Das Blog

PJ, Bandhu: Sukumar Ray and 'Third World Humor'

2012-02-26T00:18:00.017-05:00

It is sometimes said that a fundamental difference between British humor and its American parallel is that whereas the former is based on speculation about what might be, the latter is based on wry observationsof what is. In other words, the best British jokes rest upon the Monty-Pythonesque premise ‘wouldn’t it be funny if…’ (there was a Ministry of Silly Walks), but American humor – being based on the Jewish-immigrant experience – begins with the premise ‘isn’t it funny that…’ (the nicest people are also raving bigots). The generalization is probably correct, and it is useful because it shows us another way of rooting popular culture in history, including ‘deep history’ that is not typically recalled in connection with the present day.

I want to suggest in this essay that there is also a characteristic Indian humor. Like American humor, it is new, going back less than two centuries. Presumably Indians did laugh before the mid-nineteenth century. But present-day modes of Indian humor, especially humor that is self-consciously Indian, are products of colonial and postcolonial culture. Along with Indian identity itself, this humor came out of the attempt of relatively new middle classes to come to terms with their own novelty. The process is still highly active; in fact, it can be argued that it has intensified considerably since the liberalization of the economy in the 1990s. Indian television commercials, for instance, are often very witty, and the wit is both a brazen endorsement of modern consumer culture and slyly subversive of that culture, an acknowledgment of something that is jarring in the context of capitalist modernity but nevertheless comfortably familiar. For instance, a recent series of advertisements for Maruti-Suzuki (an auto-maker known for small, fuel-efficient cars) featured sales demonstrations for tanks, yachts and other massive, high-end vehicles. The salesman, sometimes a white foreigner, would smugly reel off (in English) the vehicle’s various incredible capabilities before an audience of potential buyers, all Indians. At the end of his presentation, there would be silence, and finally one Indian would speak up. Looking thoroughly unimpressed and chewing his paan, the unfashionably-dressed man would drawl ‘Kitna deti hai?’ (‘What mileage does it get?’)

It is not easy to translate the joke for a non-Indian, because the viewer is not expected to simply laugh at the rustic who wants to buy a spacecraft, or at a man who is rich enough to buy a spacecraft but who remains obsessed with gas mileage. That comic figure is also the Indian everyman. The viewer is expected to identify with him, even as he is expected to understand, even share, the desire for the private jet. This is, on the one hand, the widely shared predicament of middle-class consumers who know that their aspirations have expanded faster than their wallets, who are determined to catch up, but who are also sanguine about the extent to which they can catch up. The gap between aspiration and reality – the simultaneity of desire and anxiety – manifests itself as humor, which immediately becomes a comforting sign of group identity: ‘we are like that only.’

On the other hand, the kitna deti hai ads fit a pre-existing (although not especially old) genre of Indian humor: the PJ, or ‘poor joke.’ The PJ is a joke that is so bad that the act of telling it becomes another joke, a second level of humor. An effective PJ is never an accident; it requires deftness, chutzpah, carefully cultivated skills and attitudes held in common by the teller and the listener. It is a shared act of laughing at yourself, the mirth only partially displaced onto a paan-chewing rustic; as such, it is an act of intimacy, the drawing of a circle around the joker and the laugher. I am yet to meet a non-subcontinental who ‘gets’ a PJ.

The drawing of circles of community, even communities of the amused, is of particular importance in societies marked by flux and a sense of disadvantage. For a class that is engaged in catching up, i.e., in a process of becoming something they are not yet, a joke about becoming (world-class consumers) draws the joker and the listener into a kind of seditious complicity, i.e., into an identity with implicit subversive possibilities. These are combined movements of self-criticism, self-preservation and self-assertion. What I am calling 'Third World humor' - the humor of the PJ - is thus based on the simultaneous experience of community on at least two levels: one anxious and critical, another affirmative and even celebratory.

While the PJ obviously did not begin with a single identifiable joker, it nevertheless had its pioneers. I want to focus on the individual who was the most productive of these pioneers in the context of modern Bengali culture: Sukumar Ray. Sukumar is largely unknown outside the circle of self-conscious Bengalis: a community that he himself played a major role in shaping during his short life as a writer, illustrator, editor and humorist. Outside Bengal, his name has long been eclipsed by that of his son, the film-maker Satyajit Ray (who, incidentally, was also a writer, illustrator, editor and humorist, as was Sukumar’s father, Upendrakishore). Among Bengalis, however, Sukumar is very much part of the cultural canon. To be a middle-class Bengali child is to be steeped in his nonsense verse and other writings, to absorb the illustrations and bizarrely-named characters he created, to know his world of fantastic hybrid animals, insane kings, chaotic classrooms, ferocious infants and pompous pundits, and to learn, a little later on, that he was the Indian Lewis Carroll. As part of their postcolonial predicament, Bengalis are often quite pleased to have a Lewis Carroll of their own. Amra’o pari, amader’o chhilo.

But although Sukumar was influenced by Carroll, it would be quite incorrect to see him as a mere derivation. Born in 1887 and dead in 1923, he inhabited the most formative decades of middle-class Bengaliness, when Rabindranath also wrote and there was a revolution in spoken Bengali, when Indian nationalism matured and the Swadeshi movement flowered, when revolvers, grenades and barbells became highly desirable (but only dubiously effective), when schools and exams consumed childhood, and boys gave up their dhotis for pants. It was, in other words, a particularly intense period of becoming, which Sukumar both observed and participated in. The nonsense that he produced was the nonsensical nature of the colonial everyday, with its yawning gaps between aspiration and reality within which people had made themselves as comfortable as possible. It was a world of mad incongruities and unprecedented adaptations, petty hyper-competition and ubiquitous political repression, rampant slippage and incomprehension, and wild changes in the value of new and old forms of knowledge.

But upstart knowledge, the lack of precedent, madness and even incomprehension were not without appeal; they were tools of subversion and sources of freedom, and, of course, of laughter. In this environment, the Monday Club, a debating society that Sukumar and his friends founded, soon morphed into the Monda Club (as in monda-mithai, or Bengali sweets), and while the club’s topics of discussion ranged from Plato and Nietzsche to Bankim, Rabindranath and Vaishnav poetry, the format of discussion was adda: a mongrel cultural form and a departure from the purity of ‘debate’ [Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 178]. If the members were funny or a little mad, they were also gloriously self-conscious about it. Madness was a language into itself, which – in a sleight of the writer’s hand – also happened to be the new vernacular.

In this world that was sophisticated, wide-eyed and wry, cosmopolitanism came packaged with a necessary awareness of one’s own marginality. The ‘wouldn’t it be funny if’ scenarios that Sukumar created were also ‘isn’t it funny that’ jokes; their humor worked at two levels and was almost always an inside joke, like a good PJ. Sukumar was constructing and working within a deliberately enclosed system, or a culture of humor in which, ultimately, you laughed at yourself. Foreshadowing the TV commercials of the present day, Sukumar’s humor was both self-deprecating and celebratory: a satire of his world as well as an affectionate assertion of ownership. Like much of the culture of ‘Third World’ modernity, it was insistently worldly – in the sense of ‘global’ as well as of ‘earthly’ – but stubbornly rooted in its colonized place in that world, conscious of its ‘off-center’ location, not fully translatable, but not especially concerned about translation, because if it fed misunderstanding, it also fed upon misunderstanding.

Catalogues of the Inside-Out World

The most characteristic feature of Sukumar’s Ray’s Bengal, which was in some contexts a metaphor of India, was the interpenetration of the exotic/absurd and the familiar/normal. Colonial society was a chaotic accumulation of cultural bric-a-brac, more warehouse or madhouse than the orderly museum of Kipling and Creighton. In this great store – and it was a store, since its commercial nature was never in doubt – native and alien worlds continuously intruded into each other’s normally designated spaces. It was this absurd collection of particular absurdities that Sukumar set out to catalogue. Not surprisingly, the catalogues themselves were elaborate jokes about jokes.

Comparing Sukumar’s nonsense-fantasy writing with that of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in the introduction to his father’s collected works, Satyajit Ray suggested that Sukumar’s nonsense was more firmly grounded in the everyday reality of Bengal that Carroll’s and Lear’s was in contemporary English life. Whether or not Satyajit was right about Carroll and Lear, it can hardly be denied that the apparent randomness of Sukumar’s nonsense poems, the incredible rhyming hodge-podge, reflects the randomness and richness of a world that was new but also old and in apparent disarray. Never a mere nativist, he did not seek to roll back the alien infiltrations that were the most visible signs of disarray. He sought, instead, to claim the colonial store for the native by outlining a particular type of cosmopolitanism that might be described as openness without envy. This included, at its center, a facility for confident self-relocation, i.e., the ability to walk easily between the alien and the familiar. Humor was a vital part of the attempt, but it could on occasion be reduced to a smile instead of a guffaw, or even take a back seat to seriousness.

It should be kept in mind that Sukumar was not simply a literary comedian. Like many of his contemporary writers for Bengali children – Abanindranath Tagore and Upendrakishore both come to mind – he was also a prolific producer of educational essays, introducing readers of Sandesh (the children’s magazine his father had founded in 1913, that he himself edited after Upendrakishore’s death, and that Satyajit revived in 1961) to worlds beyond India, with their famous men and women, strange customs and curious animals. Within this sub-genre of Bengali children’s literature, exoticism could be modulated with considerable freedom [Sen, ‘A Juvenile Periphery,’ JCCH 5:1]. When Sukumar writes about the Niger River in his biography of David Livingstone, he is clearly describing exotic space and time: unearthly, misty, beyond civilized calendars. Yet when he describes the France of Jeanne d’Arc, the narrative is almost identical to contemporary narratives of sentimentalized Bengal: shady, familiar, domestic, maternal, long-suffering yet comforting [SR, Biographies, 96]. A similar domestication of England is achieved in the biography of John Pounds through the use of a familiar language of idealized teacher-student relations, which infiltrates the alien landscape to recreate, for Indian readers, a guru, a pathshala, devoted students, an old man’s eyes brimming with tears [Biographies, 99]. The John Pounds story has the added ‘Indian’ characteristic of setting the teacher-student relationship at the heart of citizenship and nationhood, even if it is British nationhood. The biographies of white scientists, explorers and martyrs (they are all white; we are, after all, in a colonized world) abound with sickly, weak and otherwise physically handicapped heroes who triumph over their handicaps – not a small concern for Bengalis in the era of ‘emasculated nationalism’ [Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, passim]. Likewise, the surfeit of rising-above-poverty-and-humble-origins stories is a familiar Victorian-capitalist sentimentality, but it is also a recognizable colonial fantasy of transcending limited horizons.

What is far away, therefore, is not fixed in its remoteness. After describing the technology of tunneling and the wonders of the London underground, Sukumar wrote that an underground railway might soon be built in Calcutta, and that his readers would then be able to experience it for themselves [SR 149-50]. In this prehistory of the Calcutta Metro, penned a half-century before the project became a scratch in the ground, he added that the city’s underground trains would soon cease to be wonderful and become mundane, like cars had become already. In his own youth, he wrote, even bicycles were a matter of astonishment. Separately, he provided an essay on early bicycles and cars [SR 152-3]. Here, even as he intertwined the exotic/amazing and the familiar/mundane in the same cultural space (Bengal), he also introduced a chronological organizing principle that becomes a defining feature of civilization: what is startling today soon ceases to startle.

The formula may not appear to be funny at first glance, but humor is not far behind. This is because there is a peculiar ambivalence in Sukumar’s writing about whether India was ‘civilized’ in the everyday colonial sense of the term. Even when he is accepting of a distinction between civilized (sabhya) and uncivilized (asabhya) countries, India’s place in this axis is not entirely clear. On the one hand, there is an apparent intention is to group it with the sabhya lands of Europe and North America; on the other, it is clear that Sukumar’s definition of sabhyata included technological modernity, mechanized production, and constant innovation, leaving Indian civilization under a question mark that could not be explicitly admitted, but that could emerge as humor. In his essay on the boomerang, Sukumar provides a relatively inclusive working definition of civilized people: they have agriculture, fire, metals, machines, pukka buildings, and the disciplined pursuit of knowledge [SR 155-6]. Yet even this definition – within which Indians might fit, although not securely – is immediately destabilized: Australian aborigines are said to be the least civilized of all, yet they possess the technological wonder of the boomerang. Civilization and its relationship to things, especially wonders and trophies, remains a slippery, jittery affair, susceptible to giggles: the uncivilized and the civilized can both be found next door or under your bed, throwing its new owner off the axis of anxiety and arrogance about one’s civilized condition. One can be both civilized and a barbarian, and the simultaneity is funny to the civilized/barbarian.

In a short essay called ‘Ajab Jeeb’ (‘Strange Creatures’), Sukumar makes a nearly explicit connection between the world of nonsense/fantasy and the real world of Sandesh readers. Set in the mold of a what-am-I riddle, the inhabitants of the familiar, intimate world are revealed to be not all that different from exotic creatures with amazing habits and capabilities [SR 157]. In the essays on zoology, alien animals show a tendency to materialize close to the reader’s home, and are promptly Bengalicized linguistically. A female gorilla becomes Gorilla-sundari, the orangutan in Alipore Zoo becomes Orang Chandra Otan. Humor functions here both as a technique of domesticating the exotic, but it is a self-conscious domestication, and laughter is a product of that awareness of the incongruity of exotic familiarity.

The familiarity of the out-of-place saturates Sukumar’s Pagla Dasu series of school stories. When he wrote the Dasu stories, Tom Brown’s School Days was more than half a century old, Richmal Crompton’s William series was (barely) in the future, and the school story was well-established as a staple of children’s literature in Bengal as well as in England. What Sukumar did in India was strip the genre of all didactic pretensions. The humor imbedded in the Dasu stories comes from a sharply observed, and keenly felt, incongruity between native society and the Macaulayan curriculum. Dasu’s presumably urban school, with its motley collection of sleepy teachers and backbiting students, contains an echo of the village pathshaha, but the pathshala is no longer imaginable as something purely precolonial: it is already hybrid. The inept teachers are government employees who live in dread of the inspector’s visit; the students are all too aware of impending careers in the offices, courts, schools and hierarchies of the regime. Not surprisingly, clothes become a subject of humor in these stories: Dasu shows up in school in trousers instead of a dhoti, and when his astonished and amused friends ask why, he explains ‘To learn English better’ [Pagla Dasu, 33]. The predicament of the funnily clad native is thus explicitly a problem – but also a solution – of cultural adaptation.

The problem is not there to be solved, however; it is there to be pointed out and experienced ruefully and with laughter. The Abol Tabol poems, which began appearing in Sandesh in 1914 (the complete volume was published nine days after Sukumar’s death), are the best-known depictions of this experienced dysfunction. Although they are often regarded as ‘nonsense verse,’ most of the poems are more accurately described as a satire – and as products – of a society in which mimicry is inescapable, often shabby, but just as often, a font of creativity. Sukumar can be said to ambivalent, but his attitude is actually a dual response – that simultaneity of anxiety and mirth – without contradiction. ‘Khichuri,’ with its weirdly fused animals, presents hybridity as both absurd and liberating: an alarming novelty, as well as a set of brilliant, clumsy and ad-hoc responses to novelty. But ‘Kimbhut,’ a very similar poem, takes a darker view of the hybridity of newly emerging animals, linking it explicitly to envy and mimicry [SR, Abol Tabol, 1, 4.] Both perceptions are real and true, and they do not come into conflict; they coexist, demanding and getting the reader’s (and writer’s) acceptance.

Every neurosis of colonial Bengal finds a place in Abol Tabol. ‘Goph Churi’ (‘Theft of a Mustache’) revels in the madness of the petty office tyrant, who is not an alien sahib but a Bengali senior clerk intimately familiar to the reader: a family member, a boss, or the reader himself. It is among other things a satire of the Bengali crisis of masculinity, in which the imagined loss of a mustache produces irrational fits of anger and bossiness. Likewise, ‘Baburam Shapure’ lampoons nationalist machismo: the snake-charmer is asked to deliver his most harmless, blind, slow-moving snakes for the hero to beat up. ‘Shath Patra’ (‘The Groom’), about the flawed bachelor Gangaram, is a caricature of lower-middle-class aspirations and status anxieties. Having depicted Gangaram as hopelessly undesirable in every way as a son-in-law, Sukumar assures the father of the bride: Kintu tara uchha ghar / Kamsa-rajer bangshadhar. (‘But they’re a very prestigious family / Descendants of King Kamsa.’)

In practically all the Abol Tabol poems and the accompanying drawings, Sukumar shows his extraordinary capacity for observing everyday life and its absurdities, such as the paranoid neighbor who corners you on the street to warn you about unlikely calamities in ‘Shabdhan!’. Opportunistic or harassed relatives – uncles, nephews, cousins, in-laws – lurk constantly in the background. This, indeed, is the comic side of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s point that the individual in colonial India remained enmeshed in the network of the extended family [Provincializing Europe, 38-9]. The joker is himself implicated in this absurdity: ‘Katukuto Buro’ (‘The Tickler’) is about a man who spins bizarre stories to force you to laugh. (Sukumar reappears in ‘The Publisher’s Plight,’ a relatively wry poem featuring a cash-strapped publisher harassed by authors demanding payment [SR, Anyano Kabita, 26].) His humor is, in a sense, a counter-gaze of colonialism: the cataloguing vision of the observer who is both within and without the colony. Many of the poems contain laundry lists of totally random objects and experiences. ‘Ahladi’ (‘Spoiled Brats’) offers: ‘We laugh at the waxing moon, the weaver’s frame, the boatman’s oar / Boats, balloons, ants, humans, trains and jars of oil’ [Abol Tabol, 7]. This not only spoofs the modern fetish of detailed lists, it highlights the disorientation and delight of life in a society that had confronted the native with things, ideas and predicaments of unprecedented diversity and randomness.

Having been disoriented and delighted by the intrusion of the alien, middle-class Bengalis (already notoriously fond of travel) then take the bizarre abroad with them – to Lanka, for instance – and populate the world with their Made-In-India dysfunctions. Lakshmaner Shaktishel (‘Lakshman and the Magic Weapon’), Sukumar’s retelling of a section of the Ramayana, is not quite Tulsidas [SR 78-81]. Going considerably further than Krittibas as well, Sukumar depicts all the major characters as contemporary Bengalis, some highly conformist, others cuttingly sarcastic. If an orangutan could become Orang Chandra Utan, there was no reason why a Bengali could not become Sugreev or Hanuman. The theatrical format, complete with whispered asides and glances at the audience, heightens the farce.

As always, the joke is multi-edged but inclusive. Sarcasm is deployed in Sukumar’s Ramayana (and elsewhere in his work) as a new rasa that is particularly well suited to the colony. As a form of communication, sarcasm was closely tied to the native-middle-class experience of schools and offices, i.e., the central institutions of public life. Moreover, even as the middle class responded to colonialism with sarcasm, Sukumar responded sarcastically to the middle class, while acknowledging his place within it. Naturally, his magazine was a character in its own inside joke: Sugreev demands a story that can be narrated in serial form. Ravan, in passing, declares himself to be Eugen Sandow’s equivalent as a body builder, slyly aware – like Sandesh readers – that Upendrakishore had written a short biography of Sandow, then a cult figure among physique-conscious Bengalis [Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri, Rachanasamagra, 381]. They would also have known that Upendrakishore had preceded his son in rewriting the Ramayana, albeit without repopulating it with annoying Calcuttans.

Sandesh and its readers overflowed Bengal again in The Diary of Heshoram Hushiar [SR 58-60]. The play is a spoof of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Bengalis and their sidekicks, led by the intrepid Professor Hushiar, have invaded a hitherto unexplored land, somewhere beyond the Karakoram mountains. The genre is utterly familiar: the contemporary European adventure/science-fiction narrative set in a dangerous alien world, going back to Jules Verne (and extending in the other direction to Indiana Jones). Having set up the genre, Sukumar delivers the story as a long punch-line. The content is totally unpredictable, overflowing and satirizing all genre conventions. The explorers encounter and catalogue ridiculously large numbers of ‘unknown’ animals. The first of these, the Hanglatherium (‘hangla’ is glutton in colloquial Bengali), enters thus: ‘Lakkar Singh suddenly realized that something even bigger than an elephant was sitting in a tree laughing at him.’ It quickly transpires that the animal eats mostly bread, molasses and boiled eggs. Meeting a large and dangerous-looking bird, Lakkar Singh bravely subdues it with his umbrella. ‘A Punjabi, after all,’ Sukumar comments. The explorers are in what is literally and figuratively a new world, but it is a familiar world: the familiar genre, having gestured at the bizarre and alien, had returned the reader to colonial India; the catalogue was a list of everyday creatures. The gesture was a joke right down to the names: Heshoram Hushiar (roughly, ‘Brave Joker,’ but the humor is buried too deeply in language for translation), his nephew Chandrakhai (‘Eats the Moon’), the Punjabi big-game hunters Lakkar Singh and Chhakkar Singh. The format of the story is a faux-diary, complete with dates and drawings, that had been acquired by Sandesh, the real press again intruding good-naturedly into its own joke. The illustrations are a series of visual gags, showing Indians in the role of white explorers, equipped with umbrellas as well as guns, sun-hats, shorts, and professorial beards and glasses.

The function of humor as a link between the familiar and the exotic emerges even more clearly when Sukumar enters the realm of apparently pure fantasy, as in a set of stories called Bahurupi. The title of the collection, meaning ‘Chameleon’ (but referring also to itinerant street performers who specialize in disguises) is an early warning of the source of the laughter: things were not as they appeared to be, nonsense and sense could each come disguised as its opposite. Filled with fraudulent scholars, arbitrary kings and fawning conformists, the stories combine the absurd potential of the classroom and the durbar, with their idiotic pedagogical rituals and rampant sycophancy, and the nonsensical potential of language (prose as well as verse) itself. Some of the stories are fables featuring animals and magic creatures, leading the reader to expect (although not very seriously) a ‘normal’ folktale. But the norm becomes unstable and unpredictable in Sukumar’s hands. Vaguely humanoid figures inhabit a forest of toadstools, anxiously awaiting the return of the toad. They greet an encroaching chameleon in an unmistakably bhadralok mixture of Bengali, Sanskrit, Hindi and English: Tumi ke he? Kostum? Tum kaun hai? Who are you? [SR, Bahurupi, 49.] The lizard, taking possession of a toadstool, declares: Ami bahurupi, girgiti’r khurtuto bhai. Eta ekhon amar holo – ami bari niye jabo. (‘I’m a chameleon, paternal cousin of the iguana. This is now mine – I’m taking it home.’) Even in these deceptively extra-colonial tales, language is the give-away: the sound of the colonial present, echoing hybrid, acquisitive, many-faced creatures, keeps bursting through the fabric of the folktale.

Likewise, ‘The Frog King,’ a story with an unimpeachably Indian pedigree, becomes a fable of colonial politics. A band of frogs, given to clamoring in unison and dazzled by the sight of a white king, immediately petition their god for a king of their own, and are rewarded with a white stork that eats them one by one, calmly ignoring their petitions [Bahurupi, 50]. A story about a clever lawyer and his client becomes another satire of colonial society, with its intertwined venality and legality, but the story remains ostensibly a folktale [Bahurupi, 51]. This is a kind of literary cross-dressing, a literary bahurupi performance, with contemporary politics dressed up as the apolitical children’s story. Its humor is not altogether different from the startled laughter generated by more overt forms of cross-dressing, such as an early-twentieth-century schoolboy suddenly appearing in pants instead of a dhoti.

Who Knew? The Problem of Knowledge in a Cut-Throat Society

The ability to wear borrowed clothes – or rather, the discovery that one is already wearing borrowed clothes – and the fantasy of lending those clothes to still others is a source of amusement in Sukumar’s work, but that cosmopolitan laughter is not without a sense of loss. The nature of that loss emerges in Ateeter Chhobi (‘A Picture of the Past’), a long poem (without pictures) written in uncharacteristically sedate language [SR 18-20]. Ateeter Chhobi is an epic history of the Brahmo Samaj, but it is a very different epic from Lakshmaner Shaktishel. In it, Sukumar describes an older, ostensibly juvenile, Indian way of looking at the world: at one time, he writes, Indians looked at the world with uncomplicated, generous and wonderstruck eyes. (Shahaj udar sharal praney / Bishmoye chahito jagat paney.) Destabilizing the value of modern adulthood much as he destabilized the worth of civilization, Sukumar gives the capacity for wonder, i.e., the ability to be surprised, a value of its own. That wondering perspective, he writes, made for incandescent curiosity and knowledge: essentially, the stuff of cosmopolitanism. The notion is reminiscent of Stephen Greenblatt’s conception of pre-modern wonder [Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 1-25], but it is not indifferent to the Enlightenment, and Sukumar saw it as compatible with modernity. The hallmark of this knowledge was self-awareness: Shey alokey chahi apon paney / apanere man swaroop janey. (‘Looking at himself in that clear light / He knows himself.’) The Brahmo Samaj had once offered a possibility of rekindling this self-aware cosmopolitanism, but that possibility had been extinguished by the pettiness of colonial society, with its relentless one-upmanship, ‘adult’ cynicism and petty conceits. The poem is decidedly pessimistic, marking Sukumar’s disillusionment with the Brahmos.

Sukumar’s sense of decline was thus closely tied to his ambivalence about knowledge in colonial society: on the one hand asserting the value of learning and expertise, on the other pointing out its ridiculousness and basis in mimicry. Moreover, the proximity between the production, sale and dissemination of knowledge in a modern society, and oppressive arrangements of power, were apparent to Sukumar, who was after all, himself in the business of producing and selling discourse. There is, in Foucault’s theorization of the modern European ‘incitement to discourse,’ a clear tension, or rather, a note of irony that is relevant to Sukumar’s work. Foucault deployed his theory to counter the ‘repressive hypothesis,’ i.e., the idea that Victorian society repressed sexual knowledge, but he linked his incited discourse to intrusive, ubiquitous and ultimately sinister systems of governmentality and institutionalization [Foucault, The History of Sexuality v. I, 15-35]. That irony informs much of Sukumar’s comedy, making it not only a critique of particular colonial institutions such the school and the office, but also a broader critique of modernity, and, ultimately, an acknowledgment of the near-impossibility of extricating the critical self from its tangled predicament.

Comedy is not the only venue where that is evident. Imbedded in Sukumar’s zoological essays are critiques of modernity that might be regarded today as unremarkable: the wonderful essay on beavers, for instance, ends with a condemnation of human greed and viciousness that have driven the animal to the edge of extinction [SR, ‘Animal Engineers,’ 107]. In his own time and place, with the Great War well underway and Gandhi already a political phenomenon, it would have been part of a more insistent critique of modern civilization, i.e., an attack on the ideological justification of colonialism itself. Sukumar cannot ignore the modern world of empire and he enters it compulsively, but then he balks and begins to make faces: something is not right. His zoological essays are also exotic adventure narratives, taking their readers into the Amazonian rainforest and the African savannah; in that sense, they are similar to metropolitan adventure/science literature. The glaring difference is the second-hand nature of the adventures in Sandesh: these are adventures that Europeans had presumably had, and they were available to Indian children only in translation and through fantasies of being somebody else. Once again, there is that slipperiness at the heart of colonized civilization: a grain of unreality, or non-conviction, at its heart which is closely related to the unreality of nonsense and humor. It is a small step from the zoological essays to the Tashgoru of Abol Tabol: Sukumar solemnly assures us that this exotic cow is technically not a cow (it is, apparently, actually a bird), nor is it exotic: it can readily be seen at the office of the everyman Haru [Abol Tabol, 9].

Knowledge is a consistently tapped vein of humor in the Dasu stories: various students – not to mention teachers and the curriculum itself – constantly lay claim to vast bodies of obscure knowledge, only to be shown up, not only because they do not really know, and also because the knowledge – what we today call ‘GK funda’ – is so arcane as to be ridiculous. Boys who would rather be flying kites are forced to stand before maps, trying desperately to point out Japanese cities and Chinese rivers. Authority becomes intertwined with absurdity [Pagla Dasu 35-7, 41]. This is not a rejection of GK funda or geography; Sukumar is himself an expert in those areas and brandishes the expertise openly in his pedagogical essays, which after all appeared in Sandesh alongside the satires of colonial pedagogy. In England in 1911-13, Andrew Robinson has pointed out, Sukumar inhabited two worlds: the world of the printer's craft and Fleet Street, and the artistic world of Rabindranath (who was also in England at the time) and his English circle [Robinson, The Inner Eye, 22]. He was an acknowledged innovator in half-tone printing, which was then as arcane as any other new technology. Rather than a rejection of technical know-how, it is an ambivalence – a self-consciousness – that is expressed as humor.

A similar ambivalence marks his spoof of students who fancy themselves as detectives: that new form of knowledge and investigation, and its fetishized place within the literary culture of schoolboys, is shown to be fit only for laughter [Pagla Dasu, 41]. It is not, however, an aimless ambivalence. The satire targets self-aggrandizing, self-promoting types, indicating a sharp discomfort with the ultracompetitive nature of contemporary bhadralok society, especially in the context of schools, with their examinations and aspirations. Know-it-all students grow up to be pathetic, permanently colonized adults, Sukumar suggests. Chalachitta Chachchari, a long play, is a scathing send-up of inept, self-promoting peddlers of arcane cultural products, including fraudulent philosophy, social science, mathematics and literature [SR 84-9]. It is also a critique of the Indian need for the smallest signs of European approval.

Aggressive self-advertisement and competition in the colonial environment, Sukumar suggests, is doubly contemptible because of the limited rewards (of money and status) available in the colonial margin of civilization. There are more digs at self-promotion and intellectual one-upmanship in the Khai-Khai (literally, ‘Feeding Frenzy’) poems [SR 11-8]. The problem, he implies, is almost inevitable in a political and social arrangement in which people compete like hungry rodents. Here also, the uncertainty about whether India is or is not a part of this ‘civilized world’ becomes relevant: if it is indeed a part of civilization, that is not a civilization that Sukumar can accept. In ‘Jibaner Hishab,’ one of the best poems in this collection [SR, Khai-Khai, 16], Sukumar connects the arrogance of colonial knowledge to cruelty (a babu ‘heavy with learning’ casually humiliates an apparently ignorant boatman) as well as to absurdity and falseness (the boatman knows more about survival on the river than the babu ever will). There is, he suggests, a native common sense that can be salvaged from the weight of intellectual conceit in colonial society, but it is accessible to the middle class only as irony and mirth, which is both amusing and tragic.

In humor there is, nevertheless, a redemption of sorts. ‘Kathburo,’ the poem in Abol Tabol about the expert in wood (he solemnly investigates why wood has holes, what the holes smell like, how to subdue disobedient wood, and so on), complete with a drawing of the expert boiling a potful of sticks, sets up Sukumar’s own engagement with obscure knowledge and expert authority. With their spoofs of scientists and professors, the poems in Abol Tabol and the extended hallucination of Hajabarala – Sukumar’s most Carrollean work – provide shelters, if not exits, from the unpleasant ramifications of being a modern, knowledgeable, colonial subject. ‘Khuror Kol’ (‘Uncle’s Machine’), about a ‘machine’ that dangles food in front of your face to make you travel faster, is a jab at the culture of technological experimentation and novice tinkerers in the Swadeshi era, when inept-genius uncles proliferated in Bengali homes [Abol Tabol, 2]. The fact that Sukumar has a nearly identical poem (‘Ashambhab Noi,’ in Khai-Khai), in which the food is a radish dangled before a sahib’s donkey, suggests the politics of this poem. ‘Hature,’ a poem about a quack doctor, actually indicates the fine line between quackery and modern medicine, as the dubious authority of the doctor diffuses into the relatively democratic society of self-appointed healers [Abol Tabol, 4]. The latter have no sustainable claims to knowledge, prestige or wealth, but they are the everymen of colonial modernity, both amusing and amused.

The Madness of the Native

Such everymen are also slightly mad, of course. In Chalachitta Chachchari, an aspiring author gives his potential readers a startling exhibition of thoroughly respectable, Sanskritic Bengali: Dekhlam maha prashanto albhola babaji hashyojwal mukhe param nirlipta anander shonge tar posha chamchiketike jilipi khaoachhen. (‘We saw the holy man, with a look of smiling, serene bliss on his face, feeding jalebis to his pet bat.’) Having thus brought together holy men, pets, bats and jalebis in the same gleeful sentence, the same writer explains that he has been a little mad ever since he was bitten by a mad cat in his childhood [SR 87]. The smirking cat of Hajabarala, which might be regarded as a sardonic and malicious version of Alice’s rabbit, has a cameo here, providing a reference to the madness of the middle-class colonial subject.

Sukumar sought out madness, which is understandable in the context of the predicament of a colonized elite that had, a generation before him, sought out the madness of Ramakrishna of Dakshineshwar. If colonial knowledge was tied to the asylum, madness was a response of the ‘institutionalized’ native: not a way of leaving the institution, but of taking it over in certain contexts: children’s magazines, living rooms, schoolyards (not the classroom), suburban temples. It was much sought after among Indians who chafed under civilization: Rabindranath Tagore, who also dabbled occasionally in nonsense literature, enviously praised his nephew Abanindranath for his more felicitous madness [Sen, A Juvenile Periphery]. Satyajit Ray, who pointed out that Rabindranath was uncertain about how Bengali readers would receive work like his Khapchhara, also noted that nonsense was not Rabindranath’s forte; his very cleverness tended to preclude the possibility of madness. Rabindranath’s humor relied on the reader’s sane ability to anticipate what was coming, whereas Sukumar’s was the humor of unpredictability itself [Satyajit Ray, SR, Bhumika]. Based on the possibility of couching total unpredictability within familiar structures and genres, the madness of the comic writer functioned as a technique of resistance: self-criticism, satire and hit-and-run attacks on the colonial order of things, which included the emerging national order. The mad were, after all, relatively safe from charges of sedition against the empire or anti-national blasphemy.

Sukumar found madness readily enough. Quite apart from Carroll’s work and nineteenth-century Bengali satire like Hutom Penchar Naksha and Alaler Gharer Dulal (which are themselves hybrid literary products), he was also influenced by pantomime, Charlie Chaplin and American comic books like Katzenjammer Kids. Aware of his location in a peculiar cultural circle, he – like Rabindranath – was not quite sure whether Bengali readers would ‘get’ this cosmopolitan humor, and he defensively wrote in the introduction to Abol Tabol that the book was not for those who could not appreciate whimsy. He need not have worried, because the bizarre and the insane, as usual, were not securely exotic (or, in their civilized way, no longer exotic) in Sukumar’s Bengal. For instance, Pagla Dasu – literally, Crazy Dasu – is both extraordinary and commonplace: the joke, the joker and the everyman, innovatively combined. Didacticism of the old-fashioned ‘school story’ variety becomes unthinkable in such inherently anti-authoritarian circumstances.

The element of innovation is critical: the madness of the comic was both productive and a product. The school plays Sukumar describes in the Dasu stories (and elsewhere, as in ‘Bishnubahan’er Digvijai’), with their stilted scripts and bungled lines, are funny because they are a cultural novelty. They are a peculiarly colonial educational ritual, in which Dasu – who spits paan juice from the stage, makes up his own script, and whose lunacy is essentially a native-ness that resists Macaulay – stands out as the misfit and the disruption, and represents the less obvious ‘unnaturalness’ of the others. Similarly, poetry – especially bad poetry, full of hackneyed idiom, written by schoolboys as an affectation of cultural refinement, recited as an affectation of a certain kind of colonial literacy, and transmitted through the student body like a contagious virus – is a rich source of humor, not least because it shows up the mimicry-driven, conformist bent of middle-class Indians. With their inherent unnaturalness, theater and poetry are particularly apt vehicles for this vein of humor [Pagla Dasu, 33-4, 38, 54].

Nonsense is the opposite of hack/conformist poetry, and at times Sukumar’s prose comes close to the nonsense verse of Abol Tabol: in ‘Nandalal’s Cursed Fate,’ for instance, he reels off a string of academic ‘achievements’ (mostly catastrophic failures) that are reminiscent of his poem about the bachelor Gangaram, who had failed his matriculation exams nineteen times [Pagla Dasu, 38-9]. The location in colonial India is unmistakable and resilient: Dasu’s pranks at the expense of teachers and fellow-students (provocatively feeding the stuck-up boy’s birthday treats to the durwan’s goat, etc.) are quite unlike the pranks of English school stories. They reflect, Sukumar himself writes, a ‘peculiar logic’ (odbhut jukti) and a madness [Pagla Dasu, 35]. The peculiar logic indicates both the paradoxes of colonial education and the response of the native oddball-everyman; the madness is, of course, that essential quality to which Rabindranath wistfully referred in his letter to Abanindranath.

