To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry

Thomas Müntzer (spring 1525)

On False And Unlimited Power, Which One Is Not Obliged To Obey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the popes, emperors, kings, etc. who puff themselves up in their own estimation

above other pious poor Christians, claiming to be a better kind of human – as if their lord-ship

and  authority  to  rule others were innate – do  not want to  recognize that they  are God’s

stewards and officials. And they do not govern according to his commandment to maintain

the common good and brotherly unity among us. God has established and ordained authority

for this reason alone and no other. But rulers who want to be lords for their own sake are all

false rulers and not worthy of the lowest office among Christians. For God alone wants to be

lord and he says in Deuteronomy 12 [:11], “You shall keep my commandment in your hand

like a measuring rod according to which you shall judge – straight ahead, not deviating either

to the left or to the right.” The same point is made in Job 5 [:8].

 

Therefore whichever prince or lord invents and sets up his own self-serving burdens

and commands, rules falsely, and he dares impudently to deceive God, his own lord. Where

are you, you werewolves, you band of Behemoths, with your financial tricks which impose

one burden after another on the poor people? This year a labour service is voluntary; next year

it becomes compulsory. In most cases this is how your old customary law has grown.

In what”dementia” or “camouflage” did God, your lord, give you such power that we poor people

have to cultivate your lands with labour services? But only in good weather, for on rainy days

we poor people see the fruits of our sweat rot in  the fields. May God, in his justice, not

tolerate the terrible Babylonian  captivity  in  which  we poor people are driven  to mow the

lords’ meadows, to make hay, to cultivate the fields, to sow flax in them, to cut it, comb it,

heat it, wash it, pound it, and spin it – yes, even to sew their underpants on their arses. We

also have to pick peas and harvest carrots and asparagus.

 

Help us, God! Where has such misery ever been heard of! They tax and tear out the

marrow of the poor people’s bones, and we have to pay interest on that! Where are they, with

their hired murderers and horsemen, the gamblers and whoremasters, who are stuffed fuller

than  puking  dogs? In addition, we poor people have to  give them taxes, payments, and

interest. And at home [they assume that] the poor should have neither bread, salt, nor lard for

their wives and small children. Where are they, with their entry fines and heriot dues? Yes,

damn their disgraceful fines and robber’s dues! Where are the tyrants and raging ones, who

appropriate taxes, customs, and user fees and waste them so shamefully and wantonly and

lose what should go into the common chest or purse to serve the needs of the territory.

And nevertheless no one can turn up his nose at them, or he is immediately treated

like a treacherous rogue – put in the stocks, beheaded, quartered! He is shown less pity than a

mad dog.

 

Did  God  give them such  power? On the peak  of what monk’s cowl is it written?

Indeed, their authority is from God. But so remotely  that they  have become the devil’s

soldiers and Satan is their captain. Yes, they have been truly rejected, being enemies in their

own territory. And what about their serfdom? Damn their unchristian, heathen nature. How

they torture us poor people! We are the spiritual serfs of the clergy and the bodily serfs of the

secular powers. Help  us, eternal God! What great unchristian misery  and murder is being

done to your property, which your only-begotten son, lord of heaven and earth – and lord of

this band  of Behemoths – purchased  at such  a high  price with  his bitter death! Put these

Moabites and this band of Behemoths as far behind you and as far away [as you can]. This is

God’s greatest pleasure. And  how little there will be prayed  for! If one of their village

officials wanted to impose anything on the poor in his own self-interest, they would depose

him with  a harsh  punishment. The princes and  lords themselves deserve nothing  less for

making self-serving commandments, which are outside the common good and unserviceable

for brotherly unity.

 

Do not let yourselves be led astray and blinded to any degree because every day the

authorities endlessly repeat what the apostle Peter says in I Peter 2 [:18]: “You should  be

submissive to your lords, even if they are rogues,” etc. In truth, the sword [of Scripture] cuts

sharply on both sides, and until now they have fought masterfully with it. But we want to see

how Tileman [a foolish man], confuses divine Scripture again, and the wolf so cleverly puts

on  sheep’s clothing. Truly, truly, St. Peter’s view means something  very  different; for

according to their interpretation, we would have to deliver our pious wives and children to

them, so that they could satisfy their lust with them.

 

The basic cause and  source of the whole confederation  of the Swiss was the

unlimited, tyrannical power of the nobility  and  of other authorities. For daily, with their

unchristian, tyrannical rape, they did not spare the common man, but forced and compelled

him contrary  to  all equity. And  this grew out of their pride, blasphemous power, and

enterprise. Their rule had to be abolished and rooted out through great war, bloodshed, and

use of the sword, as is indicated in the Swiss chronicles and in many other reliable histories

and  writings. The conclusion  of this pamphlet talks a bit about this. The lords were also

allowed to murder pious and upright people for hunting a hare, and they did similar things

because of their perverted minds. Indeed, such a Babylonian captivity has tightly confined us.

But the primary responsibility for it rests with the authority which saw itself as, and

boasted  of being, “spiritual.” Indeed, it was lustful! The bishops were sheep-biters. The

sheepdogs of the parish  themselves tore apart the good  lambs, which  they  were supposed

faithfully  to  tend  and  protect. In  this way  the werewolves [tyrannical secular authorities]

joined them in falling violently on the good sheep. For a long time now they have tended the

sheep according to their pleasure and to their heart’s content, and – I should surely say it -

have made monkeys of the sheep.

 

God can and will no longer tolerate this great misery and wantonness, which is now

found everywhere. May God enlighten his poor lambs through divine grace and, with true

Christian faith, and protect them against these ravaging wolves. And he will not enlighten the

lambs in the form in which the pernicious and cursed vermin copulate with each other – “If

you help me, I will help you.” Look, is it not a lamentable plague that they market divine

Scripture in  such  a miserable and  shameful way, [insisting] so  strictly  and  without any

foundation on obedience to their roguish commands? In truth, there is a great remedy [for

what they  do], namely  none other than  divine Scripture – according to  which  they should

judge and administer, strictly adhering to justice and without deviation.

 

In sum, the Latin word discolus in this passage of St. Peter’s letter [i.e. I Pet. 2:18]

can in no way be translated as “rogues,” as they jabber; rather it means “a coarse, uncouth or

angry person, who may also be very pious at the same time.” For David says in Psalm 4 [:5],

“Be angry, but sin not.” And St. Peter mentions here only servants. They should faithfully serve

their  lords. Even  if their lord  is upset and  angry  with them, they should serve him no less

faithfully despite this. If they  do  not, they  cannot excuse themselves for taking  their wage without

earning it. They should leave his service instead. That would be the Christian way to live.

And even if this text of Peter had the meaning which they blabber about, that “rogues” should

be obeyed, it is still in the sense of divine commandments.

 

In sum, the basis of St. Peter’s whole epistle is directed only to God’s honor, brotherly

fidelity, and unity. The selfish rogues boast that they follow these commandments. Indeed,

they follow them as werewolves do good lambs!

——————————————

Thomas Müntzer was an early Reformation era German theologian who became a rebel leader during the German Peasant’s War of the 1520s. He turned against Martin Luther with several anti-Lutheran writings, and supported the Anabaptists. In the Battle of  Frankenhausen Müntzer and his followers were defeated. He was captured, tortured and decapitated.

Marx & the Non-West (including Ireland)

Spencer A. Leonard with Kevin Anderson

Last summer, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism(1995) and Marx at the Margins (2010). The interview was broadcast on August 2, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK–FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Spencer Leonard: Broadly describe your aims and ambitions in writing Marx at the Margins.

Kevin Anderson: One aim was that, in the past couple of decades – really the past three decades since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, there have been a number of critiques of Marx that centered on charges of Eurocentrism, ethnocentricsm, and so forth. I wanted to respond to those, but also to look at Marx anew in light of them. Moreover, while there are various works on Marx and European nationalisms, on India and China, and the late writings on Russia, no one had covered the whole of these, including Marx’s writing on the Civil War in the United States, which deal directly with ethnicity. So my second aim as to address them together in a single study with the other, more well-known writings. This also required taking account of newly surfaced writings of Marx slated to appear in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe.

SL: Regarding the Eurocentrism charge, it is raised not only to criticize Marx, but also to reject the Enlightenment tradition in which all critical theory finds its roots. Yet, rather than dismissing the charge as an expression of third world nationalism, your book takes it seriously—arguing that indeed Marx and Engels are not wholly immune from criticism on these grounds. You point to the “unilinearity” of their early writings, above all the Communist Manifesto and the New York Tribune writings of the early 1850s. But is the category of “the West” really relevant for Marx or for the radical Enlightenment out of which he emerges?

KA: Certainly there are places where that is the case. In some of the 1853 writings on India, for instance, Marx speaks of England as a superior civilization, which by virtue of its higher economic form is going to revolutionize India. Also, as late as the preface to Capital, Marx says that more developed countries show the less developed the image of their own future. These examples suggest almost, if one wanted to think of it in terms of a railroad train, that the Western European countries and North America are kind of in the front couple cars of the train and that Asia and the so-called “third world” are in the rear being pulled forward into modernity.

SL: So that all countries would in a sense recapitulate the historical trajectory of those at the head of the train.

KA: Right! Of course, stated so simplisticly, no one supports such a view. No one would say that India is going to become an exact copy of England. But of the extent that one would say that a country like Britain represents the future of humanity, one is adopting a Eurocentric model. Of course, there are also problems with the critique of Eurocentrism, which is often very critical of the social structures and social institutions of modern Western societies and far less so of the social structures and institutions of the non-West. Marx in examining “non-Western” societies is always critical. And as his thought matures, these criticisms cease to rely upon a Eurocentric unilinearity and move toward a more multilinear perspective. However, Marx is no primitivist anarchist interested in returning to a clan-based, low-tech society. Nor does he idealize the social formations in places like India, with their caste and other hierarchies, their subordination of women, etc. He does not sugar-coat any of that. Nonetheless, towards the end of his life, there is evidence that he entertains more of a possibility of societies evolving and revolutionizing themselves more on the basis of indigenous institutions. This is never entirely so, but he gives more consideration to the internally generated institutions of these societies.

SL: It seems to me that when Marx says England represents a higher civilization, he is not really talking about the “Englishness” of England, much less anything “authentically Western.” Capitalism for Marx is not a superiorcivilization. Rather, capitalist society is “civilization,” per se, in a way that the past can only be said to be by analogy with it. Thus, in the Communist Manifesto, he uses the language of “civilization,” and terms everything else barbaric, as for instance in the passage where he talks about the beating down of Chinese walls by British imports. The issue is the universality of the form realizing itself at the level of world history. So, it seems that when he is using that language, he is talking about a social form, one that just happens to have emerged in Europe.

KA: Well of course there is some truth in that, but as I also say in the book, the language sometimes verges on what today we would consider ethnocentric—the descriptions of India as an unchanging, unresisting society that has no history except that which is imposed on it by its foreign conquerors, and so on. There are some problems there. Another example would be an early text in which Engels applauds the U.S. war with Mexico, the conquest of California, and the incorporation into the United States of the Southwest, referring to “the lazy Mexicans” who were unable to develop the region in the way the North Americans are going to do. That kind of language reverses by the 1860s and 1870s. You can see a real turn there. Also in writings by Engels, but also on occasion by Marx, there is the claim that the Czech and the Serb peoples (to name only a few) are barbaric, so it is good that in some areas they are dominated by the Germans, who represent a higher civilization. These nations are destined to disappear, and this is a good thing. Again, there are exceptions to this even in the early writings. And whenever they are actually in contact with real historical movements of resistance that are at all progressive, they change their tune fairly quickly. The clearest example of this is Ireland. Nothing in their writings suggests any sympathy for any “progress” that Britain is bringing to Ireland. Engels especially was intimately involved with Ireland as early as his 1845 work The Conditions of the Working Class in England. There Engels devotes a lot of attention to the Irish sub-proletariat in Manchester and to its special oppression. Marx too supports the Irish national movement, though at first his support is not for independence but for greater rights within the empire.

SL: Marx and Engels seem to me to inherit a situation from an earlier period that is utterly unfamiliar to us. They lived in a time before the whole world was bourgeois, and it seems to me that part of the struggle of not just Marx and Engels but also of Hegel, Kant, Adam Smith, and Rousseau, is a struggle to critically apprehend the specificity of modernity, one that can be apprehended both temporally and ethno-geographically. This to me is what lies at the core of the early modern debate between the ancients and the moderns—major European intellectuals of freedom and emancipation are confronted with the fact that their society is expanding and that no other society seems genuinely capable of resisting it. Hegel thus says that the North American Indians fall at the mere breath of Europe, echoing Rousseau’s comments about the confrontation of civilization with the natural man. Similarly, Adam Smith was duly impressed by the fact that a small number of Englishmen in the East India Company could in his lifetime conquer significant territories in the ancient and fabled land of India. In this sense, then, there’s the question of the Eurocentrism of their experience. They had to address a question we don’t. That question is: What if the highest potentials of modern society are brought forward before globalization has done its work? What if there is a successful socialist revolution in Europe and North America before capitalism has spread to the rest of the world?

KA: One of Marx and Engels’s great worries is this – What if radical communism or radical democracy, as they sometimes call it, should overtake this small sliver of the modernized, capitalist world only to be smothered very quickly by the rest of the world? He is particularly worried about the power of Russia. We look back and we see England as the predominant power in Marx’s time. But in political terms, Russia was the second most important power in Europe. Do not forget that the 1848 revolutions were defeated in substantial part because Russia was able to send 400,000 troops into the Austro-Hungarian Empire to aid the old regime. So Marx and Engels certainly are concerned with the fact that the modern workers’ movement has emerged only in a small corner of the world. What if it should remain isolated? So on the one hand, they are happy about the spread of modernity, capitalism, and even to a certain extent colonialism, throughout the world, at least in their early writings. On the other hand, as they develop, as Marx moves in the 1850s towards the completion of theGrundrisse and Capital, the critique of capitalism becomes more intense, sharper, deeper, more unremitting. In the Communist Manifesto, we have those lines about the progressivism of capitalism. That language persists only in very muted form in the Grundrisse and Capital. Over the trajectory of Marx’s writing there is less enthusiasm about progress emerging out of capitalist modernity. And remember that Marx had not lived in England yet when he penned the Communist Manifesto. He hadn’t experienced directly a high development of capitalist modernity. Perhaps from the outside he even idealized it. It’s very strange to say this about Marx, but he becomes more critical of capitalism. I have argued that there is a gradual shift, never toward an uncritical third worldism, never toward a primitivist anarchism, but toward harsher critiques of capitalist modernity and a greater appreciation of some of the achievements and contributions of societies at the margins.

SL: Regarding this waning of Marx’s belief in capitalism’s progressive effects the question arises, In what sense did Marx ever think capitalism progressive, in the first place? For instance, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx argued that with the coming of capitalism, “all fixed fast-frozen social relations with their venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All that is solid melts into air and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind” Here he seems to be celebrating the fact of capitalism’s having swept the past away and given rise to the possibility of its own self-overcoming, the possibility of mankind’s confrontation with our circumstances with, as he puts it, sober senses. Capitalism in this sense only makes possible the conclusion of pre-history through deliberate action to achieve a post-capitalist society. In this sense, when Marx terms capitalism “civilization,” it can be viewed as having a doubled charge as both the overcoming and the perfection of the past. Do you think that Marx’s attitude about that ever changes?

KA: Even in the Communist Manifesto, where his praise is at the highest, in those paragraphs you were quoting, there is the phrase, “the icy waters of individual calculation,” which I don’t think he means as a compliment to capitalism and its culture.

SL: No? Don’t we sometimes splash cold water on our faces in order to wake ourselves up?

KA: The point I am trying to make is that even in that language about progressivism, it’s always dialectical. Part of the way the Manifesto is set up is that the first few pages set out this model that the subsequent pages undermine by talking about all the contradictions and oppressions brought about by capital, such as making the worker a mere instrument or machine, the recessions and depressions that capitalism creates, that fact that the capitalist class is unfit to rule because it can’t guarantee to the subordinate population, the proletariat, even the minimal level of existence, etc. As you were saying, there is the very clear implication that you have to go through this process. But in the later writings, that is less clear. The most dramatic example is the late writings on Russia, where the Russian villages are still overwhelmingly rural but are starting to be encroached upon by capitalist property relations and capitalist banking. You can see on the horizon the glimmers of what was to become the beginning of the industrialization of Russia in the 1890s, which Marx did not live to see. Still Marx does suggest that if the villages resist the encroachment of capitalism, this might be a good thing. He talks about the communal structure of the Russian villages and the collectivist social forms they take, even more so than in the medieval European village, let alone modern capitalist social relations. He sees in this a possible building block for a modern communism. And there was a revolutionary movement there at the time trying to do exactly that. In dialogue with that Russian revolutionary movement, Marx is wondering whether it might not be able to link up with the proletarian revolutions of the West he is anticipating. So not everyone has to necessarily go through this painful, uprooting process of the old social relations as happens with the industrial revolution. This has wider implications. And there are other examples one can point to in the later writings, the writings from 1881 and 1882 just before his death.

SL: In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel says,

Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities and the finest examples of private virtue forms a picture of the most fearful aspect and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defense or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise, that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us into the more agreeable environment of our private individual life- the present formed by our aims and interests. In short, we retreat into selfishness that stands on the quiet shore and thus enjoys the safety of the distant spectacle of “wrecks confusedly hurled.” But even regarding history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of people, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized, the question involuntarily arises: To what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered? From this point, the investigation [of History] proceeds…[1]

It seems to me that Marx inherits this very profoundly, for instance, in the statement,“that all hitherto existing history has been the history of class struggle.” But it also seems to me that Marx’s theory of capital reconfigures that concern somewhat. In particular, it raises not only the question of the suffering of all of world history, which, for some at least, in one corner of the world, involved the suffering industrial capitalism’s emergence, but also what Hegel says—that, in some unconsoling and inconsolable way, this is just a historical fact, albeit a deeply melancholy one. In the face of which Marx asks, What about when this suffering is no longer necessary? What about the post-1848 world? That is, in some ways it is the failure of the Revolution of 1848, the failure of the working class and indeed humanity to rise to the historical tasks of industrial society that is the most deeply melancholy fact (and the most fundamental object of critique) for Marx. It might be in that light that we’d look at his descriptions of the barbarities committed in India, China or elsewhere—i.e., that these are unnecessary. They are not History, in Hegel’s sense.

