Annunciation

 

 

 

 

 

Subha Mukherji

Possibly the most delicate rendering of the Annunciation in visual art is, to my mind, Fra Angelico’s rendering (Figure I), the one that suddenly gleams upon the visitor in the little museum of San Marco in Florence, as s/he turns the corner at the top of the winding stair leading straight to this painting. And even its poster reproduction in my study surprises me with harmony and serenity.

 

Figure I  (Beato Angelico, Annunciation, circa 1438–1445)

Gabriel has stepped into Mary’s balcony, their space is symmetrically divided as well as joined up by the central pillar, the two figures are united in their gesture of cross-armed, reverent bowing. They are caught up in the same world of colours, his wings picking up the green of her cloak, her hair-band reflecting the pink of his robe, and her green uniting the indoor space with the grass beyond the balcony, the enveloping zone which shades off into the outer space from which the angel has appeared.

That world and hers seem to be in the process of generative continuum, not in opposition. The threshold at which this encounter happens is figured as a space of union. Mary’s reception of the word seems beatific, accepting, and instinct with the numinous in this moment. The angel is clearly bent in the posture of salutation. It is a picture one wants to live with. The peace it breathes, however, is conditional upon what Derrida would call ‘absolute hospitality’: ‘The law of unlimited hospitality’, which displaces and overrides ‘the laws…which are conditioned and conditional…across family, civil society, and the State’.10 It is premised, in other words, on a ‘strange hierarchy’, but it is visually translated into symmetry.

Look now at another Annunciation (Figure II) – an image one would hesitate to invite into the habitable fantasy of one’s living space precisely because of its flagrant denial of this peace. Its vivid and visual acknowledgement of the incipient violence of absolute hospitality, with the muscular Gabriel (and his troop of sturdy little winged angels) breaking through the fragile roof of Mary’s abode, places this image in a counter-beatific tradition of representing the moment of arrival. This is Tintoretto’s Annunciation, bleeding through the darkly luminous surface of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, a vast canvas that bursts upon the guest, the visitor, the stranger, surprising her not with the harmony and containment of Beato Angelico’s vision, but with Dionysiac ravagement. There is a subtle transference here: the violence of the ‘foreigner’ is turned upon the observer who has come in from outside to partake of the moment of approach; the visitor, or foreigner, at the Scuola who, expecting consummation, finds confrontation. For ‘crossing the threshold is entering, and not only approaching or coming’ (Derrida, Of Hospitality, 123).

 Figure II (Jacopo Tintoretto, Annunciation, 1581/2.)

It does more than acknowledge, and does something more violent; it questions the very process of entry. It is, of course, the very first canvas facing one as one enters the Scuola. Derrida offers a suggestive exploration of the ambivalence of hospitality, a crucial theme at stake in representations of the Annunciation. For him, it is at once a profoundly emotive and political metaphor, and one which, like the threshold the guest steps across, is Janus-faced:

 …there is no politics without…an open hospitality to the guest as ghost, whom

one holds, just as he holds us, hostage.

The first, more obvious implication is that of the power of the host. This power and the ceremony through which it is tempered and controlled, when abused, can cause a tragic rupture in nature: witness how, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Macbeths betray the unspoken bond and hold Duncan in their castle inescapably – inescapably both for Duncan and, as they will realise, for themselves. But the even more painful betrayal is the one in which the host takes over, and defies the understood relation. When Tarquin turns rapaciously upon Lucrece in Shakespeare’s Lucrece, or Iachimo in Cymbeline, in a differently sinister way, upon Imogen who has housed him with grace, we have examples of this. The idea of ingratitude and betrayal implicit here finds a painful extension in Lear’s image of his Pelican daughters (3.4.71), and an equally vivid expression in the all-licensed fool’s jingle:

 

For you know, nuncle,

The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long

That it’s had it head bit off by it young;

So out went the candle, and we were left darkling.

(King Lear, Folio, 1.4.188–91)

In the same play, the guests in Gloucester’s house, Cornwall and Goneril, gradually become trespassers: first they order him to shut up his doors – a command that could be protective, but verges on the tyrannical; then the sisters have him blinded and ‘thrust him out at gates’ – his own gate, the threshold of his own house, becomes the site of tragic reversal (3.7.93). As Heather Dubrow, in a recent article on land law and Lear puts it, ‘The guest taking over the house, effecting a Bakhtinian reversal of roles, is of course a familiar and transcultural comedic turn.

But to Shakespeare’s audience the situation would also have signaled the insecurity of dwelling places in their own historical moment.’ Dubrow offers a rigorously historicist interrogation of what becomes, in the play, a tragic insecurity and dispossession, rather thana comedic topsy-turvydom.