The links between madness, freedom and humor in the colonial setting emerge clearly in a story called ‘Hashi’r Golpo’ (‘Funny Story’), which is largely about the randomness of humor. To laugh or not to laugh is a real question, involving choices that are available to the listener/reader as well as to the storyteller [SR 53]. Sukumar touches here upon the core of the PJ: it is funny, in part, because it signifies self-conscious social and political agreements – made without recourse to permission from outside the community – about what is to be considered funny. Abol Tabol begins with an appeal to madness: Ay re pagol, abol tabol / Matto madol bajiye ja, (Come, lunatics and nonsense / Play your crazy drum), and Ay khyapa mon ghuchiye badhan / Jagiye nachan tadhin-din (Come, crazy heart, breaking all bonds / Awake and dance). Madness is explicitly linked to the breaking of shackles.

The anti-colonial possibilities of madness saturate the Abol Tabol poems. ‘Ekushe Ain’ (Law 21), with its catalog of absurd and ridiculously precise regulations and punishments, savages the governmentality and legal culture of colonial society: Shethai sandhya chha’tar agey / Hanchte gele ticket lagey (‘There, before six PM / You need a ticket to sneeze’) and Je shab loke podyo lekhe / Tader dhore khanchai rekhe / Kaner kachhe nanan shure / Namta shonai eksho uRe (‘Those who write poetry / Get locked up in cages / In their ears, dissonantly / A hundred Oriyas recite tables.’) ‘Ramgarurer Chhana’ is a satire of the humorless, in which humorlessness is equated with imprisonment and suffocation: Ramgorurer basha / Dhamak diye thasha / Hashir hawa bandha shethai / Nishedh shethai hasha. (‘The nest of the Ramgorur / Is stuffed with scolding / The wind of humor is banned there / You’re not allowed to laugh.’) Humor, in the process, is connected to freedom and thus related to madness. ‘Bhoy Peyo Na’ is a poem that can easily be a satire of the colonial police, an inescapable anxiety for nationalist youth in the swadeshi era: ‘Come into my hole / Stay a few days / I’ll take very good care of you / Are you afraid of my baton? / It’s very light, it wouldn’t hurt you even if I hit you / I’m trying to reassure you and you don’t seem to be listening, should I catch hold of you? / Then you’d really learn what fear is all about.’

At other times the sedition of the madly laughing is less direct. In ‘Ladai-Khyapa’ (Battle-mad), Sukumar describes a pugnacious madman named Jagai (armed with an umbrella in the illustration): Shaat German, Jagai eka, tobuo Jagai lade. (‘Seven Germans, and Jagai alone, but still Jagai fights.’) As the Great War consumed the civilized world, madness, anger and an umbrella came together to make the marginal-colonial subject more than the equal of anybody, in what is both a rebellion and a satire of rebellion: that typical double movement. ‘Bombagarher Raja’ and ‘Nera Beltolai Jai Kobar?,’ both featuring kings and their relatives and hangers-on, are more ‘mad’ poems, dealing in the total unpredictability of the behavior of familiar types: the queen with the pillow tied to her head, the royal aunt playing cricket with a pumpkin, the king sitting warmly dressed on a pile of bricks in the summer sun, trying in vain to calculate how often somebody named Nera visits the bel tree. Eventually, a grinning stranger simply gives him the answer: twenty-five times a month. Madness is tied to ridiculous and suspiciously imperial quests that turn out to have simple answers, but even these answers are not entirely reliable or free of madness.

The colonial regime was by no means the only target of Sukumar’s lunacy. Madness serves as an instrument of reformist social criticism: one typical bhadralok boy dreams (or rather, having fallen down and hit his head, hallucinates) that he has gone to a world populated by unsympathetic cobblers, who seize him and force him to repair his own shoes. A similar visit to a world of tailors follows. He emerges from this vision chastened and slightly wiser [SR 40].

Madness could, however, serve less politically resonant agendas. It could, for instance, underline the difficulty of reverence or didacticism in an anarchic society that had lost its spatial, chronological and moral boundaries. Those boundaries are rearticulated through humor, but then they are no longer the same. Lakshmaner Shaktishel is the best example here. When Lakshman is wounded and faints, Ravan surreptitiously picks his pockets, leading Hanuman to shout ‘Saw that!’ Ravan immediately runs away [LS, 79]. Hanuman is fined eight annas by Ram for his negligence in letting Lakshman get hurt. Relieved, he whispers in an aside ‘Only eight annas?’ Reluctant to travel all the way to the Himalayas at night to fetch the prescribed medicine for Lakshman, he first claims not to know where the pharmacy is (Ami daktarkhana chinine), then suggests homeopathy. When he finally agrees to go after receiving a volley of abuse and sarcastic one-liners (‘Is this Calcutta that the Bathgate Company must open a pharmacy for you?’) from his comrades, he is tipped a banana. When the remedy proves a success, everybody applauds in Hindustani (Kya baat! Kya baat!) and tries to take credit, but Hanuman modestly gives the credit to swadeshi medicine. On regaining consciousness, Lakshman is less than gracious, and tells his well-wishers to stop showing off their medical know-how. Even more brilliantly, Yama’s agents who have come (prematurely) for Lakshman are beset by uncertainty: ‘Are you sure we’ve come to the right house?’ one asks another. ‘Yes, the courtyard is supposed to be on the right,’ his colleague replies. (This parallels Sukumar’s poem ‘Thikana’ in Abol Tabol, about trying to find an urban address and becoming disoriented to the point of madness: a satire of colonial space, brought on by the need to locate oneself in the new city. That maddening city, apparently, could also be found in mythological Lanka.)

We circle back, thus, to the essential madness of the PJ, with its articulation of a specific native location (Kitna deti hai?) within cosmopolitanism (global automotive and advertising culture). Hajabarala, the most overtly ‘mad’ of Sukumar’s writings, entails a double maneuver: on the one hand there are totally unpredictable twists and turns, while on the other, the satire of modern Bengal proceeds inexorably. The Lewis Carroll influence is clear, with the cat standing in for the rabbit, but this is an essentially Bengali story, confronting a colonial dilemma. In the cat and then the crow, there is a near-total suspension of the rules that normally govern society, mathematics, time and language. Seven times two might be two now, the crow declares, but not long ago it was only thirteen point something. When the narrator protests, the surprised crow asks him if time has no value in his world. The crow turns out to represent an accounting firm, and the revelation spins madly into a parody of colonial commercial culture, complete with warnings about imposter crows and fraudulent accounting services. Hijibijbij, the hysterically laughing animal, is discovered to be laughing at various entirely imaginary, implausible and mildly amusing scenarios in his own mind. This is, of course, an archetypal ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if’ sketch, but it is also a ‘Isn’t it funny that’ scenario, a not-especially-funny joke imbedded in a brilliant caricature of the culture of jokes in colonial society, and as such, a PJ.

The Language of Novelty

In Sukumar’s play Shabdakalpadrum (‘The Tree of Fantastic Sounds’), a guru tells his followers: ‘You fools, you play with sounds, but you still have no idea what sounds are all about’ [SR, Shabdakalpadrum, 99]. The guru is talking nonsense, but Sukumar is extolling the magic of nonsense, i.e., the power of language to be funny through sound alone, without being dependent on the literal meaning of words. In a poem also titled ‘Shabda Kalpa Droom’ (spelled differently), we find Sukumar having fun with the multiple meanings of words and expressions, and with the percussive possibilities of spoken Bengali [Abol Tabol, 2]. The new language was a toy, a drum and a comment on society in a way that Günter Grass (or more obviously, Lewis Carroll) might appreciate but could not imagine. The sounds that Sukumar captured were peculiarly colonial-Indian, and their magic lay in his ability to turn the cacophony of the Calcutta streets into a new language, with a range of meanings that went beyond the ‘old’ vocabulary – and even the new vocabulary – to the improvised and irregular politics of modernity on the frontier of civilization.

In Hajabarala, Sukumar treats his readers to a devastating satire of the colonial courts: a civil court, which was arguably more ‘needed’ and dreaded in a litigious society than were the criminal courts of the Raj. An owl, a crocodile, a porcupine, a jackal and a toad play the various parties – all corrupt and mad – in a defamation lawsuit. Not quite apart from the madness of the situation, Sukumar exults in the madness of language itself. ‘How far does this road go?’ the jackal wants to know. ‘The road doesn’t go anywhere,’ the crow sneers. ‘It is where it always was.’

Sukumar wrote in an environment in which language itself was going through a multi-faceted revolution, and had acquired unprecedented capacities for experimentation and usage. In the aftermath of Bankim and Swadeshi politics, and in the context of Rabindranath’s global reputation and the explosive growth of commercial publication, it could hardly be denied that Bengali was a ‘modern’ language, but the hallmark of that modernity was its unfinished quality, i.e., its elasticity and seemingly limitless openness to novelty. Fragmenting, corrupting and fertilizing this Bengali frontier were the other new languages of colonial society, especially English, but also Hindustani. Those were, of course, themselves in the process of being twisted and turned by assorted natives and sahibs. The new native idiom was thus not only a product of the ongoing convulsion of middle-class Bengal, it was a necessary and highly capable instrument for identifying – and laughing at – the particulars of that convulsion. Contemporary Bengali idiom could domesticate the exotic or project the domestic into absurdly exotic places, English could designate ridiculousness, a well-placed injection of Hindustani could transform an apparently didactic folktale into a satire of colonial urbanity. Language conveyed jokes, its anarchic hybridity was intertwined with humor, but it could itself be the funniest joke of all. It was, in other words, already a PJ. What Sukumar did was bring it out into the open as a finely-tuned instrument of everyday observation and socio-political commentary.

Historical novelty was the key to the joke. Sukumar was one of the first Indian writers to recognize the comic possibilities within the colonial vernacular, especially chalit-bhasha, or ‘common language.’ This is Bengali as it is used in informal conversation. It is distinct from sadhu-bhasha, or formal Bengali, which was typically used in writing and is now extinct (except, amusingly enough, in legal documents). The line between spoken and written Bengali was not entirely rigid; by the early twentieth century it had been blurred considerably by Rabindranath and his contemporary writers. Even these writers, however, tended to observe a certain formality in their writing. Sukumar dispensed with that, and brought the everyday spaces of middle-class life – the streets, school-yards and office lunch-tables – verbally into the orbit of middle-class literature.

He went further by pushing the idiom of the present rudely into the mythical, the fantastic and the didactic. Morality tales like ‘Kukurer Malik’ (‘The Dog’s Owner’) and ‘Daner Hishab’ (‘The Arithmetic of Charity’) that appeared in Sandesh are not Sukumar’s original work. (Like his contemporary Indian children’s writers, Sukumar saw his task as one that included the translation of a global juvenile literature.) They contain, however, unmistakable echoes of his authorship, both in their subtext and in their use of the colloquial language of middle-class Bengal. The tendency to put everyday Calcutta words in the mouths of kings, gods, foreigners and monkeys is, after all, a very basic aspect of his humor. In the process, he could subvert an existing political arrangement as well as the genre of didactic literature, by mischievously shifting its moral-political priorities. In ‘Daner Hishab,’ Sukumar describes a king who wastes vast amounts of money on luxuries and ceremonies, but becomes tightfisted when it comes to famine relief: an image that would have been easy recognizable in colonial India [SR 57]. Satyajit Ray’s point that Sukumar’s humor is non-didactic is not entirely correct [SR Bhumika]. He was quite capable of the didactics of black humor, that wry ‘Isn’t it funny that’ principle, and the idiom of contemporary speech was a critical part of the capability.

The linguistic foregrounding of the profane present was itself a matter of shock and laughter, especially since sadhu-bhasha was still everywhere around Sukumar. He neither ignored it, nor respected the terms of its literary segregation. Instead, he dragged it out into the street. Its coexistence and admixture with chalit-bhasha became another reflection of the mongrel, heterotemporaneous nature of colonial society, and for Sukumar the incongruity was, typically, as entertaining as a new toy. Ohe bihangam tumi kisher ashai / Boshe achho uccha dale sundar bashai (‘Oh bird, in what hope / ‘Do you sit upon a high branch in a pretty nest’) [Pagla Dasu, 38] is hilarious, as is Chokhti kholo, gatro tolo, arey molo, shakal holo (‘Open your eyes, get up, bloody hell, it’s morning’) [SR, ‘Diner hishab,’ 20] for reasons that defeat translation. Sukumar had tapped into the rapid change and aspiration permeating the social context of the vernacular, which imbued the language with its potential for miscommunication as well as what might be called super-communication or communication beyond the literal meaning. In the very first of the Khai-Khai poems, Sukumar writes ‘These things will baffle you / Some will understand wholly, but others barely half’ [SR 11]. A measure of incomprehension was a shared part of the colonial predicament and its culture; almost as much as comprehension, it was an intimate experience of the community and a form of communication.

As much as new classes, technologies and titles, idiom was an artifact to be catalogued, but it was also the means of the wider cataloguing exercise. It identified, for instance, who was who in contemporary Bengal and its parodic extensions. In Lakshmaner Shaktishel, it is the cadence of the exchanges between the monkeys, humans and rakshasas that give them away as Calcuttans. Bibhisan scoffs at the way Sugreev walks, which is apparently not martial enough: ‘If you walk like that, you’ll be called a Bangal.’ (A Bangal is an east-Bengali migrant in west-Bengali eyes.) He then demonstrates a proper walk, and when Sugreev retorts that nobody walks like that where he comes from, counters with ‘Do they walk where you come from?’ Ravan sneers, using a mixture of sadhu and chalit bhasha: Ajodhyar lok joddha hoyechhe / Shune mori ami hashiya. (‘The people of Ayodhya have become warriors / I die laughing.’) [LS 78-9] The monkeys are casually self-hating: Banmanush kothakar (‘Bloody orangutan’), Jambuban mutters about a particularly incompetent spy.

Similarly in the play Jhalapala ('Cacophony'), pidgin Hindustani and English proverbs indicate unprecedented experiences of ethnicity, class and authority [SR 73-8]. Hindustani encapsulates Bengali bhadralok as well as north-Indian migrants to Calcutta in a way that would amuse both but probably nobody else. A Bengali schoolmaster complains to an up-country policeman about a noisy neighbor: Dekho, hamara pasher barite dinrat bhar eisa kanch-konch korta, nidrar otyonto byaghat hota hai – isko kuchh pratikar hoyna re byata? It would be pointless to translate this for those who speak neither Bengali nor Hindi, but that untranslatability heightens the joke; for those who do ‘get it,’ its humor is amplified by the intimacy of community.

More than Bengali wordplay, the English language was (and is) ripe with ‘misuse’ (otherwise known as innovation) and uneven comprehension. In Chalachitta Chachchari, doggerel verse about old, sick relatives is set to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ [SR 85]. One character describes an adulterator at work, while an unidentified voice mutters, in English, ‘Shake the bottle, shake the bottle’ [SR 86]. This is funny, in part, because of the transliteration of English in Bengali: it functions like a funny accent, which is nothing but a perceived mismatch of archetype and artifact. It is, of course, the accent of the reader (and writer) himself, but he is alive to its comic possibilities. It allows the writer as well as the reader to recognize his location in a querulous, petty and cowardly middle class society. In ‘Narod! Narod!’, probably one of Sukumar’s best-loved poems, two men provoked by various ridiculous and imagined insults come close to blows, only to back down hastily when one threatens to call the police [Abol Tabol, 6]. The class location of the men and their cultural predicament is made both explicit and comic by the bricolage of language: they keep breaking into English. (‘I don’t care kana-koRi / Janish ami Sandow kori?’) (‘I don’t give a damn / Do you know I follow Sandow?’)

Sukumar’s use of English is funny because its appearance in the speech of schoolboys is not only hybrid, but revealing of the terrors, inequalities, pretensions and insecurities of the middle class. In ‘Bigyan Shikkha’ (‘The Science Lesson’), an alarmed child becomes the object of bogus scientific investigations signified by assorted English words: magnet, reflect, velocity [Abol Tabol, 6]. In Pagla Dasu, a rich show-off who has come to school with a new pocket-watch summons the Hindustani-speaking durwan and demands that the man adjust the school clock: Eiyo! School’er clock-tate jakhon chabi dao, takhon shetake regulate korona keno? Otake oil korte hobe – kromagotoi slow cholchhe. (‘Hey! When you wind up the school clock, why don’t you regulate it? It has to be oiled – it’s always running slow.’) Han, han, abhi hum renglit korbe (‘Yes, yes, I’ll regulate it immediately’), replies the durwan, anxious to save the honor of his village and kinfolk [Pagla Dasu, 36]. Sukumar has fun here at the expense of the rustic migrant, but more than that he savages the use of English as a sign of authority. His imagined reader is disdainful of airs and extravagant claims to knowledge and status, but this everyman is by no means an innocent. Byakaran Singh, BA, the speechifying ram of Hajabarala, explains that his name (not to mention his speech) is a riot of puns, clichés turned inside out, and a jab at the fetish of university degrees. ‘Byakaran Singh’ can mean either ‘Grammar Singh’ or ‘Horned Baa-sayer,’ and BA can be either an educational qualification or a bleat. The reader himself is destined for a similar ‘BA,’ much as he is destined, in the present day, to worry about the mileage his car gets, or be slightly self-conscious (but not diffident) about his accent or idiom when he ventures beyond the backwater. All too often, when he laughs, he is laughing – with chagrin and delight – at the sounds that come from his own mouth.

Last Laugh

For those classes of the colonized that are conscious of a wider world, that refuse to remain on the margins of the world, and that must deal with the West on terms of putative equality, the shadows of Kipling and Homi Bhabha – i.e., accusations and self-perceptions of mimicry – are never far away. There is, consequently, a nagging tendency towards self-rejection and alienation. (Nirad Chaudhuri and V.S. Naipaul are particularly good examples.) It is here that the function of humor becomes apparent. Humor provides a way out of the predicament of the colonial mimic. It allows, first, for the articulation of a comic everyman who is both ‘apart’ and ‘a part’: an intimate self, but also sufficiently alienated. Through this everyman, the anti-community of colonized unease can be transmuted into the community of postcolonial laughter. Second, humor supplies a way for the members of this community to embrace wider worlds, and to extend itself beyond the marginality to which it has been consigned by empire: to extend itself, for instance, to a ‘lost world’ beyond the Karakoram, or to Calcutta-in-Lanka, or to England itself.

Humor can facilitate an awkward arrival, as in the Maruti commercial; it can also articulate – and facilitate escape from – an oppressive reality. In Sukumar’s poem ‘Bichar’ (‘The Trial’), a dog arrests a frightened rat and accuses him of theft. When the rat asks where the police, lawyers and judge might be, the dog declares: ‘I’ll be the lawyer, I’ll be the jury, I’ll accuse you, and I’ll send you to the gallows’ [SR 23]. In ‘Chhuti’ (‘School’s Out’), school and lessons are closely tied to the terror of clocks: Dashta thekei nashta khela, ghanta hotei shuru / pranta kore palai palai, monta uRu-uRu (‘Play is ruined after ten o’clock, right on the hour / The heart longs for escape, to fly away’) [SR 21.] As a native response to the colonial school, it is very similar to Rabindranath’s writing, but for Sukumar the response is inseparable from satire and nonsense. Nonsense is thus both the irrational substance of colonial reality, and the rational response to it. It is funny as well as a little sad, like empire itself. In the last poem of Abol Tabol, written not long before his death, Sukumar signs off: ‘Today, brother, before I go / I’ll say whatever is in my heart / Even if it means nothing at all / Even if some people don’t understand / Of my own free will / I set myself adrift in whimsy.’ He ends with Ghaniye elo ghoomer ghor / Ganer pala shango mor. ( ‘My sleep deepens / My song is over.’)

February 26, 2012

Note: My grandparents, hardcore Bangals, gave me Sukumar Ray's complete works as a present when I was seven. That dog-eared, half-demolished volume (Calcutta, Ananda Publishers, 1976) was the major source used in this essay.

Hitchens and the Rat

2012-01-16T11:21:00.024-05:00

In this post, I want to bring together some apparently unrelated episodes: the death of Christopher Hitchens, rats attacking a hospital patient in Calcutta, and an act of petty extortion with racist overtones. The objective is to make some connections between these episodes at the level of ideology and culture. That, of course, is also what I try to do in the larger project of writing these essays: connect seemingly random dots, and in doing so, to explore some aspects of what Peter van der Veer and Carol Breckenridge called ‘the postcolonial predicament.’

Van der Veer and Breckenridge – following Nicholas Dirks and Bernard Cohn – used the term to indicate the pervasiveness of Orientalist formulations in the cultural and political fabric of independent India. The postcolonial predicament, they suggested, was to be trapped in colonial categories of thought and identity. Organized largely within the confines of ‘area studies,’ this somewhat staid unpacking of the Indian ‘predicament’ tends to obscure the possibility that there are multiple postcolonial predicaments dispersed across borders, classes, genders and races. These have to do not only with the adaptations on the part of former colonial subjects (and their descendants, who are two or three generations removed from colonialism of the straightforward sort), but also maneuvers on the part of former colonizers (who, likewise, are not straightforwardly dominating).

I focus on India and the US in my essays for obvious reasons, which are ‘personal’ as well as ‘academic.’ These are the countries that I know something about, they are good examples of colonized and colonizing powers, they are rich in internal inequalities, and both are deeply ambiguous – and also insistent – about liberal fetishes like freedom, rights, individuality, modernity and progress. For the Indian bourgeoisie, America is not just another country. It is a model of cultural, economic and political power, and a point of personal and collective aspiration: the 'finished product' towards which 'development' proceeds, where individuals migrate, and where academic endeavors reach their climax. Considered together, they reveal some of the ways in which the personal and the academic are mutually implicated in the current era of globalization, which is not, it must be remembered, the first era of global commercial flows and migrations. It is a particular moment in the history of global culture, in which conventions of modernity have been radically recast by those on and beyond its margins, and even those at the putative centers perceive themselves as marginal.

It is limiting, and inevitably distorting, to study modern societies in the isolation that is mandated by the conventions of disciplinary subfields such as ‘South Asia’ and ‘America.’ Neither place, for instance, can be isolated from the crisis of citizenship, and the wider crisis of relations between the individual and the state, that reached its most glaring climax in Nazi Germany. Obviously, these societies have reacted differently to the narrative of Nazism and the Second World War: America has a problem with ‘neo-Nazis,’ copies of Mein Kampf are sold prominently on the sidewalks of Indian cities. Yet the two societies ‘read’ Hitler in ways that are so different as to be reminiscent of Jerry Leach and Trobriand cricket – except that here, both places are Trobriand islands. In his famous anthropological film, Leach showed how the imperial game of cricket had been transformed and nativized – i.e., invested with new, local cultural meanings – by the Trobriand Islanders. What I do in these essays is examine some of the ways in which people who are often explicitly invested in being modern display their tribal colors. By the last, I do not simply mean tribal affiliation, although that is of course a part of the package. I mean, rather, the nuts and bolts of tribalness: the ways in which practices of peculiarity contaminate the discourses of universality, the ways in which the Enlightenment turns against itself, and the ways in which the anxiously modern recuperate savagery not only for consumption in the marketplace but also as a mechanism of self-criticism and self-defense.

These are essays about travel: travel to America and India, travel in America and India, the traveler’s experience of the traces of empire. I use the concept of the ‘trace’ in a way that is broader than Derrida’s use of the term to refer to something that is present in a text by virtue of its absence. Imperial traces can take the form of an immigrant’s brush with a policeman on an American street. They can surface in a tourist’s encounter with an Indian crowd that insists on being photographed, and that requires the tourist to salvage what advantage he can by improvising a position that is marked on the one hand by solidarity (‘I’m one of you’) and on the other by superiority (‘I can ignore you.’) They can be found in the obituary rituals for a dead polemicist, and in the phenomenon of rats chewing on the living.

Postcolonial predicaments are the dilemmas and opportunities of echt subalterns who are now included, through discourse and law, in the normative premises of democracy and citizenship, and also of elites who are rendered contextually subaltern by unexpected disadvantages. For the former, these have to do most centrally with confronting the inequalities of power that modernity has brought about, while being limited to terms and mechanisms that have been generated – sometimes overtly but often tacitly and ‘accidentally’ – by modern transfers of knowledge, wealth, bodies and technology. How, for instance, does a peasant – who has never heard of Burke and Mill, and missed Nehru’s ‘Tryst With Destiny’ speech because it was made in English, aired on the radio that he did not possess in 1947, and is available now on an Internet that is also an empire of literacy and the English language – deal with a state that holds out parliamentary democracy on the one hand, and on the other is tied to a hegemonic class deeply threatened by the peasants in Parliament? And just as pertinently, what are the cultural consequences of the bourgeois discovery that its ‘own’ institutions are only precariously in its ‘own’ hands?

There are striking convergences here between the predicaments of peasants and elites in India, and American ‘peasants’ and ‘ruling classes.’ I place the latter within quotation marks because they are, obviously, not identical, either as classes or as categories, with the former. Nevertheless, they are comparable. The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US has coincided with the Lokpal movement in India; each is at its core a middle-class movement, in which the ‘peasants’ are neither fully engaged nor irrelevant. In both cases, the bourgeoisie is itself deeply implicated in the ‘corrupt system’ that it supposedly wants to overturn. But in the Indian case, corruption is perceived to have seeped ‘up’ into the domain of liberal governance, whereas in the American, it is identified with a socio-economic stratosphere, the so-called ‘one percent’ that manipulates and swindles the ‘ninety-nine percent.’

For the Indian bourgeoisie, there is a very basic determination to emphasize their modernity even as they qualify it. In a parallel movement, this class emphasizes its Indian nationalism, even as it asserts its connection to transnational currents of global commerce, communication and migration. Both movements consist of acts of differentiation: they set the modern Indian apart from Indian peasants and the urban underclass, and simultaneously they set him apart from foreigners of all classes. This produces a culture of paradoxes, such as a liberalism that routinely restricts freedom of expression in the name of ‘protecting the sentiments of the people,’ fervent nationalism that overlaps equally fervent fantasies of emigration (culminating in the phenomenon of the NRI, the Non-Resident Indian or avowed Indian patriot who does not have to live in India), and a parliamentarianism that is deeply suspicious of Parliament, seeks to bypass it through alternative instruments of government, and opens itself to accusations of unconstitutionality.

For American liberals, the dilemma is somewhat different, but the consequences are comparable. The self-ascribed status of near-universality, and hence a kind of frustrated hegemony, elides (unconvincingly) the various internal tensions within the fairy-tale community of the ‘ninety-nine percent.’ The most obvious and complex of these tensions is that of race: not only the ever-evolving ‘black problem,’ but also unapologetic Islamophobia and hysteria about Hispanic ‘illegal immigrants.’ Further afield, it elides class and merges it decisively with race, essentially by refusing to see its own investment in the American state and its global relations of inequality, consumption and coercion.

In both cases, the state comes to play a crucial role, and the postcolonial predicaments that I explore are to a great extent problems of the state: faced by the state and created by the state. In both India and the United States, the bourgeoisie that claims moral ownership of the nation-state has come to feel that it no longer controls the state. Their states have, in a sense, become absorbed by somebody else’s empire. It can be argued, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, that this is an empire of capital itself. But it is, nevertheless, an empire – or rather, interlocking empires – that is (are) operated by nation-states in the name of the national interest, by people who are deeply committed to the idea of nationality and the automatic legitimacy of the national interest. They feel beleaguered by shadowy powers beyond their oversight, but they simultaneously participate in that power: they feed it, acquiesce to it, and identify themselves with it. They are outraged by what Wikileaks reveals but accept the criminalization of whistleblowers; they victimize, and are themselves victimized, through the instruments of the state. The nation state is thus simultaneously the imperial center, the colony and apparatus of insurgency; it is its own colony, although it may have others. This is the most basic ‘postcolonial predicament’ with which I am concerned in these essays: the ‘post’ remains chronically elusive.

Such elusiveness is a cultural as well as a political phenomenon, in the sense that it becomes the stuff of essays, novels, films and music as readily as it becomes the stuff of war, torture and riot-control. Christopher Hitchens is a case in point. Hitchens was, by most measures, an insurgent: an avowed admirer of George Orwell and a belligerent polemicist against Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War. But before too long, this insurgency reached its limits and veered off in the direction of farce: having attacked the secular bomber Kissinger, he then went after believers in God in general and Mother Teresa in particular. For a late-twentieth-century intellectual to set out to prove that there is no God, that religion is irrational, or that missionaries are distasteful, is at best Quixotic; at worst, it is deeply provincial, an inability to break out of a Western ghetto with its hackneyed squabbles. (It is difficult to imagine an Indian intellectual trying to score debating points against God; he would be laughed out of the India International Centre.) It is also redundant: barking up a tree that Voltaire has already barked up quite successfully. When you find yourself ‘redoing’ the Enlightenment, it is a sign that you are going in circles.

Hitchens’ support for the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq is related to his Voltaire-redux act in more ways than one. It is, obviously, an extension to Islam of his anti-clericalism. Also, it is a circling back in cultural nostalgia: not to Voltaire this time, but as it was noted sympathetically by Ian Buruma, to Orwell and the Spanish Civil War. The Orwell connection is ironic, because the national security state (recast as the global security state) that prosecutes the neoconservative wars Hitchens enthused about was anathema to Orwell; its culture of linguistic distortion, legal obfuscation and torture is easily recognizable in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even more basically, Orwell’s sense of where power lay – in a word, justice – seems to have eluded Hitchens. How else does one imagine that rag-tag patchworks (at most, networks) of impoverished, displaced, bombed, occupied and voluminously demonized insurgents with makeshift weapons are a threat to ‘freedom’ on a par with fascism in the 1930s? How does one see their viciousness and anti-liberalism as more menacing than the viciousness of liberal imperialism, with its drones, cruise missiles and white phosphorus?

For Hitchens, Martin Amis and quite a few of their ideological cohort, a critical moment when the dilemma of postcolonial justice emerged (and appeared to vanish) was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. The shift that ordeal produced in Rushdie – the politics of his pre-fatwa work like The Satanic Verses and ‘The New Empire Within Britain’ are entirely missing from his ‘They broke our city’ and ‘They hate our freedom’ lamentations after the September 11 attacks – is unmistakable but also perhaps excusable as a post-traumatic reaction. Rushdie wrote a fiercely anti-racist, pro-immigrant novel and, for his pains, was terrorized by the immigrants (who did not read the book) and defended by the racists (who did not read the book either). It would make anybody crazy, generating - what else? - a postcolonial predicament. For Hitchens, Amis, Buruma and others who did not have fatwas hanging over their heads, fatwas had to be imagined as a chronic cultural-political condition. From there it is a short step to the ideological, political, cultural and even social company of Rumsfeld, Ferguson, Feith, Cheney, Blair, Theo van Gogh and Geert Wilders, and the accompanying sense of centrality and action: that Spanish Civil War feeling. Quite a few liberals walked that walk in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and not only in the New York Times and Newsweek.

Such delusions come partly from a middle-class boredom that is itself related to a postcolonial liberal-bourgeois predicament. Enmeshed gainfully in relations of inequality, the liberal who sets himself up as an insurgent is loath to look too critically at his own privileges. Insurgency then takes the form of decadence, and one is left with Neal Pollack’s satirical but nevertheless ghastly image of well-off, middle-aged, paunchy writers in metropolitan apartments drunkenly comparing the size of their penises in between cheering on the use of cluster bombs against Iraqis. The farewell-hale-drinking-buddy obituaries that followed upon Hitchens’ death, with their gross overflows of Hemingwayan camaraderie, extended the culture of a complacent, reactionary arrangement of power masquerading as insurgency.

It is easy but also misleading to take Hitchens for a post-national intellectual. He, like Rushdie and Niall Ferguson, was a migrant and a cosmopolitan, but only within an established national scheme of migration and cosmopolitanism, passports and green cards, visas waived, required or denied. In other words, the cosmopolitan ‘world’ that he imagined was not so much a transcendence of the nation-state as its imperial extension. Hitchens’ country was not even Orwell’s wistful vision of England, which was too puny and obsolescent to be sufficiently inspiring. It was a wider, vaguer, more powerful, but nevertheless pedigreed and nationalized West, identifiable variously as America, NATO and The Coalition of the Willing. Legal migration across its borders and check-points, no less than legal bombing, remained (and remains) the privilege of particular races and classes. But to inhabit this world, and to experience it as a series of fatwas, check-points, prisons and bombs is the differently shared predicament of the white immigrant from England and the New-York-born Pakistani-American, of the American soldier Bradley Manning and the Afghan taxi driver Dilawar. Orwell recognized that; Hitchens did not.

Two weeks after Hitchens died, rats attacked a live patient in a hospital in Calcutta, chewing off his penis. It was not the first such incident: ants had devoured a patient’s bandaged eye some years ago in another Calcutta hospital, even as nurses ignored the (dying) woman’s screams. I mention these gruesome episodes because they are both typical and extraordinary, each in more ways than one. They are typical ‘Calcutta stories,’ in the sense that Calcutta has long been a metaphor of urban horror in colonial discourse. They are typical also in that there is nothing peculiarly Calcuttan about them; such incidents happen in government-run hospitals all over India and elsewhere in the so-called ‘Third World.’ They are extraordinary in that the ‘Black Hole’ or ‘City of Dreadful Night’ (or ‘City of Joy,’ by which Dominique Lapierre meant the same thing) discourse of the Native City continues to thrive in these days of ‘India Shining’ and ‘Incredible India.’ Reported and consumed in the metropolitan media, they constitute a trace of empire that compensates for other shifts in global power, and also becomes a new cultural commodity. (The commercial success of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, even more than Lapierre’s novel, illustrates this.) Finally, they are extraordinary because they reflect not only the horrific predicament of those Indians who find themselves at the mercy of such hospitals, but also of liberal citizenship in the Third World: ‘proper citizens,’ i.e., the bourgeoisie that is not automatically bound to government hospitals, must nevertheless live with the headlines of the ‘Black Hole’ variety, and remain open to implicit or explicit accusations (from without and within) of responsibility and fraudulence. Indeed, responsibility is inescapable and inseparable from fraudulence, because only a fake or failed bourgeoisie would allow rats and ants to eat hospital patients.

At the most straightforward level, December’s incident at the SSKM Hospital – previously known as the Presidency General, and one of the oldest, biggest and best-known hospitals in Calcutta, although long gone to seed – reflects the simultaneity of wealth and dire poverty, and the chasm of lived experiences, in contemporary India. Having your penis chewed off by a rat while you lie sedated (one can only hope) in a rusty iron-frame bed is not a fate that the now sizeable, boisterous class of relatively wealthy Indians, who vacation overseas, follow Formula One racing, and think in terms of private health care at the Apollo and similar elite hospitals, face in the normal course of things. As Suketu Mehta observed in Maximum City, his entertaining narrative of contemporary Bombay/Mumbai, the Indian bourgeoisie has for some years been engaged in elaborate acts of secession: from the public sector to the private, from municipal services to closed systems of electricity and water supply, from the mixed neighborhood to the self-contained gated community (usually with a ludicrously European-sounding name). From the real-estate advertising billboards that line the expressway from Mumbai to Pune, one might form the impression that all Indians – or those with cars, at any rate – are about to move into these enclaves. This secession is an attempted distancing of the affluent from the poor, but it is also a secession from the government, if not the state, at a time when the government (of a Third World country) is perceived to have passed beyond the control of the liberal citizen (with First World aspirations). The Lokpal movement, with its attempt to create an uncorrupted new organ of government that the middle class might control, is closely related to this attempt to distance the Apollo from the SSKM: both reflect the search for a cleaner, more efficient country.

Because that attempt both indirectly and directly touches upon the state, it constitutes a crisis of citizenship, at a time when the middle-class fetish of the nation-state is not only unabated but widened and amplified. The secessionists in the gated enclaves named after Swiss resorts are also strident advocates of jingoism in foreign policy, the loudest devotees of national unity, and the most ardent wavers of the Indian tricolor on every conceivable international forum. This simultaneity is a particular postcolonial predicament; it is not only a sign of jostling subcultures and sub-nations, but a culture in its own right. That culture is marked on the one hand by the insistence that the nation and the state have become detached, and that the proper citizen can and should adapt to that detachment (essentially by seceding from the state but within the nation) even as he decries it. It is marked on the other hand by slippages and self-doubt. The rat incident at the SSKM was accompanied almost simultaneously by the devastating fire at the private and much more expensive AMRI hospital, which killed ninety patients in a new building that turned out to be an extremely efficient fire trap.

