< write< IUs patriotic songs. poems and e"ays, all thtee-RajpuiS, Manthas and Sik~t< firmly established in their ironic: place in the Bengali imagination, as both others and selves, as dteir i0l2ginary ancestors. In his remarks in the fourth edition Banlcim does not show an a.warenest of dUs d.is.tinc;tion. He gives instt-ad moral reasons why his rewrinen oc reread history is true. Aun.ng:z_cb is immoral. Rijsinha is mont, thus sating quite explicitly the point about wlu.t J have called just war. BR, i, editor's introduction, p. 40. Though Bankim does not direetly invoke contnc:urian arguments, there is a clear in.O.uence of basic social contract ideas in his. general thinking about d\e nature and legitimacy of governments. The Ci'tii, canro 2, sloka 47. Literally meaning acllesst~.ess. Max Weber, R~ligion of lntlit~, pa5$im. l luve dealt with this more fuUy in Cluprer I. Cf. Clupter l. BR. i, 819. S~nley Cavell, 'Must we mean what we say?' in Mwt Wt Mtlln W1&at w~ Say. Cambridge Univenity Pn:.s, Cambridge, 1976. This tw been wonderfully argued in Arthur Oanto's NtttYat•'on ttnd K.nmvltdgt. Danto. TransfiguratiDrt of the Commonploct, Ha:rvud UrUvcnicy Press, D.mbri~ (Mass.), 1981. BR. i , 815. BR. i, 662.

117 118 119 BR. i, 820.

Chapter 5

1 2.

3

Compate, for inmnce, Vidyi.agu'• teXIS, !i.kunt.ta and Sit4r &nab4s. Despite the &ct th:at a number of people tried co copy his succc-u. like Dunoda.r Muk,bopadhyay's t-equels to h.is famous novels in M!'JI"'.ari :and N~brw_ndini. In a gene-ral st-nse. of course even authors like R..C. Dutt could be called his imiucor:s, but they do not produce a body of artistic work which fonns a toulity with an internal coherence. and which could be called a dis-tinctive fonn. Bc:fore' Bankim scve-1'21 distinguished Vtritcn bad engaged in satirical composicitlns on the Ikngali soci21 world bwarch;ndn Gupta was the be$t known ~ong chan.

189

It is interesting to see Bankim•t critical2pprc:cUtion oC Gu?ta•s powerful though oeeationally ob.eene, poetry. 'Uwu Gupter K.avitva', BR. ' Mter the great canonical text of the NaJyaidstra, most othen nuke fine distinctions between different forms ofni1ita and #uuil4. The Rtuatdfdtt.;.,tini ofBh.anu
Indoc

Index Ahhijniina S.lruntalam 9, 13 adjective. 8 aesthwcs 159 AI Biruni 160 A/.ikr GJ;arer Duliil 9 allegories 95

Amar Durgotsav136 Anamlama!h 58. 100, lOS. 133, 13 4, 135, 137, 144, 155, ISIS andannahal 10 Anclenon, Benedict 184n •niht.r40 ·""'""" 147, 148. 152. 153, 1;4 Aljuru lOS an I, 24 Asou 74 asaology, forecasts 6, 17, 170n Aur>ngzeb 125, :30, 1~3 author 73. 74 avatara 75, 76, 77. 85, 1OS Aydi 4, S, I S, 25 Bibu '· 1-53 Bakhtin 67, 173n, 175n, !SOn

&luc26 Banclyopidoy>r Rikhil:li'. 111 &ngolfarion 34, 47 Bangia S41oityer .itJ...· 'i5 Oanhes, Roland 187n Buu, Rajlekhar 85, ; 79n Beng;ili chauvinism 146 Benjnnin, Walter 17Sn Bltigo .... 31, a.v. 91, 94, ?6 IJI;•kt' 77. a9 H7 Dhanoduli ~

hh~ais

Dlu..i.,anda t:\7 Bimili 63

Dimala (Gh'"t l'iii,.) 1 ' Bismarck 49 Dra.im4'KiMni4J' r~o 92

Br>hmos l OS Brajdwar ISS British indologists 53 Buddha 77, 80, 88 C.aitanya 73 76, 88, 89, 95 CDitanyatdritamrta 89. 95 C.ncalkumiri 19 C.ndiJis 7} 91 Cand~ldur 18, 19 Cmdrasdtltar 18, 19 c.rdinal Wolsey 49 Casroriadis, Comdous 184n C.veU, Stanley 188n Chanecjee, Porth> 86, 103, 115, 180n, 182n, 185n Chattopadhyay, Saratclundra 166 clusicism 24, 72, 78. 102. 134. 135 community 113, 131 Comte 87, 163 conquest, ri;lht of 4(\ Comeille25 counterfactulls 34, 133, 147 courts 34, 37 Danto, A.C. 169n, 184n, 188n darkness, d•rk view oC the 9•onc! 3, 7,3. 24 . Das, S;sir Karrur 177n, 181n O.sgupu, Sasibhusan I 77n Death 23 OM C41ulhu,.;,; 18, 14~. 1~2. !55 Jloanna 86, 87, 101 DhamuJf;JII"" 86, 94, 104, 141, 144 dhlralalita 95