What Shakespeare dramatises and Dubrow historicises, Derrida theorises. But crucially, Derrida is engaged with both sides of the fragile equation, though one takes the other over as his imagination progresses. He does not simply conceptualise the unconditionality of letting the guest in, but dwells, himself, on the threshold between addressing ‘the violence of the power of hospitality’ – and this belongs to the patriarch, the familial despot, the father, the spouse – and the subtle reversal through which ‘the guest becomes the host’s host’; and from host to hostage is one small step for the inviting host, as from guest to parasite. That threshold is where the peripeteia – or reversal – of the social, political or divine plot occurs; when the invited foreigner to whom we open our doors, be it in an act of invitation or asylum, but on whom we hope to retain our mastery, takes us over.

 It is also the site where the conflation of invader, liberator and foreigner, as between guest and host, is made possible. After all, the Latin hostis, which means ‘guest’, also means ‘enemy’ – the double sense Derrida is playing on when he reflects on the ‘paradoxical filiation of the hostis’ . On the one hand, he speaks of the desire to be entered, to be occupied. On the other,

 It is as if the stranger or foreigner held the keys. This is always the situation of the foreigner, in politics too, that of coming as a legislator to lay down the law and liberate the people or the nation by coming from outside, by entering into the nation or the house, into the home that lets him enter after having appealed to him… So it is indeed the master, the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes hostage – and who really always has been. And the guest, the invited hostage, becomes the one who invites the one who invites, the master of the host…

This is a paradox easily identifiable in contemporary international politics, in vexed and controversial examples in the realms of political asylum and acts of terror, and of war and occupation. The balance keeps getting disturbed, and the ineffable symmetry of powers which maintains the equilibrium of political as well as domestic life is proved to be tragically vulnerable.

The tension between the householder’s mastery and the need, even desire, to abandon all claims to ownership, on which Derrida’s notion of ‘impossible’ hospitality pivots, is precisely the tension that is not allowed its delicate poise by Tintoretto.In his painting, the hostis tears through the fabric of Mary’s bedchamber, even as the holy dove pierces the surprised and passive ‘hollow of [ her] ear’, and divinity penetrates her womb, that very little room. The ‘door and windows’ – the point of entry into the interior that defines Derridian hospitality– crumble and dissolve into a whirl of wings, great and small, fluttering frighteningly into Mary’s chamber; the wood lies in a pile of wreckage around it, leaving only a broken pillar stripped of its paint and with the bricks showing. This is a pillar which, unlike Fra Angelico’s, marks the roughness of the crossing of the threshold, not the assimilation of the other. It sharply separates the divine space and Mary’s bedroom, contributing to the dominance of vertical movement which replaces the horizontal symmetry of Fra Angelico’s painting with Gabriel and Mary facing each other; here, Gabriel and his angelic cascade burst in from above.

Light itself becomes an invader from outer space, as it infiltrates the shady afternoon world where Mary has been knitting and reading. It is captured at the moment of transition, and not seen through to what van Gennep calls the ‘post-liminal’ stage. The light that streams in also lights up Mary’s face, with its look of absolute startlement and terror: she ha jumped out of her skin, which has made her book (the Bible) fall on her lap, her knitting to her feet. Gabriel’s face and posture, on the other hand, have the certainty of knowledge and of mission.

This vision of a violent annunciation finds its closest echo in the poetry of the twentieth century – in Yeats – though, after him, several poets have addressed this moment, most notably Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson. But that is another story.

Subha Mukherji teaches at Downing College, University of Cambridge.  This is an excerpt from her essay ‘Invasion from Outer Space,’ from Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces (Edt.Subha Mukherji) Anthem Press, New York & London, 2011.

Like Elvers in Seaweed

 

David Wagoner

 Muse

 Cackling, smelling of camphor, crumbs of pink icing

Clinging to her lips, her lipstick smeared

Halfway around her neck, her cracked teeth bristling

With bloody splinters, she leans over my shoulder.

Oh my only hope, my lost dumbfounding baggage,

My gristle-breasted, slack-jawed zealot, kiss me again.

 ****************************************************

 The Burning Bush

 A quick flare takes the leaves,

And they rush together up through galls and scales,

To a crook of smoke, thinning and whitening,

And the brief red skeleton glows to a clear char.

From the ends of twigs, the ashes drift like seeds.

The bush stands bare at the edge of the silent prairie.

 ******************************************************

 Worms

 When the spade turns over, the worms

In their sheared gangways, turning tail, go thin

Among clods or blunt out in the open,

Half-hitching in fishermen’s knots and flinching

At sunlight, the pulsing line of their hearts

Strung out to be abandoned, sinking backward

And forward among the roots, like them,

Like elvers in seaweed, mouthing the darkness,

All taken in by the darkness of the mouth.