The rats have evidently invaded the new nation outside the decrepit state. Or, even more troublingly, they never left the building in the first place. Hospitals plagued by rodents and fire are not, after all, exclusively a problem of the poor, or a cultural or even a material effect of poverty. Given the scale of government expenditure in contemporary India – a military budget in excess of thirty-five billion US dollars, for instance, which is less than a tenth of American defense spending but still a substantial pile of change – it cannot be said that there is no money for clean hospitals or effective firefighting equipment. Hospital administrators at the SSKM are not of the subaltern classes; nor are the entrepreneurs, architects, bureaucrats and inspectors who command institutions like AMRI. The Calcutta Fire Brigade is not run by peasants. When these episodes of early-modern horror break out on their watch, what is revealed are the deep fractures in the modernity of the self-consciously modern: out-of-joint fiscal and administrative priorities, and a tolerance of horror that is possible only because their narratives of unified nationhood and statehood are interwoven with secessionist and emigrant fantasies. On the one hand, they seek to escape the decrepit nation-state for private enclaves, only to be pursued by rats. On the other, because the desire to secede/escape is itself subversive of the concept of modern citizenship, they are the rats.

It could be argued that this self-subverted (rather than subversive) citizenship reflects a resilient, premodern cultural essence – the ‘we are like that only’ shrug of laughter of the middle-class Indian – that continuously torpedoes the project of recreating the European nation-state in the tropics. That, however, would be somewhat misleading, because what complicates the experience of modern citizenship in India is itself dynamic and modern, produced by postcolonial desires: the desire for the vacation in South Africa, the chauffeured Honda, the nuclear weapon, the face painted in the colors of the national flag at a cricket match, and the secret overseas bank account. ‘That’ in ‘we are like that only’ refers, after all, to the postcolonial, not the precolonial or premodern. To concede that bourgeois spaces have their own rats is also to acknowledge, or at least suspect, that the liberal citizen of ‘Incredible India’ – a middle-class advertising phenomenon that features the poor mainly as scenery – is capable of various forms of illiberal behavior, from preferring the Indian Premier League over Test cricket, to championing a cult of bean-counting and managerial education over the liberal arts. It becomes possible, then, for the state of Gujarat to be simultaneously a site of government-backed mass murder and the national ideal of efficiency in industrial development.

‘We are like that only’ is a state of comfort as well as anxiety: anxious comfort, if not comfortable anxiety. It is, firstly, an acceptance and even a celebration of difference. Secondly, it is a perception of difference as failure, and its attempted displacement on to identifiable Others. In both cases, it is based on the recognition that one is not quite in control of the society that is supposedly one’s own: when a middle-class Indian laughs wryly and declares that ‘we’ are like that (only), he also means ‘they.’ In the Indian context, no less than in the American, ‘they’ is a racialized cluster, including not only the poor, but also aborigines, Muslims, Dalits, migrant workers from Bangladesh and Nepal, women from the northeastern states.

Here, I want to inject a personal anecdote. My sister is married to a mild-mannered Canuck whose parents are from the wrong side of the Punjab border, and whose foreskin seems to have been lost in a cultural accident in infancy. Very recently, while my mother was at our family home in Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s university town, she was approached by a group of men who told her that because her child had married a Muslim, because her caretaker is a Muslim, and because it was Vivekananda’s birthday, she must repent (‘apnar kichhu prayaschitto korte hobe’) by paying them a large sum of money. Otherwise, they said, they just might burn the house down.

That little reminder of the politics of identity, citizenship and extortion in modern India is insignificant compared to the cutting open of pregnant Muslim women in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Nevertheless, it is at least interesting. It may, for instance, appear startling that such naked bigotry would manifest itself at the heart of Indian liberalism. Santiniketan, it is often remarked by people who have lived there a long time, is going to the dogs, who, being lumpen dogs (or rats), have probably come from Bhubandanga or Bolpur and are alien to the culture of the ashram proper. But then, middle-class, liberal, multigenerational, thoroughly Tagorean residents of Santiniketan – in other words, friends and neighbors, not thugs – have also expressed (politely) their consternation about my family’s fondness for Muslims and urged my mother to desist from selling property to them, lest it contaminate the ‘environment’ of the ashram (in an entirely secular sense). It need not be surprising, then, that local thugs would Sanskritize themselves by talking about prayaschitto and Vivekananda. We are like that only. Rabindranath himself is not entirely innocent here: the famous multi-faith ‘glass temple’ in Santiniketan has a lovely Christmas ritual every year, but Id and Ramadan are beyond the pale.

The incident involving Vivekananda’s fans and my sister’s choice of a husband is also a reminder of a family norm that is of interest to the state, and not only because the police tend not to help ‘abnormal’ families in these situations. On the contrary, the police can apparently be counted on to hound such families literally to death, as in the case of Rizwanur Rahman and Priyanka Todi a few years ago. The brown-skinned, Urdu-and Bengali-understanding children of my sister and her Canuck, with grandparents born in undivided India, are ineligible for Person of Indian Origin status (a sort of permanent Indian visa for NRIs) and cannot even get a normal tourist visa without jumping through incomprehensible hoops, whereas my wife, descended from Slovaks, Germans, Danes and the French, could be classified as a Person of Indian Origin by simply filling out a form and paying a small fee. She and I, and our beige daughter (‘looks like a Mexican,’ I am told, to my great satisfaction), are evidently the more normatively Indian family. The Indian family, that eminently reformed and respectable national institution, incubates these absurd yet chillingly inescapable codes of Otherness and injects them into statecraft, even as it imbibes them from the state.

The family, Günter Grass wrote, is the germ cell of the state. Grass' thoughts on the issue are quite relevant to India, not to mention America. Outside the decolonizing world, postwar Germany witnessed the twentieth century's most sustained ideological, political and cultural engagement with the relationship between the nation and the state. For instance, although the patriarchal family, racism and state violence remained interconnected in Germany beyond 1945 and even 1968, there was also a sharp break from the treatment of war as a national religion – complete with shrines, hagiographies and ritual solemnities – that is nurtured within and around the family in other self-consciously modern places. In West (and differently in East) Germany from the late 1940s on, a great deal of cultural work went into recovering and reimagining nationhood from the rubble of a collapsed state and a disgraced nationalism, and integrating that nationhood and its social structures with a new state. If Grass, Heinrich Böll and their colleagues nevertheless remained skeptical or despondent, it was because they believed that an insufficiently examined family would inevitably reinfect the state with its perversions. This 'would' is not a matter of the future, but of the lived present of liberal governmentality. I am 'randomly selected' for extra screening every time I board a US-bound flight in Germany; the waiting area for these passengers is disproportionately full of brown, black and yellow faces. Is this policy American or German, I once angrily asked a policeman at Frankfurt Airport. American, he replied wryly and truthfully, except that the 'random' selections were being made on the spot by young white Germans without an American supervisor in sight. That tension between recovery and reimagination – one process reactionary, the other potentially radical – marks much of postwar German culture, keeping it within the orbit of not one but two empires: that of America, and that of the nation-state itself.

In India, similar tensions can be perceived both within the family that is simultaneously ‘traditional’ and ‘reformed’ (or ‘unreformed,’ in the case of Muslims and the poor), and between the family and the nation that is ancient/uninterrupted but also modern/awakened-at-midnight. In the family, there is no shame in discriminating on the basis of caste, religion and every other retrograde consideration imaginable: a glance at matrimonial advertisements, with their ‘Kayasth Hindu NRI boy, software engineer, short, dark and pockmarked, seeks fair homely convent-educated Kayasth Hindu girl, kindly contact with horoscope’ listings indicates as much. In the family, children are indoctrinated with hair-raising, blood-curdling lore about depredations visited upon ‘us’ by ‘them,’ them being the dirty, foreign, circumcised bastards with too many wives and children.

The more modern and liberal the state sets out to be, the more ‘traditional’ and reactionary the family becomes in compensation. This is true of the last-ditch defense of the ‘Hindu family’ against ‘pro-divorce’ legislators in the 1950s; it is true also of the fetish of the patriarchal family in Hindi cinema in the era of economic liberalization. Family values then infiltrate the state. The lobbying and legislative wars over the contents of history textbooks is an example; the chronic deployment of the police and other state forces against Muslims, Adivasis and the poor – less academic in its immediate impact – is another. Restrictions on free speech and artistic expression become, in the Indian context, distinctly illiberal attempts to protect and placate ‘communities’ invested in the status quo. Even the claim of protecting-the-sentiments quickly becomes disingenuous; what the state's ability to restrict free speech to the inoffensive and unobjectionable protects, more than anything else, is illegality and misgovernment. It protects, in other words, the secretive, unaccountable and hyper-corrupt state. In that regard, the Indian fetish of protecting-the-sentiments is very similar to the American fetish of national security.

I am not saying that the Indian nation-state was, let alone is, a beleaguered bastion of liberalism engaged in a losing war against the illiberal Indian family. I am saying that the Indian state, as well as the nationally-oriented family, reflect the limits of postcolonial liberalism, which generates impossible contradictions in the attempt to reconcile the invented past with the present in which it was invented, and to include the inventors and the invented within a common framework of citizenship and rights. It takes us back to Hitchens and the hospital rat. The predicament of postcolonial society, married to the nation-state and its history, is to continuously colonize itself, generating and perpetuating gross (and small) inequalities and violence.

The ‘new’ state and society (post-empire, post-Jim-Crow, post-Holocaust) is both recovered and reimagined: created in the image and on the foundations of its predecessor, but also full of the rhetoric of democratic departures, and held together by a remarkable conviction – which is both naïve and ferociously resistant to introspection – that there is no contradiction. The liberal citizen, imbedded in the collective of the ninety-nine percent, is both victim and perpetrator, and cannot break out of it without abdicating the concept of citizenship. He is faced, in those circumstances, with apparently disconnected episodes: being stopped occasionally by the NYPD for walking-while-brown in his own neighborhood, metropolitan writers cheering the bombing of a Third World country, a patient eaten alive by vermin, Muslim students in Jamia Millia Islamia University’s Batla House dormitory shot by the Delhi police for, well, being Muslim students, young women from Manipur and Mizoram raped in north-Indian cities because they are too sexy to be real Indians, Marines pissing on Afghan corpses, Israeli soldiers humiliating Palestinians at West Bank checkpoints, middle-class Indians (unable to connect the dots) happily using the word ‘Paki’ to refer to Pakistanis without a clue that they are engaging in a bit of self-abuse, the New York Times (unwilling to connect the dots) referring to waterboarding as ‘enhanced interrogation,’ US presidents pardoning their cronies but not death-row inmates railroaded by prosecutors. Running through these episodes – all postcolonial predicaments – like a thread is their potential for inciting rage: rage at the sight of flags and cop-faces, rage at blandly coercive bureaucratic inanities, rage that makes your blood boil, your hands curl into fists, and your tongue unwise. For a middle-class man with an American passport to be racially profiled at border crossings is not altogether a bad thing; it keeps him grounded in a fragile solidarity born of anger that would otherwise be fraudulent. Rage is illiberal, rage overflows and nullifies citizenship; rage redeems itself because it connects the dots. It too is a postcolonial predicament.

January 16, 2012

Nietzsche in the Tropics

2011-12-27T22:09:00.016-05:00

When Maurice Vidal Portman was appointed Officer in Charge of the Andamanese in 1879, he was only eighteen years old. Although his duties were primarily administrative, by 1879 the office – established sixteen years previously – had acquired ethnological functions that reflected the evolution of the better-known Australian office of the ‘Protector’ of aborigines. Portman was an officer in the Indian Marine and the son of the Viscount of Dorset, but he had no experience whatsoever in the management of people who were generally agreed to be savages. Yet this white-skinned greenhorn found himself in charge of a kingdom of sorts: the jungles, beaches and islands of the British-Indian penal colony in the Andaman archipelago, where several thousand (mostly) Indian and Burmese convicts coexisted tensely with a dwindling but still substantial population of aborigines. The startling appointment was not extraordinary in the Andamans, where improvised resources were highly valued by the administration and ethnology was a makeshift frontier science. Compared to his Australian counterpart, Portman flew – and was expected to fly – by the seat of his pants and whatever other signs of civilization he could muster. As much as ethnologists ‘made’ the Andamanese, dealing with the Andamanese ‘made’ ethnologists out of assorted chaplains, soldiers, sailors, jailers and amateurs.

Some of these amateurs quickly equipped themselves with cameras, which became essential tools of professional self-making. This too was normal in its historical context. In India at the time of Portman’s appointment, ethnological photography had just achieved an officially-recognized maturity, with the compilation and publication (between 1868 and 1875) of John Forbes Watson’s The People of India. In the Andamans, Portman’s predecessor E.H. Man had been photographing and measuring the indigenous population and making a name for himself as an ethnologist. Portman continued Man’s work on a larger scale, bringing to it his shadowy yet charismatic personality, considerable coercion, aggressive political advocacy (that sought, by and large, to shield ‘his’ aborigines from the growing convict population and clumsy European interventions), and his undeniable skill with primitive cameras. Over the next two decades, he conducted photographic and anthropometric sessions with scores of islanders, and established himself not just as the Officer in Charge, but as the ‘Father of the Andaman Islanders.’ He was not the only British officer to hold that informal title, and such fatherhood was hardly an uncommon pretension in the colonial world, but few others held it with such panache and conviction. Portman – burning villages, flogging natives, and dancing savagely on the beach in between taking pictures – has a thing or two in common with his literary contemporary, Kurtz in the Belgian Congo.

What was Portman doing, looking through a camera in the Andamans? If he was engaged in self-making, what kind of self was he making? He was not trying simply to join the ranks of academic ethnologists; his relationship with that clique was openly adversarial [Portman, A History of Our Relations with the Andamanese, 333]. The self-made ethnologist on the colonial frontier was different and superior, Portman insisted, but what was the content of this difference and superiority? I have written about Portman’s photography before, arguing that camera, calipers and the peripheral location allowed him to explore a queer masculinity [Satadru Sen, ‘Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures,’ American Ethnologist 36:2]. There is no need to revisit the erotics of Portman’s engagement with the Andamanese or to reinter an expository mode and linger on individual images in this essay. I want, rather, to locate Portman’s enterprise within some larger theoretical questions of colonialism generally, and more specifically of ‘colonialist’ visions and representations of ‘savages.’

Beyond his ‘public’ conduct as a colonial expert who could hold his own against formally trained anthropologists based in metropolitan universities, Portman was engaged in a parallel, ‘private,’ irrational project of articulating modes of white survival in the tropical jungle. I use the plural modes deliberately. The delinquent element in Portman’s work was, on the one hand, reflective of the decadence of late-Victorian and early-Edwardian European consumption of empire. It dabbled in necrophilia at a time when entire blocks of savages were seen as dying out – Portman ‘took charge’ of the Andamanese at the precise moment that they were identified by Europeans as a dying race – and the civilized felt a delightful shudder at the apparent transience of human populations: delightful, because the anticipated death was usually more literary than literal. On the other hand, it was about the real terrors of small bodies of white men in settings that they compulsively imagined as alien, overwhelming and fatal. Conventions of verbal communication based on reason and Habermasian ‘validity claims’ – the speaker’s commitment to justify himself – tended to break down in these circumstances [Jϋrgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, 228].

Photographic techniques of narration provided effective alternatives, ways of speaking in the jungle. I want to use this essay to think about colonial photography not in isolation, but as part of a larger mode of sight and representation that it helped bring about. As Susan Sontag has suggested, the camera is not merely a recording technology; it is the primary frame of the modern gaze. When we see, and when we remember and describe what we have seen, we take for granted the structures and conventions of the photograph, even if one is writing rather than using a camera [Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1-27]. A cultural familiarity with the lens and the photograph is implicit when we identify a ‘something’ that is there to be seen and described. This formulation is not stable across the entirety of the modern era; arguably, since the 1930s, it is cinema rather than still photography that has functioned as the most pervasive structuring device of reality. In the period in which Portman worked, however, the photograph was both its own genre and a metaphor of other narrative techniques, such as the novel and the memoir. Accordingly, I want to place Portman’s work alongside a novel – based on a diary – from the same period: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Conrad wrote his most famous novel after a cruise up the Congo river in the summer of 1890. In 1899, just before Portman published his massive history of 'our relations' with the Andamanese, Conrad reproduced his journey as a play of light and shadows, omniscience and blindness, stretches of action rendered as single moments, with language sometimes reduced to screams and sighs [Conrad, 87]. In the process, he ‘saw’ and induced his readers to see the Congo that his characters Marlow and Kurtz saw, or rather, he affirmed, through Marlow and Kurtz, interrelated ways of seeing and being in the jungle. Heart of Darkness, of course, is not about the Congo any more than Apocalypse Now is about Vietnam. The Congo, like Coppola’s Vietnam and Portman’s Andamans, is useful, the utility being a ready surplus of death that throws the colonizer into a psychological and physical crisis. The prosaic realities of the native world – including death – become the white man’s poetry, the writing and viewing of which contains (in both senses of the word) the possibilities of transformation.

Life in the colony threatens to detach the sahib from whiteness and civilization, to defeat and even kill him. But those very dangers, managed aesthetically, generate a mode of individuality that goes well beyond what is possible and permissible in civilization: a modern individuality free of modern constraints, free even of race. It is essentially delinquent, i.e., not answerable to reason, legality, community, bureaucratic prose and conventions of how things should be. But since photographic narratives are purported representations of how things are, they come with an irresistible license: they demonstrate that in the jungle, unreason simply is. The sahib who is able to partake of this unreason through the civilized magic of the camera, the gun and the printing press, is alive – if precariously so – against the backdrop of death, and he is alive as a white man. This, I argue, was an ‘unofficial’ aspect of Portman’s undertaking, and also of Conrad’s. They both sought to illustrate a way of becoming, in the jungle, sahibs who had been contaminated and damaged, but also enlivened and enhanced, by delinquency.

Nietzschean fantasies of an individual self that was not limited by the Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian Europe surfaced with particular vividness in the colony for a couple of different but related reasons. One is that individuality was especially resonant in the colonial context. In India, for instance, the lack of individuality was held up by Liberals and Utilitarians as a glaring defect of native society, something that set it apart from and beneath Europe. For English-educated Indians as well as colonizers, this placed a premium on being seen as individuals, and not merely cogs in social and bureaucratic mechanisms. Another reason is that the practice of colonialism, which was frequently and nakedly incongruent with the declared values of the colonizing civilization, generated vexing moral anxieties in colonizers. In the Indian case, this becomes evident as early as the 1770s and 1780s, when white ‘nabobs’ swelled with looted wealth, a quarter of the population of Bengal died of starvation, and Edmund Burke fumed. One way of dealing with moral horror was, of course, to invoke the ‘rule of colonial difference,’ i.e., the idea that natives were so different that European ethics did not apply to them. Another, however, was to insist – sometimes discreetly, sometimes shamelessly – that the white man in the colony was himself too different from ordinary whites to be judged by ordinary men and moral standards. The freedom this generated in the individual colonizer, and in localized regimes of colonial power (which could be as ‘local’ as a jungle outpost or a boat on a river), was the value of the European culture of tropical unease.

Confronting Fear: The Photography of Reassurance

In her seminal work on the cultural significance of the camera, Sontag describes photography as an anxious ritual and a defense against anxiety. The suggestion qualifies her more conventional point that the camera is ‘a tool of power’ [Sontag, 8-9]. The camera is, of course, both aggressive and defensive: it helps its users take possession of space in which they are insecure, but it cannot eliminate insecurity altogether. The anxiety to which Sontag refers is the unease of the privileged individual in a zone where authority is uncertain, like Orwell before the Burmese crowd in ‘Shooting an Elephant,’ Marlow on the river in Heart of Darkness, or a lone white man in a ‘bad neighborhood’ in an American city. The camera, the gun and the pen take on similar functions here, sketching out a colonial predicament at a particular moment in the history of imperialism.

What is that moment when the concern with picturing and interiorizing hidden darkness emerges? It is in some ways a preview of the blackness that marks the culture of the Great War, with its images of gas-masked soldiers in the mud, the poetry of Brooke, Owen and Sassoon, and the novelty of shell-shock. It is also the moment of Freud, Havelock Ellis, the medicalized interest in defective individuality, and the use of photography in criminology and police surveillance, which probably began in Paris during the suppression of the Communards in the early 1870s. These apparently metropolitan developments had direct colonial implications. As Allan Sekula has argued (and the British-Indian experience with ‘criminal tribes’ from 1871 onwards amply confirms), the criminal mugshot of the late nineteenth century reinforced the reputation of photography as a technology that could capture elusive, deviant ‘types’ that could be either criminological or racial [Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive,’ October 39 (Winter 1986), 3-64].

The European in the colony, no less than the native but more furtively, became the object of this shining of light that promised to reveal failures and deviations, an important consideration in the era of Foucault’s ‘incitement to discourse’ [Foucault, The History of Sexuality v. 1, 17]. Ultimately, veracity was less important than incitement and confession, and, it might be said, to contingent knowledge reflecting leaps of feeling derived from need, or what Nietzsche called ‘perspectivism’ [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 261-7]. Even when light appeared to lie, Conrad reminded his readers [Conrad, 111], the lie could be the aesthetically satisfying, exciting, and (paradoxically) reassuring to the white man who has discovered more recesses – in the colony, at home, and in the psyche – than he can cope with as a civilized man. The colonial photographic gaze, apparently directed outwards at the native, is often the inward-directed gaze of aestheticized panic, and the experience of ‘defective individuality’ in the colonizer in a more or less controlled setting.

The historiography of colonial photography has largely missed that dynamic. The volume of very good essays edited by Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson is a case in point. The emphasis is overwhelmingly on control and functionality. Sampson and Hight note that ‘colonialist photography’ created and maintained differences of race and place, that it proceeded in tandem with related administrative, scientific, commercial and cultural-literary projects, and that it functioned as an instrument for controlling and managing the social locations of natives, who were dehumanized, isolated or re-acculturated in accordance with colonizers’ expectations. They emphasize, likewise, the taming function of colonial landscape photography, which rendered exotic landscape as picturesque and safe while preserving exoticism and grandeur [Hight and Sampson, eds., Colonialist Photography, 1-5].

Aligned with Homi Bhabha’s theorization of colonialist culture as narratives that produced the native as degenerate and thus supplied justifications and systems of conquest and control, such a conceptualization of colonial photography is certainly accurate. It is, however, incomplete. The emphasis on coercion, discipline and domination sets up a narrow definition of ‘colonialist photography’ – and of colonial culture more generally – that elides the possibility of other agendas, particularly those that appear to be irrational or defeatist. Colonial landscape photography might privilege the picturesque, as Sampson notes [Sampson, ‘Unmasking the Colonial Picturesque,’ 100], but that does not account for the widely circulated images of forbidding tropical terrain from the Andamans through the Congo to French Guiana, which as a cultural artifact was not less intriguing because it was forbidding. The European imagination of the jungle, Peter Redfield has pointed out, was fundamentally schizophrenic [Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics, 49].

Several of the essays in Colonialist Photography nevertheless go beyond the editorial emphasis on capture and control. Pacific-Island tourism in the nineteenth century allowed white Australians and New Zealanders to ‘capture’ themselves photographically in states of erotic excess (swimming naked, etc.), Michael Hayes writes. Hayes initially makes the unexceptional observation that while this behavior appears to satirize the evolutionary scheme of civilization and abdicate European superiority, the satire/abdication takes place within undeniable inequalities of power, including the techno-magical display of the camera and the military power that allows photographic rituals to proceed [Michael Hayes, ‘Photography and the Pacific Cruise,’ 172-87]. At the same time, however, Hayes notes that the inequality of power within which the white tourist mimics the naked savage is not reliable or stable, because the white mimic is watched by natives, who are watched by the photographer, who is also watched by natives. There is, as such, a continuous tension within the power to represent without interruption or anxiety, and within the ability to maintain clear lines between the superior desirer and the inferior desired.

First, the white observer’s ability to represent comes under a shadow of doubt. Hayes writes, for instance, that the common tendency of colonial photographers to see (and show) kings and queens who were also savages was an attempt to universalize an European political arrangement, as well as satire [Hayes, 178]. While this is probably correct, these linguistic slippages – which are present throughout Portman’s photographic and narrative record of his jungle kingdom – were also precisely that: slippages, corresponding to mismatches between observed reality and available vocabulary. Portman’s ‘chiefs’ and ‘prime ministers’ in the Andamans were analogous to the ‘criminals’ and ‘rebels’ that Conrad sneered at in the Congo [Conrad, 90]. Portman himself was poised precariously between satire and sincerity; he knew that standard verbal signifiers were lost in the jungle. Whiteness is, this sense, inadequate in the jungle. Photographs compensate, but they also heighten the element of satire and function as an incitement to nervous laughter.

Second, the photographer’s desire for his subject, including the unspeakable desire to identify with the native, is highly destabilizing of the racial self that undergirds the normative (‘public’) aspect of colonialism. Inevitably, it becomes entangled with dread. In Portman’s Andamans, where measles, smallpox, syphilis and influenza were ravaging the indigenous population that the intrepid colonizer walked amongst, manhandled and ogled, it became tied up with disease and the rhetoric of death. Julia Ballerini has argued that the European viewer’s desire for the eroticized primitive in the colony was charged with a fear of contagion: contagion by desire, contagion by forgetfulness of one’s own whiteness. The better the white observer ‘knows’ the colony, the greater the fear that he has been contaminated. Successful colonization/penetration is thus tied, paradoxically, to the fear of failure [Julia Ballerini, ‘Rewriting the Nubian Figure in the Photograph,’ 31, 46]. The buyer of photographic prints in the metropole consumes a diluted, second-hand dread that is essentially decadent, but the white observer in the jungle has a more direct problem of coming out alive (which would mean, also, coming out recognizably white, and not yellow like Marlow).

Not all colonial culture is equally burdened by this problem. Kipling, a contemporary of Portman and Conrad, was more palpably burdened by whiteness itself, could be welcoming of racial confusion. But he too wrote from a reassuring location within whiteness, indicating that whatever the temptations and dangers of the colony and place of birth, he had found his way ‘home.’ It becomes necessary, in these circumstances, to find witnesses to one’s whiteness. The photographic narrative plays a vitally important role here, particularly when natives are featured. The figure of the native in the colonialist photograph, Ballerini suggests, functions as a witness, remedying the photographer’s apparent absence from the images he has captured [Ballerini, 39-41]. The posed native, like the dying native, is thus a basic prop in the construction and maintenance of the white observer’s ego, although the muddled nature of the prop (is the native actually who/what he appears to be?) and its unstable political relationship with its ‘owner’ are themselves destabilizing.

Even unpopulated photographs are a form of witness-making: ‘I was there’ statements. But what was ‘I’ doing over there when the place was full of dying savages? One answer is aligned with the disciplining function of photography. Hayes, for instance, points out that late-nineteenth-century photography tended to construct tropical islands that had merely been ‘touched’ by Europeans, i.e., not substantially altered. In the midst of the narrative of death (which could be restricted to the invisible space beyond the frame, as in the ‘last of her tribe’ images that came out of Truganini’s Tasmania), natives could appear to be at work doing typically native things, like manufacturing canoes and primitive tools, unconcerned with the white photographer [Hayes, 177]. This is an important mode of Portman’s photography. It can coexist with the apocalyptic vision of extinction, essentially by subjecting the apocalypse to the management of experts who can regulate the European ‘touch’ on the savage.

Portman, assisted by the camera, could thus invent a peaceful, living, limited and petrified lie: islands that were colonized by virtue of the striking invisibility of one set of colonial signifiers (violence, disease, extinction, civilization). In such a colony, the colonizer remained white precisely because he had been witnessed, by the lens and by the native, as inhabiting a cultural product: a zone of artificial naturalness and calm, like a museum diorama or a studio. The surrounding apocalypse – which too was staged in its own right, and not denied or downplayed – highlighted the artifice, which was civilization itself. I want to be clear on this point. A diorama of a jungle is not a jungle; it is in that sense a ‘lie.’ But visitors to the museum do not mistake it for a jungle; they know the ‘real’ jungle exists ‘out there,’ that it is a dangerous place, and the diorama is safe. In that sense, the diorama is not a lie. It is a carefully arranged attempt at reassurance and consensus: reassurance that the viewer is safe, and consensus that the curator/photographer is not a lost racial cause.

Übermenschen at Play

The apocalypse does not, however, remain safely outside the frame. To some extent, this is because the lines between ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ spaces of colonialism were rarely stable. Colonizers were driven by the political and commercial imperatives of their project to wander constantly, dangerously, beyond the diorama and into real jungles, literal and metaphorical. It is also because the jungle, with its excesses of nature, i.e., its overpowering profusions of life and premature death, tended to intrude actively into the serene, tidy spaces of photographic conventions and frames.

Early photography does not lend itself readily to colonial encounters with tropical excess. Slow, bulky cameras and darkrooms require a bare modicum of peace and stillness in order to function, and one cannot very well ask angry savages to pose as angry savages. Not surprisingly, Portman’s archive is on the surface a record of moments and spaces of control. It is, in other words, the diorama, not the jungle. Yet Portman, like his predecessor Henry Corbyn, spent much of his time in the Andamans in the jungle, seeking out opportunities for counterinsurgency [Satadru Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean, 53]. Accompanied by small parties of ‘tame’ savages and sometimes by armed convicts, he ventured deep into the interior of Great Andaman, where he hunted down the Jarawa and other recalcitrant aborigines. Crewed by Andamanese ‘boys’ that he had trained, his steamer took him all over the archipelago, including to Little Andaman, with its often unwelcoming Onge (whose children Portman liked to remove to his headquarters near Port Blair as experiments in acculturation).

Portman wrote voluminously and vividly about his forays into the jungle, and he looked around with a photographer’s eye. ‘I took some photographs of the scene, and then burnt the village down,’ he wrote about one punitive expedition [Portman, v.2, 674-5]. (He was teaching the locals a lesson about disobedience.) While Portman’s head shots, anthropometric photographs and ‘savage at work’ images suggest the colonizer’s ability to pose the savage, many photographs – and the ethnographic notes that accompany his photographic archive, which reveal persistent conflicts between Portman and his apparently immobilized subjects – drive home the precariousness of the white man’s ability to capture the kinetic and unpredictable [Sen, ‘Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures’].

‘Scarification’

A disconnect opens up here between the authoritative gaze of the camera-toting Officer in Charge of the Andamanese, and the hut-burning, lesson-teaching rogue. Only in one or two surviving images do they seem to come together: when Portman, seated on a throne in the jungle, presides over his ‘prime ministers’ and ‘chiefs’ (the first image in essay), and when he, dressed in white like a colonial action-figure, struts in front of naked aborigines and the black wall of trees [below]. Here, we catch a glimpse of Portman in the mode of Kurtz, Conrad’s vanished sahib. By having trained savages to aim his camera at him, he demonstrates that they are ‘his’ savages.

I do not want to suggest that Portman and Kurtz (not to mention Portman and Conrad) are identical creatures. Portman, I have argued before, was mostly playing at having gone a little mad, because such play was enjoyable, and because it freed him to exercise power unconventionally and extra-legally [Sen, Savagery and Colonialism, 89]. Kurtz was beyond recall, whereas Portman – like Marlow – was merely tainted by the jungle. But Portman and Kurtz both fit a particular mode of colonialism, which has been theorized by Purnima Bose as ‘rogue-colonial individualism.’ Bose actually had a third individual in mind: General Dyer, unrepentant hero of empire, who shot fifteen hundred unarmed men, women and children in a few minutes in Jallianwalla Bagh in 1919, ‘to teach them a lesson they would never forget.’ Noting that Dyer was more celebrated than condemned by his compatriots, Bose rejects that notion that he was an aberration. She argues instead that atrocious behavior that crossed the lines of ‘decency’ and civilization was a normative mode of being a white individual in the colony, because the constraints of decency and civilization not only handicapped the work of empire, they also handicapped individuality, which was as central to whiteness as was civilization [Purnima Bose, Organizing Empire, 29].

But if the work of colonialism challenged individuality, its play – or work that could be reimagined as play, such as massacres and village-burning – offered a solution. By destabilizing whiteness, the colony promised to remove the constraints of civilization and liberate the oppressed white man from his burden in ways that Kipling had not fully entertained. A related argument has been made by Gautam Chakravarty about Eurasian troops in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Eurasians, Chakravarty argues, represented an ‘irregular’ whiteness, suited to the dirty work of irregular warfare [Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, 74]. Whether Chakravarty accurately describes the role that Eurasian troops played in the war is beside the point; more pertinent is the observation that the circumstances of the colony both enabled and encouraged delinquent individuality.

We return, here, to the interpenetration of success and failure in colonialism. Delinquency, Foucault wrote, is basic to modernity. As a concept, as an administrative category, and as a political resource, the delinquent is produced by modernity: the modern prison succeeds (in generating delinquency and governmentality) by failing continuously (to reform the criminal) [Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 257]. In the colony, which has much in common with the ‘failing’ prison, the triumphant individuality of the man of the Enlightenment is exposed to its own self-imposed but definitive limits; it is exposed also to alternative possibilities of being. It is not surprising, therefore, that colonial cultures – that of sahibs as well as that of Europeanized natives – is suffused by anxieties about the individual in society.

I am not referring here to the well-established hankering for community, either of the Romantic-European variety that is a shared component of all bourgeois nationalisms, or of the subaltern-pasts variety that Dipesh Chakrabarty has identified in the Indian embrace of patriarchal authority and familiality [Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 40, 217-31]. I am referring, rather, to the modern phobia that civilized man, far from being an individual, has turned out to be a herd animal. This fear undergirds, for instance, the closely related discourses of colonial mimicry and effeminacy. When white writers, administrators and educators contemptuously described their native ‘mimics’ as unmanly sheep and monkeys, they expressed an anxiety about their own condition as free individuals [Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 271]. For many native intellectuals and revolutionaries – Nirad Chaudhuri is a case in point – the anxiety had already reached the level of self-loathing, and of wanting to separate themselves violently from the national herd that was definitively un-free. Individual freedom and the freedom of the national/racial/civilizational community came into a state of tension: they were both mutually dependent and mutually exclusive. In this context, the delinquent – a person identified not by legally determinable actions but by inclinations and proclivities, i.e., by desire – could be the true individual, marked by a will to power not limited by ordinary standards of legality, responsibility and ethics. ‘You can’t judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man,’ says his Russian admirer [Conrad, 84-6].

Judgment, Nietzsche writes, 'is our oldest belief, our most habitual holding-true or holding untrue, an assertion or denial, a certainty that something is thus, and not otherwise, a belief that here we really know.... There is in every judgment the avowal of having encountered an identical case: it therefore presupposes comparison with the aid of memory' [Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 288-9]. Since the reality inhabited by the rogue sahib in the jungle is not comparable, let alone identical, to anything within the experience or memory of those who have never left Europe, whites who are alive to the possibilities of becoming (roguish, artistic), as opposed to merely being (white, knowledgeable), are beyond the judgment of the latter. The formulation is culturally and judicially relevant well beyond the Andamans and the Congo. It is the reason why General Dyer was celebrated rather than punished, and Lieutenant Calley was barely slapped on the wrist for having presided over the My Lai massacre.

Delinquent Space

Colonial culture was valuable, in part, precisely because it provided space for European delinquencies. Regarding the map of the non-European world, Conrad notes that pleasantly, invitingly blank (‘white’) spaces had become dark only when they were filled in with the names of places and rivers, i.e., as a consequence of colonization and familiarity [Conrad, 16]. Here, he anticipates an insight that Rebecca DeRoo has offered about French photography in colonial Algeria: modern techniques of graphic representation communicated both the idea that the colonized-and-photographed native was known and governable, and the idea that the native world was fundamentally unknowable [Rebecca DeRoo, ‘Colonial Collecting,’ 160]. The familiarity of the white man with the native world is thus complicated by space itself: it generates incomprehension, darkness and disorientation. Conrad insists that because Marlow (and he himself) actually went up-river in the Congo, they know the jungle better than the sailors and tourists who never venture beyond the ship and the shore [Conrad, 12]. But he was only too aware that he and Marlow were tied to their own boats and their own ribbon (or ‘snake’) of water; no matter how far they appeared to penetrate the land, the jungle remained a wall of darkness, frustrating sight, entry, knowledge and description. The attempt to penetrate becomes inseparable from madness and death.

Darkness is not so much an inherent feature of the jungle, as a phenomenon of the sahib-in-the-jungle. It is, in other words, a white experience. Conrad is not saying that natives do not live in a place of darkness or experience darkness. He is saying – or rather, implying, because he is not interested in saying anything about natives – that it is irrelevant whether they do or not. In the process, he establishes a modality that might be regarded as post-Orientalist: the colony is a self-contained and totally narcissistic white experience, in which natives appear exclusively as props and psychological signposts: pieces of ‘a sinister backcloth’ in a ‘sordid play’ [Conrad, 24].