KA: Marx is a child of Hegel in that respect. On the language about fatality, I would say that Hegel is also the philosopher of the human subject. He is interested in the quest for freedom, for self-determination. This operates within a larger framework that adds up to a historical progression, as Hegel sees it. But, of course, even with Hegel progress is never one sided. He has room for retrogression within his concept of historical development. For example, he regards the entire European medieval period as one of retrogression. So neither Hegel nor Marx are the uncritical progressivists they are often portrayed as being.

But there are some differences with Hegel. Some of Marx’s descriptions of the Indian village and Indian civilization as backward, unchanging, unresisting, and passive, as not really having a history, are practically copied from Hegel’s Philosophy of History. But what I think held Marx back from being fully Hegelian, although that is certainly his major intellectual influence, is, as everyone points out, that Marx is a more empirical thinker. Marx is interested in looking at historical and social phenomena more closely than Hegel, although Hegel did do quite a bit of that too. Also, Marx is a humanist. That is the big difference. There is an implicit humanism in some of Hegel’s writings on the human subject, but in Marx’s 1844 critique of Hegel, he zeroes in on the abstraction of Hegel’s philosophizing where the real breathing human being, the corporeal, bodily being, is not really present or is insufficiently present in Hegel’s thinking. Marx is more reluctant than Hegel to think in terms of fatal laws of history, especially by the end of his life. In a response to Nikolai Mikhailovsky, a Russian who was trying to defend Marx by saying that he had a general theory of history, Marx replied that he did not have a concept of historical development that is inevitably or fatally imposed on all peoples. He is a little less global, as a thinker, in that sense, than Hegel, a little less totalizing, although it is a real caricature to paint Hegel as a thinker of totality without room for particularity. Because Hegel spent a lot of time attacking what he called the “abstract universal.”

SL: It seems to me that Marx is deeply beholden to Hegel on the question of the project of the self-conscious constitution of history. Of course, that project is radically reconfigured by Marx through his understanding of commodity fetishism and what consciousness means in the struggle to realize and overcome civil society in the age of capital. Like Hegel, the question is one of humanity’s becoming self-conscious. It is not just a question of fatality, but of reason’s cunning. In the modern world, as Hegel says, “everyone is free.” There is the question of the free constitution of history that Marx inherits. What you’re calling Marx’s pessimism or his increasingly harsh and unremitting critique of capital for me turns on the question of struggling with a social form whose potential for emancipation is bound up with its seeming recalcitrance to that project. Of course, post-1848 Marx thinks that the new tasks of the revolution have been announced yet humanity is not taking them up. The way I read the writings on the barbarity of British suppression of the Indian Mutiny is that Marx is arguing that, to the extent that modern society falls below the threshold of its own possibility, it renounces its title to supersede feudalism. It is not really a question of support for the Indian Mutiny, but of the melancholy recognition of a kind of civilized barbarism. But, once again, there are strong echoes here of Adam Smith’s earlier critique of the East India Company, to name only the most obvious instance.

KA: There is a lot packed into your comment. In the famous letter to Engels of 1858 where Marx talks about having reread Hegel’s Logic as he is reconstructing some of the categories that were to become the Gundrisseand later Capital, he says that the Logic was a great help to him in working through the economic categories. That’s the same letter where he says that the Indians are now “our best allies.” So, I do take that as support for the Indian Sepoy Uprising of 1857. The question is, What does support mean? It does not mean that he is supporting the political aims of the uprising, which, to the extent that they were coordinated, called for the restoration of the Mogul Empire. Certainly he doesn’t support that. My take on it is that it is very different.

———————–

[ The interview first appeared in The Platypus Review, March, 2012]

Professor Morrie and Revolutionary Literature

Ashim ‘Kaka’ Chatterjee

Tuesdays with Morrie disturbed me. This book disturbed me a lot. The story of Professor Morrie Schwartz is distinctive. There is not much of action here. Not too much description of life’s experiences. Colourful characters do not clash with each other in order to create a dramatic situation.  What one encounters instead is death—in its full glory—and life arising out of death. Tuesdays with Morrie is a story of an old professor and his not-so-old student.

What kind of a man is Professor Morrie?  He teaches sociology at Brandies University. Not merely chhatra-dardi or chhatra vatsal—to brand him thus will be saying a lot less about his relationship to his pupils. Students are his life. Naturally his home, the restaurants near his university, the lawns  and nooks—all are sites for nurturing a peripatetic world of examined life with his students. His love of books and ideas is infectious. Love of life, even more.

He arrives at a class. A hall full of anxious young minds—waiting. But Morrie is silent. For 15 long minutes. First the students are bemused, mild jokes hover around, notes get exchanged, a certain uneasy restlessness pervades. Then there comes a moment of pin-drop silence. Hush. The professor begins. His subject of the day: the influence of silence in human relationships. Why do we get bothered by silence? Wherefore peace in utterance?  This is the way the man wins over his students, commands respect and love. He is not as dexterous as his more famous fictional rival in To Sir With Love nor as historically vexed as Coetzee’s Professor Lurie. But Morrie is not against life. Though he cannot manage his steps, he would dance. Not a good singer, he would be immersed in music.  Not a particularly skilful swimmer, he would love to go for a dip.

His student, who is narrating Morrie’s life, is bringing this world, a cosmos really, into being with utmost care and craft. The university life being over and done with, his students bring Morrie a brief-case, embossed with his name. They embrace—the teacher and his pupils.  And part silently.

In such a lively man’s life there arrives a terrible tempest. All in a flash. Morrie gets infected with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS)—a motor neurone predicament. We all are familiar with Stephen Hawking and his encounters with this disease. Not much has been discovered yet about this condition and not much preventive or curative stuff is available yet. But death is imminent. Maximum duration of possible survival is 5 years. In Morrie’s case, it is 2. As Morrie comes out of the diagnostic centre, he notices the busy world going on with its daily activities. As the world refreshes, he withers.

Gradual, little, incremental changes are making him give up the small pleasures of life. He discovers in the morning that he can’t fix his car’s brakes—driving as an option is gone. Begins to trip as he walks and therefore requires a walking stick—end of independent walking days. In the locker room, in order to change his outfit, he needs manual help—end of privacy. Appears before his students one morning and announces that he might not finish his quota of coursework that particular semester and so they can opt for other courses or may drop out—end of his secret pride.

ALS, the writer tells us, in an evocative phrase, is like a burning candle. It will burn out and melt your nerves  into a waxen residue. The process starts from your legs and usually travels up. After a while, you cannot stand on your feet. And then sitting too becomes impossible. Finally, if you are still alive, a rubber tube will facilitate your breathing. And all this, when you are fully conscious of the rapid changes taking place in your body.

The professor takes a profound decision: that he will utilize fully the rest of his living days. There is no need to feel embarrassed about the inevitable.  Why not make his death a case for research? Is it not worth it to travel the boundaries of life and death and think afresh?  With this thought in mind, Morrie begins to disseminate himself to others, to everyone.  He gives a clarion call for meetings in his apartment in order to discuss the many variations on death threadbare. Not empathy or sentimentality he needs—but interviews, new connections, telephonic conversations— with an urge to examine life through death is what he would rather like to indulge in during the remaining period of his existence. He walks into TV studios. His student and now a well known newspaper columnist Mitch Albom had promised to keep in touch after they parted upon Mitch’s graduation from the university.  He could not fulfil his promise. The rat race got him. Mitch responds now—after 16 long years and they start a new research agenda, like the old times: meeting his professor every Tuesday and thrashing out issues of life in their many hues—Society, Rights, Guilt, Death, Fear, Aging, Greed, Marriage, Family, Forgiveness and so forth.  By that time Morrie is unable to conduct his everyday activities. Every Tuesday is downhill. But he is unfazed. He requests in a matter of fact fashion to a guest, “Can you please hold on to this bowl—need to take a piss?” Since he has no other option but to rely on others, he has no qualms or feelings of guilt.  When asked in a television show about what bothers him about this dependency, pat comes his reply: “Soon someone has to wipe off my arse.” The final Tuesday was reserved for ‘Adieu’—as a subject of discussion. Only a few words. Morrie breathes his last the Saturday next.

Discussion on death and human preoccupation with death is timeless really. Yet it is also historicised in specific circumstances. The sons and daughters of Amrita have not been able to transcend death fully.  The idea actually is not to transcend death but to encounter it, as part of our material living. The cells die. So do our bodies. Eventually. Those who think of decay and effacement in negative ways, will think of transcending death. They do not love life.

I remember my days in the 70s. I am not trying to personalize here, but actually trying to think through some moments. I remember Brihannal’s mother.  She was an illiterate mother whose son, Brihannal was absconding, underground, farar owing to state surveillance and atrocities. His mother came to ask me to get back her son. Her son was not into any unethical work—why was she so troubled then? “Baba, my son will die,” she said. I replied, “Yes, your son may die in this warfare. Take him back. But promise me that he will never die. Until the sun and moon and stars remain in the firmament, your son shall live.” I gave her three books to read that day—about those some other day. I do not yet know what that mother understood. Nor was I trying to act the teacher. It was an exchange. She left on her own, without her son. Was she demoralised? Was she proud?

Morrie’s book is a best-seller  So, it may be considered a popular read. Not deep enough. But I don’t know, I really don’t—why it reminded me of The Old Man and the Sea. Does a revolutionary have the right to feel good about such books?

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Ashim Chatterjee was a student leader of (CPI(ML). Chatterjee broke ranks with Charu Majumdar in 1971 after the failure of the attempts to build an armed movement in the Debra-Gopiballavbur area iand due to the opposition of CPI(ML) towards the liberation struggle of Bangladesh. He was imprisoned during 1972-78. Chatterjee formed the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa Border Regional Committee, CPI(ML)as a separate faction. . Later Chatterjee formed the Communist Revolutionary League of India.

Political Iconography & the Female Political Leader: The Case of Indira Gandhi, Some Initial Questions

 

 Trina Nileena Banerjee

 

 

‘The coming generation will feel extremely proud of the name of Indira Gandhi. They will worship her as the personification of Sita, Lakshmi and Durga. Long live Indiraji,’

~ Virendra Khanna, General Secretary of National Affairs. [i]

 

 

From a large portion of the visual, historical and literary material emerging around the National Emergency in India (1975-1977), it could be argued that a strong undertone of religiosity and the sense of a mystical, yet terrifying, female power surrounded the popular perception of Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. Sita[ii], Lakshmi[iii] and Durga[iv], of course, stood for the virtues of chastity, purity, service, prosperity and strength – qualities that were seen to be embodied in Indira’s person during the first years of her government. The influence of religious, especially Hindu religious, iconography had always been a strong determinant in the popular representations of national political leadership in India and had managed to survive from the days of the nationalist struggle into the 1970s, as Christopher Pinney has shown in his book Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India.[v] In an essay called ‘Towards the Space of the Beholder’, Pinney writes:

Ramakrishna, as also Swami Vivekananda, initially subjected to photographic regimes, were very soon circulated through the technology of chromolithography – a way of disseminating photos of the gods (bhagwan ke photo) which was more phenomenologically adequate to the task of impressing quasi-divine power. The same would soon also be true of the political pantheon as it merged towards the end of the nineteenth century. Tilak, Gandhi, Ambedkar and numerous others were endlessly photographically documented (many of them by the Bombay based photographer V. N. Virkar), but is as coloured lithographs that they sedimented themselves among the wider populace.[vi]

An examination of Indira Gandhi’s representations in popular art during the 1960s and 1970s (as recorded in the prints available in Pinney’s book and various popular cartoons) reveals a continuation of this tradition: an odd visual continuum between the portrayal of godhead and that of political leadership. The element of worship, which had continued to feature prominently in the political and electoral popularity of figures of Indira Gandhi’s stature from the time of Independence, appears to be a strong subterranean current in these popular representations. This strand of religiosity was not a figment of imagination or wishful thinking that emerged from sections of Indira’s loyal coterie, but, arguably, significantly coloured the visual and verbal rhetoric of the dominant political propaganda surrounding her greatness, shaping mass-produced images and popular calendar art, and ultimately putting the final seal on the process of her deification during the nineteen months of the Emergency, when Congress President D. K. Barooah famously claimed “India is Indira, Indira is India.’ Pinney writes in his book about the continuities that existed in the 1960s’ and 70s’ between representations of technological/military advance, political leadership and religious figures:

There were also, in the 1960s and ’70s, inevitably a vast number of Indira images; she is shown with Jawaharlal Nehru, with Sanjay, against the national flag. One series, strongly inflected with a Soviet socialist realist aesthetic, depicts scenes from the life of contemporary India within decorative interlocking cogs suggestive of a huge mechanized India. Heroic peasants clutching sheaves of wheat and sickles are juxtaposed with vast hydroelectric projects, the Trombay reactor, heavy engineering works and scenes of high-tech laboratories peopled by whitecoated technicians. Wendy O’Flaherty once commented on the Shivling-like contours of the Trombay reactor, suggesting that a postage stamp that bore its image depicted it within a religious frame. Be that as it may, some Hindu deities have always engaged intimately with modernity. Vishvakarma – a traditional deity of artisan castes – has long been worshipped through special pujas in steel and other factories throughout India…[vii]

Impulses towards industrial modernity merged with celebrations of (Hindu) religious tradition the labour-power of ‘heroic peasants’; presiding over these images, yoking together ‘progress’ and the visual grammar of Hindu worship, was the benevolent figure of the then current Prime Minister and the concrete embodiment of the idea of ‘Mother India’. This essay will attempt to examine, through the case of Indira Gandhi, the complex and perhaps perverse imbrications of authoritarian rule, deification, embodiment and femininity in the Indian political context of the 1960s and 1970s. How a female political leader ‘performs her image’ in the post-colonial public sphere and the extra-rational implications of this performance, which tap on to both deep-seated religious and socio-cultural resources for success, would be the primary themes of exploration in this paper. The essay also emerges from my broader investment in a theoretical and historical exploration of women’s relationship to power in the realpolitik, their differential engagements with political violence (not just as victims but also as agents/perpetrators) and their associations with authoritarian/repressive/right-wing regimes and politico-religious movement.  The association of a female political leader with perhaps the single-most repressive period in the political history of post-Independence India leads to an inevitable rethinking of the straightforward liberal feminist notion of female political agency as a positive in itself. I am interested in the relationship of this problematic to performance, especially the performance of gender in the public and political sphere.

Popular visual representations – for example, the frequently misogynistic cartoons and caricatures in the mainstream media[viii] – of Indira Gandhi that were current during the period of her governance reveal much about the intimate, complex, and sometimes derisive, relationship existing between the iconic female leader and the postcolonial polity she governed.  My specific interest is in the relationship of popular critiques, as well as celebrations, of political conservatism to the figure of the exceptionally powerful female. There is, in addition, the difficulty faced by feminists in reading such a figure, one who did nothing historically for the larger interests of marginalized women’s groups, as well as for ‘sisterhood’. This difficulty is addressed by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan in her essay ‘Gender, Leadership and Nation: The ‘Case’ of Indira Gandhi’^[ix] in the book Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. Sunder Rajan discusses the roles of female political leaders in South Asian countries and the difficulties that feminist theory faces in analyzing effectively their political contributions (especially vis-à-vis the complex popular representations of their ‘femininity’, or lack thereof). She writes: “In the typical biographical representations of Indira Gandhi, the problem of reconciling gender and authority is resolved through the familiar dichotomizing of the subject into a private self and a public persona; and here it is the self alone that is gendered female.”^[x]During the Emergency when Indira Gandhi’s authority grew to unimaginable proportions and slogans such as ‘Indira is India’ became unprecedentedly popular. According to journalist Kuldip Nayar^[xi], who was imprisoned under censorship laws during the Emergency, a ‘cult of personality’ developed around Mrs. Gandhi and visual spectacle formed a crucial part of this ‘cult’. Larger than life, and in some cases, enormous blow-ups of her figure, along with her new twenty-point economic programme appeared everywhere. It begun to be said that Mrs. Gandhi looked quite sordid in most of these gargantuan visual representations and she later had some of them pulled down. But the upshot was that the urban and semi-urban spaces of the country were pervaded by ‘monstrous’ representations of the female leader of the nation, who had by then begun to be widely hated in several circles for her uncompromisingly authoritarian ways. On the other hand, according to journalists like Barun Sengupta^[xii], Indira Gandhi was often popularly referred to as the ‘only real man’ in the Congress (especially contra the previous Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, who was seen as a really weak and ineffectual leader), signaling towards a continuance of the reading of effective political leadership in terms of masculinity and femininity within what was, in reality, an atmosphere of severely repressive governance.