*******************************************************

David Wagoner’s Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977 and he won the Pushcart Prize that same year. He won his second Pushcart Prize in 1983. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1991), and the English-Speaking Union prize from Poetry magazine. He has also received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

 

 

 

Psychiatry: A Gendered Microhistory

Amitranjan Basu

Amitranjan Basu

[First Look : Ajita Chakraborty, My life as a psychiatrist: memoirs and essays. Kolkata: Stree, 2010, pp. 220, index+references, hard cover, Rs. 500.00. ISBN 81-85604-92-4 978-81-85604-92-3.]

For the last two decades, since I started reading critically psychiatry and psychology from the cultural perspective, I had the opportunity to engage myself with colleagues from both humanities and human sciences, and this engagement has enriched me a lot to understand and describe the complexity of cultural practices called psychiatry and psychology. There seem to be a growing interest in the humanities that deal with human mind, but more with psychoanalysis than with psychiatry, psychology and psychiatric social work. There is a renewed interest with Frued, Lacan and a range of post-modern and post-colonial scholarships emerging from Euro-American societies. While these efforts have been productive to re-view south-asian society, culture and politics, I can hardly recall about any serious work based on resources that developed in the South Asian mileu in the last four to five decades! There are few exceptions like Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar, who probably entered the reference list when appreciation of their work started being audible from the Euro-American academia! No study tried to include the works of those who tried to raise a critical voice within these disciplines. No serious reading has been done with the ‘internal’ discourses of mental ‘sciences’ that can strengthen our intellectual culture to offer alternative views on our society, politics and culture. In this context, the book under review can provide an entry point for my colleagues.

 It links up with the threads of knowledge that the early scholars of our psychiatry, produced in a context where these disciplines were more marginalised. And again, much of this knowledge is useful once we consider history is a way to access past for the present. In this backdrop, Ajita Chakraborty’s book takes us to nuanced narratives of a microhistory of Indian psychiatry and Indian Psychiatric Society. Ajita, one of the first two woman psychiatrists (the first perhaps is Saroja Bai) in India is more known for her serious concerns about the social and cultural aspects of psychiatry, an area less travelled by majority of her fellow colleagues.

Who else could write the foreword of this book other than Ashis Nandy? A street-fighting public intellectual, who convincingly transformed his training in psychology to create a discourse of political psychology as a powerful social critique. Nandy in this original piece, opened by saying that “no account of a society is complete without a profile of its subjectivities. This is particularly true for India, which has for centuries lived with diverse, highly developed theories of the mind and techniques of intervention in human consciousness” (p. vii). He notices the paucity of data on those pioneers who tried hard to adopt this new science in a culturally diverse non-modern society to make their profession meaningful in its new social context, and laments that: “we are now left with predominantly de-cultured, asocial, overtly medicalised psychological disciplines studying subjectivities in this part of the world” (p. ix). Nandy noted that, Ajita did not try to blur the distinction between normality and abnormality like her ‘Guru’ Ronald Laing and his anti-psychiatry group. Rather, “she retains the difference as a therapeutic reality and a tool of social criticism” (p. xii). Nandy has pleaded to read this book keeping this context in the mind.

Ajita’s book is divided into two parts: memoirs and essays. Memoirs are organised in seven chapters (‘My Early Days,’ ‘Time Abroad,’ ‘Life and Work in Calcutta,’ ‘Psychiatry and the Indian Psychiatric Society,’ ‘Transcultural Psychiatry,’ ‘Deconstructing and /or Analysing Myself,’ and ‘People and Organisations’). In the essays section she has provided eight essays where the last two (‘My Views on Psychiatry in General’ and ‘Cultural Psychiatry, and Understanding Self and Identity’) are being published for the first time. The reader will realise that her autobiographical narrative is theoretically argued and evidenced in her essay section making the volume a well organised narrative.

Starting with her birth date she commented: I was born on 31st October, 1926, 9 pm, Sombar, Sashthi. Mother [Tamalini Devi] had written that information in a tiny handmade notebook of some antiquity that I have preserved. The year of birth written by my mother is 1927; I had disputed and corrected it to 1926 when I was 11 years old, after having checked it with cousins near my age. The birthday came under a strange cloud some years later. (p.1)

An astrologer, who visited her as a client persuaded her that he wants her horoscope prepared by his guru and with much hesitation she provided her birth information to him.

A few days later he came back to report her that the date is faulty: Kartik 14 did not match either Sombar (Monday) or Sashthi (the sixth day since the new moon) of that year. I told him about the confusion over the year of my birth. He came again; saying, that the day and date recorded by my mother matched neither the Greǵorian nor the Bengali year…Confusion and missing out became a part of my life, while the ‘real’ things eluded me. Even my birthday was a contentious issue. (pp. 1-2)

Her father, Khirode Behary Chuckerbutty came from a humble family of Jajmans (village priests) who, having committed the sin of eating chicken ‘fell out with his family and ran away from his village. He became a khalasi in a ferry service, and later purser with a coastal shipping company.’ However, he managed to get a BA degree and switched his career as a resident tutor in affluent families. He used the dowry for his marriage to start an electrical goods manufacturing which later on became well known as Clyde Fans. In spite of its initial success, Clyde Fan sank and Ajita’s father moved to the shade of the factory calling himself sansar tyagi (one who has denounced the family life) and put his wife and children in a small rented house where he used to visit sometimes and sent money regularly.