Conrad, in that regard, is far removed from Kipling, who rather liked garrulous natives. He is closer to Portman, who used his camera to visualize the props, signposts and backcloth. The tension between sight and blindness that suffuses Conrad’s novel is only apparently dissolved in Portman’s work, who had captured the jungle on film and paper. Behind all the ethnographic posturing, Portman was sustaining a mystery that he may or may not have penetrated, and that he may or may not share fully with the viewer. Who, after all, was qualified to evaluate him or his knowledge? Not anthropologists in Oxbridge or Edinburgh, not middle-class householders in London, not churchmen, and certainly not natives. This is the peculiar perversity of the white king of the jungle: the suspect nature of his power over his environment becomes a thing of magic, if not beauty. It undermines and serves him simultaneously, making him the central character in his play or subject in his photograph.

Conrad’s vision of magical space is also aligned with Paul Carter’s point about land being featureless, blank and unmade until it is formed into landscape by the explorer’s experience [Conrad 23, Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 34-68, 153-5]. And as in Carter’s Australian setting, this landscaping colonialism is associated with failure, self-doubt and fear of death. Marlow enters the jungle only to be overwhelmed immediately by tropical disorientation: the despairing terror of the white man who has lost his bearings (and his marbles) in the tropics, which then come to be constituted by that terror. To borrow a point made by Obeyesekere about cannibalism, this is the overextended modern adventurer’s fear of being swallowed (by jungles, rivers, snakes and natives) [Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, 2-14]. As a cultural trope, it is very similar to a later sub-genre within science fiction: the narrative of the lonely astronaut on the lost ship or desert planet, inevitably dying, going mad, or mutating into something unrecognizable. Conrad’s colony – which is a colony only in the most precarious, ironic sense, because it is so little occupied and under control – is a foreshadowing of those later ‘alien experiences.’ Conrad is, in fact, explicit about this: ‘We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance…’ [Conrad, 56]. Science fiction lingers with neo-Gothic horror in the Belgian Congo, in the process constituting it as the ‘Belgian Congo.’

This alien but European world is not entirely empty, for it has two types of natives: the white man who has discovered his delinquency, and what Conrad simply calls niggers. In his gorgeously lyrical and insightful Islands and Beaches, Greg Dening outlined a mode of interaction between the two tribes. Delinquent whites, he wrote, functioned as beachcombers or maroons: men inhabiting a marginal strip between the sea and the jungle, trying – and failing – to establish a relationship of reciprocity with the indigenes [Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches, 120, 129.] The Russian seaman who hangs around Kurtz’s station is such a beachcomber: a cunning fool reminiscent of R.L. Stevenson’s maroon Ben Gunn, or a white man who has gone wild not by becoming Godlike, but by becoming childish. This is the fate not of the Nietzschean superman above ordinary morality and culpability, but of the hippie. But Kurtz too has tried, and failed, to establish ‘relations of reciprocity’ with niggers; that, in fact, is the substance of his madness and menace. So has Portman, with his ‘family’ of kidnapped aboriginal ‘boys’ and his Andamanese boat crews, war parties and photographers. They are all beachcombers in the process of being consumed by desire, albeit in different modes: sometimes furtive, sometimes domineering.

Colonial delinquency lies not just in the prioritization of desire, but also in the nature of the object of desire, which turns out to be alien, sinister and contagious. Conrad begins and ends Heart of Darkness by highlighting Marlow’s degeneration into an Oriental: sitting on a yacht on the Thames, he has the yogic pose ‘of a meditating Buddha,’ ‘an ascetic aspect,’ sunken cheeks, and ‘resembled an idol’ [Conrad, 10, 12, 117]. He is a foreshadowing of Kurtz. Not only must the white man enter the jungle as a native in order to understand the jungle, the jungle enters and remains in him even when he can return to Europe, and it can, in moments of meditative/hallucinatory insight, Orientalize the European terrain: the Thames estuary suddenly becomes a savage swamp swallowing Roman colonizers, ‘one of the dark places of the earth’ [Conrad, 12-3].

The erotic potential of this mutant/degenerate space is clear. Kurtz, who has gone beyond the river bank, is said to have presided over – not merely taken part in – ‘unspeakable rites’ that followed moonlight dances in African villages. What might those ‘unspeakable rites’ be? Conrad refuses to speak, but silence is itself visually suggestive, conjuring up fantastic images of sex, human sacrifice and cannibalism, the trinity that undergirded nineteenth-century Europe’s discourse of savagery. He imbues the relationship between Kurtz and his Russian follower with distinctly homoerotic overtones, prodding the latter to protest ‘It isn’t what you think’ [Conrad, 85]. Kurtz ‘lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts,’ Marlow observes [Conrad, 89]. Such erotic delinquency goes beyond ordinary savagery; it is a tropical mode of whiteness. Compared to it, ‘pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief’ [Conrad, 89].

Efficiency, Aesthetics and Tropical Sahibdom

Relief could, of course, be sought in normative whiteness as well. The modern fetish of expert knowledge was an obvious tool of inoculation against the jungle. Conrad makes a clear distinction, first, between the non-knowledge of the primitive and the cultural inheritance of the modern European. Even as he compares Europeans in Africa with Romans in ancient England, each disgusted, terrified and enthralled by his own incomprehension, he also establishes a difference: what saves us, he writes, is our obsession with efficiency. Efficiency is not something natives can learn: it is so alien to them that it kills them [Conrad, 14, 29]. By efficiency, Conrad means not just the ability get things done in the world, but the ability to turn inwards into modernity: to focus on the steamship and the timetable instead of the native and the jungle. Second, he distinguishes the knowledge of the beachcomber from the limited comprehension and aims of tourists and other metropolitan consumers. The latter’s own disdain for the native world functions as a veil and a fence, limiting them [Conrad, 12]. Portman, scathingly contemptuous of the superficiality of the outsider’s prejudices and understanding of ‘his’ jungle, would have agreed.

Efficiency – which includes ballistics, photography, ethnology, punishment and modern medicine (‘triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself’ [Conrad, 36]) – works in mysterious ways in the tropics. Marlow is Orientalized with calipers before he enters the jungle [Conrad, 21]. The measuring of his head by the doctor is, in a sense, an inoculation against savagery. In another sense, it is a pleasurable concession (the doctor is gleeful) that the inoculation will fail, that savagery – and madness, visible in the body – will inevitably claim Marlow. ‘I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting,’ Marlow remarks [Conrad, 34]. Calipers and science thus mark the edge of the jungle, where reason, health and whiteness end, and darkness and inversion begin. The camera functions similarly, and often in conjunction. It can nudge you over the edge into blackness, but it can also pull you back so that you can push others.

Just as pertinently, efficiency is constantly at risk of lapsing into absurdity, like the French warship shelling the blankness of the jungle [Conrad, 25]. Likewise, European discourses of criminality and law become nakedly absurd, as when Marlow sees the chain-gang of African convicts: ‘the outraged law, like the bursting shells had come to them, an insoluble mystery from over the sea’ [Conrad, 27]. At this point, language again falls out of step with reality: it is absurd to categorize savages as ‘criminals,’ ‘workers,’ or ‘rebels,’ Conrad implies [Conrad, 90]. There is, here, an implicit hierarchy of absurdities and mysteries. The mystery of the jungle (or rather, the self-in-the-jungle) for the white man is aesthetically valuable; the mystery of European law in the jungle, the criminalization of natives, and the digging of holes and erection of buildings as philanthropic exercises, is merely absurd.

The hierarchy marks also Portman’s outlook on the penal colony and on colonialism as a civilizing project. As an aesthete, he does not bother to hide his amusement when recounting that his predecessors had enacted rituals of trial and punishment for aboriginal ‘offenders’ that were wildly farcical and vulnerable to being hijacked by the punished [Sen, Savagery and Colonialism, 103]. For the white man who has embraced delinquency in colonialism, such civilized attempts at efficiency in the jungle become inside jokes of the practice of empire, in which the absurdity of conventional whiteness in the jungle becomes a source of uneasy entertainment for whites as well as natives. But there is a difference. For Portman, aesthetics (in the form of photography) generates room for ‘real’ expertise, whereas for the more distant Conrad – who is, after all, not quite British, or even Belgian – the racial-national predicament of the sahib in the jungle invalidates all expertise. The privileged knowledge of the colonial expert (‘I felt sure that they could not possibly know the things I knew’ [Conrad, 108]) is itself contaminated by what we would today (expertly) call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

More than Portman, Conrad is aware that in the face of efficient-technological absurdity, the European can propose only more efficiency. This awareness generates Marlow’s desire for rivets: undeniably imbedded in science and engineering, but also stripped down, uncomplicated, penetrating, perhaps capable of holding together the race and its foolhardy enterprise [Conrad, 45-6]. Rivets are efficiency unplugged. But Marlow’s rivets soon prove to be unreliable; they cannot prevent his expedition from passing into the realm of nightmares and racial-civilizational collapse. Like calipers and jungle trials, they become a satire of efficiency.

Conrad, and even Portman (whose strutting machismo did not always prevent his being spat on by the savages he sought to discipline and photograph) [Portman, v. 2, 801-2], was familiar with the dilemma of Orwell before the elephant: the sahib with his impeccably tailored clothes, gun or camera (or rivets) could at any moment be confronted with the elusiveness of authority. All three men were aware that such symbols of efficiency were basic to keeping up the charade of authority, which constituted ‘backbone’ in the colony [Conrad, 31]. But there is also a stark difference between Orwell on the one hand, and Conrad and Portman on the other, when it comes to facing the limits of efficiency in the jungle. For Orwell, the self-loathing that resulted from his awareness of the limits was deeply political, whereas for Conrad and Portman it is entirely aesthetic: even loss of face and racial effacement become a net (cultural) gain. Aesthetics thus compensates for the impotence of efficiency. Artists, Nietzsche writes, 'are productive, to the extent that they actually alter and transform; unlike men of knowledge, who leave everything as it is' [Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 318]. Conrad and Portman can acknowledge the political injustice of colonialism and racism. They can acknowledge the humanity of savages, and even take an ‘in their place we would do the same’ position [Conrad, 33]. They can be dismissive of the ‘It’s dirty work but it has to be done’ approach to empire that Kurtz (or Niall Ferguson, for that matter) appears to represent [Conrad, 94]. But neither man is very interested in these issues, except when they can be aestheticized through the pen or the camera.

The camera is of course a much more complex and mysterious piece of technology than the humble rivet, although its function is similarly direct, penetrating, ‘truthful.’ Unlike rivets, however, the camera has an overt aesthetic function, and that function is central to the integrity of colonialist culture. Aesthetics recuperates whiteness in the jungle when delinquency, demoralization and degeneration threaten to eradicate it. The recognition of his kinship with ‘niggers’ is, for Conrad, an aesthetic rather than a political awareness. It delivers a bigger thrill than any perception of total alienation [Conrad, 57]. Portman’s attitude is similar; he is consistently eager to defend and recover the Andamanese from the crudely dehumanizing racism of his compatriots. [M.V. Portman, ‘The Exploration and Survey of the Little Andaman,’ Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, September 1888.] He does not see them as his equals, but photography gives him a means of articulating and modulating the sameness, the inequality and his own excitement.

The modulation of alienness is critically important to the preservation of delinquent whiteness, and Conrad is not about to close the gap. The African fireman on Marlow’s steamer is as perversely entertaining as a dressed-up dog walking on two legs, Conrad writes; he ‘knows’ how to keep the boiler going, but ‘understands’ its workings in terms of angry spirits. This qualifies, without eliminating, the sympathy that Marlow/Conrad feels for him when he is killed [Conrad, 58, 78]. The Andamanese crewmen on Portman’s steamer and the naked boys who took Portman’s self-portraits might be viewed in this light, except that Portman is prouder of his proprietary relationship, i.e., in the contingency of the dog’s kinship to the human.

Portman’s ‘boys’ carry his camera equipment

For Conrad, any claim to ‘my savages’ would have been as tenuous and foolish as the colonial manager’s claim to ‘my jungle’ when it is the jungle that owns him [Conrad, 75]. Portman, however, is thrilled by the tenuousness not least because the authority of the ethnographic photographer holds off the charge of foolishness.

Conclusion

The slightly mad sahib in the jungle highlights a tension within colonialism between the possibilities of individual pleasure, self-aggrandizement and experimentation on the one hand, and on the other, statist projects that privilege the racialized community of committed citizens, administrators and employees. This clash shapes the perception of the rogue colonizer who appears to be reveling in, and to be infected by, the civilizational and actual sickness of his tropical environment. Conrad understands that the perception is itself insane. This is his critique of colonialism, but it is an aesthetic critique, not a political one. He articulates no project of decolonization. In that sense, it is a critique but not a rejection of the white man’s burden. It is, rather, a contemplative mode of consumption. Colonialist photography such as Portman’s might be viewed – in fact, was viewed by its intended audience, who acknowledged his ‘fatherhood’ of the islanders – in the same light.

Narratives and images from the Andaman Islands at the moment when the islanders came to be recognized as a ‘dying race’ can hardly be called a conventional ‘celebration’ of colonialism; they are too full of funereal lamentation. Portman, like Conrad, was highly conscious that the ‘efficiency’ of modern Europe had brought about the death of the savage, and that it could not be adequately redirected to reversing that death. At the same time, the repertoire of efficiency contained devices and practices – such as the camera, the photographic narrative, and rituals of picture-taking – that made it possible, on the one hand, to consume the death of the savage as an aesthetically satisfying funeral that foreshadowed one’s own demise. This aesthetic cannot be described in conventional terms like ‘beautiful’ any more than a jungle can be described as a ‘forest.’ It is an essentially delinquent aesthetic, corresponding to the delinquency of the white man who has been infected but also released by colonialism into previously unavailable interiorities: spaces of power and pleasure, including the pleasures of powerlessness and madness. It let loose a form of individuality for which contemporary Europe supplied the discursive material, and the colony the stage or studio.

On the other hand, the devices and practices undeniably engaged external spaces and entities: actual jungles and aliens. They were, as such, vital to the recuperation of whiteness in the tropics. It was a corrupted whiteness, but that corruption could be distanced and managed by its confinement in photographic narratives. Thus managed, the individual colonizer could emerge as an aesthete rather than a creature of efficiency, while aesthetics retained traces of efficiency through overt – and even ironic – reminders of technological prowess: cameras, calipers, rivets. This is, in a sense, another side of Christopher Pinney’s ‘salvage paradigm’ [Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica, 45], except that what is salvaged here is not a native world consigned to archaeology and anthropology, but whiteness in a space that threatens to obliterate it.

December 27, 2010

Sources cited

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Chakravarty, Gautam. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (Delhi: Rupa, 2001)

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Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979)

_______. The History of Sexuality v.1 (New York: Vintage, 1990)

Habermas, Jurgen. On the Pragmatics of Communication (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)

Hight, Eleanor and Sampson, Gary. Colonialist Photography: Imagining Race and Place (New York: Routledge, 2002)

Man, E.H. ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands,’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, v. 12 (1883)

Obeyesekere, Gananath. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968)

Pinney, Christopher. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

Portman, M.V. A History of Our Relations with the Andamanese (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1899)

_______. ‘The Exploration and Survey of the Little Andamans,’ Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, September 1888

_______. Portman Collection, archives of the Anthropological Survey of India.

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Sen, Satadru. Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean: Power, Pleasure and the Andaman Islanders (Edinburgh: Routledge, 2010)

________. ‘Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M.V. Portman and the Andamanese,’ American Ethnologist 36:2 (2009)

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Writing Beyond the Rubble

2011-12-07T20:39:00.047-05:00

I first read Heinrich Böll in German, in an armchair by the fireplace at the Union Hall pub in Brooklyn. My German is no more than rudimentary, so it was just as well that it was a short story: Die Blasse Anna, or Pale Anna. The novels, which I read in English, would have taken me months in the original. Even the short story took more than one sitting, but immersion in sentences that yielded their secrets teasingly, almost reluctantly, is the sort of exercise one takes on when the pressure to publish has more or less gone away.

Die Blasse Anna is the sort of story a Wehrmacht veteran who has come back to his hometown at the end of the war, coldly alienated from everybody around him. On the surface, it fits a genre of alienated-veteran literature (and cinema) that became established in modern culture after the discovery of shell-shock as a social phenomenon during the First World War. America has its own version of this culture, in narratives of the troubled Vietnam veteran. But Die Blasse Anna is different from, say, The Deer Hunter or Born on the Fourth of July, let alone Taxi Driver. In American vet-lit, the basic crisis is usually that the returned soldier, traumatized by what he experienced ‘over there,’ is alienated by the discovery that the home front has not shared – and cannot share – his trauma. People in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire have gone on with their lives, untouched by murder and fire. Relating to women presents a particular problem.

In Trummerliteratur, or the ‘rubble literature’ that came out of the ruins of German cities after the Second World War, the home front is not so much indifferent as obliterated. In an inversion of a long-standing trope of war fiction in which relatives wait for a soldier who may have vanished, the living soldier returns to find home bombed out and family dead or disappeared. There is no normalcy to battle or resume, and women can appear more or less impenetrable. As Hanna Schissler has noted, German men and women experienced the war in ways that were so different that they found it difficult to communicate those experiences to each other afterwards [Schissler, “’Normalization’ as Project: Some Thoughts on Gender Relations in West Germany During the 1950s,” 362]. Nevertheless, the devastation of the land, and the scars that mark once-beautiful women who have managed to survive, themselves contain the possibilities of communication and renewal. Die Blasse Anna is bleak but surprisingly optimistic.

What is communicated and what is renewed in postwar German fiction, including the work not only of well-known writers like Böll and Günter Grass, but also a forgotten-and-rediscovered author like Gert Ledig? Not normalcy, surely, in spite of the West German government’s explicit quest for ‘normalization.’ I want to use this essay to ruminate about what is abnormal, or peculiar, about literature and societies that come out of total devastation and defeat. This is because postwar Germany and Japan are somewhat peculiar societies, in which the relationship between the citizen and the state is different from what is evident in America, even after Vietnam. America is, after all, a country in which war is both ubiquitous as a social and political concern, and remote as an experience. All American combat veterans are Veterans of Foreign Wars. Battle damage, dead civilians, mass rapes and refugees have been overseas phenomena since the Civil War. A nation with a massively militarized economy has not experienced total war since 1865.

It is fair to say that that innocence, as much as any cynicism, undergirds the hyper-security state in America. It has enabled a pervasive militarism in foreign policy, domestic politics and culture: not only the eagerness to use military force, but also the blank checks for ‘defense’ budgets, the cult of the Commander in Chief, the sentimental worship of soldiers, the overweening paranoia, the willingness to grant the government extraordinary powers over the citizen (to say nothing of non-citizens), the militarization of the police, and the saturation of the popular media by war porn. This is not exceptional at all; to greater or lesser degrees (mostly lesser), it is typical of the modern-western experience, and of the mentality of liberal-nationalist citizenship worldwide. Nor, evidently, is the experience of war a sufficient antidote; the French are clearly not exempt from the national-militarist norm, Verdun notwithstanding. French nationhood did not have to be salvaged from the mud of disgrace and defeat and rebuilt from scratch in either 1918 or (more fortuitously) 1945. In the case of a country like India, which has had no war since 1858 (border clashes and imperial deployments do not count, especially in a society without a history of conscription), innocent militarism is a hallmark of the middle-class sense of arrival, the yearning for a modern rite of passage. It becomes possible then for actresses to autograph bombs about to be loaded on to fighter jets in the latest border skirmish (to the general approval of a television audience infatuated with the American Way), or armchair hawks to write breathless ‘fantasy scenarios’ in which the bloody Chinese are taken down a notch, with or without nuclear strikes.

With qualifications that should become apparent over the course of this essay, I want to suggest that postwar German (and Japanese, although I will not get into that here) culture contains, not only in its margins but also in its mainstream, something new, admirable and fragile: nationhood without an overt militarist component. It is a cultural phenomenon with powerful political implications, and a strong connection to the trajectory of the postwar (West) German state.

One explanation that has been offered for the pervasive anti-militarism that became apparent early in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany is that it reflected the very low levels of legitimacy this state enjoyed among its own citizens. West Germans, Michael Geyer argues, did not so much reject the idea of the aggressively weaponized nation-state as the idea of fighting and dying for a poor imitation of Germany [Geyer, “Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons,” 383-5]. Geyer, however, also notes that by the end of 1950s, the popular attitude had undergone a double shift, becoming more accepting of militarization in the form of conscription and the Bundeswehr, and simultaneously evolving modes of citizenship and manhood that were detached and utilitarian in their relationship to the state. The bourgeois world of family, money-making and consumerism – the culture of the West German ‘economic miracle’ – had become a refuge from the state, allowing for a military posture that was by and large defensive, i.e., geared only to the protection of private normalcy and normative privacy [Geyer, 391-2].

That peculiarly West German emphasis on a ‘return to normalcy,’ which was a pillar of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship, was based on constructions that were often unclear and inconsistent. What exactly was the intended point of return? Was it to the immediate pre-war period? To the Weimar republic? To the Kaiser’s Germany? Perhaps obviously, none of these possibilities can be singled out as the ‘true answer,’ and none can be entirely excluded. In the early 1950s, when Böll had begun to cement his reputation as a writer, a large majority of West Germans recalled the immediate postwar years as the worst time of their lives; in comparison, even the war years were ‘normal’ [Geyer, 383-5]. Weimar might offer a more enlightened site of nostalgia, and it did provide West Germany with its national colors. But as Peter Gay has pointed out, Weimar democracy was by and large unloved in its own time, indifferently defended even by democrats and laid waste by the inner rot of fascism [Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, 1-22]. It could not offer West Germans an uncomplicated normalcy any more than could the imperial state that precipitated the Great War.

The quest for normalcy was only superficially an attempt to ‘restore’ something lost in the Second World War. Volker Berghann has argued, for instance, that it marked the fulfillment, rather than the restoration, of bourgeois hegemonism: that the norms of normalcy were, in fact, at least partially new. Berghann has noted that by the mid-Weimar period, a weak bourgeois economic and cultural order had emerged in Germany. This bourgeoisie – held back by business elites, the Junker military aristocracy, and its own suspicion of mass culture and mass consumption – was badly disrupted by the triple disaster of the Depression, Nazi populism and repression, and war. That disruption opened up a postwar moment pregnant with new possibilities, including both the proletarian and the fascist. What happened instead, however, is that a new ‘corporatist’ elite – inspired and backed by the US, and reinforced by Cold War imperatives – was able to move into a position of political, economic and cultural hegemony, having established parliamentary understandings with big business, organized labor and the state. They promoted a bourgeois culture that, to use Peter Alheit’s phrase, constituted an ‘everyday modernity’: it was simultaneously respectable, accommodating of artistic-intellectual nonconformity, and democratic in the sense of being organized around mass consumption [Volker Berghann, “Recasting Bourgeois Germany,” 326-40]. It is in this cultural context that Trummerliteratur might be located and unpacked.

Abnormal Literature in a Normal World

Böll’s writing is the literature of troubled normalcy as much as it is the literature of rubble. It is, in fact, a series of conversations between the normal and the broken, and about their interpenetration: a horror of normalcy that interferes, but never adequately, with the desire to leave behind the shocking abnormality of war and genocide. The normalcy of the 1950s is identified quite explicitly as a self-serving affectation of the bourgeois world. Böll’s sense of his own ambiguous place in this world is wryly laid out in Billiards At Nine O’Clock, in which a particularly respectable character instructs his wife about an annoying writer: ‘And when he phones…say I’m not at home. I find being with him unbearable and unproductive. I simply get bored with him. He’s always talking about bourgeois and non-bourgeois, and I suppose he thinks he’s the latter’ [Billiards, 281]. A similar writer flits across The Clown: ‘Nobody takes him seriously, he’s just being kept on out of charity. Only sometimes he creeps to the phone and talks a lot of nonsense’ [Clown, 230].

The obligation to ‘talk nonsense’ – i.e., sounding abnormal – is tied by Böll to the recovery of the truth of what people want in their social relations, which is itself tied to freedom from violence and oppression. The bourgeois ‘restoration’ in West Germany, Dorothee Wierlin and Elisabeth Heinemann have shown, was also a project of gender: an attempt to repair the masculinity of men damaged by wounds, defeat, disgrace and incarceration, and rattled by the autonomous economic, social and sexual roles women played during and immediately after the war (including the ‘Veronika Dankeschön’ phenomenon of women who seemed to prefer occupation troops to German veterans, and the emergence in East Germany of a female-inclusive workforce). Repair meant engineering a ‘new’ patriarchy of male breadwinners and female home-makers [Wierlin, ‘Mission to Happiness,’ 110-8; Heinemann, ‘The Hour of the Woman,’ 21-35]. Böll connects this newly fetishized domestic norm to an older, familiar, set of problems. In The Clown, he depicts a female sexuality that can be driven either by compassion (that of whores and kind women) or by obligation (that of whore and wives), but never by desire [Clown, 179]. Desire is withered and warped by grossly unjust arrangements of power, Böll suggests, whether that arrangement is in the family, the church, or the state. It is a simultaneous indictment of totalitarianism and patriarchy, an acknowledgment of their connectedness, and a reminder that the connection remains relevant even – or especially – in normal times.

Böll is clear about the gendered nature of violence and public affairs: men’s hands are for shooting, hitting, shaking hands and writing non-negotiable checks, he writes, whereas women’s hands spread butter on bread or push hair away from foreheads [Clown, 188-9]. We find an echo of this in Grass’ fascination with nurses, which is explicitly connected to guilt and atonement. Nursing (unlike doctoring, with its stench of Josef Mengele and his manly-scientist colleagues) becomes the opposite of killing – a curiously Gandhian formulation of no-nonsense caretaking unconcerned with the masculine business of political affiliations [Onion, 160]. For Grass, nursing is also mischievously eroticized, and this is a counter-erotica running against the grain of the eroticization of death in prewar German youth culture [Tin Drum, 461, 467]. It is eroticized not least by the fact it touches young men who have also been touched by death: an appeal to life (like his sister’s midwifery), not nationalist necrophilia.

This is, of course, the adoption of a very conventional dichotomy of gender, but it is a strategic adoption, drawing masculinity out beyond the family into the world of public consequences. ‘His voice had been that of the masterful husband, the true German, and his ‘Well, it’s about time’ had sounded like ‘Shoulder arms!’’ Böll writes [Clown, 201]. In spite of the images of buttered bread, Böll is uninterested in sentimentalizing women as ‘good’; his stories are full of female cheerleaders for violence. Nevertheless, women represent a sliver of comfort and a possibility of salvation, which is connected to their suffering condition in a violent patriarchy. (We see here Böll’s Catholicism coming to the surface.) Whores are not all that bad when they are women; they are, to a considerable extent, redeemed by femininity and compassion. But whorishness is something else: ‘If our era deserves a name, it would have to the called the era of prostitution,’ he writes [Clown, 234]. The respectable, in other words, are the true whores.

Billiards and The Clown are perhaps Böll’s most direct attacks on the implications of the search for normalcy in the aftermath – and the midst – of the extreme trauma. In The Clown, he slashes at the two-facedness of bourgeois memory: half-drunk, middle-aged, thoroughly respectable men who experienced the war, with its crimes and horrors, now wax nostalgic and tell each other it wasn’t all that bad [The Clown, 112]. The same people were deeply complicit in the crimes and horrors: the narrator’s mother sent his sister off to die (which functions as the central horror of the story), and there is a rather touching portrait of the reformed Nazi Herbert Kalick, who as a child tormented children and adults who were insufficiently patriotic [Clown, 18-22].

A character like Kalick, and Pelzer in Group Portrait, can be touching because Böll does not simply conjure up monsters and leave it at that. These are often monsters who see themselves as repentant, who want to rehabilitate themselves, but do not know how and are too complacent to push themselves very hard. A part of Böll’s attack on postwar respectability is his observation that returned exiles and reformed Nazis both found it easy to make big statements about reconciliation, tolerance and democracy, and to abjure grand evils like war and genocide, but ‘failed to grasp that the secret of the terror lay in the little things’: a gesture, a phrase, small cruelties and betrayals [Clown, 176]. That failure must be condemned more as a class characteristic than as an individual perversion, and for that reason, it is not entirely closed to empathy.

The German bourgeoisie, Böll writes in his memoirs, were opportunistic in their response to the Nazis and were left with no voice or even imagination of their own [What’s to Become of the Boy?, 18-22, 72]. His schoolteachers, for instance, were ‘blinded by Hindenburg – a fatal attitude of many decent Germans, patriotic not nationalistic, certainly not Nazist but very much the veteran.’ More than Hitler, Hindenburg – an icon of respectable nationalism and military heroics, and a man that Böll and his father both held responsible for the Nazi seizure of power [Boy, 10] – is the specter that hangs over the calamitous past on the edge of the present in Billiards; his is the name whispered reverently by the dying child. This well-meaning class of citizens assiduously prepared German youth for death, Böll writes, imbuing death and murder with patriotic glory: ‘In the final analysis, the fatal role played by these highly educated, unquestionably decent German high school teachers led to Stalingrad and made Auschwitz possible: that Hindenburg blindness’ [Boy, 35-6]. The cult of patriotic death that was a long-standing part of German Romanticism and that continued to thrive in the Weimar Republic [Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism, 322-51] is thus located squarely among the decent, well-intentioned bourgeoisie and its icons, and not among some raving, vicious fringe.

Because it is difficult to issue blanket condemnations of the decent and well-intentioned, the disapproving author is himself left not knowing what to ‘do’ with his disapproval. When the adolescent Henrietta dies her utterly respectable death in The Clown (shredded, it is suggested, on an anti-aircraft battery – a predicament so grotesque that it must be disinterred from the pages of Ledig’s Payback), her brother sets the house on fire in what is an accident but is also a firestorm of impotent rage and grief, in addition to being a sad, absurd parody of an air raid. Meanwhile, the mother worries about whether insurance will cover the water damage from the fire hoses [The Clown, 219-20]. But Böll is also more ready than Grass to acknowledge those whose respectability developed cracks of dissidence, like the police officer from his own youth who retired early ‘because he could no longer stand the sight of the bloody towels in his precinct’ [Boy, 14]. Having kept his own distance from the Nazis more effectively than Grass, Böll is better positioned to admire small acts of integrity. Grass tends to spread his shame around. The scarecrow is created in man's image, even when it is derived from Prussian history, he notes. 'All nations are arsenals of scarecrows. But among them it's the Germans, first and foremost, even more than the Jews, who have it in them to give the world the archetypal scarecrow someday' [Dog Years, 41, 57, 541].

For Grass, shame is pervasive because it is inseparable from the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of ‘good citizenship.’ He provides two striking examples of this connection, one apparently harmless, the other darker. The first emerges from Grass’ narrative of the epidemic of theft that breaks out in Danzig when Oskar starts breaking shop windows. Respectable citizens who would not break the glass themselves, and who would ordinarily condemn vandals and thieves, help themselves to the goods when the window is already broken [Tin Drum, 117-20]. The self-restraint of the respectable – the core of the social contract of modern citizenship – is real, Grass suggests, but it is also fragile: once the glass is broken, ethics are easily suspended, and anything from theft to genocide becomes permissible and almost irresistible.

The second is the brilliant analogy of Santa Claus and the Gasman. Germans in the 1930s, Grass writes, welcomed the Gasman thinking he was Santa Claus. Even when their faith in Santa had collapsed, they persisted with the Gasman, because he provided love, especially the self-love and patriotism of the citizen in his historical community: that warm glow of nationhood. And even when that love had shown itself to be cannibalistic and deadly, they persisted out of hope that the disaster would end at some point (but not immediately, because they could imagine no alternative), when they might resume their lives or start over. Here, Grass raises the basic moral dilemma of how to ‘stop’ being evil, and how to start over as not-evil. It is not, of course, a problem for Germans alone, but for all bourgeois citizens of militarized nation-states. Germans, ironically, have gone some way towards finding a solution via catastrophic defeat, although not entirely convincingly. Grass and Böll are among the unconvinced. Grass puts forward the analogy of sausages and books, both consumed with a willed nonchalance about the politics of their making. There is, he suggests, an inevitable not-knowing, silence and complicity, and this is a part of bourgeois citizenship in a society in which political and economic packages, ideas, and language itself, are sold like sausages [Tin Drum, 187-9].

After 1936, Böll writes, even his Hitler-hating family was advised by the block warden to display a Nazi flag, and did so. It was, Böll notes a bit defensively, a small flag, and size mattered [Boy, 37]. Such near-mandatory flag-waving, as we saw in America in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks (when patriotic goons visited ‘ethnic’ businesses to enquire ‘Where’s your flag?’), goes to the predicament of the individual confronted by the nationalism of the larger society. It is essentially a fascist predicament, and the obscurity of culpability in such circumstances is not necessarily disingenuous. It is a predicament in which the meaning of normalcy can break down, and the line between dissidence and madness can disappear completely. In The Clown (and also in Billiards), Böll writes about children whose parents did not give them enough to eat during the war even when there was food [The Clown, 154]. There is no overtly heroic political purpose in this deprivation; instead, there are suggestions of warped priorities which shade into heroics. Böll shudders about ‘children who are forever getting porridge or milk stuffed into them’ [Clown, 211], and adds: ‘I do not want my children to be forced to eat.’ This revulsion can, of course, be read as Catholic self-flagellation, i.e., an invocation of penance and asceticism. But it can also be read in terms of an analogy that Jessa Crispin made in her afterword to Billiards: the German trope of the Rabenmutter or ‘raven mother’ who refuses to feed her offspring. The depriving mother in Billiards – who, like Böll’s own mother, despises Hitler passionately – is locked up in a lunatic asylum. Her madness is inseparable from her rejection of normal indulgence and bourgeois self-absorption in an brutal, abnormal moral environment.

That mad normalcy, Böll suggests, saturates the memory on which the postwar present is built. Narrators and authors cannot escape the madness, or at any rate, a touch of panic. Maja Zehfuss has noted that any attempt to outline a monolithic German way of ‘remembering’ the Nazi years is likely to run into serious difficulties because of the sheer variety of experiences and agendas involved in remembering and narrating. Much of the time, the differentiation of victims from perpetrators – and hence the acquisition of a reliable moral identity by the national citizen who has emerged like a Phoenix from the conflagration – is impossible, but the exercise cannot be abandoned [Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory, 1-31, 112, 176-8].

The flipped-around nature of veracity and memory when the self is itself divided into perpetrator and victim, the silent and the loquacious, is characteristic of Böll’s work: what actually happened seems unreal in recollection, and what is remembered may not be true [Clown, 171]. In Group Portrait With Lady, he wanders among a multitude, all touched by horror, as they resume normal lives. The ‘group’ is, of course, the nation itself. In Die Blasse Anna, the landlady keeps asking the returned veteran if he knew her son, who has not returned: he keeps denying it and is not lying, but in a sense he did know him, and he loves the dead man’s disfigured fiancée. Just as uniform narratives can mask fragmented experiences, fragmentation masks secret identifications. The cacophony of sources and voices in Group Portrait, frequently unreliable and comic, and the equal unreliability and ludicrousness of the narrator’s own voice, establishes the chaotic, splintered nature of the historical-reconstructive exercise, the unavailability of objective, black-and-white and disinterested truths, especially when one is trying to tell the story of an entire society that has just gone through a paroxysm of violence, guilt and trauma and then asserted its normal, optimistic condition. (Böll foreshadows Salman Rushdie and Midnight’s Children in this regard, as of course does Grass.)

The basement of respectability is not uniformly bleak. Group Portrait, for instance, is permeated by a dry humor. Billiards, however, is a far darker novel, nearly consumed by loss. The desperate innocence that marks Böll’s first novel, The Train Was On Time, is not in evidence here. Billiards is populated by characters obsessed by age, experience, guilt, remorse, questions of hate and forgiveness. They inhabit a past that keeps invading the present, or rather, a present that keeps collapsing into the past. Time is a crucially important player, but whereas The Train is charged with the fear of dying young, i.e., falling out of time, Billiards is about the horror of being caught in eternity while others disappear around you, and you are either complicit in their disappearance or helpless.

The awareness of complicity generates in the conscientious individual an obligation of contrarian citizenship and a dilemma that is more persistent in Germany than in most other places. Billiards, like Michael Verhoeven’s film Das Schreckliche Mädchen, is a project of disturbing silences and normalcies in the postwar republic, digging up not so much the lies as the unspoken things in the pasts of the respectable: neighbors, local politicians, priests. The revelation of Grass’ service in the Waffen SS is relevant here, not least because it raises the question just what people are supposed to do with their complicity. Shout it from the rooftops? Turn themselves in? Self-flagellate indefinitely? For Böll, this is not straightforward even in the case of former Nazis, because the ubiquitous nature of complicity is tied up with the ubiquity of victimhood. Böll’s characters, like the wider population they represent, ‘did it’ to themselves, and they know it. They brought on the deaths of their children and parents and siblings, and to be a survivor is to live with that knowledge. This complicates their victimhood, but it does not invalidate it. Living with the knowledge of your own culpability in addition to your grief, and being unable to forgive yourself, is after all a deeper pathos than simply being the victim of somebody else’s malevolence, which is ultimately not all that different from an accident. Accidents can be talked about; the murder and rape of relatives tends to induce speechlessness. As Grass wrote, while obliquely revealing that his mother may have been raped by Soviet troops, sometimes “there are no words” [Onion, 285].