Dicken;, Cl»:!c 187r. Oigvijaya 63 domesticity 149, 150, 152 Don Quixote 34, 35 double endings 15()-7 double irony 32 Draupadi 21 Durg
t'2o etiqueue 57 Europe, history of29, 117, 018, 119 European orief\tWSIS I C8, I !0, I II, 119,120 evolution 87 exaggcntion 90. 91 feuerbach 72, 80, 102. 178n folk traditions 79, 90, 93 fom1. in !UmaliikAnta 28 fouc>u;,, Michel 32 freud, Sigmund 7, 170n fuzziness 113 Godam 63 Cita ss, 98, 102. l OS, 144 Cita)l<>vinda 22, 78, 90, 98 God 37, 4b, 76, 77, 8C, SS. ?9

JI<>PU92 Gorcbakoff 49

eo...:&.u:. n Govindalil 19 g~il6

Gupta, Jswucandn 93

H.,r..t~t.ottt.U

191 81

h4Jya 161 Hegel 163, 168 H eidegger, Martin 169n Hemcandra 5, 148, 149 Hindui>m 6, 14, 21, 22, 46, so; 127, 135, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143 Hira'.ly•kofipu 76 historical novels I 05, Ill, 115, 132, 133 history (itiiW•) 82, l OS, 107 humour 28-33, 45, 69, It> I Hutom Ptttciir Nal:ia 9 identity 13, 35, 36, 4()-1 improvement (utt;tat.) Z6 Indira 6, 7, 8, 9, iS. to, 18 1ndir3 4. S:.. · Ingrajstotro 42- 3 incellect 49 intcmation>llaw 40 irony 30, 46, 16!1 lser, Wol(png 186n 1sbm 88 J..,.mhae 4 J agatsinha 3, 4, 5, 25 Janmcjoya 44, 45 jati 112 . 11 3, 12s. 129 Jau<S, Hans Robert 186r. J•yade,;a 73. 77, 78, 94, 98 Jesus Christ 76, 80, 81, e5, 88, I01, 120 Jlvinanda 149, ISS, 156 justice, colonial 34, 36, 61 !Ukor, Sudhir 117n kala, time 164 K:ilidisa 99, I Z2 Kiliyo 92 !Uiy>.,U 153 K~JmalOJtdntD 26, 27- 7a. 93, ,C~~ a23, 133, 134, 135. 1~. 137, 13$, : 144, 166 !Umalikinu ~. 2; , 13<:, I: ~. !57, 163. 165, 166, 167 Kama/Ok
:v.

Indtx

193

192 K4pii!ku~d·l4

18

Khosruvis, Bh.isma4k·1 3S kitchen 10 Kobkowslci, Leuek 181o KoseUed,, Reinlwl189n Kn~· 21, 72-106, 134 IVJtWAritr• 72-106, 144 &;,.1tiinter Will 20 K~;,.bhi/4/w 84 Kur>danandini 4, 20 Kunti 21 Lab3nplati 52 bhour 49 Lal:srnansen 5

loader, leadenhip 11&-0 l.,.mins49

nation 114, 129, i52

67,68

Leonardo cb V' rw:i 7 liminality,limina12, 4. IS, 1(>, ?n, 7.1, 22, 23, 31 Lok R•hasy• 44, 52, 53 l:.ukac$, C·o~ 10 l.'J. · ,,~. 172n, 187n

ManJ 74 Manzoni, A. 133, 187n Mar.th>s 127

mani

6. , .. , . ... ,.,.tt

martyrdom If' Mart 26 ..~' t.:atiW, l1 oI
metaph"

•.e, 92, 93, 96, 9~1!

MichL:.Jlt~ciO 24 Mili,J.S. 163 MiUer, B>rlnn Stoller IM· MinhazudcLn 126 Mir Kinim 148

minres: .;), '., Mohammad 8lj

~dhi.ritti

/Uj4hi7,

1WJyaJdt·t~ 1A~

Rijs;nha 19, 147,.148, i4':1, 153, ISS, 156

Rinu 7S, 77 Rimaknna Paranuluilsa I04 Rom4y.;,;~ 13, 21. 1>2. 83, &22 Rimuran63 Ranplil63 R2najit Singh 128 ,.,. 156, 159 nisolila 91, 94, 96

~.~~C.