 Even growing up in this kind of a fissured family environment Ajita passed her matriculation exams with first division and went to Scottish Church College for her intermediate degree and finally got admitted to Medical College, Calcutta. She described in detail about her school days, family life, neighbourhood and college days, carefully avoiding excess, which shows she was consciously comporting her in a way that she should not be an average. She said that her attraction towards psychology grew up from early adulthood so it was not surprising that she chose psychiatry as her specialty after reaching England in 1951.

 In England she worked in psychiatric hospitals for considerable period before getting her fellowship in psychiatry from the Royal College. One interesting fact needs to be told about her long stay in England. Here she got introduced to London Majlis (the Indian students’ association in London) where communists played a significant role. However, her association with them ‘meant spending a considerable part of my time doing extracurricular activities with fellow Indians. Life in the UK was generally rather boring and dull.’ So Ajita ‘hung out with the communists, but never truly believed in Marxism, except in a liberal sense.’

After returning to Calcutta in the end of sixties she rented a small terrace-flat in New Alipore and spent thirty years of her life there growing a nice roof-garden. At that time posts in psychiatry were less in the state government so she had to start working in the Neurology department. She faced a lot of hurdles and harassment in her career in the government service. Both in teaching and private practice she had to confront patronising and patriarchal attitudes. These debates and critical reflections about a new profession and her being a minority (not just in terms of gender) provided a nuanced description of a microhistory of the discipline and its institutions. She was active in the Indian Psychiatric Society and became the general secretary in 1966 and till date she remains the only woman psychiatrist holding this position! She gives a detail but critically analysed version of her experience, charting out her conceptual assertions not only about psychiatry in general, but trans-cultural psychiatry in particular and of course about WHO led programmes. Besides this, she was also seen in various addas in Calcutta, which were frequented by noted litterateurs, painters, poets and intellectuals. The best part of the memoirs section comes with her ‘Deconstructing and /or Analysing Myself,’ where she tried to be open in examining her self.

As commented earlier, the essays section seems to provide a theoretical premise for the memoirs. Selections are representative of her interest in cultural, social and political issues and provide in-depth analyses on those. Western psychiatric education did not alienate her from her own culture and society rather she has questioned poignantly about the hegemony of Euro-American psychiatry and the attitude of her colleagues who blindly followed that paradigm. She offered a narrative of a woman who struggled in various ways in her life yet consciously does not claim her narrative to be a feminist one.

 This is the first time I was reading a book that reveals a gendered microhistory of psychiatry that was buried under the discourse of standard histories and of patriarchies. We get engaged with a rare kind of psychiatrist who pushes the discipline outside the boundaries of mental hospitals and clinics and brings us face to face with the social.

Amitranjan Basu is an independent researcher in social psychiatry and currently a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. 

Ideal & Waste?

Amiya Dev

We know that Châr Adhyây (Four Chapters) was Rabindranath’s second political novel. We also know that like Ghare-Bâire (The Home and the World), 1916, the first, it fared ill with nationalists, and that one special reason for that had been his reference to Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861-1907) in the preface in a supposedly derogatory way. We further know that Rabindranath withdrew that preface from the second edition, though it had been purportedly a ‘cue’ (‘âbhâs’) to the novel, for it related how his one-time friend and associate Brahmabandhab, Hindu-Catholic turned nationalist revolutionary, editor of the fiery daily Sandhyâ, had suddenly visited him one day in 1907 and while leaving after a little conversation turned around at the doorstep and said: ‘Rabibabu, I have fallen grievously’ (‘âmâr khub patan hayechhe’).1

Nationalism had had such hold over the readers that the spirit of the episode was utterly lost on them, the sensitivity unfelt; and even today, over a hundred years after Brahmabandhab’s death (October 27, 1907) the righteousness of 1934 might not have been fully exhausted. We may not do unwisely to recall the words that followed in the preface: ‘After he said this, he did not wait; he just left. I understood clearly then that he had come just to say these heart-rending words. By then the net of his activities had closed tightly around him; there was no chance of escape.’2 That was Rabindranath’s last meeting with him and the last conversation.