What seems to emerge ever more strongly in the studies of Indira Gandhi’s career, immediately pre- and post-Emergency, is the impossibility of the separation of a distilled ‘secular’ field in the postcolonial Indian context, where calculable electoral operations may be mapped without doubt in relation to stable constituencies, ‘interest’ groups and a ‘disenchanted’, and enlightened political actions. What Thomas Blom Hansen asserts in his study of Shiv Sena politics between the 1960s and 1990s, could perhaps also be said, in a more qualified way, about mainstream electoral politics in India in the build-up towards the Emergency and in the events that immediately followed it. It could be argued that some of the predominant political features of this time were the manipulation/organisation of public spectacles on massive scales and the management of public moods/rumours (during the Emergency through a containment of some rumours and the encouragement of others). There was also the deliberate operation of a certain stylistic aesthetic both in terms of rhetoric (including consistent ‘socialist’ double-speak in the case of Gandhi and the assertion of a freshly-minted ‘anti-corruption’ political honesty in the case of Jayprakash Narayan, her political and moral opponent) and bodily comportment. One could contend that it was all these factors put together, rather than any stable political ideology or concrete plan of action, which allowed both Gandhi and her subsequent opponent (popularly known as “JP”) to sustain, however briefly, the electoral/political gains they were able to garner. Hansen writes:  “[…] political choice and preference probably is guided by much more ephemeral and transient collective moods, as well as considerations of worthiness or personal qualities of the candidates standing for election. […] I will suggest we focus much more on the role of ideology, of the creation of public moods and sentiments, of the production of authority…”[xiii]  Also important for my argument in this context is the mode of production of this political authority in the case of Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, which to my mind, approximates closely to what Achille Mbembe in his book On the Postcolony calls the self-construction of this authority as a ‘fetish.’ Mbembe writes:

“In the postcolony, the commandement8 seeks to institutionalize itself, to achieve legitimation and hegemony (recherche hégémonique), in the form of a fetish. The signs, vocabulary, and narratives that the commandement produces are meant not merely to be symbols; they are officially invested with a surplus of meanings that are not negotiable and that one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge. To ensure that no such challenge takes place, the champions of state power invent entire constellations of ideas; they adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts; but they also resort, if necessary, to the systematic application of pain. The basic goal is not just to bring a specific political consciousness into being, but to make it effective.”[xiv]

But this same authoritarian move towards the fetishization of political authority/icons from above allows, according to Mbembe, a ludic space – a space where the postcolonial subject may turn into homo ludens par excellence. But Mbembe speaks also of the mutual ‘zombification’ of the commandement and the ruled which he sees as leading to instances of theophagy, since, he argues, this relationship is primarily a magical, enchanted one. He writes:

As noted, the commandement defines itself as a cosmology or, more simply, as a fetish. A fetish is, among other things, an object that aspires to be made sacred; it demands power and seeks to maintain a close, intimate relationship with those who carry it. […]It turns the postcolonial autocrat into an object that feeds on applause, flattery, lies. […]In this situation, one should not underestimate the violence that can be set in motion to protect the vocabulary used to denote or speak of the commandement, and to safeguard the official fictions that underwrite the apparatus of domination, since these are essential to keeping the people under the commandement’s spell, within an enchanted forest of adulation that, at the same time, makes them laugh.[xv]

He goes on to say:

[…] peculiar also to the postcolony is the way the relationship between rulers and ruled is forged through a specific practice: simulacrum (le simulacre). This explains why dictators can sleep at night lulled by roars of adulation and support only to wake up to find their golden calves smashed and their tablets of law overturned. The applauding crowds of yesterday have become today a cursing, abusive mob.[xvi]

Indira Gandhi’s massive electoral failure in the March 1977 elections is said to have immensely surprised her. Indira was caught off-guard by her defeat in spite of the fact that it was plain to see for anyone other than her and those who belonged to her sycophantic coterie that she was bound to lose. For her, who listened only to those who gave her the news she wanted to hear and the media she had herself carefully censored, the victory of the Janata Party under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan (also known as ‘Loknayak’: ‘the leader of the people) was unexpected. A solipsistic closed circle had been created between herself and the media she had carefully created (by putting into operation an immense machinery of every-day censorship that looked over the most banal details of everything that appeared in newsprint or was broadcast over radio), where she heard her own voice echoed back to her and in what could only be called a process of ‘zombification’ began to believe it. All official voices and every newspaper had explicitly sung only praises for Indira till the Emergency was called off on January 18, 1977, a couple of months before the election. The magical practice of fetishization and simulacral rituals had ensured that a mutual zombification of both the autocrat and the mobs was achieved. The announcement of the elections and the lifting of the Emergency meant that the autocrat’s spell was broken and the scenario seemed to be exactly as Mbembe has outlined above: the adoring/worshipping masses had turned overnight into an angry mob, hungry for its deity’s flesh. An instance of theophagy, it could be argued. Mbembe also provides an important clue towards the reading of resistance (or its absence) during the Emergency – that in the context of the familiarity and the intimate space shared by the ruler and the ruled, an atmosphere of conviviality shared by the two sides clear mappings of resistance and oppression in the way we commonsensically understand them would be difficult.

Around the time of the Emergency, therefore, official propaganda continued to fetishize and deliberately deify the image of Gandhi for the masses. Emma Tarlo discusses the emergence of dominant and official narrative of the Emergency in Northern India in the mid 1970s in her book Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi:

The overriding message was that through hard work and mass coordination, India could enter a new and successful era of socialism.

THE ONLY MAGIC TO REMOVE POVERTY IS HARD WORK

YOU TOO HAVE A ROLE IN THE EMERGENCY!

WORK HARD! PRODUCE MORE! MAINTAIN DISCIPLINE!

While slogans, stickers and newspaper headlines codified the basic message into succinct and memorable phrases, government pamphlets with titles like Timely Steps and Preserving Our Democratic Structure spread the word. […] the Prime Minister’s words are echoed in the praise of successive chief ministers and important dignitaries who proclaim the Emergency ‘a necessary measure’, ‘a good opportunity for the poor’, ‘a wise and timely action’. Meanwhile Indira herself is admired for her dynamic leadership, her pursuit of truth and her dedication to the nation for which she will never be forgotten.[xvii]

In the propaganda that painted her leadership as motherly service to the nation, the vast populace of India appeared as her children and explicit connections of Indira’s role as the benevolent maternal leader of the nation with iconic images of Bharat Mata were not uncommon. The crucial point to remember here about the nationalist imagination of Bharat Mata is that she was both a deity and a familial figure, an abstract symbol of the suffering yet resilient ‘spirit’ of India^[xviii] as well as concretely embodied in and as Everywoman of the independent nation. The Bharat Mata was also the iconic embodiment of the twin feminine and seemingly opposing virtues of service/nurture and power/Shakti. Indira herself appears to have been an active participant in the representation and dual configuration of her political role as goddess and intimate, often deliberately using her supposed familial and nurturing roles in relation to the nation in order to garner popular support during electoral campaigns. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan tells us in her essay in Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism:

Indira herself used every opportunity to flaunt her (actual) Nehru identity as daughter, as well as her symbolic maternal concern for the people of the nation; and the two were not unrelated. It was during the 1967 elections when Indira Gandhi was only fifty years old that she was first hailed as ‘Mother India’. In a speech she said to her village audience, “Your burdens are relatively light because your families are limited and viable. But my burden is manifold because crores of my family members are poverty-stricken and I have to look after them’. Thus gendered family identities – especially motherhood – are culturally capable of sustaining metaphoric expansion to embrace dimensions of leadership. Mother India (the film) became the most memorable record of the possibilities of such transformation.^[xix]

But as the Emergency intensified its grip on India, it extended its repressive reach from arbitrary mass arrests of almost all active members of the opposition parties under the MISA^[xx] and the ruthless censorship of the press, towards the forced or coercive sterilization of multitudes of poor people in Northern India. This was especially widespread in Haryana, where Bansi Lal, the Prime Minister’s right hand man held his sway. Sterilization was carried out for the announced purposes of population control, along with a programme of ruthless slum clearance for urban beautification in and around Delhi. Benevolent images of the nurturing priyadarshini^[xxi] gradually gave away to the emergent form of the terrible mother bent on the destruction of her own children, as the goddess began to turn into a demon of uncontrollable power and cruelty, an embodiment of all that was repugnant about femininity. In discussing the role and trajectory of Indira Gandhi’s political leadership, as it was reflected in cultural products during the time of her rise to power, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan begins her analysis with Mehboob Khan’s popular Hindi film Mother India made in 1957. She then goes on to discuss literary works that emerged on the subject after the experience of the Emergency, starting with a story by O. V. Vijayan called ‘The Foetus’ which is one of a group of stories that first appeared in 1978 and were according to the author, ‘allegories of power’ that emerged from the witnessing of the “power and terror, occasioned by India’s brief experience of Emergency.”^[xxii] The central figure of this story is ‘the Lady, Widowed Sovereign’ who never appears in the story but rules over a cursed village whose inhabitants are terrorized, hunted and killed by the Foetus who is her immaculately-conceived son. Only her portrait is seen in the text worshipped in ‘the carnal fullness of middle age, pregnant, naked’. Sunder Rajan argues that while the allegorical form was made necessary by concerns about censorship at the time, this story was one of the ‘more specifically political critiques of Indira Gandhi’s prime Ministership in the post Emergency period.’^[xxiii] Sunder Rajan writes: ‘Between Mother India, product of post-Independence nationalism and ‘Foetus’ and Midnight’s Children, born of the Emergency trauma, stretches the history of Indira Gandhi’s leadership.’^[xxiv]

It does indeed appear that the ‘look’ of Indira Gandhi, so to say, quite literally changed during these months as represented various genres of mass-produced popular art, especially in political cartoons that appeared sporadically in international journals^[xxv] and Indian news weeklies, some of which were later shut down. Even serious representations of her visage began to resemble grotesque caricatures, visions of a femininity gone horribly wrong. Strangest among these changes was the transformation in her own perception of the visual material manufactured by her own governmental machinery that had spectacularly filled up the urban public space during the Emergency – enormous images of herself that accompanied the pictorial representations of her by-now notorious Twenty Point Programme, circulated aggressively in order to balance out the repressive measures against civil liberty through apparently benevolent steps towards social justice and a more equitable distribution of resources.  Journalist Kuldip Nayar writes in his book The Judgement: The Inside Story of the Emergency in India published in 1977:

Mrs. Gandhi had always given an economic cover to her political manoeuvres. […] This time she believed that the twenty-point programme would hide the move to sustain herself in power. And she looked like succeeding for the time being. The twenty-point programme came to dominate the media and every official and non-official discussion. Hoardings and posters came up everywhere, listing the points and carrying large portraits of her. The bigger the hoarding, the better was the appreciation, until she herself ordered their dismantling because her close friends told her that she looked “hideous” in paintings on the hoardings.^[xxvi]

Whether the paintings themselves were ‘hideous’ or whether they were perceived as such as a result of her growing unpopularity among the people towards the later months of the Emergency is difficult to gauge. But visual spectacles that marked the public space with images of Indira’s supposed popularity, as well as her continual broadcasts over the All India Radio about the needs/benefits of the Emergency and the continuous valorization of her efforts in the newspapers that became the mouthpieces of her coterie (the ones which did not were shut down), formed a large part of the combined propaganda machinery that kept the Emergency juggernaut rolling. The attempt to use spectacle to mark popular support began early with the collection of massive crowds in front of Mrs. Gandhi’s residence in 1 Safdarjung Road 12 June 1975, right after the Allahabad High Court judgement pronounced her guilty of corrupt practices in the 1971 elections (which had brought her to the Lok Sabha as Prime Minister). This judgement was the most immediate trigger for the declaration of the Emergency on 25 June 1975. According to Kuldip Nayar, trucks and Delhi Transport Corporation buses were requisitioned to bring crowds from the villages to the capital free of charge and the Chief Ministers of neighbouring states were asked to organize rallies in support of Indira Gandhi’s continued Prime Ministership. The idea was to prove by a sheer show of numbers in the public space that the people’s overwhelming support overruled the verdict of the judiciary in the matter of Mrs. Gandhi’s continuing in office. In the days that led up to the declaration of internal Emergency further rallies were organized in Delhi to stand as evidence for the popular support for Indira’s leadership, the biggest being the one that took place on the 20^th of June. Similar rallies were organized by the opposition under Jayprakash Narayan’s leadership, starting from March that year, in order to publicly mark the growing dissatisfaction with Indira’s government.  Nayar writes:

With emergency rule a little more than two months old, a cult of personality began to develop around Mrs. Gandhi. Her pictures sprouted all over the country, her twenty-point programme began to be chanted like a mantra: “Indira-study circles” were organized by all major universities and the Indira brigade gathered more volunteers.

And the portrayal of Mrs. Gandhi as a goddess by Husain, a famous painter, was now being officially shown round the country. Mrs. Gandhi of the Emergency was the deity who rode a full-blooded roaring tiger, and not a lion as mythology depicted.^[xxvii]

It was Bharat Mata, drawing on the religious iconography of the goddess Durga, who was often shown in popular art as riding a lion signifying her embodiment as Shakti.^[xxviii] The intimate terror of the image of Indira Gandhi as Bharat-Mata-gone-wrong, the journey, as it were, from priyadarshini (the loved one who is pleasing to look at, if we consider the combined meanings of ‘priya’ as both ‘well-loved’ and ‘pleasing’) to monster – can be grasped a little better if we look a deeper into the function of representative political iconography in modern India. In studying what he calls ‘history made by art’ or ‘how pictures were an integral element of history in the making’ in the book ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed image and Political Struggle in India, Christopher Pinney writes:

Scholars such as Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern have investigated the manner in which certain cultural practices treat images as compressed performances. […] The relevant question then becomes not how images ‘look’, but what they can ‘do’.[…]  A key concept here [in Hindu practice] is the notion of darshan, of ‘seeing and being seen’ by a deity, but which also connects to a whole range of ideas relating to ‘insight’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘philosophy’. […] Darshan’s mode of interaction mobilizes vision as part of a unified human sensorium, and visual interaction can be physically transformative.^[xxix]

Pinney then goes on to suggest that the interactions and imbrications between religious and political iconography in India have had a much longer and more complicated history of overlap than have been explored in recent studies on the subject. It is clear however from the memoirs and accounts that appear right after the end of the Emergency in 1977^[xxx], that the production of Indira Gandhi as an icon with patriotic-religious significance and the creation of multitudinous visual representations of the slogan ‘Indira is India’ was a deliberate and wide-ranging process that traversed many areas of public life in India at the time. And rather than a disavowal of her femininity or an underlining of its irrelevance to her position of political authority, these images and verbal propaganda sought to highlight the fact of her specifically female power (Shakti/Bharat Mata/Durga). Saba Mahmood writes on the use of the word ‘icon’ in her essay “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?”

[…]it refers not simply to an image but to a cluster of meanings that might suggest a persona, an authoritative presence, or even a shared imagination. In this view, the power of an icon lies in its capacity to allow an individual (or a community) to find him – or herself in a structure that has bearing on how one conducts oneself in this world. The term icon in my discussion therefore pertains not just to images but to a form of relationality that binds the subject to an object or an imaginary.^[xxxi]

In discussing the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005, where the Prophet Muhammad was represented as a terrorist, and the prevalent reaction of the western world to it, Mahmood critiques what she calls a ‘rather impoverished understanding of images, icons, and signs’ which ‘not only naturalizes a certain concept of a religious subject but fails to attend to the affective and embodied practices through which a subject comes to relate to a particular sign – a relation founded not only on representation but also on what I will call attachment and cohabitation.’^[xxxii] Trying to understand the affective potency of the images of Indira Gandhi circulated during the Emergency, would lead us directly to an engagement with the historical fact that these images were actually accompanied by clear directives on how to conduct one’s life and bear oneself in day-to-day living as a good, as opposed to an unruly, citizen of India during a time of crisis. The image of the authoritarian mother entered the quotidian with clear disciplinary moves that decreed hard work, punctuality and a rigid governance of the self and family as imperative for national interest. The double-speak of socialism on paper and in propaganda was accompanied with a crackdown on democratic liberties and implicit support of big business, as various historians and political theorists like Partha Chatterjee^[xxxiii], Sudipto Kaviraj^[xxxiv] and Andre Gunder Frank^[xxxv] have shown in their work. But important for our purposes is taking into cognizance the fact that policies like the Family Planning Scheme in scaling up of the sterilization drive, especially under the enthusiastic leadership of Sanjay Gandhi, led to thousands of rural and urban males being sterilized i.e. having to go through nasbandi. These operations were carried out most often through coercive measures that were put into place by the entire bureaucratic machinery (also acting under intimidation and fearful of their own interests) through a system of pervasive rewards and punishments, as Emma Tarlo and Veena Das have shown in their work. This created an atmosphere of widespread fear and paranoia, especially among the urban and rural poor, that gave the regnant, looming figure of Indira Gandhi a directly (one could say almost literally) emasculating potential as an all-powerful woman in authority. As Veena Das writes:

In popular imagination, the emergency is known as the time of nasbandi (sterilization).^[xxxvi] This period shows with stark clarity how the politics of the body lies at the intersection between law and regulation. […] The authoritarianism of Mrs. Gandhi’s rule in this period and the destruction of institutions made it imperative for the bureaucracy to implement the policies of the government, not in accordance with rules and regulations, but in accordance with their reading of the wishes of their superiors. The state was literally seen to be embodied in the person of Mrs. Gandhi and her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, who became, as was widely acknowledged, the extra-constitutional center of power.^[xxxvii]

Monstrosity was, of course, the other side of deification. The massive electoral victory of 1971 that brought Indira to power for the term that ended in the Emergency came soon after the other high point of her political career – India’s victory in the war against Pakistan for Bangladesh’s liberation. This event had catapulted Indira to the height of popularity and personal confidence. The affective intensity and national pride that had coalesced around her person at this time saw an equal wave of hatred/disgust generated against her political authority within a period of six years. She was swept unanimously out of power by the gigantic electoral defeat that followed the Emergency in 1977. As Sudipto Kaviraj writes in his foundational essay ‘A Critique of the Passive Revolution’ published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1988:

A remarkable feature of the new politics was the quickening of the political cycle. Indira Gandhi carried her party to power on promises which were more radical and proportionately more unrealistic than earlier programmes. […] Governments had to pay the price for such populism sooner than expected. Under Nehru, electoral majorities of the Congress had never been comparably large; yet none of those administrations had difficulty in seeing through their appointed constitutional terms. Remarkably, after Indira Gandhi’s victory in 1971, no government has actually lasted its term. By 1973, Indira Gandhi’s large parliamentary majority notwithstanding, she was in deep political crisis.^[xxxviii]

In fact, Indira Gandhi grew increasingly defensive and nervous of her own political control over the nation in the face of growing international censure and rising internal resentment during the later months of the year 1976. She went into the 1977 elections, much against the wishes of her son Sanjay Gandhi and her close advisors, perhaps partly in order to prove to the international community and her dissenters inside that she was still at the helm of things, enjoying as much popular and electoral support as she had done in the past. She was, of course, proven tragically wrong. Sunder Rajan writes, interestingly: ‘During the Emergency, for instance, we learn that she felt panic-stricken, as if riding a tiger and not being able to get off it.’^[xxxix] The image of the Bharat Mata envisioned as an embodiment of Shakti or Durga, of course, returns once again to haunt the figure of this political heroine. But this time, of course, it is a Bharat Mata no longer so poised, but on the verge of losing control of what she rules, precariously balanced at the edge of political disaster. And once again, the contours, both repulsive and pleasing at extremes, of her ‘womanhood’, rather than being peripheral to our understanding of the nature of her political authority appear as intrinsic to the complexity we must untangle in order to adequately analyse the unraveling shape of her controversial political career as the leader of a postcolonial nation. In order to do so, it is essential to unpack the ambivalent relationship of popular perceptions of femininity and masculinity to political authority, as also to examine the outlines of the Janus-like anatomy of the ‘woman-nation’ symbolic unit that has worked overtime in the service of (a fervently religious) patriotism. The study of cultural representations of women in authority that emerge from the Emergency, allows us an opportunity to examine, via the covert operations of religion in the so-called ‘rational’ public sphere, the misogyny that moulds the other face of deification in the project of heroic nationalism.^[xl]  In his concluding chapter to the book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, Partha Chatterjee writes:

[…] nationalist thought has not emerged as the antagonist of universal Reason in the arena of world history. […] ever since the Age of Enlightenment, Reason in its universalizing mission has been parasitic upon a much less lofty, much more mundane, palpably material and singularly invidious force,  namely the universalist urge of capital. To the extent that nationalism opposed colonial rule, it administered a check on a specific political form of metropolitan capitalist dominance. […] But this was achieved in the very name of Reason. Nowhere in the world has nationalism-qua-nationalism challenged the marriage of Reason and capital.^[xli]

The imperatives of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ that hold pivotal positions in the dominant imagination of national histories, of course, hinge on this critical marriage between Reason and capital. The holding in permanent suspension of the crisis of the ‘people-nation’ (which Partha Chatterjee speaks about, following Gramsci) also allows for certain illusions to persist: for example, the idea that ‘development for all’ can be achieved by democratic means as long as the constitution of the right sort of ‘vanguard’ (cultural/economic/social/political) is made possible. In a strangely paradoxical way, the Emergency, then, is both the collapse of this ‘democratic’ illusion of ‘progress for all’, as well as a forceful reiteration of the power of Reason and order, which lies at the beginning of the narrative of nation. What mediates between these two faces of collapse and reassertion is, like Benjamin’s dwarf, the hidden force of religion. The governmental impulse of the state, without which no notion of ‘planning’ can operate, and which makes charting the course of development possible, comes nakedly to the fore during a political situation such as the Emergency. The rule of law runs things like clockwork, but also twists itself into strange shapes to emasculate, imprison and raze to the ground. Just like the ‘revolution’, then, the Emergency is an exceptional time. It is both order and disorder, joined at base. Trains run on time; but thousands of guiltless people fester in jails for years.  Running parallel the subjugated history of the ‘lie of freedom’ (‘yeh azaadi jhootha hai’) and highlight the dishonesty of the state masquerading as ‘people-nation’, is the story of the collapse of the dominant narrative of ‘state-representing-nation’, i.e. Progress. This is the failure of the ‘cunning of reason’, the ultimate crumbling into insanity of the dominant discourse. The Janus face of the Emergency helps us to map the course of both the dominant and the marginal narratives of ‘nation’, with a specific focus on the problematic of women and power, and the impossibility of escaping from the subterranean workings of religion when mapping this terrain.