Clearly, Grass does not condemn silence unequivocally. The dignity of the individual requires reconciling the freedom to cling to a measure of privacy, with the need to bear witness. The problem is the silence of the ‘innocent’ and the safe, and one’s own silence. Regarding his youth in Nazi Germany, Grass castigates himself for having ‘failed to ask questions’ even as schoolmates and teachers disappeared around him [Onion, 15, 35]. This failure, he writes, was productive. It generated the silences – the stories that are also missing stories – that seeped into the sausages and books, permeated the willed ignorance that is both genuine and affected, and eventually secreted shame, which further produced both the urge to conceal and the imperative of revelation/confession/atonement [Onion, 110-11, 196, 206].

The simultaneity of ‘realness’ and ‘affectedness’ in the ignorance of those caught up in German collective guilt – or the guilt of My Lai, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Kashmir and the Gaza Strip – is enabled, Grass suggests, by the permissions and requirements of national citizenship. These include the nearly inescapable requirement to reinforce the silence about the culpability of one’s own group with volubility about the crimes of the other group [Onion, 236]. Grass’ preoccupation with this dilemma shapes his view that collective guilt – i.e., the guilt of nations – cannot be expiated by ‘getting over it’ [Tin Drum, 416]. Collective guilt is real and pervasive, and it is not something that one can ‘move on’ from (in the American way of ‘looking ahead, not backwards’ after the crimes of the Bush-Cheney regime). Grass read Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernst Jünger’s conventionally heroic-nationalist Storm of Steel at roughly the same time, while waiting to be called up. He later saw this simultaneity as a bracing reminder of the limited impact that elegantly arranged words can have on the ideological direction taken by young citizens. In any case, he wrote, even the literature of realist horror soon becomes banal, derivative, effectively silent [Onion, 95-7, 125]. There are no words.

Between Lvov and Cernauti: Locating Horror Between the Lines

The inadequacy of words becomes particularly acute when the writer deals directly with the war. This is not apparent on the surface. Gert Ledig’s Payback, for instance, can be read as a description of seventy minutes of an air raid on a German city; it is probably the most extraordinarily ‘realistic’ novel ever written about the experience of being under fire. Below the surface, however, it is actually anti-description, a radically new type of story-telling marked by the collapse of language, speech, sanity, thought itself – the ‘higher functions of the brain,’ as Zehfuss put it. Everything is reduced to and distorted by the ticking of clocks, humanity is essentially eradicated; what remains is ‘an animal walking upright’ until it is dead [Payback, 179]. Absurdity becomes both the companion and the alternative to horror. In Ledig’s The Stalin Front (in German, Die Stalinorgel, or ‘The Stalin Organ,’ which was the German soldier’s nickname for the Katyusha artillery rocket), horror lies not only in the casual brutalization of the human body, but in absurdity itself: the absurdity and duplicity of a court-martial in the middle of a chaotic retreat, carried out by officers whose officiousness barely disguises their cynicism and dishonesty [The Stalin Front, 138-41, 184-95]. Sanity is revealed to be a fragile cover, as unreliable in friends as in enemies. The murder of the Wehrmacht sergeant by a German officer unhinged by cowardice, horror and self-hate is strikingly similar to the murder, in Böll’s And Where Were You, Adam?, of the Jew Ilona Kartök by the music-loving camp commander Fiskeit, song cut off by gunfire.

Yet even the debris of thought has its place in the culture of the twentieth century. And Where Were You, Adam? is, among other things, an articulate reflection on the sudden and absurd nature of death in wartime: blown away while shitting painfully by a cesspool, blown away while fetching wine for your epicurean colonel, blown away by accidentally stepping on an unexploded bomb while surrendering, blown away after successfully deserting, blown away while singing in a state of rapture (and in a concentration camp at that). In every case, the treatment of death is unsentimental, brutal, but undeniably literary. There is, in Group Portrait, an intense account of surviving an air raid in the spring of 1945. Böll was describing the thousand-bomber attack on Cologne on March 2, 1945. Dresden and Hamburg come to mind right away, with their preserved images and narratives of burned children and shrunken adults. Implicitly and indirectly, the ghosts of Vonnegut, Heller and Ledig are invoked. Böll is writing, like other writers, about the ubiquitous horror, moral perversion and literary absurdity of modern civilization.

What then are words inadequate for? It is worth bearing in mind that it was long debated whether Dresden was a war crime, and those debates have not been resolved. There is a lingering disconnect between morality and legality at the heart of the horror/civilization, and the awareness of this disconnect is a basic marker of rubble literatures. For Böll, the direct description of reality – i.e., the normalcy of perception and narration – fails when confronted with the moral dimensions of the horror in which Germans had been involved. An indirect reference is needed. The Train Was On Time places its protagonist Andreas in a specific yet generic zone of horror, located somewhere in Galicia between the cities of Lvov and Cernauti. ‘Between Lvov and Cernauti’ is the geography of Böll's own military experience. A euphemism and an abstraction, it is also a foggy and surreal killing field dotted with death camps and emptied ghettos, pseudo-secrecy, guilt and even salvation. It crops up repeatedly in Böll’s writing, more than central France, where he also fought. In Group Portrait, the Russian prisoner, who is probably Jewish, is named Boris Lvovich Koltovsky, Koltov being another Galician town.

Böll’s choice of Galicia was not idiosyncratic. Georg Trakl, whose poems the young Böll first read just as the Nazis came to power in Germany [Boy, 9], and whose work runs through Böll’s stories like a fiercely guarded thread of anti-militarist revulsion, had gone to Galicia as a medic in the Great War, shot himself in the head almost immediately, and died soon afterwards from a self-administered drug overdose.

The wild pipe organs of the winter storm

are like a people’s grim wrath,

like the crimson surge of battle,

defoliated stars.

With shattered brows, with silver arms,

night reaches out towards the dying soldiers.

In the shadow of the autumn ash-tree

the souls of the slaughtered sigh.

A thorny wilderness winds around the city.

Along bleeding stairwells the moon chases

the terrified women.

Wild wolves have broken through the gate.

[Trakl, “The Eastern Front”]

Where exactly is this place, Galicia, the very sound of which reminds Böll of snakes and knives? A phantom on the map of postwar Europe, it is sometimes in Poland, sometimes in Austria, sometimes in Russia, sometimes in Germany, sometimes located almost entirely in Andreas’ mounting fear. It is similar, in that sense, to Conrad’s location of the ‘heart of darkness,’ and to Coppola’s idea of a lost zone of deep horror somewhere near the Vietnam-Cambodian border, assigned less to either Vietnam or Cambodia than to an American horror.

Trakl and Galicia represented darkness and death, but they also represented a slender chance of salvation.

Cold metal oozes from my forehead.

Spiders explore my heart.

There is a light that dies in my mouth.

At night I found myself in a meadow

Thick with filth and the dust of stars.

In the hazelbush

Crystal angels were ringing, again.

[Trakl, “De Profundis II”]

It is in Galicia that Andreas, the protagonist of Böll’s first novel, prays for the Jews before he disappears. Darkness cannot be honestly bypassed, Böll suggests. Grass also read Trakl – who himself had read Holderlin and Nietzsche in ways that were useless to the Nazis – as a cultural fragment retrieved from the rubble of fascism and war [Onion, 274, 304, 410]. He read Goethe too, of course. He notes the luminousness of Goethe’s poetry, but he also sees in it a certain intolerance [Tin Drum, 78]. Here, he not only anticipates Greenfeld’s point about Goethe being both for and against the Enlightenment [Greenfeld, 310-3], he suggests that intolerance lay in Goethe’s affiliation with the Enlightenment.

We see here Grass and Böll attempt to invert a basic structure of German nationalism by recapturing its ambivalence about the Enlightenment. For Grass, Trakl-and-Goethe, not to mention Rasputin-and-Goethe, represent interpenetrating, mutually implicated aspects of the modern German self (technically, Trakl was Austrian, but so was Hitler), and these selves are geographically available as East and West. One is not either luminous-Goethe or seductively-dark-Rasputin/Trakl; one is necessarily both. The Germany of Trakl and Rasputinphilia defined itself in opposition to the West, overlapped with vast areas and cultures of eastern Europe, and was disrupted by the Iron Curtain. The Second World War, when Germany literally went east, and then the East Prussian expulsions, when twelve million ethnic Germans became refugees going west, were in a sense the climactic convulsions of that earlier ‘east’ Germany. Then, even a Rhinelander like Böll could become obsessed with Galicia. Grass, of course, was already there in the east, in the immediate proximity of horror.

Like Galician towns, the trains of Böll’s first novel stand in for words. They form an intensely symbolic shorthand, traversing the east-west axis, representing but also suggesting the difficulty of representing other things: not only the ‘punctuality claim’ of fascist regimes and the technological confidence of Europe, but also sealed capsules that carry motley collections of virgins, rapists and the raped off into surreal, foggy places. They reflect also the trains carrying people into the death camps. The thoroughly respectable modern experience of train travel becomes inseparable from coercion, death, dirt, putrid air, the press of sweaty bodies, high anxiety. Anxiety-charged trains and night-and-fog imagery surface again, and repeatedly, in Billiards, like nightmares breaking through the soothing normalcy of the bourgeois world of the West German economic miracle. There is a hallucinatory quality about the stories, as if what has happened is scarcely comprehensible or describable in rational terms; one awakens from the nightmare into other nightmares.

The Architecture of Anti-Monuments

Böll was born into a family of architects. Not surprisingly, architecture surfaces repeatedly in his books: as a profession, a problem and a metaphor. Architecture was a matter of direct political significance in Böll’s Germany. His boyhood overlapped the brief ascendancy of unburdened, airy, modern Bauhaus over brooding, Romantic, neo-Gothic building, when Weimar architects like Walter Gropius sought to move beyond the culture of Wilhelmian Germany into a new civilization [Gay, 99]. His writing career paralleled the rebuilding of cities shattered by the war. And in between had come the years when overbearing architecture became a statement of Nazi ideology, and the science of building and blowing up took on additional national functions.

One function of architecture, Böll understood, is the facilitation of memory: cityscapes, churches, tombs, obelisks and arches of triumph serve to memorialize not only the private and the everyday, but also the public and the historic. This memorializing function is particularly vital to the institution of the nation state, which not only appropriates the structures of the past as its monuments, but obsessively builds its own. Every state-affiliated building becomes a potential war memorial; as Grass suggested in The Tin Drum, even a post office could be a monument waiting for its war. (Anybody who has visited an American post office, with its massively squat exterior, sheets of armored glass, interlocked bullet-proof windows and conspicuously mounted flag might agree.) These monuments have a fundamental importance within the bourgeois self-image and self-esteem: to remembering oneself as a member of a deep community whose state of beatitude is actually the state of war. This is a form of remembering that middle-class citizens of ‘lesser’ nations must learn in the process of learning nationhood, citizenship and middle-class-ness: a point that Amitav Ghosh makes brilliantly in The Shadow Lines, in which the elderly Indian nationalist becomes demented in her admiration for England’s cult of soldiers’ graves and war monuments, recognizing them as temples of nationhood. For writers like Grass and Böll, therefore, the critique of the militarized nation state and related bourgeois fetishes necessarily included an anti-monumental vision of architecture: an assault on the built-up structures of memory that could be deployed to serve the state.

Grass rejects oppressively monumental buildings (which fail to protect their occupants in any case) in favor of the light, the fragile, the whimsical and the transient: the house of cards, even cigarettes that are smoked away in minutes. When Oskar stands at the Atlantic Wall on the eve of the Normandy invasion, Grass connects the concrete of pillboxes and monuments not only to Speer and the Nazis, but to a century of boredom, barbarism and mysticism. ‘Concrete is treacherous,’ he writes. In front of this concrete, nuns are shot; in this concrete, puppies are buried alive. Postwar German architecture relies heavily and discreetly on stone scavenged from graveyards, Grass notes, and he himself worked in this trade in his days as a stone-cutter. Inevitably, he perceives a creeping reversion to monumentality, as well as unthinking and secret continuities with the Nazi past [Tin Drum, 227-30, 315-9, 324, 418]. The re-use of tombstones indicates both the deceptiveness of monumentality, and the transience of identities [Peeling the Onion, 253-5]. He perceives also that gravestones are a valued commodity in postwar Germany: death and memory are marketable assets in the economic miracle. As a writer, no less than as a stone-cutter, he is conscious of being a player in this market. And by literally imbricating old tombstones in the new buildings of West Germany, Grass evokes a forgetful, rather than memorializing, cannibalization of the past.

For Böll in particular, the location at the outset of his writing career is crucial; he is remembering from the ruins. He retains the rubble even when the rebuilding of Germany was well advanced. Billiards, published in 1959 (the same year as The Tin Drum), is almost a literal example of Trummerliteratur, with rubble taking on an undeniable moral significance in the story. Robert, the demolition expert serving in a war launched by a regime he despises, blows things up and produces rubble as a deliberate political gesture: to blow up a particular Germany, to accuse, to exact revenge, to underline the relative value of people and culture. Heinrich, his father, is a prewar builder whose buildings have become a part of the landscape of Nazi culture: he comes to hate it, but does not see it until it is too late. Joseph, the grandson, is charged with rebuilding the very structures that his grandfather built and his father destroyed, but he wants to walk away from this eminently rational, respectable, even noble task; his position leaves him unbalanced and suicidal. For all three men, the debris of Cologne becomes an anti-monument as well as a counter-monument. Ledig had already written: ‘The altar of the fatherland was made not of stone, but of rubble’ [Payback, 175].

‘Only someone at play willfully destroys,’ Grass writes in explanation of Oskar’s tendency to break glass objects [Tin Drum, 53]. He is arguing that Oskar was not playing around, and destruction was not the point. Here, Grass and Böll diverge: in Billiards, Böll is clear that destruction itself is a valid political and emotional response to fascism. The task of rebuilding thus becomes troubling because the memory of the original is troubling, implicated in absurdity and worse. In Adam, a blown-up bridge is painstakingly and lovingly rebuilt by army engineers, only to be blown up again immediately in the face of the Soviet advance. A variation on the bridge-building at the heart of David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai, it highlights what might be considered the rather generic theme of ‘the absurdity of war.’ But it is also a pointed statement on the politics of building and architecture. Like so many of Böll’s characters, Feinhals – the protagonist of Adam – is an architect, whose plans for building after the war are of a decidedly non-monumental nature. ‘He had become a very mediocre architect, and he knew it,’ Böll writes, ‘but still it was nice to understand one’s craft and build simple, good houses that sometimes turned out to be quite pleasing when they were finished.’ [152] Even that modest, unmemorable rehabilitation fails to materialize; Feinhals dies as his childhood home collapses on him. It is as if Böll hesitates to concede the viability of any rebuilding at all. Rubble remains what is real and true, a greater site of contemplation than any building. “We have to pray to console God,” Böll writes [Adam, 153]. And here is Trakl:

You great cities

built in stone

on the plain!

So, mutely,

The man without a home,

his brow dark, follows the wind,

the naked trees on the hill.

You dying tribes!

A pale wave

breaking on the night’s beach,

falling stars.

[Trakl, “The West”]

Böll is deeply suspicious of anything that suggests continuity from the war into the postwar, and from Romanticized pasts into the mundane present. Yet he is also highly conscious that continuity is basic to love: love of buildings and cities and homes, of Cologne and the Rhineland, and also love of people. This tension generates the tragic in his writing. It also generates, however, the possibilities and metaphors of hope, in the form of the alternative city of the necropolis. In Group Portrait, Böll paints a picture of what is literally an underworld of derelicts who are actually (but only a little) more human than the denizens of the world above ground. In the cemeteries, cellars, and catacombs around Cologne, German deserters, Soviet POWs, Polish refugees, Jews in hiding, and even Nazis congregate, forge (in both senses of the word) documents and identities, defend each other, betray each other, love, fuck, give birth, disappear. National, political and even cultural identities become wildly fluid, Germans become Italian, Russians become German but also suspiciously Jewish, an aristocratic Rhinelander crosses back and forth between German, French, Rhenish and Jewish allegiances. There is a reflection here of Böll’s perverse sense of his own boundaries: the marginality and simmering treason of the man from a border zone, who wrote that he (‘we’) perceived the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 as ‘an occupation,’ and would have preferred to see French or British troops there [Boy, 63]. There is also an echo of the legendary no-man’s-land of the Great War, where communities of British, French and German deserters supposedly lived in warrens of abandoned trenches between the enemy lines, emerging at night to forage like zombies among the bodies of dead soldiers. After the armistice, the legend went, the zombies proved to be so threatening that they had to be gassed, i.e., re-subjugated to the logic of modern national warfare [Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 123].

Geographic marginality is a more obvious factor in Grass, whose Kashubian locations enable an off-center Germanness, with unusual, liberating and even exonerating possibilities and contingencies of perspective and identity [Tin Drum, 21]. Kashubes – people without a state, not entirely distinct from either Poles or Germans, easily dissolved and forgotten – become a model, as well as something lost. Other fragile and fantastic nations emerge in the realm of whimsy: the nation of schoolboys with Zuckertuten, or the nation of defenders of post offices, which, Grass suggests, are no more absurd and perhaps less disastrous than conventional nationalities [Tin Drum, 401]. The marginality of the Danzig man is an invaluable assert for Grass; it allows him to imagine a kind of anti-citizenship, in which Oskar becomes ‘a person upon whom, for want of any better designation, I bestow the inadequate title cosmopolitan,’ rejecting explicitly the unambiguous citizenship of Germans and Poles who ‘want everything cut and dried’ [Tin Drum, 289, 397].

Grass sees the ironic continuities between the cosmopolitanism of wartime, with its multinational SS forces, rituals of travel, and geography lessons, and that of peacetime, with its middle-class tourists and cameras [Onion, 110, 174]. The eager tourists are often the former soldiers. But typically for Grass, delinquency supplies a streak of optimism: a different, marginal, decidedly non-bourgeois cosmopolitanism of sex, comfort and indifference to national identity is also discernible (in relations between a German woman and her French-POW lover, for instance) that is preferable to both of the other kinds, and that is also, ironically, facilitated by war. That semi-subaltern, sexually manifested cosmopolitanism is evident after the war in the inter-ethnic miners’ wedding that becomes an orgy starring the bride (who is, meaningfully enough, a war widow), a sort of anti-bourgeois counter-order of lust and life. His own participation in this orgy and his low-budget hitchhiking through Italy become emblematic of this alternative cosmopolitanism. If he is aware of ‘traveler’ posturing of the Lonely Planet variety, he does not let on; he is, in that sense, earnestly and complacently bourgeois-European himself. European cosmopolitanism liberates him from German nationalism, but it also confines him within Europe.

The cemetery in Böll’s Group Portrait is both a metaphor and a refuge from Europe. Born in this world of corpses to a German woman and a Russian POW, Lev is the postwar man, or rubble-child: simultaneously a sign of optimism, i.e., of defiance of the complacent brutality of the normal world, and a walking tragedy, doomed by the traumatic circumstances in which he came into being. Lev’s mother Leni, like the soldier Andreas, is an innocent, but this is very different from the innocence of the Quiet American or the Good German; it is the stubborn, slightly deranged, highly abnormal innocence of the citizen who appears to have become innocent of nationhood and its demands. It is, in that sense, a close cousin of the madness of the Rabenmutter, located on the margin of society in graveyards and asylums.

Grass too is intrigued by the idea of country-as-graveyard and graveyard-as-country, but he approaches it differently, highlighting a movement from the Romantic pre-war cemetery where people dream about being buried (and where the German death-romance can thrive) to the cemetery where people are shot and then buried [Tin Drum, 134, 418]. Both writers dwell on the theme (and problem) of being ‘at home’ in the cemetery: working in and on the graveyard. One can work with wreaths as in Böll or headstones as in Grass, but the real work is remembering and making choices about what to do with memory, i.e., fitting the dead into life.

What kind of society, and what moral order, might emerge from the necropolis? Like Paul Fussell’s no-man’s-land, Böll’s netherworld is only superficially Romantic or paradisiacal. When Böll sees a ‘paradise’ or a community of solidarity, either in the wartime cemetery or in its recreation in Leni’s disreputable apartment building after the war, a sharp note of irony is audible in the text. Böll’s search for the solidarity of the victims of capitalism and the capitalist nation-state – migrants, workers, tenants, etc. – can certainly be called somewhat romantic, but he is himself painfully aware of this romanticism. Is solidarity enough, he asks, not at all confident that it is. Billiards is, among other things, a complicated question about democracy. I’m a democrat, the ex-Nazi Nettlinger says, and proceeds to give his daughter a sermon on democracy. Böll is sarcastic, but he is not denying Nettlinger’s democratic bona fides. He is, rather, suggesting that democracy is not incompatible with militarism and brutality. It is, in other words, not enough. Böll is not advocating a socialism that can be identified with the state; he refuses even to embrace 1968, more out of a tendency to recoil from large crowds and their big demands than anything else.

That simultaneous love and suspicion of the crowd is crucial, going to the heart of Böll’s anarchic anti-fascism. He will not identify himself as an individualist, but he is also unwilling to sacrifice the individual: the individual is preserved in the time that he has left when his duties have been performed, upon which society – not to mention the state, or capital – has no claim. The precariousness of this position is perhaps more evident to Grass than it is to Böll. In Grass’ narrative of the underground world of the miners, the depressing picture of right-wing preponderance even after the war is tempered only by the existence of real politics (in spite of its apparent sterility), and by the pragmatic and doubtful (in the best and also worst senses of the word ‘doubtful’) tolerance of the Social Democrats. Grass remains suspicious of communism. He sees the dominance of capital as an overwhelming problem, but he is not a romantic admirer of the Soviet Union; he has seen the deployment of Soviet T-34s – the same model of tank that nearly killed him in the war – against protesting workers in East Berlin in 1953 [Onion, 225-8, 365]. ‘The only faith he had was faith in certain people,’ Böll writes about Edgar, a sympathetic working-class character [Clown, 217]. The key word here is ‘certain’: it saves ‘the people’ from being enfolded in a maudlin, meaningless or murderous democratic spirit.

Rubble and Governmentality

Böll wrote about troop trains and lived to ride the high-speed rails of postwar Germany. It is, of course, to be expected that a man ambivalent about rebuilding on a monumental scale might want to wander about. The preferred mode of wandering is significant. Böll writes that he was fond of going around on a simple, lightly loaded bicycle, and adds that the Vietnam War was won on bicycles [Boy, 41, 44]. In the process, he suggests a technology of human dignity, and rejects highly mechanized, technologically inscrutable, bureaucratized civilization. As an ideological position, it has obvious similarities to the Gandhian advocacy of technological simplicity as a moral priority; it is affiliated also with Feinhals’ scaled-down architectural ambitions, and with Böll’s larger critique of governmentality in the military-industrial state.

This state is identified with the society above ground, whose defining site is not the derelict cemetery but the checkpoint, the prison camp and the bureaucrat’s register. In this world, everybody is in danger, and danger comes irrespective of nationality. Anybody can be arrested, enslaved, hanged, bombed or shot. The trope of the concentration camp spills over into peacetime, and crucially, there is no sharp line between war and peace. All of Europe is a camp, or a collection of camps, Böll implies: national-political camps and their instruments for creating order by incarcerating, separating, numbering and cataloging (but in the process, abbreviating and vanishing), enslaving and killing. This is more than a metaphor: it is worth recalling that long after the formal end of the war, millions languished and labored in POW camps across Europe. Grass too is quick to acknowledge the continuities of governmentality across 1945 and again across 1989: the tendency of the state to ‘evaluate’ its citizens and reduce them to ciphers, and to brutalize them in institutional regimens geared to produce brutes. In a related vein, he notes that even liberals outraged by organized violence are enraptured by the modern pornography of state violence to the point of accepting the penetrating, violating state as normal [Onion, 17, 31, 111-2].

No writer working in the aftermath of the Holocaust could afford to be unambiguously hostile to the recording function of modern governance. Böll is quite aware that statistics, the meat and potatoes of modern governance, serve a moral-political need to record and remember, and the psychological needs of individuals who would otherwise be overwhelmed by horror. In Billiards, numbers and formulas are for Robert Faehmel a way of maintaining a semblance of control, sanity and distance. Grass’ work is an exhortation to remember repeatedly, even (and especially) when memory is painful, charged with guilt and remorse. The ritualized onion-peeling and squeezing the pus from the headstone-maker’s boils in The Tin Drum are only the most overt examples. Elsewhere, Grass writes: ‘even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings’ [Tin Drum, 177]. He understands the unreliability of memory, which is after all Oskar’s unreliability. The hundreds of tin drums that Oskar uses up over the course of Grass’ first novel – which become The Tin Drum in the title of the book – indicate the fragmented, fictitious nature of the remembering, narrating Self. But that does not diminish the importance of the task, and the sequence of drums is infiltrated by a gift from the art student Raskolnikov, i.e., by the obsessive need to confess and atone [Tin Drum, 477, 532]. The converging drums are echoed in Grass’ later ode to his three Olivetti typewriters, which also become a single, yet undeniably multiple-fragmented, narrator-identity: ‘my everlasting Lettera,’ a modest, low-tech counter-monument like Böll’s bicycle [Onion, 400].

In spite of necessity, modesty and good intentions, however, the danger remains that counter-monuments can take on monumental functions of a decidedly ordinary variety. (It can hardly be denied that the memorialization of the Holocaust has impacted the Palestinians violently.) The problem is to remember differently, in ways that are less overtly masculine, concrete and statist. For the girl Anna in Die Blasse Anna, for instance, the past is contained in the scars on her face, left by a bomb that blew her through a glass window. Frau Faehmel, the Rabenmutter, remembers her dead children. A failed clown drunkenly remembers his dead sister. A fading photograph contains the shadow of a daily commute that will not be repeated, but it is enough to bring two of the surviving commuters together. Böll remains uneasy with the other kind of memorialization: Group Portrait, with its use of abbreviations, statistics and psychology, is an indictment of bureaucracy and governmentality in state violence, and of the social sciences in bureaucracy and governmentality. Caught but not absorbed by systematic dehumanization, Leni and Boris – Böll’s closest approximations of free Europeans – read Kafka.

They also smoke constantly, which brings me to Böll’s nearly obsessive concern with having enough cigarettes on hand. This is not, I think, merely a reflection of a love of lighting up. It has more to do with the politics of consumption and control. The Wandervogel youth movements that flourished in the Weimar period had been obsessed with clean living, which included a disdain not only for parliamentary politics, but also for alcohol and cigarettes. In Adam, Böll gives us a portrayal of a man who does not smoke: SS Captain Fiskeit, with his murderous racism, love of music, self-hate, and fear of sex, cigarettes and booze. Fiskeit is of course a caricature of the anal sociopath; he perfectly fits Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, which was no longer new when Adam was published. But he is also an excellent representative of modern citizenship, with its interlinked emphases on the docility of the body and purity of nationhood: he does not like killing, but appreciates the necessity of carrying out – and of giving – orders to kill [Adam, 102-13]. In contrast, Trakl – a morose drug addict pushed over the edge by the horror of shattered bodies – was barely able to kill himself.

Smoking, in this context, stands for a welcome and necessary disorder: untidiness, self-contamination, indifference to official standards. Between the end of the war and the monetary reforms of 1948, certainly, cigarettes functioned as a form of currency in the barter economy of the rubble. Even before the war, the young Böll was working the illegal economy of black-market cigarette peddling [Boy, 15]. (He took from this the lesson that wars solve unemployment problems and regulate the cost of cigarettes [Boy, 60].) Grass, who also worked as a cigarette trafficker in his youth (before he took up smoking), explicitly invested cigarettes with a symbolism that rejected the smugness of the ‘economic miracle.’ He was conscious of (and amused by) the existentialist affectations that smokers put on [Onion, 292] – existential bowel movements, he called them [Dog Years, 533] – but he nevertheless saw trafficked and bartered cigarettes as small icons of a pre-capitalist life of the community.

Grass was not entirely dismissive of existentialist affectation, seeing in it an aesthetic-political substance that retarded the governmentality of the postwar bourgeois restoration. For writers in the rubble, normalcy is undergirded by a horrifying obedience. For all the carnage in Ledig’s Payback, one of the most unsettling images is also almost serene: a sailor, fallen overboard in the Arctic Ocean, is passed by a convoy that will salute him but not stop for him. Sailors line up on the ships to stare at him, ‘synchronized and obedient,’ Ledig writes. ‘But he was only a tiny point on a motionless surface, and he stayed behind until no one could see him anymore’ [Payback, 178]. Ledig thus uses docility and discipline to indict a political ideology that renders the collective mechanical, obedient and important, and the individual helpless and irrelevant. (The scene also anticipates Grass’ image, in Crabwalk, of children drowning upside-down in their life-belts. [Crabwalk, 149.])

In comparison, the disreputable are preferable even when they come with Bohemian affectations. The unkempt Gypsy models and chain-smoking art students who frequented the studio of the sculptor Otto Pankok, with whom Grass studied, are its living examples: the Gypsies were, Grass notes, probably survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. ‘They were more than models,’ he insists [Onion, 311]. The Tin Drum is among other things a scathing attack on bourgeois self-governance, which Grass unequivocally links to fascism. ‘Oskar hated this single-minded hymn to cleanliness,’ he writes [Tin Drum, 85]. The desire to disinfect, in the death-camp survivor Fajngold, is simultaneously tragic, sinister and hopeless. It is when the alcoholic musician Meyn becomes a Nazi that he tries to sober up, and he nearly beat his cats to death with a poker. It only gets worse: Meyn is tried and punished by the SA for cruelty to animals, tries to make amends by participating in Kristallnacht, and is finally rehabilitated when he joins the SS. The horror of cat-bludgeoning proceeds through racism to mass murder, marked continuously by bourgeois hypocrisies [Tin Drum,182-5, 394-5]. Grass writes in Dog Years: 'And piles of bones, heaped up for the sake of purity, will melt cook boil in order that soap, pure and cheap; but even soap cannot wash pure' [Dog Years, 303]. The Stutthof concentration camp outside Danzig, within sight (and smell) of the anti-aircraft batteries where Grass did his initial military service, is also the place where the legendary soap made from human bodies may actually have had some substance. For Böll, 'stinking German cleanliness' is a sign not only of crimes that refuse to dissipate from memory and perception, but also of the shining, liberal society of the economic miracle, where state surveillance ruthlessly uncovers leftist sympathies and sexual peccadilloes but buries and protects the bloody past – the 'corpse in the vault' – in the name of order [Böll, The Safety Net, 256, 259]. The drive to violate is the other side of the drive to conceal, as Bradley Manning and Julian Assange have discovered.

Grass identifies this murderous governmentality with a peculiarly gendered ideal that is far removed from nursing or even housekeeping. It has, instead, to do with tidiness of the body. Describing the semi-comic homoeroticism of the scoutmaster (and minor Nazi) Greff, Grass connects his suspicion of cleanliness to a particular vision of nature and masculinity: ‘Greff loved the taut, the muscular, the hardened. When he meant Nature, he meant asceticism. When he said asceticism, he meant a particular type of physical culture’ [Tin Drum, 276]. While it is possible to detect a touch of homophobia here, the more important target for Grass is the worship of a masculinity that has been stripped down to a clean, hard, violent skeleton, and that is opposed to the fleshy softness – i.e., the mire – of the unmanly and feminine. ‘The Jews, being a feminine race, also have no soul,’ Grass drily observes in Dog Years, citing Otto Weininger’s influential (and much misappropriated) 1903 treatise on sex and feminine nature [Dog Years, 37]. The obsession with clean, orderly bodies thus becomes inherently violent. Neither Grass nor Böll would deny that the necessity of cleansing is a part of Germany’s postwar predicament; the filthy Klepp begins his rehabilitation with a bath [Tin Drum, 486]. The trick, they appear to be saying, is to bathe but to remain on friendly terms with dirt, and to remember dirt in a continuous exercise of memory.

The Author Beyond the Rubble

In the liberal-democratic nation state, there is an unavoidable tension between the need to remember and speak out (about rightness, and also about guilt), and the individual’s right – which is also a need – to remain silent about what she or he remembers: taciturn like Grass’ mother, and Robert Faehmel and Schrella in Billiards. Without the right to remain silent, there is no freedom of speech.

At a more complex level, questions arise about the circumstances in which speech can be free. The twentieth-century European experience with murderous demagoguery suggests, after all, that free speech is not automatically harmless nor benign. It requires cultural groundwork, towards which defeat – and rubble – can contribute. Rubble is the ‘ground’ in the groundwork. The postwar moment, for Germany and Japan, is also a moment for grappling with freedom of speech. Is it both necessary and permissible to say anything? To make any salute? To wave any flag? Defeat imposes a circumspection, a hesitation, which is not unambiguously a bad thing. In America, where there is a hypothetical insistence on the absolute right to free speech, it also remains acceptable to display the Confederate battle flag in a way that postwar Germans would not display the Nazi flag. This, in spite of the fact that the Confederacy lost the war, because that defeat was not accompanied by a larger rejection of racism. To be ideologically meaningful, defeat needs cultural and institutional follow-up, and in the American south that follow up – the Reconstruction and the Grant presidency – were aborted and discredited all too quickly in the process of the rehabilitation of the Democratic Party.

The cult of the Stars and Bars is of course sustained by the particulars of American politics, such as shifting voting patterns and the Republican Party’s ‘southern strategy.’ But it is also rooted in a culture of innocence that underlies the larger edifice of southern nostalgia: innocence of slavery and racism, innocence of dishonor, the related innocence of the Quiet American, and the wider innocence of the citizen of the militarized nation state, who cannot help being shocked by an image that Ledig presents almost as a throwaway line in Payback: newborn babies in a maternity ward, the soft skin of their heads torn away by exploding aerial mines [Payback, 199]. It is to soften the shock and preserve the innocence - to preserve, in other words, the ability to fantasize about citizenship without having to imagine scalping babies - that we have words like “collateral damage” and veterans exclusively of foreign wars. Citizenship is the sausage, encased in innocence. The power of this innocence cannot be underestimated; it has ensured, for instance, that Kurt Vonnegut never acquired the cultural purchase he might otherwise have got in his own country, and that Joseph Heller is better known for a phrase than for an idea.

Böll’s novels are, to various degrees, explorations of innocence as a problem, as much as they are about guilt. Only those who have known dishonor can know what honor is, he suggests [Billiards, 32]. Neither victory nor victimhood carries ethical possibilities of similar power. In this, he is not claiming any automatic, privileged knowledge for the defeated or the perpetrators of atrocities, but he is suggesting – ever the Catholic – that acknowledgment of guilt is a necessary first step to beatitude, which is the most desirable of all human conditions. (Böll is explicit about this in Group Portrait.) Yet for Andreas, the innocent protagonist of The Train, there is only one exit from the state of moral virginity: a further descent into a childlike innocence and then death. Böll is thus deeply ambiguous about innocence: on the one hand, it leaves Andreas open to disarmament (he has lost his rifle), remorse and kindness, but on the other hand, it also suggests a profound, shell-shocked helplessness and pessimism that makes reconstruction appear to be the work of aliens. For Böll, the sense of alienation from West German normalcy had been foreshadowed in his prewar youth: he had not considered himself superior to his ‘normal’ schoolmates, he wrote, merely alien [Boy, 48].

The question, then, is whether alienness can be brought into an ethically and culturally productive relationship with citizenship. During the 1968 convulsions, Frank Trommler has written, Böll, Grass and their colleagues suddenly lost what we would today call ‘street cred.’ (Ledig had been forgotten much earlier and had dropped out of the literary world.) The younger, strident students accused them of being ineffective Dichter, and no doubt even more gallingly, complacently bourgeois [Trommler, ‘Creating a Cocoon of Public Acquiescence: The Author-Reader Relationship in Postwar German Literature,’ 312]. Trommler does not disagree with the criticism. He argues that postwar writers – and he specifically mentions Böll and Grass – did not seriously challenge the hierarchical relationship between the author and the reader. Even as they protested against the authoritarian-restorationist trends of the Adenauer-Erhard years, they continued to assert their own authority as authors. Consequently, their relationship with readers never took on the quality of a real (i.e., equal) conversation of the sort that Jean-Paul Sartre had advocated. Instead, the German authors wrote primarily for each other, self-isolated from the reading public in cocoons like Group 47 that, ironically, reflected the esprit de corps of the youth organizations and military units which the writers had joined in their youth. Even the rituals of these societies (like the hazing-criticism at Group 47 that Grass describes in Onion) are relatable to those earlier, decidedly undemocratic, organizations [Trommler, 305].