Anyway, my concern is not with Châr Adhyây’s immediate reception, nor with the full implications of Brahmabandhab’s confession, whether it hadn’t also hinted at a recent falling off his noble mission of adapting Catholicism to Vedânta. Had his brand of svadeúî been in the way of his truth, cherished with great ascetic fervour in the teeth of the dominant politics of then Indian Christianity? Nor is it my concern to test Châr Adhyây out against the latter-day svadeshiî of the early 1930s, branded ‘terrorism’, that claimed a great many young idealist lives. In a moving essay, written in fifteen days of Pritilata Waddedar’s heroic suicide in 1932 after leading a successful attack on Chittagong’s European Club and sustaining a wound herself, her preceptor ‘Masterda’ recalled her with great fondness, almost sentimentally, and bid her goodbye as he would bid goodbye to Goddess Durga on the day of her immersion.3

He also recalled many others that he had inspired to brave death or incarceration across the seas. How many mothers he had bereaved of their children, what emptiness he had brought about in home after home! All for a great cause no doubt, yet was it right? Would he be forgiven? Iron-willed Surya Sen was pierced by doubt. That Tagore, who had moved away from his svadeúî involvement during the agitation over Bengal Partition (1905) before long, was pierced by more than doubt and had absolute disapproval of ‘terrorist’ violence leading to tragic waste, was once again proved by his reaction to the attempt on the Bengal Governor’s life at Darjeeling in May 1934 involving a few youths’ blighted future; but I am not going to look for its contemporary transcript in Châr Adhyây.

I shall reread Châr Adhyây as a crucible of the time I have lived and the time I am living. Whoever has read Câr Adhyây a second time will not miss its design as a virtual drama in four acts. Whatever gathers is mainly by means of dialogue. The attendant narration is sharp and subtle, except in the prelude, so to speak, the prastâvanâ. The description too is sparse, as if only meant to lay the scenes. Also, the usual slow pace of a novel is missing along with the co-temporality of spaces. Novel readers will find more pleasure notwithstanding its triple perspective in Ghare-Bâire, let alone Gorâ or Jogâjog (Relations). Time-propelled, it seems to be rushing, without a hint of space coming in the way of time. Ghare-Bâire’s twin Chaturaaga (1916) too is time-bound, but being a quartet it also carries four squares of space. Though this may sound overstated, Châr Adhyây is indifferent to space.

WE recall Tagore’s defence of it as a love story, which it is to a large extent, but which by no means exhausts it. The three Ela-Atin dialogues that form the bulk of the novel have a clear crescendo, ending on a merging of love and death, a kind of Liebestod. But the ‘star’ that ‘crosses’ their love is the ideal to which they are bound, no less voluntarily than involuntarily. Ela is Indranath’s recruit, sworn betrothed to the svadeœ; but Ela is also Indranath’s means of instilling the spirit of sacrifice in his boys and keeping their morale high, above all, of pulling Atin to the cause of svadeœ. Over Ela-Atin’s love is cast Indranath’s shadow in the name of svadeœ; thus what turns out to be Liebestod is the eventual strategy of liquidation: Ela must go, for she has become vulnerable through her desperate love taken advantage of by turncoat machinations. That Ela must go at Atin’s hand is Indranath at his most ‘unattached’: the sound of the distant whistle that closes the novel is the surrogate arrow cutting through the air.

Tagore’s critics of the time found such fiction unfounded on svadeshî ideals. Ela would probably swallow cyanide before spilling out secrets. Ela surely would, but that is not the point. The point is: is the risk worth taking? Is she indispensable? Is anyone indispensable? Is there any room for love in the political underground? At the end of the third chapter, after Atin has been packed off to a safer underground, beyond Ela’s and through Ela’s, any other’s ken, Indranath suddenly appears on the scene and scolds Ela for thus yielding to her eros and risking their safety, saying: ‘If I could I would have straightaway killed you.’ There is an impelling dehumanisation that Rabindranath is trying to trace, arising out of the underground’s own logic. It is obvious that he is not making a transcript but mining out the truth. Indranath has a dialogue with his confidant-cum-assistant, Kanai Gupta, in Chapter One laying down his rationale of action. The crux of that rationale is obviously Gîtâ, 2.47a, karmanne yevâdhikâraste mâ phaleshu kadâchana. Indranath doesn’t quote the second line of the œloka that might have elaborated his cast of mind: mâ karmaphalaheturbhûrmâ te saago’stvakarmannei (do not either be the cause of action’s fruits, nor have a desire for inaction). The mâ of the mâ phaleshu kadâchana can be either plainly negative or prohibitive (Sibaji Bandyopadhyay has recently studied the history of this double interpretation relating it to the possible overall ideology of the interpreter). However, there is no ambiguity about the mâ of the second line—it is prohibitive.