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Endnotes:

[i] Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi, (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 2003), 27.

[ii] Sita, the wife of Rama in the great Indian epic Ramayana was known for her chastity and unquestioning devotion to her husband.

[iii] Lakshmi was the goddess of prosperity and household well-being in the Hindu pantheon.

[iv] Durga was a goddess who was an embodiment of ‘Shakti’ (power personified as female) and a destroyer of evil.

[v]  Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London:

REAKTION Books, 2004).

[vi] Christopher Pinney, ‘Towards the Space of the Beholder’, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Text Archives: 
http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2008-09-18.9604442564
.

[vii] Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: REAKTION Books, 2004), 172.

[viii] One interesting later example is the cartoon of Indira Gandhi that was published towards the end of her life as the cover of the magazine The Economist in 1984. This cartoon depicted her quite literally as a monstrous figure, mimicking the ‘devis’ (goddesses) who were representations of Shakti (female power) but displaying an extraordinarily repulsive/ugly visage. Here, Indira has four arms (much like some of the mythical Hindu goddesses), each arm representing an aspect of her power. In one hand, she holds a sword. In another, a bag marked ‘money’. And in two other fists, she holds captives representatives of the ‘common man’ of India, who seem to be screaming in protest. She is also shown as stepping over Sri Lanka, in a grotesque dance that mimics the ‘Nataraj’ or the ‘dancing Shiva’.  Copies of the magazine were confiscated at the airport before they could be disseminated and this issue of the magazine banned.  This was preceded, however, since the 1970s, with several national and international representations that were equally derogatory, including election graffiti on city walls. Popular cartoons included those by cartoonist Sudhir Dhar, who worked for the English daily Hindustan Times and cartoonist Abu Abraham whose works appeared in this period in The Indian Express, as well as other newspapers. It is interesting to note that in Abraham ‘s cartoon’s Indira as “Mummy” to the nation’s male politicians becomes a recurrent trope. A detailed analysis of these cartoons, however, is beyond the scope of this essay. [Indiequill, “The Economist’s Indira Gandhi Circa 1984’: 
http://indiequill.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/the-economists-indira-gandhi-circa-1984/
 and Sadanand Menon, “Bursting Bloated Bladders of Lies and Pomposity”, Himal Southasian (June 2010): http://www.himalmag.com/component/content/article/4259-bursting-bloated-bladders-of-lies-and-pomposity.html. ]

[ix] See Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993).

[x] Ibid, 116.

[xi] Kuldip Nayar, The Judgement: The Inside Story of the Emergency in India (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), 86.

[xii] Barun Sengupta, ‘Indira Ekadashi’ in Rachana Samagra (Kolkata: Ananda, 2008), 526. Sengupta writes about Indira’s steady rise to power in the late 1960s: “Indira’s critics could see after this fight that she was inimitable even in the field of political strategy. The way in which she steadily fought against the party leadership and won her place made most ordinary people think that these leaders were novices in comparison to her. At this time, a lot of people started saying: amongst the Congress leaders only Indira was the real man, and the rest were women even if they appeared to be men!”

[xiii] Thomas Blom Hansen, “Politics as Permanent Performance: The Production of Political Authority in the Locality”, in The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India, ed. John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt and Vernon Hewitt (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 20.

[xiv] Achille Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity” in On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 103.

[xv] Ibid, 111.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 27.

[xviii] In fact the creation of Mother India as an icon helped in some ways to envision and performatively bring this imagined spirit into being in terms of popular political practice.

[xix] Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, 106-107.

[xx]“Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) had been amended only a year earlier to authorize the government to detain or arrest individuals without producing charges before a court of law.”, Kuldip Nayar, The Judgement, 38.

[xxi] A name given to her by Rabindranath Tagore in the year spent at Shantiniketan between 1934 and 1935 and subsequently popularised.

[xxii] Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, 106.

[xxiii] Ibid.

[xxiv] Ibid, 108.

[xxv] For example, a cartoon of Indira Gandhi as ‘Mother Goddess’ and half-animal that was published in The Economist, 1984, which caused the magazine being confiscated at airports in India, as we have pointed out earlier.

[xxvi] Kuldip Nayar, The Judgement, 59.

[xxvii] Nayar, 86.

[xxviii] As evidenced in the prints available in Christopher Pinney’s Photos of the Gods.

[xxix] Ibid, pp. 9. [Emphasis mine.]

[xxx] Primila Lewis, Reason Wounded: An Experience of India’s Emergency (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), Soli Sorabjee, The Emergency, Censorship and the Press in India, 1975-77 (New Delhi: Central News Agency, 1977) and Kuldip Nayar, The Judgement: The Inside Story of the Emergency in India (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977).

[xxxi] Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (1 January 2009): 836-862.

[xxxii] Ibid, 842.

[xxxiii] Partha Chatterjee, A Possible India, in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 51-66. Chatterjee writes: “In November 1975, major reforms were announced in licensing policy: some fifteen export-oriented engineering industries were allowed automatic expansion of capacity – virtually all of them were marked by low average capacity utilization; blanket exemptions from licensing were granted to twenty-one industries in the medium sector, and unlimited expansion beyond the licensed capacity was allowed to foreign companies and large monopoly houses in thirty other important industries; the procedure for regularising unauthorized capacity installed by monopoly houses and foreign companies was liberalised.” [Chatterjee, 63].

[xxxiv] Sudipta Kaviraj, “A Critique of the Passive Revolution”,  Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 23, No. 45/47, Special Number (Nov., 1988), 2429-2444

[xxxv] Andre Gunder Frank, “Emergence of Permanent Emergency in India Author”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 12, No. 11 (Mar. 12, 1977): 463-475.

[xxxvi] Specifically, the sterilization of males.

[xxxvii] Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 172-174.

[xxxviii] Sudipto Kaviraj, ‘A Critique of the Passive Revolution’, 2438.

[xxxix] Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, 102.

[xl] Examples of other plays written in India at this time that contain references to Indira’s rule include Vijay Tendulkar’s Encounter in Umbugland, which was a farce written in 1967. The character of Princess Vijaya here perhaps represents the young Indira. [Vijay Tendulkar, Collected Plays in Translation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)].

[xli] Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 168.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Chatterjee, Partha. A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

———. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

———. The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley and Los Angeles:      University of California Press, 2007.

Frank, Andre Gunder. “Emergence of Permanent Emergency in India.” Economic and Political Weekly 12, no. 11 (March 12, 1977): 463-475.

Hansen, Thomas Blom. “Politics as Permanent Performance: The Production of Political Authority in the Locality”, in The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India. Edited by John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt and Vernon Hewitt . New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Indiequill. “The Economist’s Indira Gandhi Circa 1984’.  
http://indiequill.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/the-economists-indira-gandhi-circa-1984/
.

Kaviraj, Sudipta. “A Critique of the Passive Revolution.” Economic and Political Weekly 23, no. 45/47 (November 1, 1988): 2429-2444.

Lewis, Primila. Reason Wounded: An Experience of India’s Emergency. New Delhi: Vikas, 1978.

Mahmood, Saba. “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (January 1, 2009): 836-862.

Mbembe, Achille. “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity”. On the Postcolony. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.

Menon, Sadanand. “Bursting Bloated Bladders of Lies and Pomposity”. Himal Southasian (June 2010):
http://www.himalmag.com/component/content/article/4259-bursting-bloated-bladders-of-lies-and-pomposity.html
.

Pinney, Christopher. “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.

——- ‘Towards the Space of the Beholder’, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Text Archives:
http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2008-09-18.9604442564

Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1993.

Sengupta, Barun. Rachana Samagra. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2007.

Sorabjee, Soli. The Emergency, Censorship and the Press in India, 1975-77. New Delhi: Central News Agency, 1977.

Tarlo, Emma. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.

Vijay Tendulkar, Collected Plays in Translation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)

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Trina Nileena Banerjee is currently teaching at the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her PhD was on women in the group theatre movement in Bengal (1950-1980) and she is also currently working on a monograph titled Embodying Suffering: Interface(s) between Women’s Protest Movements and Women’s Performance in Contemporary Manipur (1980-2010). She has also been a stage and film actress, as well as a poetry and fiction writer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Walls : Art & Land

“One Project. Two Sites.” Curator Josef Ng warned viewers at the start that Lin Yilin’s project, carried out in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, presents two utterly different sides of itself. And in the end, he was right.

In the Chiang Mai countryside, Lin Yilin highlights the utopian connotations of the “Land Project,” guiding his audience to “recollect” this historical fantasy rooted in Chinese cultural tradition which is radically democratizsed. The high, bare concrete wall built on the border of the Land’s paddy field stands tall like a monument. On the day of the event, some viewers stood rapt at its base or weighed themselves using the built-in scale, while others sat atop it, a few even holding fishing rods. An air of tranquility and simple joy reigned. Especially when viewed against the backdrop of its natural surroundings, the scene is almost entirely stripped of its “Land Project” (i.e. art-world) context, and the notion of “Land” is momentarily restored to its “man and nature” dimension–without an iota of sentimentalism. However, though full of imaginative appeal, these acts—surveying the view, fishing, weighing—transpire at the mercy of that high concrete wall; or more precisely, due to the existence of the wall, people’s aesthetic associations with the Land themselves begin to constitute a kind of landscape. Like the pivot point where the long wooden balance is riveted, the wall serves to tether which could have otherwise become romanticized modes of behavior to material foundations.

 

At Tang Contemporary back in Bangkok, there is yet another wall—similar in size to the Chiang Mai wall, though white and made of brick. On a striking diagonal, it cuts the room into two separate spaces. One space features two videos and a poster print; the poster and the video recording to its right are relics of Lin Yilin’s moments of artistic activism in response to his rented Beijing studio’s premature demolition, which occurred prior to the original date laid out in the government’s land acquisition contract. The other video records the “protagonist” returning to the scene of activism after several months, only to find the remains of the studio in mounds of dirt and ruin. Here, we can see the increasingly common process of land commodification in China with its host of conflicts and contradictions. The video recording on the other side of the wall, right by the gallery entrance (or exit) shows Lin Yilin on the sidewalk of the Champs-Elysées in Paris, handcuffing his right hand to his right foot. His body bent in half, he struggles to walk and manages however he can. None of the videos or posters in the exhibition are physically connected to the wall. As far as the gallery is concerned (from a commercial standpoint), the wall immediately catches the eye and divides the space in a way that serves only as a temporary, aesthetic ascription. The temporality that it embodies forms a kind of tacit agreement with the current system of land acquisition in China.

Lin Yilin uses two different walls to define land issues unique to two different spaces (Thailand and China). In the Chiang Mai installation and performance, he takes the greatest pains to build an aesthetic conception into an environment; whereas in Bangkok, he turns his energies towards elucidating some of the most sensitive issues China faces today. Nevertheless, in reality, the intertextual link between the two goes beyond a mere discussion of land ownership, and extends to a reflection upon the human condition. It therefore seems that these two questions printed on the Bangkok gallery brick wall—“Whose Land? Whose Art?”— are a revelation in line with Walter Benjamin’s thinking—a kind of struggle with fatalism and yet aspiring towards some undefined doom.

—————————————

[The report first appeared in the magazine Leap]

No More A Barrier Than A Couple of Beers Between Us

 

 

We are Invincible. We Cannot, 

We do not Deserve to Lose 

[La Jornada 2/7]

February 2, 1994

 

 

To Mr. Gaspar Morquecho Escamilla, Tiempo newspaper, San Cristóbal de las Casas:

 

Sir:

I have just recently received your undated letter. At the same time, I am reading a  newspaper in which you and other noble people are accused of being “spokespeople for the  EZLN” or “Zapatistas.” Problems.  If you would like to know where these denunciations and threats come from, look in the directories of the ranchers’ associations and you will find much cloth to cut. Well, passing on to another subject, and since this is about  memories, I hope that you have finally been sent the mix of drunken crudeness with which you tried to interview us that beautiful first day of January.

Perhaps all of you do not remember it well, but that time the one who was interviewed was you, because you would ask a question and then would answer it yourself. I do not know whether you would have  been able to take anything coherent for the newspaper out of that monologue of questions and answers about the surprise and fear that took over the ancient capital of the state of Chiapas on the first day of the year. We were many, that day, who burned our bridges that early morning on the first of the year and assumed that onerous path of the ski mask wrapped around our faces. There were many of us who took that step of no return, knowing full well that the end that awaited us was probably death and improbably to see triumph.

Taking power? No, something far more difficult: a new world. Nothing is left for us, we have left everything behind. And we have no regrets. Our path continues to be firm, in spite the fact that they are now seeking thousands of grotesque green masks in order to annihilate us. However, Mr. Morquecho, it turns out that we have long known, and not without pain, that we had to become strong with the death of those who fell by our sides, dying from bullets, and yes, with honor, but always dying. We had to shield our ears, Mr. Morquecho, in order to endure seeing compan~eros of many years in the mountains, their bodies sewn with bullets and torn by grenades, mortars, and rockets, their bodies with hands tied and the mercy blows to their heads, to be able to see and touch their blood, our blood, Mr. Morquecho, flowing brown in the streets of Ocosingo, of Las Margaritas, on the earth of Rancho Nuevo, in the mountains of San Cristóbal, and in the plantations of Altamirano.

And understand us, Mr. Morquecho, that in the middle of that blood, of those shots, of those grenades, of those tanks, of those machine-gunning helicopters and those planes throwing their explosive darts, understand the simple truth: We are invincible… We cannot lose… We do not deserve to lose. But as we say here, our work is this: to fight and to die so that others can live better lives, much better than the ones that were ours to die. It is our work, yes, but not yours. So therefore please be careful. The fascist beast is bitter and directs its attacks at the most defenseless.

Of the accusations being made against you and the entire team of noble and honest people who deliver (because the technical conditions of producing a newspaper must make it a real birth) that standard of impartiality and truth that carries the name of Tiempo, I want to say several things:

The authentic heroism of Tiempo does not come from putting out a newspaper with Fred Flintstone’s equipment. It comes from, in a cultural environment so closed and absurd as San Cristóbal’s, giving voice to those who have nothing (now we have arms). It comes from defying, in four pages, the powerful men of commerce and land who have their goods in the city. It comes from not submitting to blackmail and intimidation to obligate them to publish a lie, or to neglect to publish a truth. It comes from, in the middle of that asphyxiating cultural atmosphere that sews up its own mediocre self-reflection, seeking fresh and lively air, actually democratic, in order to clean the streets and the minds of Jovel. It comes from when the Indians came down from the mountain (note: before the first of January) to the city, not to sell, not to buy, but rather to ask that someone listen, but finding only closed ears and doors; one door was always open, had been open for some time by a group of non-Indians who put up a sign that said the same thing: Tiempo. After passing that door, those Indians that today enrage the world with their audacity of refusing to die without dignity, found someone who would listen, which was already plenty, and they found someone who would put those Indian voices in ink on paper and with the heading Tiempo, which was before and is even more so now, heroic.

It turns out, Mr. Morquecho, that heroism and valor are not to be found only behind a rifle and a ski mask, but they are also in front of a typewriter when the zeal of truth animates the hands that type. I find out now that they accuse all of you of being “Zapatistas.” If stating the truth and seeking justice is being a “Zapatista,” then we are millions. They should bring more soldiers. But, when the police and inquisitors come to intimidate you, tell them the truth, Mr. Morquecho. Tell them that you simply raised your voice to warn everyone that if changes were not made in the unjust relations of daily oppression, the Indians were going to rise up. Tell them that you simply recommended seeking other paths to follow, legal and peaceful, for those who surround the cities of all of Chiapas (and Mexico, don’t believe Salinas who says the problem is local) with desperation. Tell them that you, with other honest professionals (a true rarity), doctors, reporters, and lawyers, searched for support wherever it was in order to force economic, educational, and cultural projects that would relieve the death that was being sewn in the Indigenous communities.