This was a stinging attack, and before asking whether the ‘68ers (and Trommler) were being fair, it is useful to note some specific implications of the criticism. Effectiveness – i.e., political impact visible to the public – had become a criterion of assessing writers. The venerable German-cultural icon of the Dichter had been reformulated. Centered on Goethe, Rilke, Holderlin and Kleist, the cult of the Dichter – the poet as cultural hero, who inspires and represents the community – had become an accusation of undemocratic and ineffective old-guardism. The Dichter in the age of television would inevitably reinforce, or at least accept, an arrangement in which the public’s relationship to the writer was characterized by dabeisein (‘being there’), a passive receiver/observer’s position that is essentially the attitude of the television watcher. This not only kept the reader from engaging the writer more dynamically, it also generated in writers a sense that meaningful intellectual and aesthetic exchange was possible only in exclusive circles of authorship. Finally, because postwar writers felt that some experiences were too overwhelming for words, they made an aesthetic artifact of silence itself, and this could add up to acquiescence and complicity when directed at readers engaged in dabeisein [Trommler, 307-8, 315-6].

Neither Grass nor Böll could – or would – have rejected altogether the charge that they were parts of the ‘normal’ edifice of Germany. Some were more ‘normal’ than others: Grass saw Böll as an artifact of the interwar era, almost unreachably older than himself [Onion, 408]. Big novels are monumental in their own way, Grass acknowledges, inseparable from the bourgeois urge to ‘produce something stupendous’ [Onion, 422]. Grass also shares, to some extent, his critics’ dislike of intellectual self-isolation. He is dismissive of the phenomenon of ‘inner emigration,’ or responding to fascism by turning inwards personally and politically [Gay, xii, 144]. He sees it as largely a self-serving postwar posture, calculated to gather sympathy and anti-fascist credibility [Tin Drum, 111]. He was himself vulnerable to the charge of inner emigration, and he confronts this in Onion when he accounts for his SS past: inner emigration does not work; everybody is accountable and culpable.

What might work? How, in other words, might the writer situated in a society that is receptive but nevertheless engaged in complacent dabeisein raise questions of collective guilt and complicity? One suggestion lies in Grass’ use of the word ‘crabwalk’ to describe Oskar’s ‘method of locomotion’ as he approached his grandmother sideways, indirectly, to hand her the memento from Jan Bronski’s execution [Tin Drum, 239]. The crabwalk, which is also the title of Grass’ novel about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff – a ship from his boyhood – with over nine thousand lives lost, becomes a method and a metaphor of approaching submerged horror with an almost reassuring intimacy.

But paradoxically and crucially, Grass also advocates direct grappling: a Godlike willingness to intervene in the past and the present. He describes God as a diligent amateur photographer, taking pictures of his creations from on high and pasting them in albums for his own pleasures of creation and possession. When we take our own pictures, Grass suggests, it reveals the absurdity and pathos of our self-representation, but sometimes it allows us to cheat – and to control and create – by bending the rules, mixing and matching fragments of images [Tin Drum, 38-42]. It allows us – God, writer, and reader – to admit the arsonist and the fireman, Koljaiczek and Wranka, not just into the ‘same’ individual with disparate identities, but into a common photograph that suggests their shared historical awareness of suffering [Tin Drum, 42]. Here, he undermines the perpetrator-victim dichotomy as well the writer-reader hierarchy. The reader-citizen can enter without following: a photograph of the young Oskar reveals ‘in each blue eye, a will to power that needs no followers’ [Tin Drum, 48]. The determined photographer can thus subvert the Nietzsche-Nazi connection.

Böll’s case is somewhat different. Whereas Grass worked actively with the Social Democrats and thus opened himself to the accusation of participating in the politics of normalcy, Böll preferred to lurk on the edge of the churchyard, wallowing in faith and its fluctuations, and in the minutiae of sectarian differences. (The relatively secular Grass is not immune to religious navel-gazing either. This churchiness is almost bizarre for postcolonial Indians, whose proximal intelligentsia stopped wallowing in religion – and writing about wallowing – in that manner a good hundred years ago. Europeans, it would appear, had more resilient and poignant expectations of religion as a font of justice in public life.) But although Böll remained attached to the Church, it was not a ‘normal’ attachment: he became disinclined to write in lock-step with priests (nuns remained objects of mingled dread and desire), and he is deeply suspicious of the authoritarianism, conformism and hypocrisy of the Church, which mirrors the state and the army in this regard.

Böll’s contrarian Catholicism thus mirrors his contrarian citizenship. In his memoir, he downplays any suffering he may have experienced as a schoolboy in the Third Reich, noting that such suffering had become a mandatory memory for postwar German writers. His own experience, he says, was largely one of revulsion – aesthetic, political – for Nazis, and he dealt with Nazi-affiliated groups like the Hitler Youth by staying out. School was mostly uninspiring and dull; he preferred the ‘school of the streets’ [Boy, 7-8]. Emigration was unthinkable. He refuses, in other words, to assume the position of the victim, that of the blind/uncaring, that of the inmate in the institution, or that of the refugee, either before or after the end of the war. Refusal has its limits – Böll was unable to stay out of the army indefinitely, after all – but his ironic awareness of those limits marks his fictional writing about soldiers’ experiences and guilt.

It also produces the odd accidents and coincidences that are a characteristic of his work. The narrator of Die Blasse Anna compulsively remembers the girl from the tram, but does not notice her in the photograph that he has been handling every day, and she just happens to be living – disfigured and thus beatified – in the room next door. Feinhals is killed just as he reaches home, literally by the last shell to be fired, and even that shell is fired by his own side, more out of habit than in anger. These contrivances are tactical rather than naïve: positioned on the edge of society but unable to contemplate a complete separation, Böll participates by emphasizing the everyday nature of extraordinary possibilities, the apparently forgotten and elusive realities under the nose of the postwar subject.

What the Great War did, Peter Gay wrote, was sever German society’s ties to a usable past, and damage its pipelines to external influences. The producers of Weimar culture had sought to restore the broken links [Gay, 8]. This is, in a way, similar to the task of post-1945 writers like Böll and Grass, who want to fashion a new cosmopolitanism that is also German. But unlike, say, Thomas Mann, Böll and his colleagues are determined to see their war as a decisive and necessary break: a moment that had to be acknowledged and improvised upon, not ignored or repaired. Rubble is not there merely to be swept away, and the past is to be recovered as a text of caution and horror. Even the Dichter could be recovered, but as rubble. Böll’s references to Trakl (and even Holderlin) are, in this sense, a wry inversion. Trakl – lost between Lvov and Cernauti – becomes the anti-Dichter of the anti-monumental world.

At evening, when we walk the dark paths

Our own pale forms appear before us.

[Trakl, “Evening Song”]

The criticisms of ‘ineffectiveness’ and ‘self-isolation’ do not dissolve entirely. For most West Germans, Trakl did not become an icon of any kind, and Holderlin probably did not undergo a wholesale reinterpretation. But perhaps that is not the point.

More importantly, no new Dichter emerged after the war; the ‘restoration’ was clearly also a real shift. Böll and Grass cannot be said to be ineffectual and marginal on the one hand, and Dichter on the other. They formed a new margin, but the margin is valuable as a margin, not as the new center. This value is spelled out in The Tin Drum when the dwarf Bebra, who has joined the Ministry of Propaganda (and later becomes a rehabilitated member of the postwar establishment) tells Oskar: ‘We dwarfs and fools should not dance on concrete that’s been poured and hardened for giants. If only we’d stayed under the grandstands, where no one suspected our presence’ [Tin Drum, 326]. Grass proposes here not so much an entirely new norm as space on the underside of society for a freakishness that threatens to collapse the line between Selves and Others and reveal what is otherwise invisible. It is in this space that the comically earnest art students repeatedly draw the blue-eyed Oskar as a black-eyed Gypsy interned behind barbed wire, forcing but also enabling him ‘to witness all this misery’ [Tin Drum, 442-4].

Also, it is useful to remember a point that Kaspar Maase has made about the relationship between the years of the ‘restoration’ and the ‘revolution’ of 1968. A sharp dichotomy between the Adenauer era and 1968 is not quite sustainable, and the radical students who saw Böll, Grass and others as fellow-travelers of reaction missed the degree to which they themselves were following in the footsteps of the rubble writers. (In any case, Baby Boomer accusations of ‘selling out’ and claims to uncompromising radicalism are rich in irony.) 1968, Maase writes, was the culmination, not the beginning, of a democratization of German culture that began earlier in the course of a transformation in elite attitudes towards popular culture and mass consumption [Maase, “Establishing Cultural Democracy,” 428-46]. Maase does not deal with the rubble writers directly, but they are relevant to his analysis nonetheless. Before the war, a bourgeois monopoly on taste had sustained a rigid hierarchy in German society between the respectable and the popular. After the currency reform and establishment of the Federal Republic in 1948-49, the West German elites briefly revived this hierarchy as part of their restoration of bourgeois hegemony – hence the sharp anxiety triggered by a disreputable phenomenon like the Halbstarke youth gangs. Soon, however, the consumerist imperatives of the economic miracle dissolved the boundaries of popular culture, and established the principle that taste was determined more effectively by the marketplace than by elite assessment. This brought cultural forms and embodied behavior previously identified with the working class into bourgeois society. (A little further down the line, the Halbstarke were inevitably incorporated into punk-rock nostalgia.) It expanded the bourgeoisie as a cultural-economic phenomenon and appeared to consolidate its hegemony to an unprecedented degree, but it also ensured that it was a fundamentally different, democratized and open bourgeoisie – a class capable of imagining and organizing the upheavals of 1968.

The rubble writers, who were only weakly connected to older German literary traditions and relied mainly upon the war experience for their material and credentials [Trommler, 307], and who were self-consciously positioned on the edge of respectability, were undeniably a part of this democratization. The expression ‘outsider as insider’ applies to them much as it does to Peter Gay’s Weimar intellectuals and artists, but Böll and Grass were less alien in their milieu, because the milieu had changed more significantly. The ‘hunger for wholeness’ in Germany after the Great War, Gay writes, was ‘awash with hate’: paranoia, racism, fear of the city [Gay, 96]. The sharpness of the contrast with the culture of the Federal Republic, in which there was a conscious attempt to reject these responses to war and defeat, is undeniable. It shows how extremely differently Germans experienced the two world wars, and the difference between creative context of Böll and Grass and that of the Weimar writers. Like any social development, the rubble writers were both the effect and the cause of the change; cultural products as well as agents of production. They were arguably too enmeshed in the networks of capital and consumption to be uncompromising rebels, but those same networks allowed them to find an audience. Nearly every specific that Maase lists as a factor in the growth of cultural democracy in the 1950s is a central concern in the work of Böll and Grass: the weakened authority of fathers, the embrace of cosmopolitanism, the erosion of the old line between (materialistic) Western ‘civilization’ and a (superior) German ‘culture’ that, by virtue of not being a civilization, had room for savagery. It was culture by Germans but not obsessed with being German, and as such it was a part of the reformulation of postwar citizenship in transnational terms.

The extraordinary nature of West Germany and the reunified German state should not, obviously enough, be overstated. It is a nation state, it has a well-funded military, it is a member of NATO and an important part of the American empire, it has conscription. It is at best a semi-reformed statehood. It should be noted, however, that German conscription is based in part on a new, postwar, consensus that a permanent and professional military caste is undesirable. Deployed reluctantly and only after considerable public debate, and with a minimum of chest-thumping and flag-waving, the German military – like Japan’s – approximates a more or less novel relationship between army, state and citizenry. It can (and should) be argued that the unaggressive military posture is a little disingenuous, because it is adopted in the shadow of somebody else’s nuclear umbrella. It should also be pointed out that what Germany, the EU and Japan have eschewed in the way of militarism, they have made up in their formidable bureaucracies and police forces. The individual is always a half-step away from the status of an insect; the governmentality that Böll recoiled from is, more than ever, an inescapable reality even for bicycle riders. Circumspection and chagrin in foreign policy may have reduced the likelihood of another Auschwitz or even a German Guantanamo, but the domestic governance of modern states has a logic that is largely autonomous of overseas imperialism. The state is its own empire.

That empire cannot be dismantled safely or without incalculable losses, but it can be mitigated, and here the half-step between the individual and the insect becomes critically important. A society is human to the extent that it preserves the visibility of that half-step, which requires sustaining a state of ideological tension between modernity and its violence. The underworld will inevitably be infiltrated by the world, but it is not without the capability to shape the world in turn. The reluctance of Böll and Grass to leave the margin for a triumphant new mainstream is a response to fascism (not to mention the Soviet policies on display in Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968), but it is also a compromise: a grappling with the liberal-bourgeois predicament, a concession of the difficulty of finding a solution within liberalism and without liberalism, an advocacy of ‘the people’ cut with a refusal to romanticize the people. It is, thus, not the creation of a social-political space in which state-sponsored misery is impossible, but the creation of space in which such misery is visible, speakable and contestable (not least through the articulated legitimacy of underworlds and alternatives), and its extremes are rendered less likely.

December 7, 2011

Standing in the Middle of Life (with My Pants Behind Me)

2011-11-16T12:01:00.021-05:00

I’m standing in the middle of life with my pains behind me…

is a line that, for many years, I heard as “I’m standing in the middle of life with my pants behind me.” It made more sense that way. Whether a thirty-three-year-old woman can credibly claim to be “standing in the middle of life” is a reasonable question, but in fairness to Chrissie Hynde, she grew very convincingly into the song. (Part of being middle-aged, for me, is the startling realization that CH is now in her sixties.) But even at the outset, I was able to grasp that when Ms. Hynde described leaving her pants behind she had just joined the ranks of the procreationally disposed, and that parental nakedness was a ritual of snarlingly meditative middle age.

By and by, other songwriters offered further suggestions about the meaning of middle age. Moving to the east coast, for instance, was nicely foreshadowed by an annoying Irishman who wrote one of the finest songs ever recorded about New York City:

Hit an iceberg in my life / but I’m still afloat

Lose your balance / lose your wife

In the queue for the lifeboat...

Just got a place in New York.

Having got a place in New York under more or less the above-mentioned circumstances, I went whole hog and knocked up the first woman who insisted. The results are, on the one hand, a heart-warming affirmation of life, renewal, magic, innocence, and so on. On the other hand, it is a chastening discovery of what lies beyond the pants one leaves behind.

The social side of having reproduced, which I had dreaded, has turned out to be quite bearable. Some of it is indeed as bad as I had expected: there have been the inevitable "Now you see how instantly, wonderfully and irrevocably your life has changed, don’t you? Well, don’t you?" congratulations from assorted parents, indifferently pleased at the sight of a parent-basher biting the dust. Anything short of a sheepish admission of reformed foolishness marks you as a Nazi. The smug admonishment is often accompanied by effusive praise, as if I – or they, who joined "the club" earlier and apparently with less ambivalence – had performed something other than a fairly commonplace biological function. But with a few exceptions, even my relatives have been reasonable and restrained. They merely urge me to acknowledge that the baby is cute, which I am happy to do. They also declare earnestly that it looks like me. (The wife and the pediatrician did the same.) I stand reassured, although it looks like a baby to me.

I also stand extended in both directions, albeit ambiguously. In the new monkey-baby, I cannot help seeing the fossils of old family trees. There are residues here of a dead father, dead grandparents, faces known and unknown: schoolteachers and bookworms from Dhaka and Pabna, an orphan girl from Benaras tormented by reluctant caretakers, a young foreman (once similarly tormented) in the Kidderpore docks, shadowy priests from UP and pioneers from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, and even further back, almost unimaginable shapes that crossed the Hindu Kush in rags or the Arabian Sea in rafts. There are Slovak and German peasants, and possibly a Native American tree in Algonquian country that French fur-trappers had climbed. There is (my mother was told by a gossipy in-law) a similar rumor of an amorous Portuguese pirate in the Ganges delta. I have now done my bit, given them all a slightly longer lease on a sort of life, kicked the football down the field, pushed the fossils and chromosomes a few years further into the future. And in the process, I have bought insurance for my own fossil: the creeping sense of mortality that marks the beginning of middle age, the panicky fear of one’s own approaching death that sets in as each year passes a little faster than the one before, has been assuaged somewhat. Such self-extension by diaper-changing is the satisfaction of an embarrassingly animal urge, but the acceptance of one’s bestial-democratic instincts is quite appropriate for those who have dutifully read their Subaltern Studies.

But mostly I stand humbled. Not by the ‘miracle of life’ or any of that rubbish, but by the inadequacy of middle-aged manhood. When my daughter is asleep in my arms and I look at her face, I realize that nothing that I can do will protect her adequately, or at all, from what lies ahead: the cruelty of strangers, the callousness of boyfriends, frat parties, failed marriages, ungrateful children, old age, irremediable mistakes, loneliness, death. When I look at the two-weeks-old baby, I cannot help imagining her at seventy. (Not for nothing the Bengali tendency to call little girls buri.) So I printed out Kahlil Gibran’s On Children and taped it to the fridge. This too is embarrassing; On Children nearly took on the status of a greeting-card when Gibran, along with Spock, became one half of the gay couple that raised the Baby Boomers. But whereas the Boomers embraced the poem as a manifesto of the liberation of the child, I love it for liberating the parent. To be resigned to being unable to protect and preserve what you love: that may very well be the trick to standing in the middle of life, with or without your pants.

November 16, 2011

Occupied with Nowhere to Go

2011-10-18T10:47:00.026-04:00

Mulling over the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” protests in New York City (and now beyond), the BBC's Washington correspondent recently pointed out something that has been obvious from the outset: these demonstrations, which supposedly reflect the anger of the American public, do not appear to be especially angry. There is no throwing of bricks and Molotov cocktails, no overturning of police cars, no running battle. This is nothing like London earlier this year or the Paris suburbs in 2005, not Brixton in 1981, not Tahrir Square (although parallels with the Arab Spring have, in fact, been voiced by the optimistic), or even the Lokpal agitation. Instead, we have smallish crowds of well-behaved, assiduously law-abiding citizens milling around, waving handmade signs, singing and banging drums, and trying to engage the police in earnest chit-chat. We also have, no doubt, a wider halo of public sympathy, but it has not filled the streets or closed the city. A lawyer friend visiting from Bangladesh went to Zuccotti Park today and could not hide his surprise: 'That's not a protest, that's just people having fun.' What kind of anger is this?

It is not that American street protests are always so soft-core: this is, after all, a country with a rich history of rioting. Labor unrest in early twentieth-century America was radical, well-organized and effective. There is a parallel history of racial unrest: Watts, the violence that followed Dr. King’s assassination, and I remember the fiery aftermath of the Simi Valley court verdict. But in general after 1968, street-fighting has passed from American politics, and disgruntled citizens – here as in Joe Strummer’s London – can reasonably be said to ‘walk the street too chicken to even try it.’ Rioting is not an automatic consequence of political disgruntlement: it requires and reflects a contingent, anti-authoritarian attitude towards the state (and perhaps a measure of desperation) that is alien to middle-class citizenship in the US in most circumstances. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the protestors in Zuccotti Park with their signs about revolution appear decidedly non-threatening.

Rioting may not be essential to revolution, but law-breaking probably is. If anyone is expecting OWS to have dramatic results, it will not happen. A month into the movement, that much is clear. OWS cannot have dramatic results, first and foremost because it has no cogent demands: nothing to negotiate towards, let alone a leadership that might negotiate or an identified partner for negotiation. Those things may yet emerge, but it is striking that they have not emerged so far. The revolution has probably fizzled already: another abortive outburst of excitement, like the 2008 election. The signs are not encouraging and the challenges are formidable: the American left remains severely fragmented and has no ideology that might compensate for that fragmentation. Instead, it has diffuse resentments, and it is painfully obvious that any attempt to chalk out something more specific would probably cause the agitation to fall apart.

That inability to focus (except in very general terms on ‘Wall Street’) is not just an organizational weakness, but a function of class. Who are the protesters? The demographic of OWS (at least we now have an acronym, a necessary step in focusing) is not monolithic by any means, but the core is the decidedly un-revolutionary American ‘middle class.’ This is, in fact, not a class at all, but a vague culture of aspiration. Despite the vast disparities of wealth in this country, almost nobody admits to being either rich or poor. Everybody claims to be middle class, effectively taking class out of politics and politics out of class, so that politicians can spout pious non-sequiturs about being ‘for the middle class,’ and everybody from bus drivers to corporate lawyers can feel included in the love. Classlessness is a shared fantasy of American republicanism for the ‘left’ as well as the right. In the process, poverty is reduced to a shameful, marginal secret, and wealth to another secret that we do not talk about. For all its drumming and chanting, OWS has not been able to break through this silence, because even when it means to talk about the rich and the poor, it is more comfortable talking about the rich and the ‘middle class,’ and is not comfortable with being anything other than ‘middle class’ or acknowledging its internal fractures and contrivances.

The result, almost inevitably, is a movement that is sentimental rather than political: a sort of group hug, more feel-good than angry. In Zuccotti Park, sentimentality takes the form of a palpable nostalgia. While it is uncharitable and inaccurate to dismiss the protestors as a bunch of hippies (as the right-wing media has sought to do), hippies are undeniably and dutifully present. Peasant skirts, dreadlocks and nose-rings are prominently on display. People kneel earnestly on the ground with crayons, like happy children rejecting the corruption of the adult world. “Dylan” and “Lennon” are whispered around like magic words, peace signs are flashed, quilts are stitched. Flashes of inspiration are not altogether absent: a man in a suit and a kafiya brandishes an improvised megaphone, miming Middle Eastern revolution. For all that, the failure of the American left to maintain an original idiom of protest after Vietnam, its tendency to fall back repeatedly on the exhausted corpse of the Counterculture – partly in the hope that it will come back to life, partly as a sort of performance art – is more depressing than inspiring. In our wildly productive culture, it is doubly depressing, because it indicates a total bankruptcy of vision, or even the ability to appropriate imaginatively from one’s own context. Why hippies, Dylan and the 1960s? Why not Wobblies? Why not William Jennings Bryan and the Cross of Gold, while we’re at it? The chances of ‘success’ would not be that much lower.

For an uprising – especially a non-violent one – to succeed requires a certain precision of vision, of both style and substance. It requires, first of all, a reasonable consensus about what success might mean: benchmarks that would allow the assessment of what has been achieved, when to stop, when to restart. This has not happened with OWS. It requires, second, that the movement disrupt the ability of its adversary to function normally. This too has not happened; OWS is at most a nuisance, even in lower Manhattan. Third, in a liberal democracy, it needs to create or capture a viable political vehicle – a party, a parliament, or even the media – that is both responsive to electoral pressure and capable of creating political pressure. On all these fronts, the Lokpal movement in India earlier this year was exemplary: it developed a manifesto that became increasingly serious and constitutional, it created immediate practical difficulties for the government by raising the prospect of the death of an iconic figure, it drew the news media into a formidable public relations campaign, and it promised (very convincingly) to change the course of future elections. For all its frippery, it became a very sophisticated campaign in its second phase, and whatever one might think of its objectives or its style, it was politically effective.

In comparison, OWS is quite literally an amateur operation. There is little indication that it will have any significant influence on any viable institution, let alone the Democratic Party. Its participants – and I must include myself – simply have no idea how to articulate a politics of class that takes into account the racial ideologies in which they are embedded, or the national-militarist mythologies that undergird the economy in which they are enmeshed. We can proclaim a sort of unity, but the claim is so plainly fictitious and superficial that it is perverse and self-defeating.

It is worth noting that the Tea Party did much better, both in its own local organization and in pressuring the national organization of the Republican Party. The populists of the right were effective because their fuzzy ‘classlessness,’ in which talking about class becomes ‘class warfare,’ is consistent with the essentially reactionary discourse of an ‘American Dream’ in which anybody can ‘make it.’ They ignore, of course, that the ‘Dream’ had some basis in reality only in a limited historical period – from the New Deal through the Great Society – when the American state took on some of the functions of a regulatory social democracy. These are the functions that were gutted by the so-called Reagan Revolution, and that Barack Obama has declined to rehabilitate except in rhetoric.

But more disastrous than the right-wing denial of class is the vapid classlessness of a left that insists – in spite of extremely modest scale of the OWS demonstrations – that ‘ninety-nine percent’ of Americans are in the same political boat (by which they mean, by default, the Democratic Party). Such is the hegemony of the ‘Dream’ that outside a small circle of hippies and liberal-arts faculty, i.e., the New Left that emerged sterile from the 1960s, the left that makes up OWS is embarrassed by the very concept of the left. Under the circumstances, no matter how many cities OWS spills into, and how much silent or inchoate sympathy it attracts, it is unlikely to acquire serious political traction. Neither the hippies and professors nor the somewhat larger Left That Dares Not Speak Its Name will have anything to do with their sympathies beyond waving cardboard signs at sympathetic cameras. The corporate-politician nexus has little to fear from such ‘anger.’

OWS is, of course, better than no OWS. Inchoate sympathy is better than apathy, and the demonstrators are admirable. It is always encouraging to see a suit, a hard-hat, and a Buddhist priest in the same demonstration. (It amazes me that a Buddhist priest is always on hand for these things.) Also, the liberal-democratic spirit of the demonstrators has been impeccable. Some days ago, one man held up a foolish sign along the lines of “Zionists Control Wall Street.” Another man stood beside him with a cardboard arrow pointing at him, bearing the word “Asshole.” I wanted to applaud. The second man did not try to kill the first one, or to have him arrested for “hurting the sentiments of the community” (as he might have done in India, or in Europe for that matter), or to silence him in any way. Not only was it an excellent demonstration of tolerance, diversity of opinion, and so on, like the rest of OWS it was good theater, i.e., aesthetically interesting. But as politics, it was an empty exchange, and free speech without political content is a lot of hot air.

It may be that the hot air will be useful in the long term. A friend (CUNY colleague, naturally) suggested that at least we now have a conversation going about the pernicious ties between the political structure and the corporate world. No doubt, but this is not a new conversation. We last had it in 2008, and now we are having it again, the conversants are more or less the same people, and neither the form nor the content is more radical than it was the last time around. Quite the contrary, in fact: if the 2008 election was a stunning example of wasted and betrayed radical potential, at least there was something there to betray or waste. Nothing remotely out of the ordinary is likely to come out of the 2012 election, let alone the 'angry street’ that resembles a polite conversation between Gail Collins and David Brooks on the editorial pages of the New York Times. At best, having the conversation gives one a warm glow in the October weather. We may be angry, but the anger remains either impotent or fraudulent.

Looking for anger and action in Zuccotti Park, I found the police. Much has been made of the conduct of the NYPD over the course of the protests: the pepper-spraying incident, the forceful arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the use of a police scooter to run over a demonstrator have garnered headlines and deservedly so. It must be granted at the outset that as police brutality goes, this is barely horseplay. Nobody was shot, maimed or tortured, and a scooter assault comes close to parody. I imagine a swaggering cop arriving by scooter while humming ‘The Ride of the Valkyries,’ to declare his fondness for the smell of pepper-spray in the morning. There is a world of difference between, say, Richard Daley’s use of the police in Chicago in 1968, and Bloomberg’s deployment of his forces in New York in 2011.

Generally speaking, American police do not use deadly force against middle-class crowds. Strong traditions of constitutionality and citizenship stand in the way. An useful comparison can be made here with the policing of crowds in India. Indian police, a constitutionally unreformed holdover from the colonial state, open fire on crowds quite readily, in a way that would be totally unacceptable in this country. "Three killed in police firing" is a small, everyday headline in any Indian newspaper. But Indian police are also quite discriminating about what crowds they fire into, and tend to be reluctant to use brute force, let alone lethal force, on a demonstration organized by a major political party. Every police commissioner knows that today's opposition party could be tomorrow's party-in-power. Thus, in the context of the Indian street, where the Constitution does not provide adequate protection, political society steps in. It gives party-led demonstrations an automatic legitimacy that is unavailable to crowds in America, where political parties, reduced to fund-raising machines, disavow anything as low-rent and popular as demonstrations, strikes and other public protests. (That development is still some years away in India, where a sizable subaltern electorate and localized, semi-autonomous vote-banks require street-level mobilization.) The Democratic Party will not embrace OWS, and the reactionary Bloomberg administration - like any bureaucracy inflated by the word 'administration' - is of course viscerally hostile. This means that while OWS demonstrators have the protection of the Constitution and are safe from bullets, they lack political cover and are highly vulnerable to being assaulted by the NYPD. In other words, whereas the threshold for the use of deadly force is (normatively) quite high in the crowd-control tactics open to American police forces, the threshold for sub-lethal violence can be very low, and it is quite likely that we will see some atrocious clubbing, beating and Tasing before this is over.

Historically, the NYPD has not been averse to violent thuggery. On this occasion, however, it knows that it is dealing with a movement that has shown no inclination to go beyond a very modest set of spaces and objectives. So the encounter between the ‘revolutionaries’ and the ‘forces of the establishment’ has, for the most part, been a sort of ritualized dance. The dance is not without tension, however, and the tension is not simply a matter of ‘the state’ versus ‘the people.’ It is, again, a matter of class and race: the very things that the avowedly ‘middle-class’ protesters seek to bypass. But cops drawn from the working class have not been oblivious to the gap between themselves and the New Left. Right-wing regimes have historically relied on precisely that animosity to police their enemies on the left. It works. Ironically, it works especially well in societies where republican discourse causes the middle class to suspend its class-consciousness, and where the state is endowed with a normative hyper-legitimacy: no middle-class Indian would be as automatically deferential to a working-class cop – who remains a slightly elevated chowkidar in the service of a dubious enterprise – as middle-class Americans habitually are to ‘Officer.’ It can, however, generate peculiar inconsistencies that were very much evident on display in Zuccotti Park. I recently took my camera along to photograph the faces of the police, expecting to come away with images of brutality. I was not disappointed. But there were also smiling faces, gentle faces, and flattered faces that chatted with pretty hippie girls. The brown faces under the blue hats seemed less frozen into hostility than the white ones, suggesting that the police too are not a uniform caste.

Mostly, however, the police were wary: unlike in Chicago in 1968, they were dealing with an adversary whose agendas are not easily identified with those of aliens. Common ground potentially existed. If an ‘asshole’ and his accuser could stand on the same side of the barricade, so – in fleeting moments and perhaps mainly in the imagination – could the black policewoman and the leftist protester. But that common ground cannot be articulated without talking about the fissures within the ‘ninety-nine percent,’ and it cannot be engineered by essentially apolitical ‘demonstrations’ and revolutionary gestures borrowed from forty years ago. It requires pushing much harder politically, ideologically and idiomatically than the self-identified ‘middle class’ is currently willing to do. If we are indeed ‘the change we were waiting for,’ it will be a long wait.

October 18, 2011

The Culture of the Inappropriate

2011-09-21T14:00:00.028-04:00

In America in the early twenty-first century, we live in a culture obsessed with propriety, or rather, with a particular notion of the inappropriate. ‘That’s, like, so inappropriate,’ punctuates the conversations of teenage girls, nervous parents, breathless reporters, sanctimonious school administrators and government bureaucrats. In the case of deans and social workers, the observation is usually accompanied by a blandly disapproving, I’ve-covered-my-bases-so-you-can’t-sue-me shake of the head. In its prissy, vague and self-satisfied moralism, and its apparent quaintness, this culture of the inappropriate is almost Victorian.

It does not, of course, come directly from the Victorians, and it is not really quaint. It comes to some extent from a particular stage of the women’s movement: a Dworkinian suspicion of male sexual desire, that has merged – not entirely comfortably – with the Reagan-Schlafly backlash against the permissiveness of the Counterculture. No doubt legal and institutional changes were necessary to cut down on bottom-pinching at the water cooler and date rape at fraternity parties, but what we got in the bargain was a humorless culture of primly pursed lips, an overweening anxiety about ‘power relationships’ (which never includes state power) and a general evisceration of the notions of adulthood and consent.

It comes, probably to a greater degree, from the extraordinary child-centeredness of contemporary America, where parents live in a state of chronic fear that everybody wants to molest little Emily or Tyler. (Perhaps climate change and nuclear testing have drastically increased the percentage of pedophiles in the population.) This is actually not so much child-centeredness as parental narcissism: an exaggeration by adults of their centrality in the lives of their children. Anything that fails to acknowledge this centrality – a stranger smiling at a child on the street without asking the parents for permission to smile, unsupervised playtime or sports – becomes ‘inappropriate.’ And, of course, because this narcissism overflows the actual parents and enters the realm of social workers and the state, parents themselves are constantly at risk of being judged inappropriate. A six-year-old running naked on a beach earns Mom and Dad a lecture from the police, and sheepish parents, self-righteous cops, concerned neighbors and (formerly) naked child all appear on television and the Internet news, generating more outrage and head-shaking in the Comments section. It would be difficult to find better support for Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis,’ i.e., the idea that the apparent repression of sex in the modern world is actually an incitement to sexual discourse.

Even as the notion of the inappropriate has had an extraordinary resurgence, it has saturated a cultural space that is by and large coincidental with an older notion of the personal: ‘private’ parts, domesticity, hidden sexual relationships. It has, again following the Foucauldian dynamic, opened this space to public scrutiny and state regulation. In the process, it has introduced a toxic mixture of voyeurism, moralism, paranoia and state power, of which the sex-offender registries beloved of suburban parents are the best example.

This expansion of the moral gaze in the ‘personal’ domain has, however, coincided with a closely related restriction of the inappropriate in another domain: propriety has no relevance in the overtly public world of politics and statecraft. One overflow (that of the indefinite/inappropriate/delinquent over the definite/criminal) produces another (that of extraordinary/delinquent governance over constitutionality). In the past few weeks, we have had two high-profile demonstrations of this link. One was the Presidentially-approved assassination of the Sunni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, which effectively set the precedent that ‘bad guys’ – including American citizens – can be ‘taken out’ by the US government without so much as an indictment, let alone trial and conviction. (I love that expression, to ‘take out,’ with its combined echoes of respectable Archie-and-Betty mating rituals and the pornography of hi-tech warfare.) Awlaki was, no doubt, a highly unsavory character. But being a shit is not a capital crime. Moreover, until and unless he was charged with a specific crime, given a lawyer, put on trial, shown the evidence against him, and convicted, he was merely a political delinquent, i.e., a man guilty of inappropriate tendencies rather than a particular act. In the absence of due process, even that inappropriateness boils down to nasty things he said, and I am reminded of a Clash lyric (which happens rather frequently these days): You have the right to free speech / As long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it.

There is nothing random about Awlaki’s killing. It reflects, at one level, the governmental utility and power of the concept of the inappropriate. At another level, it shows how that concept has expanded and clouded our understanding of that ultimate monopolistic power of the modern state, which is the power to wage war. Increasingly, since the Nixon and Reagan administrations, American governance has relied on the rhetoric of war: war on crime, war on drugs, war on terror, etc. (Johnson's 'war on poverty' was not the same thing; it had no direct relevance to extraordinary policing.) It can, of course, be argued – as Orwell argued – that this development was a central feature of the national-security governments that emerged from the Second World War. And so the Awlaki assassination can be, and has been, justified as an act of wartime self-defense, like killing an enemy soldier on the battlefield. Modern warfare is not a free-for-all; it is subject to rules of engagement, even laws, that inhibit the killing of enemy troops not immediately engaged in fighting. But when hostility is informed by the general concept of the inappropriate rather than a notion of imminent and specific threat, war becomes diffuse: it is everywhere, all the time, unbound by formalities, a standing authorization of state violence in any circumstance.

The other case indicates that even due process is no guarantee of appropriate governance: Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia in spite of all the evidence of flawed police procedures and the fact that multiple prosecution witnesses had backtracked on their testimony. Davis offered to take a polygraph test; the offer was rejected. There would thus seem to be quite a bit of ‘reasonable doubt’ regarding his guilt in the shooting of a policeman some two decades ago. Amnesty International campaigned for clemency in the case, there were protests on the streets of Paris and Rome, and even the New York Times denounced Georgia’s determination to go ahead with the execution. But in general, there was no outcry – not even in the black community and civil society – about whether the impending execution or the judicial mechanism on which it is based, let alone the death penalty itself – might be inappropriate. The British press, but not the American, asked whether it is appropriate to execute a 42-year-old for a crime supposedly committed by a 20-year-old, who has already spent two decades in prison. Steeped in the politics of victims' rights, we do not ask whether it is 'appropriate' for the dead policeman's relatives to insist, even after twenty years, that they will find peace only when the prisoner is dead. That otherwise ubiquitous word has hardly been used at all to describe the presumption, studiously undisturbed by the Supreme Court, that conviction and execution are to be determined by the formal correctness of the judicial procedure, and not by whether the ‘guilty’ man actually committed the crime.