Now, whether as the mere interlocutor or as truly desirous of svadeshî’s success, Kanai Gupta does raise the issue of ‘fruits’: ‘But I feel you are overdoing your denial of purpose to this enterprise.’ ‘Not at all. I shan’t do wrong, shan’t go mad, shan’t shed tears by calling my country “mother” and “goddess”, yet carry on my action—there lies my strength.’ ‘But how are you going to fight your enemy if you do not call him enemy and hate him?’ ‘It’s like fighting a stone you stumble on, with unexcited intelligence. …’ ‘But you are not sure of success.’ ‘No matter. But I won’t do an insult to my inner self (svabhâb) …’ (pp. 483-484) Svabhâb or svabhâva is a concept analogous to karma. One ‘acts’ according to one’s svabhâva. By doing this karma (svadeshî) Indranath is answering his svabhâva. But can he deny that all else are doing that—Atin, or Ela, for that matter? If not, then by answering his svabhâva is he not doing violence to others’ svabhâva, Atin’s or Ela’s? That seems to be an issue in Châr Adhyây. Apropos this, here is another excerpt: ‘Do you love Atin?’ Ela kept quiet. ‘If he ever causes us danger, will you be able to kill him?’ ‘It is so improbable for him that I may not mind saying yes.’ ‘In case it is probable?’ ‘In spite of what I say, do I really know myself?’ ‘You have to know. You have to prepare yourself imagining terrifying eventualities everyday.’ ‘I am certain you were wrong in choosing me.’ ‘I am certain I was not.’ ‘Mastermashay, I beg you, please release Atin.’ ‘Who am I to release?

He is caught in his own resolution. His conflict will never cease, his sensitivity will go on getting hurt. Yet, every moment his self-respect will drag him on, till the end.’ ‘Do you never go wrong in reading human nature?’ ‘I do. There are many who have two strands in their nature (svabhâb). These two strands are dissimilar. Yet both are true. Such persons too misunderstand themselves and go wrong.’ (pp. 479-480)

NO one would doubt Indranath’s perspicacity, yet no one would also doubt his will to use Atin’s svabhâva to fulfil his own svabhâva-ordained karma to which alone he has the right, not to whose fruits. Svabhâva occurs in Gîtâ, 18, especially, in œlokas 41-44 where it is defined in terms of the karmas enjoined on the four varnas respectively, finally culminating in shloka-s 47 and 60. Let me quote 47 that sums up Gîtâ’s position on this concept: úreyân svadharmo vigunnah paradharmât svanushxitât/svabhâvaniyataJ karma kurvannâpnoti kilvisham (Even ill-done svadharma is better than well-done paradharma; no sin accrues in doing svabhâva-ordained karma—obviously echoing 3.35: úreyân … svanusxitât / svadharme nidhanaJ œreyah paradharmo bhayâvahah? [… / even dying in doing svadharma is good; paradharma is terrible]). Of course, Gîtâ’s svabhâva (=svadharma) is grounded on varnnâúrama, though in a society bereft of varnâúrama it may take on a wider meaning, the inner self or nature, calling, vocation. Indranath is no ringmaster, but he is dedicated to a greater cause that cannot do without Ela and Atin. Indranath has all the personality to persuade them and win over any doubts that may be lurking in them, even if for the time being.

There are moments when he seems to be a bit like Gîtâ’s Krishna to Ela-Atin’s Arjuna. But the Kurukshetra that he is conjuring up is far from the dharmakshetra it is to be. Can the ‘cause’ attest dharma or does it have an a-dharma built into it? Ghare-Bâire posits Nikhilesh against Sandip’s svadeúî, no less a patriot but not carried away by the passion of the moment, a personification as it were of what Rabindranath meant by Âtmaúakti. To be sure, Indranath is no Sandip, he is too bright for that. Nor is he pitted against a Nikhilesh to prove him wrong. He is a revolutionary per se, of the underground variety, though not entirely functional without Kanai Gupta’s pragmatic sense and feel for the terrain. As hinted above, not much happens in Châr Adhyây except revolution eating up its own children. Of course, in revolution’s context such eating is a minor event. What matters if Ela is liquidated, and by Atin who too is ripe for liquidation? Is it not proof that revolution is greater than love, which in other words is revolution’s waste? Not love alone, but humanity too can be revolution’s waste. ‘The lie that by killing a country’s soul its life can be sustained is going round the world today in many places,’ says Atin. (p. 504) Reading Châr Adhyây is to a large extent listening to Atin and Ela’s perceptions told one another. At one point Atin tells Ela how he has been pained to see noble-minded exemplary youths gradually succumb to inhumanity, without regard to the revolutionaries’ self-respect and hauteur. His last confession could have come from the 1970s: Look, I have fallen to the last limits (let us not merely source it back to Brahmabandhab Upadhyay).