Tell them the truth, Mr. Morquecho. Tell them you always searched for a peaceful and just, dignified and true way. Tell them the truth, Mr. Morquecho. But, please Mr. Morquecho, don’t tell them that which you and I know happened to you, don’t tell them what your heart murmurs to your ear in the anxiety and commotion of day and night, don’t tell them that which wants to leave your lips when you talk and hands when you write, don’t tell them the thought that keeps on growing, first in the breast, and keeps on rising gradually to the head as soon as the year passes and advances its pace through mountains and ravines, don’t tell them what you now want to shout: “I am not a Zapatista! But after this first of January… I would like to be one!”

Greet, if it is possible for you, that man named Amado Avendan~o. Tell him that I haven’t forgotten his cold blood when, that happy morning (when less for us) of the first day of our triumphal entrance “into the First World,” I notified you that it wouldn’t be advisable for you to approach to talk with me and you told me: “I am doing my job.” Taking advantage of the trip, greet Concepción Villafuerte [editor of El Tiempo], whose integrity and courage to write we greet with joy when the improbable link arrives and brings the newspaper.

Greet all those of that periodical which not only deserves better machinery but also the regards of all the honest journalists of the world. Greet those professionals of Chiltak who sacrifice the desire for money and commodity to work with and for those who have nothing. Tell all of them (from Tiempo and from Chiltak) that if those who rule today had half the moral stature that you have, neither rifles nor ski masks, or blood in the mountains south of San Cristóbal, or in Rancho Nuevo or in Ocosingo or in Las Margaritas or in Altamirano would have been necessary. And perhaps, instead of writing to you now beneath the harassment of planes and helicopters, with the cold numbing my hands but hopefully not my heart, we would be speaking, you and I, with no more of a barrier than a couple of beers between us. The world already would not be the world but something better, and better for all.

Certainly, if the truth were to come out (God wouldn’t want it to, but it might), I don’t drink alcoholic beverages, so it would actually be: “with no more of a barrier than a beer (yours, without offending) and a soda (mine) between us.”

Health and a great affectionate hug. And, please, learn to put the date on your letters, although history passes so rapidly that, I think, it would be better to include the time.

Ten p.m., it’s cold and the noise of the airplane that flies above, menacing, until it almost seems to coo.

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast,

Insurgent Subcommander Marcos

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Justice in a Landscape of Trees

Rajarshi Dasgupta

Homeward Bound
How does a call for justice appear? When is such a call thought justified? Standing at the crossroads of 1947, as colonial rule came to end in south Asia, the Indian Left had coined a slogan: yeh azaadi jhoota hai, this freedom is lie. But the reasons did not seem very clear to them. Sixty years after, writing in support of a nuclear treaty with the US opposed by the Left, the editor of an English daily recalls how the nation was let down at the very moment of independence. Why, we may even like to think of it as a crime, throwing our hard-earned nationhood into question, is that what you call justice? The point is that such moves are always difficult to justify as they pass through the nation state towards a wider field of ethics, coming to it in response to the violence and injustice that underlie our nations. Thanks to a rich body of scholarship on the partition and refugees, today we have come to recognize the enormous carnivorous sacrifice that made India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, possible.But perhaps we have never really understood how displacement has made the very ground of the citizen subject unstable and shifting in south Asia, turning freedom into a violent force of individuation and justice already into an object of loss.

It is here that an exercise of moral freedom runs into conflict with juridical propriety, where the everyday subject of experience is unplugged from the abstract citizen. In order to grasp this uncommon thread of moral freedom, we must listen to the narratives of displaced without the rush to formulate them into a rights discourse, which cannot afford to pay that singular attention required of justice in this case. My paper contends that there is a terrain of justice and moral freedom, pressing for critical recognition in the ideas of home in refugee discourses, which cannot be assembled in a talk of pure logic, but enjoys the felicity of a poetic narration. We can observe here certain forms of subjectivation of the displaced, where one need not construct the reality as it is framed in law, but as it ought to be, framed ethically, overriding the law. We shall see how this implies an escape from present – a flight into the past, as well as, a return to the responsibility of future. In this way, such exercise comes to involve a back and forth movement of thought, holding the current state of affairs against an imagined horizon of infinity, in order to judge the truth, as it were, in other times and places. The texts selected here chiefly illustrate the making of this different awareness of time and place, where moral freedom does not mean ensuring entitlements, but the performance of certain critical modes of subjectivity. In a way, this stages a trial of the modern subject on the margins of the global capital that is producing new ways of thinking about oneself today.

Perhaps, it is impossible to keep in mind the historical contingencies of our freedom and respond to the query of why that freedom was untrue or inauthentic to some of us. As recent debates in political theory indicate, there is a danger in underestimating the reality of nation state in south Asia, divided on religious grounds, bordering unfriendly governments, territorially binding on people, rent apart with a seal of finality. Yet, there are overlapping surplus of disturbing memories, as there is a daily traffic across the borders of commerce and human relations, and adamant claims to belong elsewhere rather than the permissible place, which practically spells a gnawing disquiet for the region’s law and order. The displacement needed to carve up the nations and citizen subjects seems to have produced a call for justice at the very heart of the question – where should one belong, regardless of our lawful habitations, as a free subject. The examples we will look into here deal with this very theme of belongingness: how the subject of displacement needs to belong and wants to recreate a home, despite its impossibility in the strict sense of the fact. I hope the analysis will give us a clear idea of an impossible homeward bound-ness, performed through narratives that carry the sense of justice in a way that cannot be legally enforced but invested obliquely, ethically and aesthetically, although not without a sense of irony.

Here we may see the ideas of home in the shifting invocations of a territory – an ancestral village very often, sometimes a keenly contested terrain of politics and history, as well as, where I will focus, at times, an elemental, enigmatic site of nature. Rather than a culturally particular location, we need to think of morphologies here, in keeping with what geographers treat as a conceptual space, we may call these invocations a theoretical landscape. Of course, there would be proper names to such places in some discourse, for a historian like Dipesh Chakrabarty, talking about this particular revisited village, or a poet like Jibanananda Das, meditating on the flora of that specific district in undivided Bengal. But we are not exactly interested in the physical-geographical locus of stated individuals in this paper. Instead, we think that despite the names of such places in memory one cannot be restricted to a solitary archive only, which holds the census and administrative data about a place. There is a sense here of other kinds of archives that record and relate differently to the sense impressions and ways of representation in the testimonies we are about to judge. The paper suggests that in keeping the interpretive possibility of such landscapes open to universal implication, we take up a difficult and challenging labour of reading. And that is the only way to understand the political aspect of what leading scholars are happy to knock down as aesthetic parley rather than engaging reality. There is no doubt that the morphology of landscapes often involve a glossing over the questions of property and class, which makes the labour invested in land invisible to the scenic representations of nature. Landscape is, after all, as Henri Lefebvre and Denis Cosgrove have pointed out, along with David Harvey, a commodity, as well as an ideology referencing material form. But let me insist that there is a void that cannot be subsumed entirely by the analytic of property, and there is an economy of restraint and excess that relate to the ideas of home and justice especially for the refugees. This is what we shall chiefly discuss here. Let me admit, however, that there is a complex dimension of collective memory and forgetting involved here whose implications are beyond our immediate scope.
In particular, this paper will draw your attention to three key aspects of a theoretical landscape. First, although entirely textual, one of the most striking features in this case is the quality of a heightened sensuality, a bit like sex, intensely tactile, optic, aural, but also with a feeling of watching a tableau passing us by like a float on republic day parades. This could be a refraction of how it looks everyday with the regular stuff that we find masquerading as hyperbolic or elemental inside a text, like a robust sensory encounter but wholly predicated on words. Such words conjure the picturesque – an intense and vivid scenery, shot with desire and warmly imprinted in the body as an archive, which gives out anew the signs of aroma and noise, old and new shapes, sending the warmth of information to our fingertips. In other words, as the examples will make it clear, theoretical landscapes carry out a practical demonstration of the archival experience of a body. It is at once a solitary body that is hypothetically free from the marks of gender, race and nationality, actually plastered on it, and a body that must make sense of the other bodies surrounding it in society without prejudice. The perception of this form of embodiment follows from standing before a breathing geography, inviting anyone that approaches a place with a home in mind, ready for endless anecdotes at every recess.

The second key aspect is that such theoretical landscapes are often digressive and chiefly anecdotal in character, working in some sense against the grain of received historicity. On the one hand, they involve telling us stories as a basic mode of experience, giving rise to unseen community of listeners, who are invited to share the ethos of a place without occupying the same place or even the same language. On the other hand, the gesture of narration brings into play all possible and traditional structures of narrating available to a certain performative context. These narratives may turn out from scientific to fabulous with as little pause as they take in turning from a terse moral deposition to that of telling a politically incorrect joke on the side, even saying completely outlandish things. They include anything that is not attached to a direct claim of historical truth as a necessary condition, for engagement. There seems to be a very different principle of believing in these stories precisely because they stand for what they cannot represent – the incalculable questions before justice: what is living; is life infinite; what is truth. Aware of these philosophical limits of representation, theoretical landscapes pull out from games of truth and enter un-dogmatic games of narration. This does not imply that truth becomes anything hereafter. On the contrary, it means that truth is not everything, like facts, nor a definite property ofeverything, like value, but perhaps more like a middle ground, which holds up us with our ideas but also outlives our intelligence, like a forest of symbols.

The third vital aspect I would like to highlight here is the evocative symbolism of theoretical landscapes, particularly the use of a natural-metaphorical figure like that of trees in the cases below.[1] However strange it seems as an object of knowledge to a social scientist thinking of justice, let us recall there are classics of anthropology entirely devoted to the symbolism of trees, which cover an astonishing range of ground from the Ndembu tribe’s rituals in Africa to Judaic and Christian theology of the middle ages, from the importance of woodlands in Victorian Britain as property and sign of improvement, to the tree as a pictographic metaphor of natural liberty in Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, which spilled into newspaper cartoons of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the political and economic significance of trees in Europe like that of oak and willow should hardly need elaboration, providing the basic inputs for trade across oceans with strong wooden ships and accurate compass, with the evangelist cross and later, cricket bats. But the tree has enjoyed no less felicity of investment in the narrative and symbolic repertoires of south Asia, which would be pointless to catalogue here in-depth. The case of Nammalvar, the ancient Tamil poet, is an appropriate example. “According to historians, Nammalvar was born into a peasant caste (vellala) and lived from approximately AD 880 to 930. Some would date him a century earlier. Although the facts are hazy, the legends are vivid and worth retelling. According to these latter, he lived for only 35 years. He was born in Tirukurukur (in Tamil Nadu), into a princely family in answer to their penance and prayers. When he was born, the overjoyed mother gave him her breast but the child would have nothing of it. He uttered no sound, sat if seated, lay if laid down, seemed both deaf and mute. The distressed parents left the child at the feet of a local Vishnu idol. Once there, he got to his feet, walked to a great tamarind tree, entered a hollow in it and sat like a yogi in a lotus posture, with his eyes shut and turned inward.” It is from here that he would later pour forth more than one thousand hymns to Vishnu, which became the famous Tiruvaymoli, hailed as “the ocean of Tamil Veda in which the Upanishads of the thousand branches flow together.”[2] There are many similar examples where the arboreal metaphor of tree combines with traditional modes of knowledge on the one hand and where it offers an imaginative clue for interpreting nature and language in modern imagination on the other hand. But the crucial question for us is the uncertainty of its status in a discourse on history, politics and justice. I would like to point out in this regard that, in between the famous Bo tree of Buddha and the cosmic tree of knowledge in Indian mythologies, we must not forget the charged subtext of the metaphorical poison-tree of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, which was recast by the poet Samar Sen to represent the roots of middle class radicalism mired in colonial education. As we know, the metaphor of poison-tree was employed once more by Partha Chatterjee to talk about the problem of historical difference in the modes of nationalisms in the south. But then what has the metaphorical use of a tree got to do with substantive issues of politics and, in this case, the question of representing justice? I would like to address that question here, together with another question raised by a recent insightful work on the Pakistani middle class – who says that nationalism was all about producing the citizen subject? This paper tries to offer another category – of home, to reopen the horizon of displacement before the realm of citizen subject. As the examples will bear out, there are three different notions of home that will emerge below, which are convenient to plot in grammatical terms. Briefly, they are as follows: first, the ablative, from where one hails but cannot return; second, the locative, where one finds oneself in the middle of a journey; and third, the accusative, where one would like to arrive in the end.[3] The invocations of landscape in the examples below not only instantiate these different notions of home, but also show how we travel towards them, circulating between the registers of a community locus and individual passage, in ways that confound our usual understanding of citizenship.

The Vanishing Trees

There is an intriguing anecdote about a tamarind tree in the ancestral village of the historian Tapan Roychowdhury. The incident took place around the time when Fajlul Haque was leading the Krishak Proja Party which headed the first provincial government with the Muslim League after the Congress had refused alliance. The Raychowdhurys were the jamidar of mouja Kirtipasha, close to the elite and nobility of Bengal. Two of the author’s uncles, principally talented in spinning tall tales, were living in London, from where they sent the telegram: “Stop felling tamarind tree. Letter follows.” The entire village was taken aback. The resolve to fell the tree was made only a few days back – the first chop had barely landed. How did the boys divine this information? The market was agog, mulling over the riddle. The people eagerly gathered at the chandimandop; when the letter arrived and read aloud. It said the brothers had retired to their respective lodgings in Gower Street at late night, when they had the same dream about the same fellow at roughly the same time. The subject of their dream was an old friend, Chhontu Pal, a good for nothing fellow who died a week back. Again, the brothers did not know this – Chhontu had told them he has taken up residence in the tamarind tree. However absurd, it obliquely echoed with receiving divine instruction in dreams – swapnadesh, and the folklore that the aristocracy in phantom society, chiefly, the departed brahmans can become attached to certain trees they frequent in this life. Although Chhontu was an addict and no brahman, the tree was spared. Slowly, it became a holy shrine worshipped in the entire district. “Blessed be the country”, Roychowdhury quips, “which has such a tree.” [4]

The first line of the novel Khoabnama by Akhtarujjaman Ilias says: “Oi jaigata bhalo kore kheyal kora dorkar” (It is necessary to take good note of that place). This line is the key to the entire novel – space is the central problematic of the story.[5] The task of the novel is to flesh out the life-world and the history of an erased location, to produce a different idea of people and geography that pushes against the impersonal narrative of nation and the abstract locality in our conception. The writing thus resembles archaeology – new layouts emerge like anthills under anonymous, sedimented surface of events. Written in 1996, Khoabnama unfolds a space that also belongs to dreams – certainly for the father of Tomij. The old man walks in his sleep on the banks of Katlahar bil, to the north of which stands an old Pakur tree. The old man hopes to catch a glimpse of Munshi Barkatullah, follower of Majnu Shah, the leader of sanyasi-fakir rebellion of the eighteenth century, who is believed to possess the tree. Because he is insane, the father of Tomij has a delirious sense of time; his past and present collapse. He makes it a sacred duty to guard the Pakur tree, the birikkho, which is in danger of losing its place that dwindles with every flood and new habitation. Ilias expressed similar concerns in another equally famous novel, Chilekothar Sepai, written in 1986. There we hear about the ancestral land of Boiragir Vitey and the two hundred year old banyan tree spreading over more than three bighas of land – creating a maze at the centre of which is a hollowed trunk, where Majnu Shah used to counsel with Bhavani Pathok, a rebel leader figuring in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Anandamath. But unlike the printed text of Anandamath, which erased the Muslim fakirs from the account, and rewrote the unrest as against the Muslims, Akhtarujjaman’s stories are oral and vie for other kinds of evidence. The banyan tree and the Pakur tree are resources of such evidence – they are seen as local murubbi – the wise counsellors of an enchanted place. Yet, when the father of Tomij finds the Pakur tree gone one day, the village headman doubts if it was ever there.

The characters of the autobiographical novel Bishadbriksha initially refuse to be part of the refugee exodusof 1947. The account takes it as a time whose damage is still distant in coming to the periphery. The author, Mihir Sengupta, talks of a location where the displacement is prolonged over the next decade. He describes the everyday life of a Hindu family in the quiet backwaters of East Pakistan, as if the partition had not taken place, not where they lived anyway. This idea of ‘where they lived’, where the author continues to live in his thoughts, and which does not leave him insofar he must have a sense of his roots, even if he now lives in West Bengal, is a chronic motif. Mihir repeatedly refers to this place, a local landscape, a sleepy hamlet in the district of Barishal, with two recurrent features: the pichharar khal or the flowing canal running at the back of their ancestral home; and the two raintrees, that gave the novel its name – bishadbriksha. Both of these give a centre of gravity to the landscape, with a cluster of Muslim peasants and low caste Hindus, stringed around the Hindu upper-caste household, to which the author belongs. The novel painstakingly remembers the steady decline of this family: the moral degeneration of patriarchs; the collapse of emotional ties; the waning of merry rituals; the auction of extravagant furniture, the flight of women, and finally, the poverty which forced the author to a life of manual labour. But this remembrance is underlined with an interesting affect. The author’s emotion in relation to this unfolding tale of loss is decisively that of becoming a free man – free from the fake aristocracy of worthless fathers, from the dubious respectability of feudal vestige, and free from the pretension of coexistence in a divided society. Now alienated, the writer finds serendipity; he encounters marginal people, especially women, and chance relations teach him new values, creating a different worth of the self. This liberated self likes to recall the funny episodes, the comedy of the bhadralok, the incredible tales and family follies, and the vulgar argot of everyday life. These reveal a complex practice with history, which I leave behind, to fasten your attention to an aspect of the author’s agency. As a subject of partition, Mihir Sengupta abandons the impulse to blame, both the alien regime and the communal hatred intrinsic to this or that denomination. If anything, he takes upon himself the responsibility, for the transition from a community life, with memorable moments, love and pleasure, to other emergent configurations. As we know, Mihir Sengupta migrated to West Bengal, and is now settled in a suburb of Calcutta, after his retirement. But there is a deeper sense in which the rain-trees keep shadowing him.  Although it is impossible to retrieve the life whose destruction he patiently recounts, he keeps mourning the absent matribhumi, through its catalogue of sky, river, vegetation and soil, which gather in the tree, waiting for a melancholic meditation, naming the novel, Bishadbriksha.