Nor has the word been used, except on the margins of respectable opinion, to describe the glee (or indifference) with which state violence – ranging from capital punishment to drone attacks and extrajudicial assassination – is usually greeted in this country. It is not used to describe a political process that systematically prevents a more just and rational distribution of resources. It is not applied to the obscenity of a military budget that is more than the combined military spending of the rest of the world, bizarrely skewed arrangements of foreign aid, barely disguised contempt for international law (the more equitable, the more contemptible), or the harassment and humiliation of airline passengers who go to the toilet while brown. Nothing that supposedly keeps us safe can be inappropriate. And, of course, we are perpetually and existentially unsafe: a report in CNN noted recently that crime rates have fallen, but a Gallup poll showed that people continue to believe that crime is rising.

This paranoia is politically vital, since without it, the structure of the security state would collapse almost literally: post offices, for instance, might no longer resemble fortresses of bullet-proof glass and synchronized windows designed by Albert Speer (to protect us from crazed postal workers, no doubt). Within the logic of the state represented by this architecture, it has become axiomatic that crime must continuously go up. If crime wasn’t always rising, and terrorists weren’t always threatening, and there was no war-of-the-moment (on drugs, crime, terror, etc.), the market for tanks, helicopters, backscatter machines, police cars and hero-cop movies would dry up. There would be fewer jobs for heroic policemen, prison guards, and the people who record the solemn 'If you see something, say something' announcements on the subway. Politicians and Political Action Committees would have to find new scripts and rationales. Nobody wants that, surely. There is, consequently, a warping of language and its moral content. Barack Obama, who sees nothing inappropriate in killing people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, would never interfere with the Davis execution: it would be inappropriate. (He will, of course, pardon a turkey during Thanksgiving, and perhaps a few cronies when he leaves office.)

There are, in all of this, some serious implications for politics as an adult activity. In a recent review of a new television series about terrorism, a critic (who liked the show) observed apologetically that ‘we are a culture that overreacts.’ Indeed we are. Those overreactions are evident all over the domain of public action: in ill-considered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in TSA procedures, in stop-and-search policing, in ‘three strikes you’re out’ policies and other forms of mandatory sentencing, in the expulsion or arrest of children for bringing a toy gun to school. Overreaction marks us as an easily spooked citizenry. In this model of citizenship, everything – including the overtly political – is about you, and your needs, and your feelings and fears. Individuality is now constituted entirely by your feelings, community by your zeal to share them, and citizenship by your insistence that the state acknowledge them. Present-day middle-class America is thus not simply child-centric, but a society in which the model citizen is essentially a child.

Because childishness lends itself to a shallow and easily placated populism, politicians are all too happy to indulge us. Ah feel yo’ pain. But the insistence on sharing our feelings, which usually takes the merely annoying form of whipping out a camera whenever little Tyler vomits or two or more people gather in a restaurant, and then inflicting the snapshots upon everybody we know, also takes the form of a childishly self-indulgent attitude towards policy that is by and large incompatible with the discipline of constitutionality and constitutional rights. That man frightens me, let’s throw him off the plane. Or kill him with a missile. Constitutions may protect children in some circumstances, but they are not written for children: they presuppose a capability for reason, self-restraint and responsibility that is fundamental to modern adulthood. I want to reproduce below a letter that appeared in the New York Times in response to news that people who have been legally cleared of terrorism charges can still be left on the FBI’s ‘watch list’ and its bureaucratic cousins (such as the TSA’s ‘no-fly list’) and not allowed to see or contest the evidence against them.

"What bothers me most about the United States is its doublespeak, underlain by a current of doublethink - and yes I do intend these terms in Orwell's sense. Here in India there is little pretence to such absolute rights as your First Amendment's freedom of expression and right to petition, your Fourth Amendment's freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, your Fifth and Sixth Amendments' rights to due process and to discovery of evidence. In your country, at airports, subway entrances, football matches, schools, council houses, and nearly every major public gathering you have already dismantled your Fourth Amendment, you are well on your way to rubbishing your First Amendment, and as the current report makes clear, you also are consigning Nos. Five and Six to the dustbin. Let me offer a modest proposal that would bring your writings in line with your practices: if you don't want to live by your Bill of Rights, then just convene a constitutional convention to repeal it! We in the rest of the world are, frankly, quite sick of your rah-rah-freedom, look-at-us-we're-all-free-and-you-aren't rhetoric. The truth is, you behave just like we do. The difference is, you're much less sincere about it." [Matthew Belmonte, Kolkata.]

It’s a wonderful letter, the kind that makes you wish you had written it yourself. (Luckily, you can incorporate it into your writing.) It suggests, perhaps not deliberately, that there is a paradox in our current practice of citizenship and modernity. By normalizing the diffusion of feelings and the incitement to share into all spheres of public life, we have undoubtedly promoted a typically modern diffusion of power, which undermines not only the distinction between the inappropriate/delinquent and the criminal, but also the divide between government and society. But by normalizing the primacy of feelings, i.e., the reasonableness of overreaction, we have also juvenilized ourselves in two ways: we have accepted an irresponsible, quasi-juvenile position relative to an overprotective government, and simultaneously, because we are not fully distinct from government, we have invested government itself with the irresponsibility of children.

The condition of the citizen-as-child – let alone the government-as-child – is actually quite deceptive, because while it suggests innocence, it is anything but innocent. In an essay on the moral politics of childhood, Ashis Nandy pointed out a duality in the discourse: whereas ‘childlike’ indicates innocence, ‘childish’ connotes perversity. The childishness of the overreacting public is a political perversion. To be easily spooked into cries of ‘that’s so inappropriate,’ while demanding unconstrained government intervention, is to be perversely semi-aware of your privileges – racial, economic, geopolitical – and to understand that constitutions may not protect them adequately. (It is to be semi-aware, because such awareness is easy to repress, except in the space between the lines.) Overreaction is not an equal-opportunity affair; it is available to, and legitimate for, only some people and some societies.

Inevitably, that inequality is visible in the overreaction itself. Its targets, which are perceived to be the sources of our unsafe condition, are always more or less explicit: blacks, Muslims, illegal immigrants, pedophiles, the assorted ‘wackos’ and ‘sickos’ of the New York City tabloids. Not only are they inappropriate as members of society, they eliminate the need for propriety in how they are treated by the state. Those who claim that Troy Davis' execution (or the death penalty generally) is barbaric are, in fact, the quaint ones: the misplaced Victorians. Whereas the Victorians maintained a link between propriety and civilization, we tie propriety only to governmentality. The concept of the inappropriate serves to demarcate and protect a bourgeois culture of extreme narcissism, and simultaneously, to differentiate between Us and Them by producing permissible (necessary) and impermissible (unnecessary) responses. A diffuse concept, it has diffused the power of the state and its affiliated bourgeois institutions through the ‘personal’ domain, effectively reconstituting privacy as trivial, inseparable from the condition of being perforated by power. In the process, it has freed the state from older, ‘civilizational’ constraints, including the very concept of civilized conduct. The only appropriate personal space (and conduct) is now that which has already been opened to impersonal and bureaucratic forces, and what is most inappropriate is any interference with the power of the security state.

October 3, 2011

Remembering Robi

2011-09-04T11:41:00.029-04:00

Childhood, Freedom and Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore wore many hats over his long life. Not quite apart from being a writer, a composer and a painter, he was also a highly influential thinker about the education of children, and about childhood itself in a particular moment in Indian history. That moment was marked by rebellion, or rather, by multiple crises of rebellion: not only revolt against colonial rule, but various simultaneous revolts against the very structures that were being held up by Indian nationalists as the antitheses of colonial alienation, such as religion, tradition and the family. Rabindranath himself lived in the thick of these confrontations. Around the time of the first partition of Bengal (in 1905), he had chosen a side: he was more committed to the rebellion against conservative definitions of Indian tradition than to the revolt against British rule.[1] At this highly fertile point in his evolution, when he emerged as an educational pioneer and a critic of swadeshi Extremism and British imperialism, Rabindranath consolidated his reputation as a peculiarly vexing rebel.

These were interconnected but seemingly contradictory developments. Nationalist agitation in swadeshi-era Bengal was also to some extent a youth movement, energized by the participation of school and college students. It is counterintuitive that in this setting, an ideologue would be ambivalent about nationalism but enthusiastic about youthful self-assertion. Yet Rabindranath cultivated not only the voice of rebellion, but also that of youth. We see that in his typically articulate defense of nationalist student activists during the crisis in Presidency College that followed the assault on Edward Oaten in 1916 [Sen, ‘Anarchies of Youth,’ SIH 23:2, 2007]. In that episode, Rabindranath occupied a position that came under attack from both the nationalist right and apologists for empire: he argued that youthful individualism, while highly desirable, was bound to be warped by the authoritarianism of the colonial regime and its educational apparatus. We see it also in his musical play Tasher Desh (‘The Land of Cards,’ written in the early 1920s), a comic satire of youthful rebellion against an ossified and tradition-obsessed society, aimed openly at an audience of children but hardly irrelevant to its adult targets.

Not surprisingly, Rabindranath’s reputation as the patron saint of rebel youth does not sit easily. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it sits too easily. In either case, there is something unconvincing about it. His rebellion is far too genteel, too devoid of anger, violence and profanity, to fit our expectations of the word. His major institution of rebellion – the school and ‘ashram’ in Santiniketan – is, if anything, a bastion of bourgeois cultural orthodoxy within the modern Indian scheme of things. Bengalis like to joke about the neo-feudal mannerisms and Brahmo affectations of the culture of Santiniketan, and are quite aware of the irony of its compulsive genuflection before a deified ‘Gurudeb’ (Teacher-God, i.e., Rabindranath himself). A series of oppositions have sprung up around this divide: grittiness and jagged edges versus prettiness and decorum, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak (in their different ways) versus Satyajit Ray, Calcutta University versus Vishwabharati, the poetry of Jibanananda Das versus that of Rabindranath, and so on. These are not hard-and-fast oppositions and they do not hold up well to close inspection, but they reflect a tension surrounding Rabindranath’s place in Bengali middle-class culture: the rebel is also, apparently, the establishment, and the gestures of rebellion are perpetually at risk of remaining a form of musical play.

I want to suggest in this essay that the conflict has an ideological coherence that can be found in Rabindranath’s writings on childhood, authority and the free individual in colonial society, and in his memoirs of his own childhood. Born in 1861, Rabindranath grew up in a period when – as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued – nationalist discourse tended to place the individual in a decidedly subordinate location within the patriarchal family that was also the normative Indian-national domestic arrangement [Chakrabarty, 217-31]. His interventions in the conventions of childhood, education and the family necessarily had to contend with that authoritarian paternalism. Rabindranath rejected, to a considerable extent, the authority of the father as it existed in contemporary bhadralok society. Simultaneously, he rejected the models of schooling and institutionalization, imported from Europe, that threatened native paternalism in some respects, but were aligned with it in others. Most pertinently, he recoiled from the shadow of nihilism that was implicit in a world of youth in rebellion against father, teacher and state, and that appeared to consign the individual to insignificance and death. He put forward, instead, a theory of child-rearing and education that emphasized a freedom that was restrained by a reformulation of nature and society, and by love – including love of authority itself.

This restrained, structured freedom was central to Rabindranath’s vision of novelty in nationhood, i.e., his solution to the abiding problem of the colonial nationalist who seeks both to materialize something that is extant and ancient, and to assert a radically new political and cultural reality. The new Indian child that he imagined – and that he imagined himself as having been – embraced the wildness of pedagogies that were identified with England, submitted to ideals (although not necessarily forms) of discipline that could be identified with India, and emerged as free: Indian but not orthodox, modern but not mimic, liberated and individual but also reassuringly social. Imbued with the fearlessness of innocence and also relatively plastic, children appeared singularly amenable to re-imagination, re-education and re-socialization. In the case of adults, the corresponding maneuvers presented severe difficulties: the native adult was too hardened by adulthood, too invested in social and political relationships, to be easily reconfigured. Nevertheless, significant changes were already visible within Rabindranath’s own family, which was neither ‘modern’ nor recognizably ‘traditional.’ These shifts – or rather, destabilizations – made further change imaginable.

Robi Reimagined

Robi, Rabindranath’s narrated child, is not merely an icon of the future, but also a gateway into the past and a bridge between the two. He is a way of imagining while remembering: imagining what ‘we’ were, what ‘we’ are, and what ‘we’ might be, while remaining a recognizable and continuous ‘we.’ The writer’s recollections of his own youth in overlapping autobiographies – Jibansmriti and Chhelebela – are exercises in imagining different times, and implicitly, different places. The backwards gaze is, for instance, an evocation of technological simplicity: childhood is a world with neither electricity nor gas, but sooty oil lamps. Its remembrance is thus a movement in civilizational time, an act of nostalgia, and simultaneously an evocation of obscurity [RT, C 10]. Back then, Rabindranath writes, ghosts and goblins lurked in the nooks and crannies of people’s minds. The supernatural is thus located not only in the world of the child, but also in the world of a pre-rational, pre-modern time, effectively merging the two worlds. Since then, he writes, ‘bhitore baire alo bere gechhe’ (‘there is an excess of light within and without’), and the ghosts have gone missing [C 11-2]. The remembered child functions as the point at which relief and regret can both materialize, and where novelty must occupy the space vacated by the anachronistic.

I have chosen to focus in this essay on Chhelebela and Jibansmriti not because they paint an especially accurate portrait of the 1860s and 1870s. I chose them partly because they are probably Rabindranath’s most commonly read prose, and have played a vital role in ensuring that even at the age of a hundred and fifty, Robi remains – and continues to become – the prototype of the Bengali child: a dreamy, motherless boy wandering alone through the corridors of a mansion in decline, administering lessons in numbers and alphabets to railings and kittens. Rabindranath is himself, of course, a partial archetype of the adult bhadralok, and not just because he played a massively influential role in the creation of the archetype. The various narrated episodes of his life – prosaic, poetic, autobiographical, biographical, mythical, even cinematic – have become a national narrative of childhood, adulthood, loss, idealism, propriety, and inevitably, nostalgia. Within that narrative, Chhelebela and Jibansmriti have come to represent to middle-class Bengalis a distinct stage of their own lives (when they first read these books), just as the older Rabindranath’s shattering poetry of grief might be read in – and represent – midlife and old age. In other words, because Bengalis tend to grow up and grow old with Rabindranath by reading his work in an ‘age-appropriate’ sequence, those narratives and sequences appear natural. It is useful to remember, then, that the ‘Robi’ stage of Rabindranath’s life was assembled quite consciously as history and art, i.e., not as a natural and seamless ‘experience’ but as a retrospective intervention in memory: midlife and old age circling back to inform childhood.

I chose them also because Rabindranath himself was highly conscious of the unreliability of autobiography-as-history, especially when the subject is one’s own childhood, which then becomes a foreign country revisited by a partially-sighted liar. He supplies in Jibansmriti an image that is both a memory and a metaphor: the ancient banyan tree (gone by the time of writing) in the garden (also vanished). Its overgrown canopy and roots represent (for the adult autobiographer) but also are (for the child of the past) an area of obscurity, fantasy, shelter, and the implied precolonial: a dark, mysterious complexity, Rabindranath called it [RT, JS 7].

Because the remembered child and childhood are to some extent fantasies of the adult looking backwards, the ‘reality’ of fantasy and the representation of fantasy are not cleanly divided. There is instead a fluid, imaginative and unreliable interplay between what the child experienced, what the adult remembers the child as having experienced, and what the adult would like the child to have experienced. Moreover, as Maja Zehfuss has pointed out, memory is not so much the recollection of a stable event, as a repeated and self-reinforcing practice: we remember not (only) an 'original' event but (also) previous memories of that event, accumulating small and large deflections with each recollection [Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory, 176]. Such reconstruction, Rabindranath acknowledges, is often an aesthetic project [JS 1-2], and as such it is subject to the politics of aesthetic choice. This allows us to use the autobiographies to think about multiple periods and imaginations: not only that of imaginative young Robi, but also that of imagined Robi reconceived by Rabindranath, and indeed, the Robi of the later generations that have adopted him as an icon of childhood and history. Even in the autobiographies, authorship overflows Rabindranath constantly, and this happens especially when he makes a particular effort to recover the child’s voice. In Chhelebela, the later and more self-consciously ‘juvenile’ of the two autobiographies, the author falls back every so often on specific stories that he had heard in his childhood, and that – like the boatman Abdul’s tale of the wolf, for instance – indicate a deeper, pre-rational past that is peculiarly accessible to children. These stories are known to practically all middle-class Bengalis, who learn them as children and then recall them as adults as a ritual of remembering their own childhoods. In the process, Robi breaks up into fragments embedded in layers not only of individual pasts, but also a shared cultural hinterland that constitutes both a foundation of, and a refuge from, the present.

That hinterland is undeniably colonial-historical: Abdul wishes his gun license had not expired, as, no doubt, did other natives affected by the Arms Act. But it is a colonial-historical world full of traces of something old and obsolete, which represent, paradoxically, a world of children. Rabindranath suggested a vivid analogy that demonstrates the paradox: the past is the prince, occasionally and seasonally distributing his wealth, whereas the present is the son of a merchant, always open for business and open to all [C 28]. By using a trope of Bengali folklore (which was then being collected and codified), Rabindranath was able to make a distinction between early-capitalist colonial society and the final decades of colonialism, and to indicate that both might be glimpsed in the present if childhood is utilized as a prism and a portal. But through the same strategy, he also ensured that the past is enveloped in loss and nostalgia, loaded with things that will not come back: foods, spaces, forms of transportation, princes and merchants who go off into the wilderness, and what might be called lifestyles, including styles of being a child and remembering childhood [C 21].

While modern childhood, saturated with diaries and photographs, is built on nostalgia, the overwhelming sense of loss emanating from Rabindranath’s boyhood is most typical of the migrant memory. Rabindranath was not a migrant in a conventional sense, but he was nevertheless implicated in a double migration. One was a movement beyond childhood. Another was a peculiarly colonial movement: beyond the presumed precolonial, beyond the native, beyond the premodern. Born soon after the Mutiny and writing at the dawn of the age of strategic bombing, Rabindranath was well positioned to perceive a great deal of such epochal ‘migration,’ but the perception is also inherent in the colonized experience. For the Bengali reader in independent India, there is an additional layer of migration-and-loss, produced by stories that invoke east Bengal, the Padma river, and so on. For those born after 1947, this lost land/river/time is entirely mythical. Much-imagined in shifting contexts, the child Robi is thus an extremely rich historical text, capable of transporting modern adults backwards even as they remain highly conscious of (and thus anchored to) their present location in time and place.

Rabindranath underlined two great sets of social distances in Robi’s world: between males and females, and between children and adults [C 25]. These divisions are not quite separate and frequently merge, since children of both sexes are partially absorbed into the female society of mothers and great-aunts, with their indifference to clocks, their folktales and folk-music, and their rituals of pre-capitalist paan-making [C 33, 41-3]. Boyhood is not gendered in a consistently modern-masculine way; the ‘house arrest’ perspective of Chhelebela is, in fact, strikingly similar to Rabindranath’s sense of the locked-inside world of women, in which the outside is perceptible only as echoes and reflections [C 39, JS 8-12]. (The magnificent opening minutes of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata come to mind.) Rabindranath does not describe this as entirely a bad thing, since it incites the child to produce fantastic/mythical spaces within the quotidian/familiar: one’s own home becomes a fairytale, the urban back garden becomes a wilderness, a heap of rocks becomes a mountain. But it also produces childhood as a fundamentally lonely experience, in which loneliness is a modern dysfunction, i.e., the consequence of relatively recent changes in familial roles and adult expectations.

Even before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Rabindranath’s childhood was already in a crisis of gender and family. It was lived, for instance, within an unfolding shift in elite-Indian maternity that required the child and the autobiographer to improvise their responses. Robi is more alienated from the world of women than he is connected – Rabindranath repeatedly emphasized that he was raised by male servants – and a large part of the Bengali iconography of Robi is that of a practically orphaned child. (The intimacy between children and servants can also be read against the grain to highlight the distance between the child and the upper-class man.) His mother Sarada Debi is a remarkably sparse presence in his memories of early childhood. Rabindranath was thirteen years old when Sarada Debi died, so the ‘motherless child’ narrative is not straightforwardly accurate. He tells us that she was an invalid in the final stages of her life, but more than that she appears in his memoirs in a pre-nuclear mode of disengaged maternity that, in the later nineteenth century, no longer fit easily into upper-class families infiltrated and destabilized (but hardly transformed) by modern Victorian ideals of marriage and parenting. By 1912, when Jibansmriti was published, the discomfort would have been even more palpable. Robi’s mother is often affectionate, but she is far from the model of maternity that we see in Gora (1910), in which Anandamoyi might be regarded as Rabindranath’s attempt to reconcile an adoring, attentive ‘Indian mother’ with a more recognizably European-derived maternity [JS 58]. Nor is Sarada Debi the playful, intimate mother that we find in the Shishu poems (1913), who is frequently addressed by the child in the ultra-familiar ‘tui’ form – not ‘apni’ or even ‘tumi’ – and suggests a rustic Romantic familiality that has been invented and immediately consigned to nostalgia and longing.

The Romantic also informs the male adults available to the child’s imagination. Brave, chivalrous but frightening dacoits – who are already stories by Robi’s time and are further fictionalized in Rabindranath’s writing – represent a source of masculinity for Bengali boys in a time when the specter of effeminacy haunted the nationalist psyche, and the wrestling craze was beginning to catch on as a middle-class phenomenon [Sinha, 1-32]. But they also represent, in the colonial world, an alternative legality and legitimacy: a romantic residue that is deeply rooted in the very idea of an alternative, i.e., of rebellion. The child discovers dacoits in the imagined wildernesses of the past, but also identifies with them in the present: they are both an Other and a Self [C 29-31]. This duality is a definitive luxury of childhood, inaccessible – or at any rate, impermissible – to adults without the cooperation of children, real or imagined. Even as the child is given a Romantic imagination that differentiates him from adults, he also functions as a screen on which adults can project their Romantic and rebellious inclinations.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that although Rabindranath announces the existence of a sharp divide between the worlds of children and adults in his boyhood, the child-adult dichotomy is not safe from slippage. ‘In those days, the young and the old were children,’ he writes [C 49, emphasis mine]. The desire to see the past as an escape from the disciplined boundaries of modernity, including the boundary between adulthood and childhood, is too powerful to escape consistently. The slippage is particularly relevant for authors setting out to write for children. Rabindranath noted that in the literature available to him in his childhood, there was no ready differentiation between children’s books and adults’ books [JS 62]. He saw early Bengali ‘youth fiction’ – literature by young authors for young readers – as a new genre without a pre-existing code of discipline. That code had to be improvised by the author, and while the requirement opened up a kind of freedom, it was a modern, adult freedom that required contours and management [JS 84].

That perception is particularly evident in Rabindranath’s thinking on adolescence. He described the age between the middle teens and early twenties as culturally under-defined: a bewildering zone that individuals had to negotiate without significant external guidance, like primitive animals in what was neither land nor sea [JS 99]. He was, of course, writing at a time when the concept of adolescence was very much in its infancy in the social sciences. But he was also writing from a colonial world in which it was not entirely clear whether natives had an adolescence at all, and in which it was also clear that such a lack, if confirmed, could represent a racial failure. For Rabindranath, writing from a ‘future’ in which adolescence existed as a problem, the apparent non-acknowledgment of that problem in his past made his own youth appear disconnected from the certainties of modernity. It was, again, a freedom in need of fixing.

Moreover, for Rabindranath, the core of adolescence was exuberance: an excess of impulse, an overflow of messy (and internal) emotions into orderly (and external) social spaces. This exuberance signified freedom, but it was not unambiguously welcomed: it was identified also with a loss of self-control. He saw his own adolescence as a stage of life that was marked by outbursts of natural freedom, that was responsive to freedom, and that was nurtured by freedom of the kind he was given by his father Debendranath and brother Jyotirindranath. This included, especially, the freedom to make mistakes. Rabindranath writes that ‘badness’ in the adolescent is preferable to zealous attempts on the part of parents, teachers and the government (‘the religious, social and political police’) to ensure goodness. Compelling youth to be good produces an intolerably oppressive slavery [JS 71, 83, 85]. This is, of course, a comment not only on childrearing, but also on colonialism. In the context of colonial society, then, childhood becomes a problem of freedom. It represents freedom, it incites freedom, but since there is no going back to being a child any more than there is a going back to precolonial times, it also incites the need to imagine freedoms that are consistent with modernity and racial-civilizational self-assertion.

Prison-houses of Modernity

The difficulty of reconciling freedom and modernity pervades Rabindranath’s thinking on the most inescapable aspect of modern childhood, which is schooling. It is, of course, well known that Robi did not enjoy going to school; the aversion is central to Rabindranath’s image as a rebel, and his experiments with pedagogy in Santiniketan were transparently a response to that early trauma. It is worth noting, nevertheless, that when writing about his childhood, Rabindranath made explicit connections between the school and the other ‘total institutions’ of modern society, pointing out their shared penal qualities. In the autobiographies, school is described not only as hell, but also as a prison in which the child – and the child’s time – is swallowed by hacks, clocks and calendars. Academic study is usually described as drudgework, a mill grinding away at the spirit [C 31]. At one point in Chhelebela, Rabindranath refers to his school as a ‘ten-to-four Andaman Islands’ (penal colony) in a way that Foucault would have approved [C 40]. Even at home, Robi is subject to a crushing routine of tutoring. Rabindranath saw modern pedagogy as a mechanism of making an external knowledge internal to the child, but was straightforwardly dubious about whether a system that is literally punishing could be an effective method of achieving this [JS 4]. Thus, he both saw the Foucauldian dynamic in the modern institution, and doubted whether it ‘works.’

The doubt might be seen in the context of the colonial discourse of the ‘native crammer,’ i.e., the idea (commonly expressed by disdainful Anglo-Indians) that Indian students merely ‘crammed’ for examinations without actually learning anything, and became damaged, demoralized and dangerous in the process [Sen, SIH 23:2]. Rabindranath did not reject the basic accusation, but sought an explanation in something other than racial-cultural inferiority. In the drab, monotonous classroom, he wrote, like in any other institutional ward or cell, the likes and dislikes of the individual become irrelevant, beauty is banished, contact with the real world is lost, and learning is enmeshed in cruelty and horror (‘nirmam bibhishika’). He saw the classroom both as an extension of modern-colonial reality of jails, hospitals and factories, and also as an exile from reality, which corresponded here with the nature of the child. Cut off from that reality, the denatured child-inmate was inevitably driven to fantasizing about rebellion, which Rabindranath wryly characterized as the richly colonial notion of ‘sedition’ [JS 18, 26, 34, 60]. Fantasy/imagination – in other words, the basic stuff of aesthetics, culture, writing and being – itself became an act of sedition and escape.

But where could the refugee from Macaulay escape? The child Rabindranath was still in touch with an earlier intellectual tradition, marked by Farsi education and what appears in his hindsight (in the person of Srikantha-babu, a family friend of the Tagores) to be an attractive unworldliness, agelessness and abdication of adulthood [JS 29-30]. Robi is not equipped or encouraged to explore that vanishing world. His teachers, surrendering to his aversion to the standard school curriculum, assign him alternative readings [C 72-3]. But the alternatives – Kalidas, Shakespeare, etc. – are an alternative canon, or rather, a shuffling and expansion of the standard syllabus. ‘Independent study,’ then as now, was not especially independent. Robi prefers studying informally with his father to studying with schoolteachers and tutors, but that is merely a long holiday in the mountains [JS 51].

That leaves the disused old palanquin from Rabindranath’s grandmother’s time, in which Robi shuts himself for long flights (or rather, voyages) of fantasy. Inside the palanquin, Rabindranath wrote, the clock time of the outside world did not apply. The palanquin goes where Robi wills it to go [C 13-4]. But even this famous palanquin (a central prop of ‘Birpurush,’ which is probably Rabindranath’s best-known poem for children, set in the still-real wilderness around Bolpur, which merges with the folkloric emptiness of Tepantar), is not untouched by colonialism: as often as not, Robi borrows its destinations from Macaulay’s curriculum. A cultural hijacker, he imagines the palanquin as Robinson Crusoe’s island, and himself as Crusoe. Here, we glimpse again the layered nature of the past: a writer from ‘our’ past is looking back (in 1940, when Chhelebela was published) eight decades into his own past, which contains a relic from an even deeper past in the shape and the space of the old pre-Mutiny palanquin. Each layer contains possibilities of escape and fantasy, which are tied to assertions of the will and movement across boundaries. By going into the dark past of the palanquin, he goes out to a wider world, which is already hybrid: it is marked both by recovered precolonial myths and by the colonial mythology of Robinson Crusoe, with the native as Crusoe rather than as Friday. Even within the palanquin, freedom is stubbornly attached to the modern self, provided that self can be dislocated from the prison-house of institutional convention, and the institution reimagined: as a palanquin in childhood, or as a school with open-air ‘classrooms’ improvising a ‘global’ education in the Bengali language.

The emphasis on a mother-tongue, which marks Rabindranath’s autobiographies as well as his pedagogical work in Santiniketan, is perhaps a natural corollary of the remaking of childhood by a man who had once been tormented simultaneously by Macaulay and motherlessness. But Rabindranath’s ambivalence about learning and studying in English is actually the basis of a complex philosophy of pedagogy and culture in a colonial society. On the one hand, he saw English as an unnecessary burden on the native child [JS 22]. On the other hand, he saw English literature as a highly desirable conveyor of excitement and agitation, not only in a culture that was overly inert and given to restraint, but also in the nature of the child that stood to remain restrained and underdeveloped. English stirs things up in sluggish pools, he wrote, and this is good even if it stirs up the mud of the bottom and produces rebellion and disobedience [JS 100-4].

Rabindranath made a distinction within European literature. Classical European literature is refined, with established codes of discipline comparable to those found within Indian cultural forms, he wrote in Jibansmriti. But English literature – the core of the Macaulayan curriculum – was new, crude, unrestrained. It was thus doubly alien in the Indian setting. This alien culture was easy to consume superficially, without serious interest in its truths, but such consumption produced only the superficial and cruel rebellion of mimics. (He distinguished carefully between rebellion based on excitement and rebellion based on truth-seeking.) This superficiality and cruelty, he suggested, lay at the heart of the problem of colonial culture. But English literature in the colony could also be disciplined, subjected to codes of restraint, which could be developed at least partly from an Indian cultural repertoire [JS 100-4]. Thus, the rounding out of jagged edges – restrained excitement, codified rebellion, and indigenized English influence – became central to Rabindranath’s philosophy of truth and to his pedagogy, and it was focused on the child because he saw the malleable, as-yet-unsettled, colonial child as the primary object of risk and benefit.

We have therefore a pronounced dialectic, in which over-civilized inertia meets brash, savage excitement and is resolved in disciplined, restrained rebellion. The dialectic was not Rabindranath’s invention: it can be identified in Bankim, and to some extent in the Brahmo Samaj also. But Rabindranath was original in placing it at the center of a project of rethinking childhood in heroic terms, and simultaneously, revising adult authority by making it less intrusive and more accommodating. Youth and excitement added up to a fearlessness, a willingness to try new things, that for Rabindranath was both productive in the cultural sense, and essential to freedom. He saw Jyotirindranath, in particular, as having fostered this freedom in him, and it is fair to say that this older brother, whose own independence and daring were evidently matched by his readiness to encourage those traits in Robi, and whose dignified superiority in the family hierarchy was leavened by intimacy and indulgence, comes closest to an ideal father-figure in Rabindranath’s memoirs [JS 109-10]. But youth and excitement also generated a fear, which is evident, for instance, in Rabindranath’s attitude towards contemporary English music. For him, its ‘extreme’ lack of restraint was not only an aesthetic failure, it verged – paradoxical enough – on the unnatural [JS 105-6]. Effectively rejecting Nietzsche as well as Sturm und Drang, Rabindranath hesitated to equate nature with unrestrained freedom. Instead, he took a position in which improvising and imposing a code of discipline produced the natural by producing its boundaries and its aesthetics; it also saved rebellion, iconoclasm and freedom from an otherwise inevitable nihilism. Taming wildness without killing it, and achieving ownership over the process of restraint, became the critical maneuvers in the realization of freedom in nature, and also of the nature of freedom [JS 111, 131].

That dialectic of freedom is enabled by love, including erotic love. There can be little doubt that Rabindranath’s views on youthful exuberance developed not only with reference to the political violence around him, but also as a slowly building reaction to the suicide of his sister-in-law Kadambari Debi when he was twenty-four. The relationship between Rabindranath and Kadambari Debi is, in some ways, an open obscurity: widely imagined as slightly scandalous, but not clearly evidenced and hence not openly discussed, except obliquely in Rabindranath’s own writing (and Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptations). It is worth noting that in Nashta Nir and Ghare Baire, and again in Char Adhyay, the erotic excess of youth goes hand in hand with its political exhilaration: Rabindranath will not disavow this dual heroism of the rebel individual (who is, effectively, the only individual), and insists that it is inseparable from social and political justice. But the most searing chapter of Jibansmriti deals with Kabambari’s death. He does not name her, does not directly implicate himself (except by the striking refusal to name names or go into details, in a book that otherwise overflows with names and details), but the devastation is unmistakable [JS 142-6]. Liberated and also condemned by youthful excitement, Rabindranath sought solace from a discovery of its limits:

“Tobu ei duhshaho duhkher bhitor diye amar moner modhye kshane-kshane ekta akashmik anander hawa bahite lagilo, tahate ami nijei ashcharja hoitam. Jiban je akebare abichalito nishchita nahe, ei duhkher shangbadei moner bhar laghu hoiya gelo. Jahake dhoriachhilam tahake chharitei hoilo, eitake kshotir dik dia dekhia jemon bedona pailam temoni shei-kshanei ihake muktir dik dia dekhia ekta udar shanti bodh korilam.” (“But through that unbearable pain sometimes blew a sudden breeze of joy, surprising me. The discovery of the uncertainty of life lifted some of the weight off my heart. To have to let go of what I had held was painful, but when I viewed it from the perspective of freedom, it gave me a kind of peace.” [JS 144-5].)

This was not, it should be emphasized, a simple escape into detachment: it was a passage through detachment, not only to the restraint (not repudiation) of excesses of aesthetic appreciation and love, but also to the ability to survive the consequences of excess. Writing about the relationship of the individual to the world (nature as well as society), Rabindranath suggested that there is, ideally, a movement from the wild freedom of emptiness and detachment, through the constraint of being burdened by the world, to freedom-in-discipline and responsibility born of love. ‘Bairagya-sadhane mukti she amar noi,’ he wrote: ‘Mine is not the freedom of cultivating detachment’ [JS 132-3]. The Brahmo roots of this emphasis on restrained engagement – with a brilliant sister-in-law or with contemporary Europe – are never in doubt, but it should be noted that Rabindranath is not limited by the Brahmo model, and constantly reaches across the aisle to the turbulence evident in the Hindu mainstream. Again, Gora is probably the best example. The accomplishment of rebellion and freedom is identified with a rearrangement of memory and love, i.e., with establishing and managing ‘true’ connections between adulthood and childhood.

Authority and the Loving Rebel

The loving rebel is a conundrum of authority. The problem is inescapable in a colonial society in which native subjects and sons are expected to love king-emperors and domestic despots, and where childhood, not being a permanent condition except in racist discourse, does not automatically provide a lasting solution. Moreover, Rabindranath’s own nostalgia for a Romantic childhood identifiable with the past can be sharply at odds with his construction of modernity, or rather newness, as an admirable willingness on the part of children to question (although not necessarily defy) adults. Here too there are vexing complications, expressed as nostalgia: such new children were apparently hard to find in the Santiniketan of his adulthood, unlike in his childhood, when he himself was such a child [C 51]. Thus, even as newness is embraced, the present and its children are not: a stubborn gap remains between the ideal and the reality, especially when the reality is British India. There is, nevertheless, a strongly asserted determination to revise the authority of kings, fathers and teachers, i.e., the structure of the nationalist-conservative family, not to mention the empire. New children called for new adults.

What might these adults be like? Convinced that coercion was counterproductive in education, Rabindranath sought to make a clear distinction between authority and authoritarianism, even as he acknowledged the difficulty of the distinction [JS 31]. He was aided, once again, by a rethinking of nature. He saw the nature of the child as having a primeval authority of its own, against which adults must struggle, but which they also had to respect [JS 40]. In his autobiographical narrative, his conception of that respect is articulated in terms of space: in some ways, a juvenile version of Virginia Woolf’s ‘room of her own,’ and a fairly radical idea in the context of the Indian family in Rabindranath’s lifetime.