Niett · ·'

rational thcolOj~) r.ationalism 35, 36, 3,,

.I

nir4~a 0~

novel 19, 64, Ill, !44

oraltrodition 73 otber-woddliness 1 S I

Pinjni 74

pa~ody, travesry 29, 42, 6~ 66. 1, Pascal 177n past, construction of the T P:Uupati 5, 6, 14, t.'i people, VCP"'·· masses 52, 60-7 Plrmom~ ~(the Mind 39 Plasscy, Baale of 126

18

t8

RiljsiM• 18, t"J, 1~2. 144, 14S, 146

f'!ew!>p<1P,C' ;._,. .~

opium 30 M acaulay 35, 104,110,117 : •1-es; 21\ 12 MiJh. '2 ?' , 41, 81, 82, 83, ' Mahendra 134, 137, 138.· Minikii1 63 Manorami 5, 1•. I 5

R2bebis 24. 6..>: 6i !Udhi 22, 53. 78, .. ~. 90, 91, 92, ' 3, 95-Hi2

Nageodn 19 rwi!l!dtmy• ISO, 151, 152 N.oroji, Da-hblai 34, 54, 173n ourratives, narrativiratio~ 79, 107 109, 110, !12, 113, 115, 118, 131. 133, 154, 155, 156 narrative irony 153, ISS, IS(t

bn~ge 2, 8, II, 39, 4S, 46 5:1. 54,

problematic individual S, 19 prohibitions 2 Pucani 92

Moliere 64, 65 morals 2, 3, 5, 16, 22 Mmilini 5, 9, 14 M~liniS, 14, IS, Ill. 143, I•S ~;;cirim Gud 19, 50 Mwtitam ~ fwancari! SO Miiller, Mu 116, 118, '85n Mulcbopadhyay, Bhudev liQ., .t()q, 114, 120, 123, 162, '73r I~Hn Mus'izrs 1:12

49, 58, 112,

87, 103 1 '1

rotionaliry 30, 104 Ray, Sukumar 27 Raychaudhuri, Tapm 129, 137, 173n, 184n, 185n, 187n, 188n realism I, 14 rcfonn 46, 56

rebcions, sociaJ 7 r1ftions 6. 14 .embtartdt 24 r' .h~ 56 rol>ve:1 ~~ Rohini 4, 16, 20 Romanti<.ism, ronu~ 3, l.S Roy, M .I.J. 125, 186n

Pbto74 politicians 46-9 politics 46-9 power SO

~iballni 18, 19, 25 Said, Edward 110, 184n bltti 152

l'taphulb/Dcvi C.udbu~ 16. ~.?.> :~. 147, 148, 149, ISO, 152 IS. bS, 156 Prasanna (f.alini) 1 I, 34. 40. 'If, 52, 54, ~-'- "t . Patip 18, 19, 25, 148, 149 pruis 78, 106

~-; 16. 17, 31 :.011\krit !I ~nti 52, 149, 152. ISS Sastri, Harapras:ad 129, i87n Saryinan
<;G,..y. 9;\

self 161 self-love IS I Sen, Sukunur 1UO«\ servants 53, 62~

sexualiry 89 Sbakespem: 64, v~. 122 Shaw 10, !1, 68, 176n Sbivaji 128 Sikhs 127

Singh, Namwar 180n Siti 12, 159 Slt4ram 16-19, 144, ISS Sitirim 16-19, 147, 148, 152, ISS Sorel, Gcorga I 06 Spencer 163 ~n 4, 16-t&, 19 ~ridharaswir.u 9~ slava 136

Steiner, Georg; 172n stolid 42, 13S, 136, 139, 140 stratification in te>.t. 8) sub::lterniry 33, 62 Sub.isi.ni 8, 52 Sundar~ 19 • supemawhl occ-~r:•n .s t~~ suppression of women 55, 5(, sutt• 76 Tagore • 11, 32, ~3. ·?.'). 8_3. ·''""'94,

98, 99. .

.'".(' :"\ ...

166

:s.

".

+

~

6,128;

..

terrorism 6~

Tilouami 3, 4, 25 Todorov 8, 13, 169n

Tr/Jtl4tus !J.,gico Plrilosophicus 22 tragedy 23, 24 transgression 2,

Trivedi, Ramen

' 7, Ill, ZJ, 22,% ··L'clar \'ll~r.

truth 83, 84 Turner, Victor 10),

Upco(; 1£, 13, 14, utopi2 29

. lu2:t 1~.

...J.roka2S wutt11Mr.,..94 verbs 8, 18

vemacularlrutive bngU2gc ,;.. S.J

17tt U•hoppy Consdoumtss

194

Vidyip11; 73, 90 . Vidyas:ogu, bwarchandn 9, 62, 159 violence 148 V~20.S7

Visn~ 4s, 77, 84 v~~upur.'U;Ia 81 Volosinov 176n vrtti 94 . .;yajostuti 29, 42,

..

.

;.

••. : • .. : ~. ~. !

wife 6, 14, 15, 16, 17, 53-61

Winch, Peter 58 Wittgen>Cein, Ludwig 172n women as symbols 5-<>, 8, IG-11, 18, 19, 53, 54, 63, 100, 101,

I

. ·~

~ . • .•.,;,

Weber, Max 127, 151, 188n

"!

Young Bengol 167 Zob, Emile 64

•.; ~ .

.. . :

116,160 wodd I, 18, 26

44

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