We need not see these instances as revealing a fundamental opposition between collective life and individualistic existence, as one is often led to believe. It is of course tempting to distinguish these modes of thinking in terms of an underlying antagonism between sociologically discrete subject positions, like the tension between an apparently traditional peasant mindset and that of a modern urban person. In terms familiar to political theory, such difference might be translated into an opposition between a community and an individual as the competitive locus of thinking about rights. However, what I would like to underscore here in the following examples is the complicated enmeshing of community and individual in the experience of displacement and aspiration for belonging. Let me introduce you to those troubling instances where it is increasingly difficult to sustain any singular subject position, or any pure mode of understanding in self-articulation. As we shall see, the invocations of a theoretical landscape in these cases dwell deliberately in a language that participates in idioms outside the rational self, dovetailing existential elocution with a framing that is mystical and bordering on insanity. This is where the aesthetic dimension takes on added valency, for it carries the duty to insert moral parameters into the dominant mode of reasoning, in short, the task of creating a new consciousness that imagines outside the present and beyond the foreseeable future. That is to say, a consciousness in touch with a horizon ever receding, undoing the sovereign weight of utility with a question undoubtedly more fundamental – what is that principle of relationship one seeks to establish in belonging.

Aesthetics of Infinity 

The excerpts below are taken from an autobiographical fragment, about the life and times of the intellectual Ahmad Chaffa in the late twentieth century Dhaka. A different landscape surfaces here, cramped with urban housing, small, rented flats coming up in purana Dhaka, snatches of academic life in the Curzon Hall and Jagannath Hall andthe staff quarters of Dhaka University, and newspaper offices bristling on the Tipu Sultan Road. Trees are everywhere, a mystic obsession with Chaffa.

An idea has been taking shape in my mind since many days. Allahtayla has activated a part of his secret power in the life of the trees. This is why some day humans have to approach the tree for shelter. If man does not bow down to trees, his very life-force conspires against his life. Imagine how intelligent Allah is. The simple life that flows through trees has a definite resonance with the heartbeat of man … A man can create a relationship with trees the way a man creates a relationship with a woman. But what kind of man? The one who believes with his heart and soul that trees also have a living persona, like any other animal … a house where I was tenant previously had an open courtyard. The owner had planted a guava and lemon tree there. A spray of madhobilota was happily growing on the iron-gate. When I came to this house, I thought I should leave a sign of my living here by planting one or two trees. I usually plant a tree or two where I go. There is no noble design behind this. The innocent desire to live in the memories of men drives me to do this time and again.[6]

This was then in some ways a methodical madness, which sustained parallel worlds for internally displaced postcolonial intellectuals like Ahmed Chaffa. As a counter-part to his urban existence as a man of letters and radical persuasion, here was an entirely different world he would happily be sharing with the children, with a parrot he carried, when he wandered like a fakir on the streets of Dhaka, walking through its avenues blooming with flowers that delighted him and trees he loved talking to. But he was also afraid of turning mad like Sarodababu, a Hindu schoolteacher in Chattogram.

Sarodababu used to go mad for a period every year. His madness would begin with the advance of winter. … In the beginning when the signs of madness surfaced, Sarodababu used to tell me that he understood the language of trees. But the problem is that the language of trees and the language of human beings are not the same. When he converses with trees in their language, he still remembers the language of humans. That is when things start becoming confused, that is, he is forced to become insane … He used to often tell me he would teach me the technique of talking to trees. Trees do not respond to everyone’s call; not everybody will understand their language. The power to understand this language does not come without a particular kind of purity of mind. Sarodababu used to think I have the capacity to talk to trees, though it did not mature.[7]

The question for us is this – how do we think of these relationships when we think of the abstract figure of citizen subject in a language of secular liberalism, civil society and democratic institutions. I hope it is sufficiently clear by now that the question of relationship is absolutely central to the affect of belonging and longing for a home of the displaced. Whether or not one is mourning the ablative home from a locative perspective, one is always looking at an accusative moral horizon, across the future. But in the process one also loses the language and sensibility that is needed to interpret these relationships as the principal ground for conducting life in a way that embodies justice. It demands a manner of reasoning that must seek its passage again through the embodied experience of the world, not for housing and emplacing a population, but for a home for the uprooted traveller, a place premised on relationships. Let me conclude this with a passage written by the painter Paritosh Sen, reminiscing about his ancestral land in Bangladesh.

Our village in Bangladesh was dotted with numerous ponds, lakes and canals. The rivers were not far either. During the monsoon, each home became an island. We had to row our little dinghy to visit our neighbours and to buy provisions from the market-place …

Whenever my mind travels back to my boyhood days in the village, an abstract picture painted somewhat in the manner of Mark Rothko, appears before my eyes. Slabs of all possible shades and tints of green, ranging from the silken blackish-green of the neem leaves as the morning light filters through them thus, making them gleam like the green crystals of a chandelier. Or, fading into the turquoise green of the floating water hyacinths in the evening. It felt as if the whole village had just had a dip in a pool of green light. Indeed, at times the sun itself appeared green.

On the north-eastern bank of the large pond situated at the far end of our home, where we did all our bathing and washing, stood a giant Arjuna tree (Terminalia Arjuna), rising nearly one hundred feet and dominating the entire landscape. It was so huge, so dense, that it seemed like a small forest. Its thousand branches spread like outstretched arms in all directions. Its majestic height dwarfed every other tree in the village. Its powerful build, magnificent proportions and statuesque three-dimensionality were reminiscent of the monolithic ninth century Jaina figure at Saravanabelagola in Mysore.

Did anybody in our village have any idea of the age of this Arjuna tree? … It had such an air of eternity about it and it seemed to proclaim, “I was, I am, and I shall ever be.” The Arjuna tree was a world in itself, as living and eventful as the human world, if not more so. It gave shelter to countless birds, reptiles and insects of every description. They seemed to be so happy living there that they would not exchange it for any other place in the world.[8]

It is in this sense of home that freedom was betrayed in 1947.

What is that mode of thinking that the figure of the tree presents to us? Let me clarify that the distinction I have tried to point out should not be confused with the standard oppositions between individual and community, between peasants and urban middle class, or between pre-modern and modern sensibility. I believe we are looking very much at a modern phenomena, arising out of the postcolonial experience of displacement, which produces a form of subjectivation fundamentally concerned with a critique of the subject of bourgeois liberal humanism. How does the tree constitute thinking against the grain of such a subject? I would like you to imagine for a moment we have attained the ‘purity of mind’ Chaffa talks about. Let us pretend to experience like him that trees are like animals with living persona, talking to each other in a language we understand well; while we observe another set of creatures, making frantic sound and gestures we vaguely recognize as human beings. This coming closer to the tree is about taking lessons in different techniques, of surviving, watching, witnessing, knowing the soil, branching and spreading out, being in touch with the simple life inside, like the heartbeat. I think we may recognize this in terms of a completely new orientation to life and politics, where one learns to think of oneself as part of an entirely new kind of complex that is manifold and one patiently works everyday like an ethos to realize that freedom is an ethical practice of living with the other. What kind of man is that? To recall Chaffa, one who can create a relation with a tree like one creates a relationship with a woman, of that kind where power must give way to love.

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[1] Introduction to Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Vishnu by Nammalvar, translated from Tamil by AK Ramanujan, New Delhi 1993.

[2] I am grateful for this theoretical scheme of home to the philosopher Arindam Chakrabarty.

[3] Tapan Raychoudhury, Romanthan Athoba Bhimratiprapter Parochorit Charcha, in Desh, Sharodiya, 1992 (1993) See the section on ghosts, especially, pp. 50-1.

[4] See in this connection Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds.) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments, Cambridge1998.

[5] I am indebted to Sibaji Bandyopadhyay’s reading of Ilias in Bangla Uponyase ‘Ora’, Calcutta: 1996. See especially Khoaber Ratdin.

[6] Ahmad Chhafa, Pushpo, Briksha ebang Bihango Puran, Dhaka, 2002, p. 15. This was taking place around “the beginning of August in 1980. I was sure after paying a visit to the office of the newspaper Ganakantha in Tipu Sultan Road that it was going to die. So much of effort and labour is going to waste. I begged with so many people, asked for money from so many … what is happening is what is bound to happen. Tomorrow the representative of the toiling masses will be committing a suicide. Like the gooey mud left behind after the flood, all the mud-slinging, disbelief and doubts have started coming to the surface after the initial rush of revolution.” p. 19, ibid.  After this Chaffa started cultivating aubergines in the campus of the Dhaka University hostel, teaming up with children, tilling and tending vegetable gardens, discovering an experienced cultivator in Maulvi Abdul Quddus, a lecturer in the mathematics department, and making fun of the tie-clad Dr Khairul Millat, who on seeing Chhafa tilling land, would lecture him on wage, labour, and profit.

[7] Ahmad Chhafa, Pushpo, Briksha, pp. 53-5

[8] Paritosh Sen, A tree in my village, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, 1996

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Rajarshi Dasgupta teaches at Centre for Political Studies, JNU.

Laziness & Work: An Interview with Pierre Saint-Amand

Sina Najafi and Pierre Saint-Amand Jean-Siméon Chardin, Auguste-Gabriel Godefroy Watching a Top Spin, 1738. The roots of our contemporary obsession with work and productivity are usually traced to the eighteenth century, when the new social and philosophical project of the Enlightenment, founded on rationality, dovetailed with the emergence of a capitalist economic system based on maximizing efficiency and productivity. This is the century in which the secular gospel of work in its modern form was written. In its most radical articulation, this gospel proposes that freedom and work are in fact equivalent. In his book, Paresse des Lumiéres (Editions du Seuil, 2008; The Pursuit of Laziness: Idle Philosophy and the Enlightenment), Pierre Saint-Amand, professor in the departments of French studies and comparative literature at Brown University, looks to the eighteenth century paradoxically not for a critique of laziness but instead for a counter-tradition that champions it. In figures as diverse as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Pierre Marivaux, he finds the beginnings of a refusal to participate in a social project governed by the work ethic and of a skepticism toward the notion that productivity and industry should be our ultimate goals. Sina Najafi spoke with Saint-Amand by phone. Why did you choose the eighteenth century as the focus of a book on laziness?The discourse against laziness really starts in a coherent way in the eighteenth century, as we reach the cusp of industrial capitalism, and as the discourses on labor and economy emerge in their rationality. That is when we see the previously marginal discourse on laziness becoming more and more pointed. In many of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, one finds an equivalence between work and life itself. In Discourse on the Political Economy, for example, Rousseau acknowledges the inevitability of work; when he considers the responsibilities of the State and the well-being of its citizens, he argues that it’s imperative that work always be necessary and never useless. Voltaire champions the spirit of industry that pervades his century when he writes, “To work is to live.” And in his famous essay What Is Enlightenment?, Kant defines the project of the Enlightenment as having “the courage to use your own reason.” For him, laziness is associated with cowardice, which is the condition for remaining in what he calls a state of “tutelage.” For Kant, laziness is the primary obstacle to an autonomous life. I was interested, however, in examining a counter-discourse that valorizes laziness. This counter-discourse rejects functionality, resists the ideology of utility, and affirms forms of marginality that radically unsettle the Enlightenment project. What is especially interesting is that some of the same figures in my book who promote laziness are also the ones writing apologies for work and labor. Diderot would be one example, as would Rousseau, who begins to associate laziness with freedom in his later work, especially Reveries of the Solitary Walker. This is also the case with the painter Chardin. Many of his canvases celebrate domestic activity, but then you have the other paintings where work is suspended, and the subjects are distracted—they indulge in relaxation and even indolence. That’s basically the contradiction, the moment of dialectic, that I wanted to explore in the book. But I wanted to leave aside the question of aristocratic idleness, which is of course a given in the eighteenth century. I wanted to confront instead the particular area where laziness and idleness become figures of resistance within bourgeois economy. Is the aristocracy exempted from critiques of laziness?Not exactly. In religious treatises and in a lot of satire, you do see aristocrats being portrayed as lazy, as unproductive. And, of course, during the French Revolution the aristocrat will become the iconic figure of laziness. In 1789, for example, Emmanuel Sieyès formulated, in his influential What Is the Third Estate?, the revolutionary ideas of the nation, which he saw as bound by a common obligation to work. And aristocrats became “strangers” to this common project because they did not produce anything. But the aristocracy is not really affected by the context of the rising bourgeois economy and its values, which is what I’m concerned with. After all, the aristocracy is a class that is exempted from all forms of work. Leisure is an inherent privilege. Are people like Diderot in fact reading the emerging bourgeois theories of economics and labor?We have traces of these theories in the work of someone like Diderot, of the way the discourse of liberal economy is infiltrating the discourse of the philosopher and the encyclopedist. The historian Annie Jacob has written on the alignment between the physiocrats, who were the early economists of the eighteenth century, and the encyclopedists like Diderot. We even find in Diderot allusions to Benjamin Franklin’s writings on economy—the proto-Weberian apology for work. Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack was translated very early on into French as La Science du Bonhomme Richard. When in Rameau’s Nephew —Diderot’s imaginary dialogue between a philosopher and an idler—he portrays the nephew as a parasite, as someone who lives on the margins of the market economy, he knows exactly what he’s doing. But there is a contradiction in Diderot’s work. He certainly belongs to the category of philosophers who promote labor, who want to valorize work. But in Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot creates this unique character who is a hero of non-production—a bohemian musician who does not produce anything that lasts. Diderot shows his admiration for the genius of an artist of unfinished works, for an idler who resists economic finality and is consumed by the present, who refuses employment and subjugation. And it’s interesting that Rameau’s Nephew was written while Diderot was involved in the great busy work of his life, the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote around five thousand entries. There are also entries in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia that deal with laziness.There are several of them, and they establish a hierarchy; I focus on three. The articles were written by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who contributed many entries to the encyclopedia. At the lowest level, there is fainéantise, literally “doing nothing,” which is described as the most physical negation of activity, a perverted escape from the obligation to work, a fault that reaches the soul. Then there is, at a more positive level, paresse, simply described as “lack of action.” And then oisiveté, “idleness,”which has more noble connotations. Is Jaucourt drawing on an already accepted ranking of types of laziness? Or is he in fact inventing this hierarchy himself?One can see in Jaucourt’s definitions that he speaks very much like the economists who are writing at the time, for example Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. Jaucourt is repeating distinctions that physiocrats like Turgot are making between various forms of economic unproductivity. It was interesting to see that Jaucourt lionizes Hercules and his labors. I assume some of the anti-laziness discourse followed an existing Christian tradition that defined sloth as a sin. But to what extent was Classical literature mobilized?Yes, it was interesting to see how Hercules becomes this mythological hero of work. He appears not just in Jaucourt but also, for example, in the seventeenth-century treatise Traité de la paresse (Treatise on Laziness) by Antoine de Courtin. The treatise, which continued to be influential in the eighteenth century, drew on the Christian tradition, and considered laziness essentially as what derails a virtuous, useful life. In one nice phrase, Courtin describes laziness “as a bed for the devil to lie in.” And Courtin proposed Hercules as the hero par excellence of action, as the paragon of virtue. Hercules is not only present in philosophical works, though; as Lynn Hunt shows in her work on the French Revolution, Hercules is also referenced in the French Revolution, which establishes an entire discourse valorizing work. And, of course, we find Hercules later in some fascist discourses. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Indolence (The Lazy Italian Girl), 1756–1757. One of the figures in your book is the playwright and novelist Pierre de Marivaux. He is perhaps the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century and was also quite prolific. It is surprising to see him as one of the people you turn to in your book for evidence of a counter-Enlightenment position that advocates laziness. Can you talk about this? Despite Marivaux’s rich output, laziness is a persistent preoccupation of his in certain autobiographical fragments and in a number of his other writings. I focus on Marivaux’s output as a young man. In 1721, he launches Le Spectateur français, a French version of The Spectator, the periodical started by Addison and Steele in England in the first decade of the century. Le Spectateur was similarly part of a modern aesthetic project that represented an ideological break with the anciens, namely the attempt to put the present into prose. Marivaux becomes a painter of modern life, of “the world as it is.” He anticipates Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent,” and he wants to avoid any authorial gravity, any thinking that involves work. Instead, Marivaux’s “Spectator” becomes the scribe of circumstance, and holds himself in readiness for events as they transpire. Marivaux insists that openness to the incidental means the total absence of work. At one point, he says, “An author is a man who, in his leisure moments, is overtaken by a vague desire to think about one or several subjects; and one might call this ‘reflecting upon nothing.’” The Spectator abandons himself to the “randomness of things.” What fascinated me about Marivaux is that he is one of those authors who portrays lazy subjects who are in fact very active at the same time. It’s this contradiction that makes them interesting—this productive un-production. The Spectator is busy, and he’s busy not being busy. His non-production comes from observing the form of an urban life that produces moments of pure circumstantiality, moments of complete inconsequence. For example, the Spectator at one point described a moment when the wind catches the powder in the hair of a bunch of elegant men. It’s these moments of volatility, pure moments of ephemerality, that Le Spectateur captures. Are these experiences non-productive in that they don’t build on each other and offer a larger perspective?The urban experience gives us these moments of pure futility, where the significance of events is consumed in pure epiphany. So there is nothing to build on! The observations are empty. The minute they happen, they are inconsequential. And there’s no judgment. Pure perception is the goal. In your book, you discuss how the labor that goes into the Spectator’s busy laziness must remain invisible in order for the project to maintain itself. How does that work?It appears like trickery, in a way. Because it doesn’t aspire to be aristocratic; it’s simply a perverse play on not giving in to the ideology of work and capital. You see this in Chardin as well. The critics of Chardin wanted him to find more noble topics for his work, which was simply genre painting and not more elevated history painting. Of course, a lot of the subjects in his paintings are also distracted or lazy. Chardin’s critics accused him of not showing his labor: they accused him of laziness, complaining that they never saw him paint! It’s true that Chardin was a slow painter, and in the eighteenth-century ideology of work, there’s a need not just to be productive but also to show labor. The realization of labor does not only come about in its products, but also in its representation. The question of representation of labor brings up Rousseau. Can you talk about the various positions that Rousseau stakes out on laziness, political life, and the public representation of work?Rousseau is complicated. There are a lot of shifts in his work and I didn’t want to efface them. On the contrary, I wanted to play with them and see what was going on in Rousseau’s edifice. Because, indeed, even very early on in his political writings, in the Discourses, for example, you find an apology for work. He sees work as being contiguous with citizenship, and in the famous Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater, he defines work as constitutive of the polis. Yet we see that at the end of his life he elaborates a different subjectivity, this time founded on laziness, idleness, and solitude. Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy, Rousseau Meditating in the Park at La Rochecardon near Lyon in 1770, 1770 (detail). The work that Marivaux refuses is a particular type of intellectual work. But Rousseau is talking about manual labor. Does he make distinctions between different kinds of work? He does. And it’s interesting to see that when he himself withdraws from work, his criticism of work is specifically of large-scale manufacturing, which he sees as politically alienating. The work that he celebrates instead is mostly artisanal: work that can be done in solitude, doesn’t involve a major production, and doesn’t extend to a consumerist society. They are, in the end, for him, non-work. He himself hand-copied sheets of music for money. And, perhaps surprisingly, he thinks of his own work as artisanal because it satisfies all those conditions. How does his position vis-à-vis work evolve?In his earlier anthropological writings, there is a moment where from his description of the different states of society—agricultural, pastoral, and the more superior cultivated state of society—you see that he finds the pastoral state the most perfect. And artisanal work is in some sense a manual version of pastoral work, because in the pastoral age, you also have isolated individuals who are obviously not involved in a consumerist goal. But when Rousseau considers work in the social state, he then refuses laziness. He views it as going against the collective will, as a negative. Laziness appears only to be acceptable in the state of nature; elsewhere it is a perversion. In his last book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau is very interested in the relationship between doing nothing, for which he uses the Italian phrase far niente, and working.Reveries represents the moment when Rousseau finally abandons all apology for work. The text re-creates the conditions for idleness: isolation of the individual, the forced distancing of the collective, an artificial state of nature. One form of “work” that we do find in Reveries is botanizing. This is the sort of peculiar form of work that Rousseau will celebrate. You’re basically working with and in nature, contemplating creation, and collecting. It is the closest to the pastoral age. Botanizing in Rousseau, as he explains it in Reveries, never becomes a scientific, methodical enterprise. Rousseau basically collects plants simply for memorizing. Although Linneaus is a model who is invoked, in fact the Linnean approach is completely deconstructed in Reveries. Ultimately, Rousseau’s project is not even about naming plants. It’s about capturing the souvenir of a moment of enchantment. Walking involves the same; it is governed by the same economy of ephemerality and bliss. Does Reveries explicitly discuss the effect of laziness on the self?Yes, and it is at its purest in the chapters dedicated to the fifth walk and the eighth walk. There, Rousseau develops in full the subject of “worklessness,” where he finds full autonomy in doing nothing, where you have the individual who finds freedom in the act of doing nothing. In doing nothing, the self is completely “aerated.” There is an airing-out, an expulsion of external forces. It’s a little complex; you have a turning inward, yet you are also outside in nature. Is far niente not possible in your own house? For example, if you just stayed in bed?No, he specifically finds these epiphanies outdoors in a sort of harmonizing with nature. And he specifically critiques the cabinet of the philosopher, the philosopher’s study. He says, “My cabinet is outdoors.” What is left of the self after you “aerate” it, after all of the external ideologies and forces that have shaped your subjectivity have been expelled? Even if doing nothing were able to accomplish this, what would be left of the subject called Rousseau? And a second question: in this moment, even if it were possible, what is left for him to think, or see, or do, or indeed write?What is left is pure existence, pure affect. That is what, in fact, he seeks in Reveries—this peculiar moment of pure affectivity. When Rousseau is back at his desk, does the task of writing this pure affectivity pose a dilemma for him? Is writing the experience of a fully evacuated self an issue?Yes, it is an issue. That’s what you find in Reveries—he says that the writing traces this ephemerality, this drive toward affectivity. That’s whyReveries is written in the form of a diary. It’s a poignant irony that Rousseau’s death is inscribed in the work’s unfinished state. As he seeks repose, as he searches for this sovereign moment of worklessness, it is ironic that he encounters the most poignant form of repose—death itself. The shortest reverie is the last one. The book is unfinished; he died before completing it. ———————————————- Pierre Saint-Amand is professor in the departments of French studies and comparative literature at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel (Brown University Press, 1994) and The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet, a non-profit organization. This interview first appeared in an issue that dealt with Sloth, Cabinet magazine, Spring 2008.