His autobiographies indicate that the child’s own space could surface in unexpected areas, some of which were accidental products of shifts within the family. He vividly describes being under the authority of servants, being beaten by them, and so on [JS 13-4]. He resents it, rebels against it, recognizes (as an adult) the absurdity and irony of ‘sedition’ against a regime of servants, and sees it as an arrangement that represses both the servant and the child. But he also sees the servant-regime as a source of freedom, because unlike the authority of parents, it is incomplete, indifferent, and therefore not stifling [JS 5-6]. It leaves him ambivalent about the intimacy of the nuclear family. Servants-as-surrogate-parents are careless, violent and premodern, but since their authority is sporadic and makeshift, deployed by default rather than any encompassing design, they allow the child the necessary room to imagine and inhabit his own world.

An accidental benefit cannot be a prescription, however, and Rabindranath was interested in prescribing something more reliable than negligence. For that, new models of parenting were required. I have already touched upon his tinkering with motherhood, but the problem of remaking the father was, for a son in that setting, more directly relevant to questions of authority and rebellion. Debendranath Tagore was no more a ‘hands-on’ parent than was his wife, and he was more often away than he was present. Even when he came home to the Jorasanko mansion, he came almost as a visitor, except that the entire household would suddenly enter the hushed, reverent mode of a Brahmo prayer hall. To Robi as well as Rabindranath, he is quite literally ‘Pitrideb’ (Father-God). In other words, his authority, while awesome and real, is also distant in its Godlike quality [JS 38]. He is different from the ever-present, ubiquitous, meddlesome tyrant of middle-class patriarchy.

Debendranath represented a model of paternal authority based on a significant modification of the bhakti that Chakrabarty has emphasized in his analysis of colonial Bengal [Chakrabarty, 217-31]. The value of this model in the modern world is explicit in Rabindranath’s formulation of the institutional ideals of Santiniketan in a series of essays written between 1909 and 1916. In that narrative, freedom and joy – the missing elements in the conventional relationship between the child and the father/teacher – were restored to the child’s response to authority, not least by placing ‘Gurudeb’ at a benign distance from the student [RT, Santiniketan, 15-7]. Also, by characterizing the school as an ashram, Rabindranath did not just make a nostalgic gesture towards a classical or Vedic past, he also produced a specific form of ‘refuge’ in and from the modern world: a new child’s space as well as a new adult space, where rebellion could be constructed as (and contained by) good taste and decorous forms, decorum and good taste invested with the rhetoric of rebellion, and anti-colonial individuality saved from its own excesses. This institution/space was liberating because it generated dislocations and distance: not only from Utilitarian ugliness, colonial oppressions and pistol-packing nationalists, but also from fathers of the mundane sort.[2]

Distance and awe could thus be reconciled with the child’s desire for intimacy, and made to produce individuality. Robi’s relationship to his father is related to his sense of himself as a house-bound child: with Debendranath immersed in the exotic and remote, the domestic location and force of paternal authority becomes diluted. Father, like God and the abroad, becomes impressive because he is distant and exotic, but he simultaneously makes room for the son at home [JS 38-9]. Robi breaks into his father’s room when Debendranath is away and hides out in this secret, forbidden world, much as he hides out in the palanquin [JS 9]. While this activity can certainly be read in Freudian terms, and Rabindranath’s writings on childhood can be richly Freudian (I am thinking again of ‘Birpurush,’ but his relationship with Kabambari Debi is not safe from Freud either), it is also useful to note that Robi’s invasion of his father’s space is not so much a direct challenge to paternal authority as a surreptitious usurpation. At no point does the question of confrontation arise; it is simply bypassed.

A different, more revealing intimacy emerges when Debendranath takes Robi along with him to the Himalayas. Although Debendranath is strictly controlling in some areas of his son’s life, he is permissive in others, and inclined to encourage independence and initiative. This is not only different from the predictable model of an intrusive, stifling paternal authority (and informed by emergent European norms), it also divides the life of the child into more or less clearly demarcated zones of obedience and independence: one in which childhood persists, and another in which adulthood emerges [JS 44, 53-4]. Such parenting undergirded, for Rabindranath, a notion of truth that could emerge and survive only in the absence of coercion. Its connections to the imperative of responding to the paternalism of the colonial regime – itself a producer, patron and disseminator of ‘truths’ – are very real and complex, intersecting as they do with Rabindranath’s ideas about freedom and love. His account of running away in real terror from an imaginary policeman [JS 4-5] can be read as a metaphor of the colonial child’s reaction to an authority that is adult, alien and incarcerating. But when Debendranath gives Robi five hundred rupees as a reward for the Bengali songs he had written, and tells him that since the king is a foreigner and cannot appreciate native poets, he must step in, Rabindranath effectively suggests a paternal authority that is simultaneously intimate, appreciative of the individuality of the son, and a patron of national culture [JS 50]. This is not the nationhood of the revolutionary terrorists, but it is nevertheless a nationhood of sorts, identifiable with the final stage of the dialectic of freedom, compatible with rebellion as well as love, and constituted by reformulated sons and fathers.

The revision of paternalism is predicated on a notion of childhood innocence that is inherently unstable, and that requires the father/state to be accommodating rather than rigid. Rabindranath describes his own participation in a nationalist secret society in the 1870s as a kind of child’s play [JS 78-9]. (The narrative is ironically reminiscent of ‘playing detectives’ in British children’s literature.) This is consistent with the wider tendency of Indian nationalists in the early 20^th century to look back at the ‘70s as a time of innocence, when rebellion was not incompatible with love. I want to reproduce, at this point, an essay that Rabindranath wrote during the Presidency College crisis of 1916. The piece appeared in Sabuj Patra, a journal recognized as a forum for radical social criticism. At a moment when large sections of Anglo-Indian and Indian-conservative opinion were nearly hysterical about the ‘anarchic’ tendencies of Bengali schoolboys and college students, Rabindranath wrote:

The incident [i.e., the assault on Edward Oaten] is only an outward expression of the spirit of rebellion which has been bred in the minds of Bengali students by the haughtiness and aggressive egotism of English professors and by the sense of injustice done to Indian professors. Situated as all Englishmen are in India, an English professor of a college in Bengal looks upon his Bengali student not merely as a student but also as a subject. Consequently, it becomes natural for him to lose patience for even a slight cause. He considers it his duty not only to train up Bengali youths but also to maintain the prestige of the British Raj. Besides this, he is in the habit of wounding the social and religious susceptibilities of his Indian students. Of course, it is difficult for an English professor in India to forget that he belongs to the ruling race and that his students belong to the subject race, but it is equally natural for his Indian students to resent this treatment and sometimes give outward expression to this feeling of resentment. English rule and English education have, for more than a hundred years, been creating in the minds of the Indians a sense of self-respecting individuality which it will now be hard to destroy and the destruction of which will mean the unfulfillment of England’s mission in India. The history of India has always been in a nebulous condition consisting, as it does, of the history of different races not welded together into a homogenous whole. It is only since the advent of Englishmen, whom we must henceforward recognize as one of the races permanently inhabiting India, and the establishment of English rule in the country that it has begun to take a definite shape. It is England’s sacred task to fashion the history of India and she must not shrink from it. It is God’s decree that she is required to perform. If she performs it willingly it will a pleasant and ennobling task. If she performs it unwillingly it will be an unpleasant and tormenting burden. It therefore behooves all English professors in India to build up the character of their Indian students into one of love for Englishmen. And this can only be done by subjecting them to a rule of love and not to a hard and heartless rule. The name Bengali has now-a-days become an object of abhorrence to Englishmen. This feeling towards Bengalis must be given up and a feeling of love and sympathy must be substituted in its place. If this is done, Bengali students will, on leaving the University, carry into the world a love and respect for Englishmen which will have a most far-reaching and beneficial effect on the administration and well-being of the country. If this is not done the minds of Bengalis will become embittered against Englishmen even from their college days and the relations between them and their rulers will become more and more strained. [Sabuj Patra, Chaitra 1322.]

The radicalism of this remarkable polemic is not straightforward. Rabindranath recognizes the fractured roles of the native student and the white teacher in the colonial classroom, and grounds the anger of the Indian student in an individuality that is necessarily hostile to the state [Bose, 5], but he disavows neither the individual nor the cultural-political ideologies that produced him. His growing distaste for nationalism was based, after all, at least partly on a sharp awareness of its crushing effect on individuality.[3] But he feels compelled to point out that the fostering of individuality in native youth goes against the grain of colonial administrative practice, which is not separable from pedagogy. Thus, the adulthood that is associated with the colonial school must simultaneously produce and repress the native individual, the pleasure of production turning immediately into the burden of repression: a burden that can be ameliorated only by love, which is possible in the reimagined family/ashram/nation but a mirage in the racist state. By differentiating between ‘rule of love’ and ‘heartless rule’, Rabindranath again articulated his reimagined relationship between the generations (and implicitly, genders), and posed it in opposition to the coercion of colonialism.

In 1916, i.e., before the advent of Gandhi but at the tail end of the first wave of swadeshi agitation, it was reasonable for Rabindranath to see the British presence in India as a permanent fact of life that could be modified but not eliminated. The modification he suggests is double-edged, marked by an essentially pessimistic but nevertheless productive struggle to locate childhood in the colony. He wants the colonizer to be a better father by acknowledging the transitional nature of childhood irrespective of race, indulging the rebellious instincts of the young individual, and respecting his emergent adulthood. It is, typically, a rebellion marked by restraint – and by nostalgia. While colonial schooling and disciplining distorted the nature of the child by repressing the impulse towards political heroism, Rabindranath wrote in Jibansmriti, the regime ‘back then’ was more often inclined to ignore the sedition of children, which prevented a greater and more violently tragic distortion [JS 79]. Things are different now, he implied, observing that even when children are slow to learn to content of the lesson, they quickly learn the manner in which the lesson is taught, and that any project of teaching liberalism through illiberal methods was bound to be a violent failure.

Some Implications

One of the shibboleths about ‘Indian culture,’ ‘Asian culture,’ and similar essentially Orientalist/nationalist constructions is that ‘we’ are ‘family-oriented’ that intergenerational relationships are grounded in authority and obedience, not rebellion or individual self-assertion. That is, naturally, a comparative assessment, in the sense that it contains an implicit comparison with the supposedly lesser ‘family-orientation’ and greater individualism of Europe. The construction, in is many variants, has been used historically to suggest a fundamental difference between East and West, and for nationalists in the colonial world, that difference has generally been interpreted positively. It is worth remembering, therefore, that this particular snippet of colonial difference, like others, is rooted in the ambivalence and insecurity of a native elite confronted with loss, loneliness and nostalgia on the one hand, and multiple oppressions on the other. The idea that the child is an individual entitled to the privileges of liberal individualism promised to alleviate the oppressions, but the individualizing processes were themselves oppressive, and tended to accentuate the loss and the loneliness.

Rabindranath’s writings about childhood – his own and those of others – indicate an acute sensitivity to these dilemmas, and a series of interventions that were, on the whole, highly influential. Given his centrality in Bengali (and to a lesser degree, Indian) bourgeois culture, it could hardly be otherwise. By looking at Rabindranath (and at Robi), we can see the contorted but also aesthetically rewarding movements by which individualism, rebellion and a discourse of freedom were injected into the notion of a modern, natural, distinct, Bengali/Indian childhood, alongside strategies of containment. Containment, as much as rebellion, became central to being simultaneously juvenile and free. Going by Elias and Foucault, not to mention Freud, the dynamic of containment is ubiquitous in the history of modern childhood. (Foucault, of course, also highlighted the element of emancipation, but he meant primarily the emancipation of discourse [Foucault, 17].) In the colonial environment, however, there has been a real preoccupation with the freedom of the child itself, and with the emancipation of the various entities that children might represent: nation, race, the past, the future. Colonial society, more than metropolitan Europe, has needed the rebel child not just to be free, but also simply to be self-identifiable. The challenge has been to accomplish this emancipation without lapsing into atoms or anarchy, i.e., without bringing down the authoritative structures that the decolonized collective stands to inherit. Rabindranath's solution was to formalize and limit rebellion within a contextualized and thus limited authority. He did not, of course, 'accomplish' that feat of accommodation in some decisive, triumphant way. Such challenges define Indian national society, and as such, are beyond triumphant resolution. Rather, he materialized - in literature, in the home and at school - the aesthetic and political possibilities of a cultural tension, in which decolonized modernity could reside in the exploitation of its own inconsistencies like a brown Crusoe in a palanquin.

Selected references

Bose, Purnima.

Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency and India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)

Chakrabarty, Dipesh.

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)

Foucault, Michel.

The History of Sexuality vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990)

Sen, Satadru.

Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1860-1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2005)

‘Anarchies of Youth: The Oaten Affair and Colonial Bengal,’ Studies in History 23:2 (2007)

Sinha, Mrinalini.

Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Tagore, Rabindranath.

Char Adhyay (Calcutta: Vishvabharati Press, 1938)

Chhelebela (Calcutta: Vishvabharati Press, 1940)

Gora (Delhi: Rupa, 2002)

Jibansmriti (Calcutta: Vishvabharati Press, 1961)

Santiniketan (Calcutta: Vishvabharati Press, 1961)
Zehfuss, Maja.

Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

[1] The choice would become increasingly firm. ‘What you call a patriot, that I am not,’ he wrote in 1938. RT, Char Adhyay, 63.

[2] In this respect, Santiniketan was within the existing trajectory of the colonial-Indian boarding school, which was based on a dissatisfaction with native domesticity. Sen, Colonial Childhoods, Chapter 5.

[3] ‘The place you’ve assigned me, calling it a country – which…is nothing but a country of your band’s own make – [is] nothing but a cage to me. My natural powers do not find full scope in it; they are becoming unhealthy and perverted. My wings have been clipped, my limbs shackled.’ RT, Char Adhyay, 38.

September 4, 2011

You Say You Are Wanting Revolution

2011-08-28T13:15:00.020-04:00

(Pal of the People Revisited)

The drama in Delhi these past two weeks has been overshadowed in the global media by other events: a climax in the Libyan war, the American budget crisis, the fraudulent Hurricane Irene, a shocking cricket series. Certainly, Anna Hazare’s hunger strike, the crowds in the Ram Lila grounds and the Manmohan Singh government’s apparent capitulation has not attracted the kind of attention that the Arab Spring garnered earlier this year. (The Indian media is the exception, of course; this is a movement propelled by the twenty-four-hour news channels.) Nevertheless, while what is happening in Delhi is far less radical than what happened in Cairo and Benghazi, it is probably more interesting, in the sense that it indicates some remarkable transitions in the trajectory of the democratic state as it is negotiated by peasants, capital and a nationalist bourgeoisie. It reprises elements of Gandhian agitation, aspects of American Progressivism, and simultaneously, it takes us into new political terrain.

There can be little doubt that the Lokpal movement has grown substantially since last spring. It is now much more than a movement of Barkha Dutt’s constituency of well-off candle-lighters and their NRI cousins. Large numbers of the lower middle class, small tradespeople and the nearly-poor are now involved, and while the movement has retained its urban overtones, the crowds in Delhi include people who have taken the train from the towns of the hinterland, and have the support of many more who have not traveled. The level of enthusiasm in the heart of darkness (rural Bihar) is not clear yet, which is not insignificant, but it cannot be denied that Anna Hazare now represents a mass movement of great social, economic and political diversity.

That diversity is, in some ways, a curious phenomenon. It is, for instance, counterintuitive to see Muslim participation in a program led by a man who is well known to have ties to Narendra Modi and the backing of the RSS, alongside people who are more or less open Hindutwits. Likewise, Hazare’s coercive tendencies, rustic moralism and disinterest in liberal political conduct ought to trouble the middle-class candlewallas; evidently it does not. While this might be read as a sign of the limits of Indian liberalism, there are more reasonable explanations. One is that Hazare is a figurehead, whose authoritarianism and specific political leanings are irrelevant because he does not have, and will not have, access to the coercive powers of the state. A beer-drinker can support the Lokpal agitation without any serious apprehension that Hazare will take his beer away. A second explanation is that because Hazare’s seemingly ambitious program is actually quite limited: he seeks only to establish an agency with some general goals, not implement a specific program of political transformation. He is thus able to function as a big, accommodating umbrella as well as an empty shell. People can not only see him as whatever they want him to be, they are also able to connect their own specific programs to his movement without encountering instant contradictions.

While that Rorschach-test quality is instantly reminiscent of Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign, the better analogy is of course Gandhi. This is highly ironic. Hazare and his team (being called ‘Team Hazare’ in the bourgeois media, in direct imitation of recent Indian cricket jargon, which is itself an imitation of the jargon of American sport) have consciously sought to utilize Gandhian references, including the tactic of the hunger strike, posters of the Mahatma, and so on. Those parallels are at best superficial, since Hazare’s political philosophy cannot be called Gandhian by any stretch of the imagination. But Gandhi, too, was effective because he generated an inexhaustible vagueness: as Shahid Amin and Jacques Pouchepadass have suggested, people followed Gandhi because they were able to misunderstand, misappropriate and ignore him at every turn, leaving the Congress leadership to manage a coalition in which internal contradictions were not so much resolved as left strategically unstated. What was difficult to digest could simply be set aside. We see that in the Hazare phenomenon also: his Hindutwit ties may be unappetizing, but like Gandhi’s cosy relationship with the Birlas, they do not become a disqualification, because ultimately the movement is not about Hazare. His role as its focal point is vitally important, but he is a plastic moral symbol, not a Fuhrer-in-waiting. And whereas Gandhi had considerable authority in an organization capable of managing country-wide crowds and coalitions over appreciable periods of time, Hazare has no comparable organization. Nearly everybody in the Ram Lila ground understands that, and so, probably, does Hazare himself. This, in fact, is one of the most appealing features of the Lokpal movement.

It would be a gross oversimplification to say that the movement is only a misunderstanding, without a genuine common ground on which its members stand. But it is important to acknowledge the limitations of that common ground. If the objective is to establish a new mechanism that might combat corruption in government, it can fairly be asked if another layer of bureaucracy is a reasonable solution to the problem of corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, and whether the Lokpal’s office – even with state-level extensions – can tackle the scale of the problem in a manner that goes beyond a gesture. Arguably, strengthening the guarantees of freedom of expression and doing away with India’s absurdly restrictive rules on contempt-of-court would do more to make the government and the judiciary accountable. Also, while the basic idea of a national ombudsman is far more fleshed out now than it was in April, neither Hazare’s Bill nor the government’s watery version provide satisfying answers to the question of who will staff the new office and how they will be selected, supervised and dismissed: what method, system and demographic will determine the procedures, how the system can be both democratic and do what it proposes to do.

In spite of the participation of shopkeepers and cab drivers in the demonstrations in Delhi, the Lokpal proposal is designed to ensure that the nation’s ombudsmen come from the middle and upper classes. The institution that it seeks to emulate is the office of the Election Commissioner, and I have not heard of a peasant or a paanwalla becoming the EC. It must be granted that the EC’s office is a necessary and salutary institution, that it is generally disliked by political parties and tolerated because it frustrates all of them, and that it ensures a measure of liberal propriety in elections and prevents fiascos like Florida 2000. But like the activism of the Supreme Court, the EC reflects the chronic tension in India between democracy and propriety, or between democracy and the authoritarian management of democracy. A new institution based on these premises cannot escape that predicament: it can be either democratic or proper, but not consistently both.

In other words, the dubious idea that corruption is located in a ‘political class’ that is distinct from ‘the people,’ and that it can be brought under control if only the people bring the politicians under control, is unlikely to produce satisfactory results unless it is accompanied by much wider and deeper changes in the distribution of wealth and power in society, and a re-examination of the basic priorities of the state. There is no indication that the Indian middle class is willing to contemplate such changes, any more than the American middle class is serious about the economic and political changes that would have to undergird one of its shibboleths: the trite fantasy of ‘world peace.’

For all that, it is clear that for a fairly broad section of the public in India, words like ‘corruption,’ ‘Anna Hazare’ and ‘Lokpal’ are shorthand for a crisis of state and society driven by a recognition that the existing political system no longer meets their needs as citizens. Indeed, this recognition now constitutes the public. Historically, when such shifts have happened within the framework of the liberal-democratic state, they have come at moments when the relationship between the population (those who live within the jurisdiction of the state) and the public (those who identify with the state) has changed more or less abruptly. They happen also when major shifts in media and communication technology produce new imperatives of identity and mobilization. We see it, for instance, in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, when middle-class anxieties generated by immigration, machine politics, the emerging corporate economy, labor unrest and the movement of black people into northern cities, accompanied by photojournalism and radio, produced not only a perception that the existing structure of governance was corrupt and morally alien, but also attempts to establish a more accountable regulatory state. American Progressivism was not remotely a radical movement; it was the preemption of radical change and a self-correction, not so much by ‘the system’ as by the classes invested in ‘the system.’ Building upon and partially absorbing the rural populism of the 1890s, it remains an excellent example that populism is quite compatible with hegemony (and indeed, evidence of a resilient hegemony).

A similar hegemony is perceptible in the Lokpal movement. It is not inherently surprising that cab drivers, tailors and paanwallas might demonstrate against government corruption; it affects them too. But the specific form that their participation has taken is indeed remarkable: they have participated in the mode of citizens addressing their government, demanding a reform – not a demolition – of that same government. They may not have wrapped themselves in the national flag as fervently and ridiculously as the candle-waving, face-painting class, but they have accepted the flag as the symbol of a level of political action at which governance and protest are relevant. They have observed recognizably proper forms of protest, and in spite of the apparent assault on the privileges of Parliament, by adopting the language of Bills and injecting their Bill into an established legislative procedure, they have acknowledged and reinforced the place of Parliament in legitimate government.The organization that they claim as their own is not a revolutionary body, but the state itself.

The emergence of the movement is indicative of a considerable, if contextual, expansion of the circle of propriety and citizenship, and of an expectation on the part of large numbers of people – including the overtly disadvantaged – that ‘the system,’ for all its flaws, has advantages and investments to offer them. The contrast with the riots in England earlier this summer, with their utter nihilism and the masses of looters demonstrating their disconnect from the state, could not be sharper. Thus, in India, a double movement is evident: on the one hand, proper citizens are unsettled by the political effect of the poor and the improper, but on the other, large sections of the sub-bourgeois population have been pulled by the economy and the media into the orbit of bourgeois aspirations and attitudes towards the state. The convergence of these two dynamics has produced the Anna Hazare phenomenon.

This reformist hegemony is not a bad thing. It will almost certainly not ‘fix’ the problem of corruption, but that is not really the point. If the office of the Lokpal emerges, and functions somewhat predictably, it will at best mitigate the problem. The larger point is demonstration itself: the demonstration of the resilience of the liberal-democratic state, the demonstration of a will to collective political action, the demonstration that such action can accomplish institutional reform, and perhaps the demonstration of the desire for reform over revolution, rioting or apathy. There is also a demonstration of the state’s response: it was often clumsy and defensive, and it may yet try to obstruct the provisions of the Bill, but nobody ordered tanks into the Ram Lila ground. Machine guns and goons were not unleashed on the crowds around India Gate as in Tiananmen and Tahrir Square; nobody died, not even Hazare.The protesters were not entirely external to the order they had challenged, and it did not disown them.

If one accepts the liberal-democratic nation state as a given, this is as good as political mass action gets. Under the present circumstances of India, the liberal-democratic nation state is a given: its violence and dysfunction can be mitigated, but not done away with, unless one is prepared to put up with even greater violence and dysfunction. I cannot resist closing with Lennon’s ambivalence about revolution: ‘If you’re going to be carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you’re not going to make it with anyone anyhow.’

August 28, 2011

Heartlands (It's a Chicken, Not a Choice)

2011-08-10T13:38:00.011-04:00

This is the blog at the end of the double-cross-country motorcycle ride, when one is exhausted and at rest in New York City, glad to be back with the wife, the sofa, the air-conditioner, and the Celebrate Brooklyn concerts in Prospect Park. It comes from the feeling that one has just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson’s kick-boxing cousin and survived, if not won. But it is also an essay about just having passed alone through the mythological middle of the continent.

First, a caveat. Travel writing, which I don’t often attempt, is a curious and dubious genre. Unless you’re a specialist of some sort, you write with almost no knowledge of the places you are describing. Nearly everything you say is superficial or wrong. You might, at most, come equipped with some self-awareness. The trick is to find a measure of grace in your incorrect perceptions. When you write from the perspective of a stranger in a land without a context, you are the context; you are writing, always, about yourself. At its best, the travel narrative is a chastened autobiographical genre. At its worst, it is Orientalist claptrap like the output of V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux, self-centered but unselfconscious.

The concept of the heartland, a geographical middle that cocoons the authenticity and integrity of national culture, may seem to be ubiquitous but it is not. The fables of the American Midwest – Norman Rockwell, Dorothy, Babbitt, Mr. Smith who went to Washington, Mary Ann and Ginger (yes, Ginger: Californians too must be offered the possibility of redemption, a chance to find a passage back to the place they were before, so to speak) – have no parallels in Madhya Pradesh, although the latter is also a Middle Province. Nobody would argue that the city of Bhopal or the hills around Panchmarhi have some special relevance to the idea of India, although, admittedly, Kipling did try something along those lines in The Jungle Book. In the decolonized world, authenticity is conveyed more typically by distinctions and negotiations between the village and the city than by zealously defended chasms between the center and the edge. And America has no villages: every intersection with three people and two shacks calls itself a city. This mythologized middle is a settler-colonial phenomenon, with its sentimental emphasis on people dispersed, stranded and lost in the middle of a new emptiness that is both absorbed and absorbing. But Middle America is not entirely unconnected to Madhya Pradesh either, in the sense that the Midwest and its southern extensions contain an American peasantry: people left alone and preserved on islands in seas of dirt and grass, people that have apparently grown into, and out of, the soil itself. Perhaps every national discourse, even those of the New World, needs a peasantry to give it substance, ballast and a repository of the past.

The irony here is that the coastal cities, especially those on the Atlantic, are so much older as settlements than the towns of Nebraska and Oklahoma. But coastal cities are constantly renewed – and rendered inauthentic, suspicious, alien – by immigration. The interior is renewed also, of course; there are Hmongs and Bongs in unlikely places. But it is less overt, almost secretive. The prevailing notion is that Middle America is an old America, where even the young are old and old is innocent. Here adults remain immersed in the world of high school sports. Welcome to Jailbait, MN, Home of the Beavers. The location of the high school at the heart of the rural community is fiercely democratic in spite of its inevitable exclusions, a Jacksonian residue; Tocqueville would have recognized it. But it is also a kind of retardation: a reluctance to move beyond the familiar boundaries of childhood, an anti-cosmopolitanism and a stubborn refusal to transcend the local except in extraordinary circumstances – the Civil War, the Great Depression – and even then only in clichés. These are the hallmarks of peasants everywhere.

The peasant’s world is nothing if not charming to passing outsiders, and the community-of-Jackson and the community-of-childhood both possess an undeniable allure for overeducated, post-everything coastal types. The cosmopolitan in unguarded moments wants roots in the soil, and envies those who appear to have them. To read Webb Miller’s account of his childhood in a poor farming family, for instance, is to fall slightly in love with a fantasy of earthiness and taciturn decency that is tied up with struggle, disappointment and loss, and paradoxically, with innocence, simplicity and safety. Miller’s Midwest was a century ago, but some of that can still be glimpsed, or at any rate, imagined from a motorcycle. There is a sweetness about the white-painted water-towers, the reassuringly identical main streets (very different from Main Street in Flushing, NY), the rolled bales of hay and stock-still cows, and the farmhouses set back from the highway in shady groves. Compulsively, I imagine cool, spacious kitchens, lemonade and beer, jars of preserved things on dark pantry shelves, Daisy Dukes and fireflies and sleep.

Close to the Interstate, of course, not much is left to the imagination. Here is the corporatized ‘country’ of Cargill signs and identical Crapper Barrel restaurants, with their diligently dropped g’s and prefabricated chicken. Old-fashioned, down-home, country cookin’ with all the fixins! Did you just say ‘fixings’ to that customer, Marge? You’re fired! Marge, terrified, makes amends: Can I get you another five thousand calories of somethin, hon? I have a guilty fondness for these restaurants, which serve enormous portions of premature death and give you unlimited refills on your soda. (Unheard of in New York.) Elderly customers sit immobilized, stock-still and dazed like the cattle in the fields. The younger men all have that characteristic oval shape of middle-American masculinity, thanks to the wardrobe of baggy knee-length shorts, XXL T-shirts and baseball hats. They look like giant toddlers with van Dyke beards. The girls are dirty-blonde, tank-topped, with bored looks and heavy eye-liner.

Fifty miles from the freeway is a different country. In the true – or truer, since rural insularity is a mirage – boonies of the Alleghenies, I found myself riding slowly, carefully, through towns like Laurel Springs and Sparta, looking for shelter in a storm. I was stranded at the end of the day by a closed section of the Blue Ridge Parkway, drenched, and talking to myself, which is how one survives bad weather on a motorcycle. ‘Never mind the soaked saddlebags and the ruined schedule, bastard, you concentrate on keeping the bike upright, the rest will take care of itself.’ (It’s surprisingly effective, like talking to yourself while batting in cricket.) Cadging local maps with sloshing boots but upright bike, I meet people who look like they may have wandered off the set of a zombie movie. (I remember Harold and Kumar in search of White Castle, and suddenly the connection between zombies and remote country towns makes sense. The horror, the horror.) Refueling in dripping pants, I encounter ridiculously toothsome redneck girls who will look forty by the time they are twenty-five, done in by smoking and babies. Confederate battle flags are on display in incongruous proximity to the Stars and Stripes on trucks and gas station walls. I find it curious that those who romanticize the Confederacy are also the most reflexively nationalistic of Americans. A colleague once explained it to me in terms of the irrepressibly bellicose Scots-Irish culture of the Appalachians: to put it crudely, they need something to shoot at. But the Old South is the spiritual home of cultural conservatism in America; the rebels are the last bastion of the old country, it's the coasts that keep seceding.

But behind the counter at an empty restaurant, I find a young black woman, smart, teasing, freckled, hazel-eyed. Ah, fellow person of color! Stress drains away; my body unwinds of its own accord. A creature void of form. She tells me she’s from New York, having deliberately moved to Zombieland. Stanley meets Livingstone, only Livingstone is a hot chick! I flirt shamelessly, realize I am overdoing the ‘I can’t believe you chose to move here’ shock, and check into the entirely civilized local motel to dry off and sleep. The next morning is hot, bright and redolent with steaming fertilizer, perfect motorcycling conditions. I can't see a zombie anywhere and my pants are dry.

The highways of the American countryside have their distinctive smells. There’s garlic on US 101 around Gilroy, pot (still on 101) near Eureka. In the heartland, the aromas are more patriotic: a stench of oil around Midland, TX, processed corn in West Lafayette, IN, and everywhere else, breeze pungent with manure. I appreciate these things, having lived as a child in a flat, dull town made familiar by the smell of industrial waste. The nauseating reek of the Phillips Carbon Black plant on the way from the railway station to the house was my ‘welcome home’ at the end of the holidays.

Obviously, it takes no effort at all to exit from observation into remembrance. It is this that makes freeways bearable when you’re pulling well over six hundred miles every day. The Interstate is in some ways like Amitav Ghosh’s metaphor of the transit lounge: a place that is no place at all, more or less the same everywhere. But that very sameness, the apparent lack of content and character, sets some things in sharp relief. The past, for instance. When you remember, aided as usual by rock and roll, even I-40 is not soulless at all. The Oklahoma sunrise / Becomes the Amarillo dawn, and I am suddenly much younger, driving through Amarillo with a girl from Pulaski, TN. We fight, it is mostly my fault, but I lose my temper and threaten to drop her off by the roadside. Then I am ashamed and apologetic all the way to Berkeley. But she has her revenge: she is now in the CIA, I think, screwing secrets out of the spoiled sons of politicians and generals in Delhi and Islamabad. A lovely girl, passionate and brilliant, self-destructive and vain but not too much, reminiscent of both Cybil Shepherd in The Last Picture Show and Delta Burke in Designing Women. It’s a fine line between lust and farce, and Amarillo makes me smile. Nearly every time that I’ve passed through, it’s had that right-after-a-rainstorm look, brightly washed, dramatic sky and glittering asphalt.

It’s interesting country, the long stretch between Phoenix and Texarkana, especially for a brown man with a chip on his shoulder. I stepladder through the highways: I-10, 20, 30 and 40, Route 180, 176, 191, 285. The mass-marketed country here is a bit more grass-roots than it is further north. There are, for instance, the Indian spirit-peddlers (‘We don’t own the land, we belong to the land’) and their female coastal-tourist customers (‘That’s, like, so cool,’ ‘I think I learned that in my yoga class,’ 'Yeah, Bikram is hot.'). Lose a land, gain an image, sell it for what you can get. New Mexico sells not just Indians, but aliens too, although in Arizona and Texas ‘alien’ means ‘Mexican’ – an understandable hazard where the distinction between heartland and borderland is fuzzy. Cormac McCarthy country! I once got a rather thorough questioning by the Border Patrol near El Paso. Where was I coming from, where did I live, where was I going, why, and so on. I very badly wanted to confess that I had once lived in San Francisco’s Mission District and talk about my rather successful prom date with Claudia Martinez, but the cops were themselves Mexican and it would have been rude.

Traversing this wasteland is an intensely physical experience, and the uncertainty it generates goes beyond your own body. Riding in the desert in summertime is literally hanging yourself out to dry. At first, when you’re sweaty from having walked thirty yards from motel room to motorcycle and the labor of attaching the saddle-bags, it’s not unpleasant: you’re a wet towel in the sun. But then you become a dry towel, sitting in an unbelievably desiccating eighty-mph, hundred-degree wind, waiting to catch fire. During fueling stops, those 33-oz ‘medium’ jars (to call them ‘cups’ is surely wrong) of Coke suddenly make perfect sense. The mind wanders a bit. What if there was no road? What would the land look like then: the flat stony fields of Saguaro cactus and the low brown mesas? In The Road to Botany Bay, Paul Carter explains how landscape is an effect of the road. The road disciplines not only the traveler, forcing him to take a particular route between two points, it disciplines the land itself, placing it in perspectives and sequences that the man on the road accepts as given. The result is solidity, form, a named and nameable terrain. I try to make the landscape revert to formlessness and namelessness, and although it works only in flashes that are gone before they can be captured, it is disconcerting nevertheless. Something similar happens when I pause to hike in the Guadalupe Mountains: a burning, desolate place. The National Park Service has built trails which I use, and although I fantasize about going off-trail into the back country, I hold back. Unformed land comes with paradoxical demands: on the one hand, provisions, on the other hand, a level of detachment that is hard to summon up in ordinary circumstances. Cowardice.

Thus, the thrill of knowing that it is there, this dissolved, formless country, close at hand and half-way to a heat-stroke, is mixed up with trepidation and failure. It has been remarked that there is a difference between the Australian and American mythologies of the desert. Whereas Carter’s Australian interior has produced a sense of pessimism, dread and defeat, America’s bone-dry wastelands have generated triumph and confidence: Las Vegas, John Ford, John Wayne. Perhaps. But while Monument Valley has been turned into a sort of postcard by Route 163 and the two Johns, The Searchers is not really a triumphant film; it’s a narrative of derangement. The dominant moods of The Bagdad Café, one of the best films to be set in the American desert, are desertion, fear, loneliness and stoicism: not triumph but bitter-sweet acceptance. America’s desert heartland may not be so different from the Australian after all. (Then again, The Bagdad Café is a German film, the inevitably unreliable perspective of a passer-by.)

It’s not just the desert. All of the interior of America, and the Midwest in particular, is imbued with an inescapable sadness: not only the sadness of peasants and industrial derelicts, but also of longing for worlds you can no longer access. There is a bleakness to it; it makes your hair stand on end like Springsteen’s Nebraska (another unreliable outsider-dream, of course). I feel it every time I ride through Illinois and Indiana, through familiar freeway interchanges and past familiar green-and-white signs. You were here. This is where the past lives on, this is where I once was, cocooned in a comfortable car, smugly oblivious to what lay waiting just ahead. You never think that you might ambush yourself. A motorcycle, without the steel cage, airbags and seat-belts, is a more honest reflection of safety-in-the-world than a car. Crossing I-65 near Gary, I again hear voices in my head. On the one hand, the agonized rasp of a scruffy guy:
I’m going out of my mind

With a pain that stops and starts

Like a corkscrew down my heart
On the other hand, a blue guy, sometimes lecturing patiently on a crowded battlefield as if to bored and fidgeting students, sometimes floating casually in the sea, scooping up mugs of water and pouring it over his head (desi-style) to illustrate his point:

What have you lost, that you are grieving?

What did you bring, that you have lost?

What did you create, that has been destroyed?

What you took, you took from here.

What you think is gone, is where it always was;

But change is the order of the world.*

August 5, 2011

*I should confess that I first read the Gita at university. A few years ago at the British Library, I ran into Gene Irschick, who had been the professor in that class of mostly freshmen. He teased me about the terrible and rather combative paper I had written, using my mother as a reference.