The other day our band looted a lonely widow’s house. Manmatha knew her by village connection—it was he who had sent word to us and led the way. She recognised him in spite of the mask he was wearing and said: Manu my child, how could you do this? After that the band could not let the old woman live. It is through these hands of mine that that contaminated money signifying our loss of goodness has reached its target to fulfil our country’s good. And with that money I broke my fast. Finally I am branded a thief, I have touched the stolen loot and partook of it. (p. 512) It could have come from more recent times as well. Yet, this is not vandalism, this is wiping away one human for a greater cause, an ideal. We may be straightaway reminded of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov who felt that killing one old woman for the good of a hundred youths was fully justified. And that was the beginning of his ‘punishment’. And that would further remind us of the revolutionary violence a la Stavrogin and Shatov-Kirilov.

The moot question is perhaps that of ends and means: can means be utterly independent of ends; in other words, can good ends justify bad means, or more, can bad means not contaminate good ends? Of course, Gandhi will ask us to keep our conscience awake as the constant guide to our action, no matter what ideal we are cherishing and what utopia we are trying to establish. • I recall an evening at a Kolkata crematorium in 1970. We had gone to cremate a famous elder. There was a wait. Suddenly, standing in the waiting hall I discovered scores of names written in red on the walls around with the pledge that they would not be forgotten hinting at possible political vindication. All are annals now, but could the ideal that took them away afford such a huge waste? They were not a faceless crowd, not numbers like ‘thousand eighty-four’, but individuals. Visiting the Cellular Jail at Port Blair some years later and standing respectfully before those glorious names of the incarcerated inscribed on the central marble, the red splatter of the Kolkata crematorium flitted across my mind.

I beg to be excused for this personal note, but memory doesn’t listen to you and images often make a montage without your asking. When Sombhu Mitra staged Châr Adhyây in 1951, what impelled him? Was he merely putting Rabindranath on the modern board, or also recording a reaction to post-P. C. Joshi Left-wing communism of B.T. Randive’s? Surely in 1997 in his Hindi film on Châr Adhyây Kumar Shahani of the Pune Institute fame was trying to come to terms with some historical experience: was it the ‘terror’ that had already taken root in the Punjab and Kashmir? The world today is rent apart by ‘terror’ that is fast taking the proportions of a mushroom cloud, yet a ‘terror’ that has an ideal somewhere in the background. The pseudo-Hobbesean idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ is too mocking an argument. It is not ‘mere anarchy let loose’, but the fallout of violence once triggered by an ideal, maybe even now distantly triggered. Its waste is massive, not simply in its victims but in its ever-increasing human instruments. The fidayeen cannot be a casual recruit, a volunteer without choice, but a suicide answering an idealist call.

We shudder at the double waste. A certain righteousness reigns over the ideal. Thomas Mann’s dialogue between the frenzied cleric Savonarola and the liberal bourgeois hero of the Italian ‘Renaissance’ Lorenzo di Medici in Fiorenza (1906), amply illustrates that. So does Tagore’s Gora and Binoy’s dialogue in a different context pending Gora’s transformation. Tagore has an earlier play called Mâlinî (1896) where this comes through Kshemajkar’s allegiance to Sanatan Dharma and his friend Supriya’s growing attraction to Buddhism. In view of the enormous waste laid today that is eventually traceable to some ideal, what would Gandhi have done? Fast unto death? And Tagore? Write a sequel to Châr Adhyây? Reading Gandhi’s autobiography and the Gandhi-Tagore correspondence4 one would perhaps be persuaded to that assumption, though it is most likely that his ‘unto death’ would be foiled by a human bomb. And Rabindranath’s ‘sequel’ will produce ten times the critique the original had to go through, and perhaps from many more quarters. Tagore’s famous song—‘jadi tor dâk shune keu nâ âse, tabe eklâ chalo re’ (‘if none joins you at your call, then go ahead by yourself’)—would not only be addressed to Gandhi but would also be self-addressed.

Today’s civil society that feels hemmed in on all sides would do well to go back to them again and again. Even though they had respectful difference on a number of things, on one thing they wholeheartedly agreed: the human spirit will survive all wasteful blindness. Châr Adhyây was Tagore’s last novel. It came out in 1934, the year of my birth. Hence perhaps this licence, violating all critical modicum and putting together a personal essay, for which I beg forgiveness of whoever reads it.

(Acknowledgements: Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Sourin Bhattacharya, Moinak Biswas, Pranab Biswas, Amlan Datta, Swapan Majumdar, and Rajiv Gandhi University where it was initially presented at a conference in 2007)

REFERENCES 1. Rabîndra-Rachanâbalî (Collected Works of Rabindranath Tagore), Vol. 8 (Kolkata: Government of West Bengal, 1986), p. 514, trans. Julius J. Lipner, in Brahmabandhab Upadhyay: The Life and Thought of a Revolutionary (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 379.