© 2008 Cabinet Magazine

Civil War in Jefferson Country: Lessons from the University of Virginia

Brinda Bose

A rain-drizzled, splendidly-verdant, sleepily-calm campus it was, just about a month ago, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, USA – so much so that many of its residents would often laugh and exclaim at its placidity, the almost paradisiacal quality of an island-in-the-mild-northern-spring-sun quite untouched by the rowdinesses that we of the alarming tropics both fear and desire in our daily lives. So much so, in fact, that at a conference on Global Humanities at the UVa’s newly-minted Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures at the end of April, where I was part of a presentation on new administrative policies in Indian higher education (which some of us on our campus here in Delhi perceive as nothing less than an orchestrated, concentrated attack on academia as we value it), it was received by many of the local audience – made up of faculty members across the humanities and social science disciplines, deans and other administrative stalwarts of the UVa – with sympathy and surprise. A few expressed outrage about what was happening at a faraway campus (perhaps quietly thanking their stars for being at the University of Virginia rather than of Delhi). A couple of others (presumably of UVa Rector Helen Dragas’s ilk, as it appears with hindsight) implied in their comments and questions that we in Delhi were perhaps rather naïve to even expect that an university would be run in any way differently from a corporate – what kind of an arcane idealism was that?

It aroused curiosity, the Delhi University story of midnight show-cause notices that stank of fake legalese, accompanied by photographic evidence of sniffer dogs, police men and women and rope cordons around a regular Committee of Courses meeting at which its members were to be coerced, initially with veiled threats and ultimately with open punitive action, to sign in favour of what the Vice Chancellor and his team had decreed for the institution: wild and wicked systemic changes whose fallouts, in just over a year or so, Delhi University is already beginning to crumble under. Those there who were far more sharply attuned to grave and fatal rumblings in academia all across the globe (and there were, of course, many of them) knew, of course, that horrific and melodramatic as the unfolding, ongoing DU story was, it was symptomatic of the times we were all thrashing about in.

But even they, I can wager, did not in their most vile nightmares imagine that a so-very-similar horror would slam upon their summer-somnolent Charlottesville ‘Grounds’ like a frenzied tornado within the month, just as the last batches of students had slunk away for a glorious summer break after ‘end-sem’ examinations and the beautifully leafy campus was drawing a quiet fragrant breath or two to build up spirit and stamina again for the new academic year to come. I can bet that, even as some of them spoke with pride of the University’s high-ranked Darden School of Business, they did not in their most bizarre dreams imagine it would bring them so much shame and sorrow just as the sun grew stronger on the tall trees and rolling greens and their lovely stately buildings. Brandishing “strategic dynamism” as a weapon in the face of a slow-and-steady academic vision, and ravaging the edifices of loyalty and love among alumni, donors, students and staff overnight that take years of care and understanding to build, a fresh new management-oriented policy of governance has, as suddenly as the proverbial storm on a blithe summer’s day, brought mayhem and melancholy to the University of Virginia this historic June of 2012. And as is already evident from the outpouring of articles, open letters, Facebook posts and tweets, and the massive – now nationwide in America and fast turning global – outburst of reportage, interviews and analyses in the media, the charming, bucolic University of Virginia at Charlottesville will certainly never be the same again – even if, as latest news filtering in gives hope, the tide is stemmed and turned.

Just a week ago, two years into her five-year-term, Teresa Sullivan was summarily dismissed from her post as President of the University of Virginia, to the complete shock and disbelief of the majority of the staff and students on campus. Helen Dragas, Rector of UVa’s Board of Visitors (what we in India know usually as a Governing Board/Body), explained this decision cryptically, thus: “The Board believes that in the rapidly changing and highly pressurized external environment in both health care and in academia, the University needs to remain at the forefront of change.” The sticking point, however, was that Sullivan was largely seen as a successful leader in what are extremely difficult times for public universities all over the world, and the one who was attempting to bring change to the institution with vision and grace. This was a very rotten bolt from a pretty serene blue. Bewildered, and convinced that there must be a good explanation for this unexpected move from the Board, the faculty began to ask questions – fast, furious, and increasingly embarrassing. What was revealed subsequently was a tale of Machiavellian wringing and stringing, in the true style of corporate boardroom politicking: hardly astonishing, however, given that the chief protagonists who engineered this coup d’etat under cover of darkness were Rector Dragas and a bunch of wealthy donors to the university, in cahoots with a group of university insiders, some members of the Darden business school of the UVa – fie on them, most of all. (And could Dragas have been better named? Dickensian, according to an astute Facebook comment; one’s literary soul is sated at once.)

Farcically enough, an email sent out by hedge-fund billionaire, former Goldman Sachs partner and member of the foundation board of UVa’s business school Peter Kienan by a mistaken ‘reply all’ hit to more people on a university list than was intended, revealed that Sullivan’s removal was shamelessly ‘managed’ by some who are most possessed of those skills by academic training, through silence, lies and cunning – Dragas did not even call a Board meeting before the ouster, but spoke to some of its members individually and then threatened Sullivan that she had enough votes to fire her if she did not resign. Baffled but dignified, Sullivan did the civilized thing and handed in her resignation, and retreated to consult with family and lawyers, not even responding to the thousands of messages and calls she began to receive from university colleagues and well-wishers in solidarity and shock. She requested merely that she be allowed to address the Board of Visitors when it met this past Monday, and asked that the meeting be public. Dragas agreed to a closed door hearing; Sullivan agreed, and circulated her statement as a public document after the meeting. Well before then, of course, Sullivan had become something of a Joan of Arc for colleagues and students on UVa’s beloved and beautiful ‘Grounds’, which swelled in indignant protest over the weekend into a massive rally to “save” the University from a bunch of managerial bigots. Alumni donors and parents of past and present students grew vociferous in their condemnation of an outrageously brazen act of power-mongering and money-flexing that was unbelievably detrimental to the rich academic spirit of this nearly-200-year-old university, founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson.

On Sunday (June 17^th) evening in the middle of its summer break, the faculty senate gathered in an emergency meeting to deliberate upon the options available to them to put pressure on the Board to reinstate Sullivan as President and change gears to damage-control-mode in Jefferson country. On Monday afternoon while the Board met to hurriedly announce an ‘interim President’ to try and quell the swelling trouble on campus, a 2,000-strong crowd of angry and disappointed protestors made up of faculty, students, administrators and even a former President of the UVa gathered on the steps of the massive, impressive Rotunda, built by Jefferson as the historic nerve-centre of the campus, to press the Board into reversing its decision. The Board heard out Sullivan’s solemn and decorous statement (all documents relating to the unfolding UVa scandal are available on the net) and went ahead to announce its chosen interim President without an iota of embarrassment: Carl Zeithaml, the current Dean of the McIntire School of Commerce at UVa, whose curriculum vitae boasts of a specialization in – don’t hold your breath – ‘strategic management’.

What would be the most astounding thing in all this if it did not so easily resonate with what is happening in universities the world over, alas, are the reasons for Sullivan’s ouster. Her sin, it appears, is that she was much more of a university administrator than a business person; she refused to cut “obscure” and low-yield programmes like the Classics and German, and rejected a plan to bring online education to the university. The main criticism leveled against her was that she was too “incremental”, (rather than being strategically dynamic, presumably), that she was too steeped in academic culture (how did she ever imagine she could be that, right, to lead a 200-year-old public university?) and too resistant to plans for bringing “top-down, corporate style management” to UVa. For all these very original sins, her head rolled.

But it may not be a bandwagon to just jump on to blindly, as Sullivan’s tempered choices indicate; it is quite amazing, of course, how many American universities, just by herd instinct, might follow Harvard and Stanford and Wall Street Journal edits to “go online”, as Dragas had myopically suggested in early messages to her conformist peers on the Board.  Online courses will never be as rigorous (or as difficult) as interactive ones. Given the economic downturn, the best institutions are inclined toward opening online services and overseas branches for easy money. If UVa wishes to follow that trend, there is no need to fashion it into an argument for academic excellence. At least in India we know that the results of distance education have not been about excellence: it means polytechnic vocationalization, in which teachers know how to calibrate their lectures for an online audience.

So UVa’s Board of Visitors led by the Dragas-lady has had its way for now, though the picture continues to change dramatically even as I write. An interim President who will be strategic rather than academic has been put in place. Sullivan is already being wooed by other institutions in the country, and the one which is lucky to snare this apparently quiet efficient academic visionary will win what will surely be charming Charlottesville’s monumental loss – not merely in the enforced departure of someone who seems to be a fine individual but in a far more insidious, dangerous way, in the damaging of the spirited aspirations of an entire academic community. And what Sullivan somberly warned in her statement on Monday, June 19^th at the Rotunda (on whose grand pillars vandalists had spray-painted G-R-E-E-D in bold black letters the night before, in disgust at the dirty hands among Board members), that universities across America were waiting to ferret away UVa’s best teachers, students and administrators in the wake of this upheaval, has startlingly begun to come true within a day of its utterance: one of only 13 holding the title ‘University Professor’ at UVa, William Wulf of the Computer Science department submitted his letter of resignation to the Board on June 20^th, declaring: “In my opinion the BoV has perpetrated the worst example of corporate governance I have ever seen. To repeat – I resign. I want no part of this ongoing fiasco.” On Wednesday June 21^st, another professor of the Biology department has filed his papers. If this marks the beginning of a real as much as symbolic exodus of eminent faculty, the Board of Visitors at UVa may well soon be holding an unwashed baby while the bathwater drains.

As many analysts in newspapers and journals all over the world are beginning to conclude about the implications of this enormous academic scandal in Virginia, the seriousness of it lies in that it is symptomatic of higher education policies everywhere. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies at UVa wrote in a prominently-circulating piece immediately after the flames of shock and horror began to engulf his campus: “The biggest challenge facing higher education is market-based myopia. Wealthy board members, echoing the politicians who appointed them (after massive campaign donations) too often believe that universities should be run like businesses, despite the poor record of most actual businesses in human history. Universities do not have ‘business models’. They have complementary missions of teaching, research, and public service. Yet such leaders think of universities as a collection of market transactions, instead of a dynamic (I said it) tapestry of creativity, experimentation, rigorous thought, preservation, recreation, vision, critical debate, contemplative spaces, powerful information sources, invention, and immeasurable human capital.”

But as we can all see, universities are being made to have “business models”. I have been following articles and statements circulating on the UVa case this past week, and what is most frightening is how much the Dragasian model of university administration and aspiration is instantly recognized as the draconian rule of law that is being laid upon other academic communities almost everywhere, from Georgia, USA to Cambridge, UK to our very own doorstep. What is most inspirational about the UVa story, however, is in the way such a huge chunk of the university’s extended community, past and present, has rallied boisterously and bravely around their ousted President, rightly seeing in this mischief of the BoV a far huger and horrific assault on academia at large. Those of us who are connected in some way to the University of Virginia, and even those of us who are not, will surely wish for it a speedy recovery of spirit and form and equanimity. Charlottesville has been truly heroic – some downtown business establishments even closed shop on Monday afternoon so that its workers could attend the protest at the university’s Rotunda in solidarity with UVa’s majority – and UVa’s larger community has demonstrated a fierce and admirable collective investment in an academic institution with a vision for change that is incremental rather than strategic. This is enormously inspirational, for the youth that it seeks to nurture and prepare for life, and for all of us who see resonances in the policies governing our own institutions today.

Early this morning, there are reports that Sullivan has been persuaded by the groundswell of support swirling around her to let the BoV know that she will be willing to rejoin as President of the UVa if Rector Dragas resigns. There has already been a key resignation of a Dragas aficionado from the Board, and there are increasingly-loud murmurs that the numbers in favour of Sullivan’s ouster are not really what Dragas indicated. If Sullivan is reinstated as head of the University of Virginia in the next few days, it will be a magnificent sign of how much public outrage and spontaneous mobilization can actually achieve in the face of undemocratic, sinister and completely unscrupulous machinations. After all, the powers that be, always and always, are but people’s creatures!

Postscript. If, however, people’s power does not prevail at UVa after all, I wonder if Teresa Sullivan could be persuaded to leap across a couple of continents to pursue her leadership instincts in a different place with a snarkily-similar set-up of education power-brokers? I have a feeling that there will be many of us in various universities across the world who might be thinking the same this week.

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Brinda Bose teaches in the Department of English, University of Delhi.

A Song Sung True

Gopal Gandhi

 

Her name responds with images. Of her. O.P. Sharma has a lovely photograph of her. A ‘late’ Kamaladevi, picture-daters would say. She is seated at a table, her hands stretched across it. The round face is lined with scars of battle. The salt march of 1930, for instance. A thousand footsteps on the sand are etched on that face. And a smile washes over them, like the waves at Dandi might do. As you look at the picture more closely, you see a chin of extraordinary determination and eyes of a rare penetration.

But it is the hands that grip you. Strong-veined and profusely, almost ostentatiously, bangled. Who says courage and beauty do not go together, she seems to ask. They cannot but. I am proud to be a woman and I celebrate the beauty of womanhood, the whole frame can be heard saying. Let no one, absolutely no one, take beauty to suggest weakness, no fear! And to proclaim womankind’s strength, I will assert its feminity, not ape men. My working, writing, creating hands will proclaim them.

Then there is the black and white footage of her fanning a pot of boiling saltwater. The quirk of 8 mm speed-filming gives her hands, bangled again, an extra verve. With each vapour goes a wisp of imperial hubris. Each sedimented salt-crystal makes swaraj tactile. Kamaladevi is in that frame the satyagrahi incarnate. But she is not to be typecast! Not in that scene, not anywhere else.

In Mangalore, where she was born on 3 April 1903, father, mother, elder sister and Kamaladevi comprised a rather small family, for those days. It was there, in the verdant garden home of her Saraswat parents – Ananthiah Dhareshwar and Girijabai – that Kamaladevi first saw, touched and began to move the multi-coloured beads on the abacus of her sensibility. Her memoirs (Inner Recesses Outer Spaces, Navrang, 1986) tell us that the twinkling of the mrigasirsha star which heralds rain, the onset of showers in the month ofsravana and the worship of the tulasi plant became a continuum for her, signalling the reassurance, if any was needed in that fecund part of our western ghats, of the creative principle of life. Kamaladevi’s narration of her childhood is no idle amble down a memory footlane. I had not heard it explained anywhere until I read her autobiography that mrigasirsha is so named because the rains it heralds are such as make the mriga (deer) bend its sirsha (head) down under the torrent.

For Ananthiah, a district collector, nationalist politics was taboo. But even in her teens, Kamaladevi made her own decisions. Nobody was to give her taboos. In this, she was clearly influenced by her mother, ‘a feminist with a very strong consciousness about women’s rights.’ In 1910, when Kamala was seven, Ananthiah died, leaving no will. Her step-brother claimed the entire estate and offered a subsistence allowance to Girijabai. This the self-respecting widow declined to accept and decided to support her daughters by herself.

For those times, this was no ordinary resolve. It steeled the young girl in adversity and resoluteness. But certain customs Girijabai could not resist. By the custom of the times, Kamala was given in marriage while in her early teens – and not surprisingly, was widowed not long thereafter. What could that ‘status’ have meant to a child? In a less enlightened home, it could have meant an irreversible eclipse. But Girijabai’s home was different. Kamaladevi studied, passed her Senior Cambridge and was encouraged to pursue her interests which were clearly taking her towards the arts and theatre. She moved to the intellectual and capital of the South – Madras.

Around that time her path met that of Harindranath Chattopadhyay. A musical genius, the young Bengali had poetic and histrionic talents that could only have been matched by those of his sister, the Bulbul-e-Hind, Sarojini Naidu. Kamaladevi and Harindranath found they had shared interests and decided to marry, affronting the orthodox not just because this was, in her case, a remarriage but by its cross-regional nature. Spurred by a joint vision, this did not deflect them. ‘When poet-musician Harindranath and I teamed up it was for a sharing of dreams and ambitions to devote ourselves to create a new theatre in India,’ she writes in her memoirs.

But the real theatre of the times was not under arclights or on stage. It was being played out under the sharp daylight of non-cooperation. Kamaladevi was but sixteen when she happened to be in Bombay and attended a mammoth meeting addressed by Mahatma Gandhi. Chowpatty was ‘a sea of heads,’ she recalls, and being there she felt the power of the Mahatma’s appeal. She was enlisted into politics that day, I should imagine.

What drew Kamaladevi into that vortex was more than the self-evident political compulsion of the cause. It was the strange mix that Gandhi was offering of political regeneration and constructive renewal. Kamaladevi and Harindranath met the Mahatma and Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan. ‘Tagore felt that personality can be built up through music,’ she records. Whereas Gandhi said it was ‘to be built up through craft – the use of hands.’ Harindranath, restless by temperament and peripatetic by choice, wanted to go to England and savour its world of letters and theatre. Kamaladevi joined him there and enrolled in Bedford College, London, to read sociology and economics.

But after a brief spell there she returned home. Not because she would not have made a success of an academic course in London but because her mind was in India. She enrolled in 1924 for volunteer work – no simple badge-pinning work, let us remember, but everything that needs to be done at a mammoth gathering – at the Belgaum Congress. The session was a historic one, presided over by Gandhi himself. The Mahatma had been a volunteer in earlier Congresses himself, when still relatively unknown. Nothing was too menial or too ‘high’ for a volunteer. Kamaladevi’s presence did not go unnoticed. How could a Sakuntala have gone unnoticed! And especially when her Dushyanta, Harindranath, was as prone to short-term memory loss as the hero of Kalidasa’s epic. A drama troupe started by the two had been most successful, with ‘Abu Hasan’, the play Harindranath wrote when he was eighteen, showing to packed halls in Bombay. Another, ‘Discovery of India’ showing the progress of Indian civilization from 5000 B.C. to contemporary times had also captured popular imagination. Their son Ram had a role in that production. So here was a stage heroine boarding the nationalist train.

Within two years Kamaladevi was in the thick of mainstream politics. In 1926, elections had been called to the Madras Provincial Legislature and just on the eve of polling it was announced that women too could contest. Margaret Cousins, educationist wife of the Irish poet and playwright James Cousins, prevailed upon Kamaladevi to do so. She decided to file her nomination as an Independent, as Congress had already closed its lists. With no time available, and no resources of any kind, her debut was foredoomed. And fail it did but with the astonishingly small margin of 51 votes! Her ‘defeat’ was in fact a victory and was hailed as such. She had made a point – that in the man’s world of elections a woman could take men on as their equal.

The Congress invited Kamaladevi to become a member of the party the very next year and organise a volunteer corps in Madras, which she did with the kind of ‘to-the-manor-born’ ease she was to become celebrated for in public life. In 1927-28, Kamaladevi was elected to the All India Congress Committee, the citadel of political participation. But the citadel was not so pleasing! Not to her, anyway. She found the status of women needed to be safeguarded even there, in the very core of the freedom movement.

As batches of volunteers began to be identified for the salt satyagraha in 1930, she learnt that women were to be excluded from the enacting of that historical moment. Never awed, she went to the Mahatma. ‘The significance of a non-violent struggle,’ she put in, ‘is that the weakest can take an equal part with the strongest and share in the triumph.’ The point was conceded. Kamaladevi was one of the first to break the salt law. ‘Even as I lit my little fire to boil the salt water, I saw thousands of fires aflame dancing in the wind. The copper pans sizzled in laughter while their bosoms traced the white grains of salt and the heat lapped up the last drop of water.’

I do not think Sarojini Naidu could have improved upon her sister-in-law’s description. ‘Hail Deliverer!’ are the words which the Nightingale of India had uttered, as the Mahatma bent to pick up his fistful of salt at Dandi. Kamaladevi was at that time making a double point. The salt law needed to be broken and it needed to be broken by the sons and daughters of India, together.

Even as Gandhi was arrested, so was Kamaladevi along with hosts of others, the magistrate saying she had been responsible for more people breaking the law than anybody else! She was incarcerated at Yeravada, Poona, in the first of her many jailings which were to extend to a period of five years during different periods of the struggle. Five years are, today, thought of exclusively in terms of Lok Sabha terms and governorships. She clocked a different kind of quiennale.

In the 1932 Civil Disobedience movement, she shone as a star. By now Harindranath and Kamaladevi were pulling in different directions. He was a musical bee, humming his winged way in a garden of many flowers. She was the sole lotus in the garden pond – sublime when she was closed for him, sensational when not, as in the plays they did together. But the lotus’ decision to bloom or remain inaccessible was the lotus’s. The bee had no part in it. They parted. He, to explore other harbours and manorial hothouses. She, to remain firmly rooted in her deepening concerns. Harindranath performed and performed brilliantly. Kamaladevi just was.

There was something naturally anti-pomp in Kamaladevi. Anti-pelf and shall I say, anti-chandeliers. Her charisma glowed from a simple oil-wick in an earthen lamp. And strangely the wick remained sootfree. Naturally, she was drawn to the socialist ideal, going counter to ‘insider’ sentiment in the Congress. Becoming a founder-member of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, she was elected President of the CSP at its Meerut session in 1936. Elections took place in 1937 to the provincial legislatures and Congress won 8 out of 11 provinces, notably in Madras where Kamaladevi had done so much work in. Rajaji was to be premier of Madras. Many illustrious Congressmen were for the first time inducted into office.

I have recently come across a fascinating letter written on 5 April 1937 from the Mahatma to Jawaharlal Nehru, then President of the Congress, on the subject of women in the higher reaches of the Congress of the times. I excerpt it:

‘…Kamaladevi was travelling with us from Wardha to Madras. She was coming from Delhi. She came to my compartment twice and had long chats. At last she wanted to know why Sarojini Devi was excluded (from the Congress Working Committee), why Rukmini Lakshmipati was being kept away by Rajaji (from the Madras Ministry), why Anasuyabai was excluded, and so on. I then told her of my part in her exclusion, and told her almost all that I could remember of the note I wrote for you on that silent Monday. Of course I told her I had no hand in Sarojini’s exclusion at first or inclusion after. I told her also that Rajaji so far as I knew, had nothing to do with L’s exclusion. I thought you should know this.’

Now that was Kamaladevi at her typically determined and assertive best. Nobody was allowed to ignore womankind. Not when womankind was not ignoring the struggle. And if that meant boarding the Mahatma’s compartment between Wardha and Madras, and obtaining from him a point by point clarification, which then had to be shared with the Congress President, so be it. World War II broke out two years later and Kamaladevi addressed the Mahatma another letter, which must rank among the most important in India’s political discourse on the war. Quoting it in extenso, Gandhi wrote an article on her intervention in the Harijan of 9 October 1939. One part of that letter of Kamaladevi’s is memorable. ‘…if England and France have the right to rule over large tracts and big nations, then Germany and Italy have an equal right. There is as little moral justification in the former countries crying halt to Hitler as there is in his what he calls his rightful claims.

‘That there is a third view the world hardly seems to think, for it rarely hears it. And it is so essential that it should find expression: the voice of the people who are mere pawns in the game. Neither Danzig nor the Polish corridor are the issue. The issue is the principle on which the whole of this present Western civilization is based; the right of the strong to rule and exploit the weak.’ Kamaladevi was telling Gandhi, not very gently, that in his opposition to the Hitlerian aggression, he and the Congress were letting Britain get away too easily.

Gandhi commented in his article: ‘I agree with Kamaladevi’s analysis of the motives of the parties to the war. Both are fighting for their existence and for the furtherance of their policies. There is, however, this great difference between the two: however incomplete or equivocal the declaration of the Allies are, the world has interpreted them to mean that they are fighting for saving democracy. Herr Hitler is fighting for the extension of the German boundaries, although he was told that he should allow his claims to be submitted to an impartial tribunal for examination. He contemptuously rejected the way of peace or persuasion and chose that of the sword. Hence my sympathy for the cause of the Allies.’

In 1941 she toured the USA, making a deep impression on the Roosevelts and numerous others by her candid countering of British propaganda against the Indian national movement. She also visited China and Japan, and while in Japan roundly criticised the Japanese aggression on China.

Sanctimoniousness was something she had no time for. Words devoid of sincerity were verbiage, action which was not genuine hypocrisy. So if the Congress could not contain her, nor could the mantra of socialism. It had to prove itself in the actuality of daily life. Having been in the forefront of the Quit India movement in 1942, she became a member of the Congress Working Committee in 1946. Anyone would have expected her to gravitate from there to the Constituent Assembly. Kamaladevi declined. She had not taken to politics as a vocation! She was to turn down other offers. Saying ‘no’ came almost as an aesthetic exercise to her. She had said that most effectively to an aesthete of aesthetes after all – Harindranath himself.

Kamaladevi’s signature, incidentally, became a wonder to behold. Few signatures have its elegance. Though separated from Harindranath she had retained his surname. But the ‘C’ in capitals and the following ‘h’ in her signature intersect, making a cross, a crossing-out. I find that flourish of her carefully-held pen deeply symbolic. She did nothing without thought. A ministership of state, came her way very early on after independence. ‘If Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, very rightly, should be of cabinet rank, should I…?’ Only this time, she did not seek to interrupt the prime minister’s train journeys. The modes of leaders’ travel had also changed! Kamaraj, then chief minister of Madras, wanted her to be governor of his state and sounded Nehru. ‘Ask her,’ the PM told the CM, ‘If you can persuade her, what can be better!’ Nehru knew, Kamaraj understood, that Kamaladevi’s ambitions were not for office.

After 1947, Kamaladevi turned her attention increasingly to crafts, to the use of hands, the natural passion which had been whetted in her by Gandhi and by a valued friend, G. Venkatachalam. Setting up the Central Cottage Industries Emporium and heading the All India Handicrafts Board for a number of years, Kamaladevi became a synonym for crafts. But not for the acquiring and flaunting of objects made by hand. That she left to the ‘cultivated’ classes of Delhi.

She meant by crafts the makers of those objects, their needs and the nurturing of their genius. For her, handcrafted objects were not an elite interest, though that too she did not exclude as a natural aspect. For her crafts meant a continuum between the maker and the user of those objects, not unlike that between mrigasirsha, sravana and tulasi.

Kamaladevi came to know innumerable craftspersons intimately. And she discovered talent among city-breds in the matter of crafts-promotion. L.C. Jain, whose acquaintance she had made earlier in the matter of refugee rehabilitation, brought his formidable talents of marketing and distribution to her cause. Craftspersons thanked her for her assistance, of course. But more, they thanked her for her understanding. The World Crafts Council sought her out. And she travelled the world, meeting artists – her natural constituency – and writers, thinkers.

Kamaladevi probably had more friends in the outside world among its true ‘greats’ than anyone not in high office in India. The Roosevelts, De Valera, Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek and his wife, Chou-en-Lai, Oppenheimer – all came to know and respect her personally. Kamaladevi told me once of how an All Important Person had looked right through her at the CIE in New Delhi, only to be told within days by a visiting prime minister that she wanted ‘to see Kamaladevi more than anyone else in Delhi’ – and then being invited by the same Mightiness to a meal in honour of the visitor and being hugged ostentatiously!

She visited Sri Lanka, as Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, when I was working there, in 1978. Her visit was regarded in that country as that of an Indian stateswoman. She was better known there than many then or later in high office in India. She had first visited the island in 1931 with the Nehrus – Jawaharlal, Kamala and young Indira. Apocrypha grow like mildew around the famous. I was told by Minnette De Silva that the Kandy of 1931 was agog with rumours of Kamala Nehru strongly disapproving of her husband’s taking the other ‘lotus’ a-rowing in Kandy lake! And Kamaladevi was also remembered in Sri Lanka for her later visit in the early 1940s to help the Lanka Sama Samaj Party ‘build up’.

In her 1978 visit, she did not stop with visiting the high and positioned. Her hosts, High Commissioner Thomas Abraham and Meera Abraham had drawn up a fine itinerary for her. But she found time to include in it visits to the homes and huts of little-known mat-weavers, potters, painters and writers travelling in a bumpy jeep I was able to offer her. ‘Do you know if Manjusri is still alive?’ she asked me. I had not even heard of Manjusri at that time. Enquiries were made and the great artist of Sri Lanka’s temple paintings and decorations was traced and brought, in an ecstasy of joy, to meet Kamaladevi. Years later, when I was back in Sri Lanka, Manjusri’s son, now an acknowledged artist himself, remembered that meeting of his late father and Kamaladevi. And Chitrasena, the Lankan dancer recalled her as ‘the greatest Indian name after Gandhi and Nehru.’

All this is not to say that Kamaladevi was a beloved goddess always and everywhere. She was not. There were many who found her hard, difficult, impossible to persuade or correct when she was in error. In the iciness of her relations with the remarkable Aruna Asaf Ali, the ‘fault’ was not that of the heroine of 1942 alone, surely. And in the later lack of warm understanding between the creative and much misunderstood Pupul Jayakar too, Kamaladevi’s reserve amounting to coolness certainly played a part. Especially when it came to judging people, she was human enough to make mistakes, serious ones, of assessment. She could be taken for a ride. And many tried to do just that.

As the years advanced, and Delhi’s long shadows of indifference crept over her evenings at India International Centre, she became easy prey to the passer-by’s idle curiosity and even naughtiness. She could be made to play favourites – easy and disastrous in the world of the performing arts over which she reigned as Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Never dizzied by applause or dismayed by its absence, she was nonetheless susceptible to the insidious effects of Delhi-bile. She saw through games soon enough. But only after they had caused her distress and her causes, harm.

Kamaladevi was human enough to be greatly pleased when she was asked if she would accept the Padma Vibhushan. ‘I am getting it for my contribution to Letters!’ she said with barely concealed joy. Some years later when the President of the day most appropriately conferred the Bharat Ratna to Aruna Asaf Ali, Kamaladevi was not alive. If she had been, the Gods of Equity would have been displeased. It would have been like conferring that highest award to Latabai Mangeshkar before Subbulakshmi.

Kamaladevi had said no to office and power, but not to public life. Her interest in causes such as those of the tribal communities of India, of refugees and of children, was great. But great as it was, her interest in these had to be subordinated to her care for individuals. When towards the end of her days she came across the case of two boys, one of who happened to be a Hindu and the other a Sikh who were picking berries somewhere near the Punjab border between India and Pakistan and strayed absently into the ‘wrong’ side of the border and were locked up, she took up the matter with President Zia ul Haq. Her letter worked and within a few days the boys were back home. But not before they came to her personally to say thanks. Everyone else had just seen the reports in the papers and turned the page, perhaps with a tch, tch.

I remember about the same time seeing Kamaladevi in tears. ‘This girl,’ she said, ‘Anshu Saxena, has had acid thrown on her face and on her torso by a bunch of hoodlums in Meerut.’ I did not know quite how to respond. ‘You cannot imagine what that can mean to a girl.’ And then tears were replaced with rage and resolve. ‘Those men have to be given the hardest punishment there is for such an offence. But more than that I want to raise enough money to see that the girl gets the best reconstructive surgery there is. Will you help me, Gopal?’ Many people helped, not because they would have ‘even otherwise’ but because after she had spoken to them they saw the ‘case’ as a human being’s traumatic experience. Among them was the then President of India, R. Venkataraman who wrote out a handsome cheque and sent it to her with the spontaneous seriousness of something due from a diligent Roman to Caesar. Truth is a big word. So misused. And made so common. But if there is one word I would associate with Kamaladevi, it is that word.

Decades earlier, Kamaladevi’s mother had told her about truth: ‘Taste the tiny drop of its essence and you will continue to linger on it…’ Kamaladevi did that. She lingered on what seemed to her to be true and just. Its tiny drops, one by one. Be it Sarojini’s exclusion, the ordeal of two berry-pickers, Anshu Saxena’s torment. Or the dry and howling cataract of our neglect – India’s and particularly male India’s neglect – of those who ought not to be counted as ‘weak’ but are. To all these she extended her hand – the use of her hand – as Gandhi had told her. A strong-veined and bangled hand which seemed to say ‘you know, these bangles… they have been made by a remarkable couple I know in the deep of Madhya Pradesh…’

In Kamaladevi’s equation with Gandhi there was space for candour, with Nehru for firmness, with Jayaprakash for compassionate understanding. Her nationalism had room for a global outreach, her socialism for individual expression. Her work for women came from within. It came from her as the sravana breaks over Mangalore, spontaneously and torrentially. It is my conviction that had she lived some more years Kamaladevi would have organised a nationwide movement in support of women’s issues and become something of a national lodestar once again, even as Jayaprakash Narayan did in the late ’70s. And perhaps with the same disillusionment?

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Gopal Gandhi was the governor of West Bengal serving from 2004 through 2009. This essay was first published in Seminar 540.