2. Ibid. Subsequent translations including those from the Gîtâ are mine.

3. See Surya Sen, ‘Bijayâ’, reproduced. In Bhâßâbandhan, Vol. 4, No. 11 (November 2006), pp. 5-7.

4. The Mahatma and the Poet, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 1997).

Amiya Dev is former Vice-Chancellor, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. He has edited the Science, Literature and Aesthetics, Volume XV, Part 3 of the Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture.

London: What Cities Tell Late at Night

Akhil Katyal

During late evenings, just before the cemetery closed for the public, you could always notice guys cruising each other. Often returning home on a bus, if you took the fun ‘long-cut’ through Abney Park, you could have guys ask you local addresses as very improbable conversation starters. Imagine being asked by someone for ’146 Manor Road’ when he is sitting on a bench bang in the middle of a cemetery with no particular hurry to go anywhere.

All this was far too exciting for a place, whose founders had after all, in their long train of inspirations, taken their cue from the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith’s dreary pastoralism in his 1770 ‘The Deserted Village’. A few years back during my Lit Hons years in Delhi, I had suffered his ‘Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain / where health and plenty,’ he fantasized, had ‘cheered the laboring swain’. Those who set up the cemetery in Massachusetts, model for Abney Park behind my house, had very consciously cited Goldsmith’s poem in its architecture, flora and landscaping.

Now in a strange turn, my room window looked onto Goldsmith’s dreamland, twice-removed. At nights, I heard its many birds and a rare guy or two who must have jumped the gates to get in. During  those nights when I called my friends, I joked about living next to a cemetery and laughed about my own room with a view.

Over the next two years, I had moved to the inner city Kings Cross. Although it is synonymous with its two arterial rail stations, till the late 80s it had also been ‘notorious’ as a run down red light district, as a place where it was very easy to get drugs and as a site where the British pop scene had thrived in the now defunct 80s clubs.

Till large scale regeneration projects began to give a face-lift to Kings Cross, and litter it with a boring office architecture, it had a look of a post-industrial district, with vacant lots, disused goods and redistribution yards, some social housing and obsolete tube stations. Not for very long now, if you walk north of the station, you can very easily notice the imprint of the second world war, of a city that was oncebombed out.

That is now rapidly changing. In its revamp mode for the 2012 Olympics, London is a paradise for the developers’ lobby. Billions of pounds are being invested to make the semi-derelict parts of Kings Cross into a commissioned sort of haven for mainstream culture and commerce, introducing tens of new streets and squares, pushing for a well-packaged vision of an affluent urbanness. An insular, instant city is being culled out of a haphazard history of dereliction, poverty and cultural experiment in Kings Cross.

The last set of my late night walks in this city take place in this fast transforming neighborhood, mostly in the parts immediately north of the two stations. They take me past this specific landscape of London that is now disappearing in a city poised on the verge of a mega-budgeted sports event.

A sort of event that even as it inspires a superficial cover of a very old kind of nationalism in its host nations, even as it pushes obscure sports and athletes into limelight, what it really does and depends on, especially since the mid-70s, is activating a very global circuit of corporate finance, of high-end property developers and of international broadcasters fighting over television rights.

The games themselves pose as a national crisis-point, and policies and public expenditure that any other time would not go uncontested, are steamrolled in a rush of preparation. They become a rallying point for a very untimely national pride. And cause displacement among poorer communities, ejects squatters, have a questionable impact on sports among the lower-class youth and spend outrageous amounts of public money on projects whose benefits rarely trickle down below the developers lobby, the well-advertized sponsors and those few who can afford the white elephants after the games.
My last set of night-walks happen in a city that is itself dream-walking into this giant spectacle of the Olympics.

This often takes me along the course of the inner city Regents Canal, about two hundred years old, whose waters, long obsolete now for ferrying goods after railways and lorries, are used as a coolant for the high voltage electricity cables that run alongside it and power the inner city.

The canal meanders through the heart of Kings Cross’s regeneration project, with the construction sounds now spilling over into the several moored houseboats. People jog or cycle along the path till late in the evening, avoiding it at night for fear of mugging.

It was on this particular path, on an early June night this year, that I had noticed a rough-sleeper using a plastic sheet, probably the material of some publicity banner, as a blanket. Her sheet had a large imprint of that spaced-out 2012 Olympic logo on it. Its raw lines and colours had settled in the shape of the sleeping body, moving slightly with her breathing. 

For the longest time, I had thought that the cities look their most beautiful at night, peaking at dawn. Lately, it has begun to look like that during nights our cities become more difficult, more agitated. Night time isolates the pressure-points of the city, where it is hurting the most. And just before dawn, it seems, it poses these starkest challenges to us.

Akhil Katyal is a poet and writer from Delhi, now working from London.  He is also finishing his doctoral work at S.O.A.S., UK.