Cultural Histories of India 2020000648, 9780367435318, 9781003007869

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Cultural Histories of India

This book explores the social and cultural histories of India, focusing on cultural encounters and representations of subaltern communities from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Examining cultural encounters between Europeans and Indians during the precolonial and colonial periods, the book analyzes European, especially English, efforts to exoticize or investigate the social practices of the Other. It also presents the culturally conditioned Indian subject’s perspective on Europe and the imperial society. The book engages with narratives of suppressed movements of tribals and dalits, of erosion of the culture and history of ancient communities, and recovers the local narratives of marginalized groups in Andaman and Malabar, which get superseded by the larger narrative of nationbuilding. Often relying on oral history instead of printed material and sociological fieldwork, the alternate histories are presented through unconventional, literary or semi-literary genres like travel narratives, fiction, films, and songs, thus presenting an alternative interpretation to the central narrative of the progress of mainstream India. Representing cultural history and the view from below, the book shifts its focus from the conventional historiography associated with political history and will be of interest to academics working in the field of cultural studies, the historiography of India, South Asian Studies, and an interdisciplinary audience in history, sociology, literature, media, and English studies. Rita Banerjee is Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, India.

Routledge Studies in South Asian History

India and World War I A Centennial Assessment Edited by Roger D. Long and Ian Talbot Foreign Policy of Colonial India 1900–1947 Sneh Mahajan Women and Literary Narratives in Colonial India Her Myriad Gaze on the ‘Other’ Sukla Chatterjee Gender, Nationalism, and Genocide in Bangladesh Naristhan/Ladyland Azra Rashid Evolution, Race and Public Spheres in India Vernacular Concepts and Sciences (1860–1930) Luzia Savary Democracy and Unity in India Understanding the All India Phenomenon, 1940–1960 Emily Rook-Koepsel Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India Anjali Gera Roy Cultural Histories of India Subaltern Spaces, Peripheral Genres, and Alternate Historiography Rita Banerjee For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/asian studies/series/RSSAH

Cultural Histories of India

Subaltern Spaces, Peripheral Genres, and Alternate Historiography Edited by Rita Banerjee

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Rita Banerjee; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rita Banerjee to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Banerjee, Rita, editor. Title: Cultural histories of India : subaltern spaces, peripheral genres, and alternate historiography / Rita Banerjee. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2020] | Series: Routledge studies in South Asian history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020000648 | ISBN 9780367435318 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003007869 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: India—Historiography. | Great Britain—Relations— India—History. | India—Relations—Great Britain—History. | Travelers’ writings, English—India—History and criticism. | Anglo-Indian literature—History and criticism. | Indic literature (English)—History and criticism. Classification: LCC DS435 .C85 2020 | DDC 954.0072—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000648 ISBN: 978-0-367-43531-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00786-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of contributorsvii Acknowledgmentsx Introduction

1

PART 1

Investigating cultural practices, fashioning identities, and travel literature13 1 John Locke’s India: religion, revelation, and enthusiasm

15

DANIEL CAREY

2 Encountering the “sati”: early modern English travel narratives and the politics of exoticization

35

RITA BANERJEE

3 Indian travel writing in the age of empire: mobility and cosmopolitan nationalism

52

PRAMOD K. NAYAR

PART 2

Alternate histories, divergent concepts, and subaltern spaces of resistance65 4 Patriots in Kala Pani? Writing subaltern resistance into the nationalist memory PHILIPP ZEHMISCH

67

vi  Contents 5 Reading Bhikshu Bodhanand’s Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya: reflections on an alternative history of the “beginnings” of “Indian civilization”

89

TAPAN BASU

6 Enacting resistance in history and fiction: counternarratives of tribal historiography in Mahasweta Devi’s writings

98

DEBARATI DAS AND RITA BANERJEE

7 “We must create a history of India in living terms”: Patrick Geddes and aspects of Sister Nivedita’s writings on Indian history 117 ARPITA MITRA

PART 3

Writing history and engaging with peripheral genres133 8 Cassetted emotions: intimate songs and marital conflicts in the age of pravasi (1970–1990)

135

P. K. YASSER ARAFATH

9 Framing history, precarity, and trauma: a study of Nandita Das’s Firaaq

149

NISHAT HAIDER

Index169

Contributors

Daniel Carey is Professor of English and Director of Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, National University of Ireland ­Galway. He has published a monograph on Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (2006), and six edited ­volumes. He has published in a range of interdisciplinary journals on literature, the history of philosophy, history of science, anthropology, and travel. His teaching interests include Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, the eighteenth century, and Romanticism. He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2014 and is a board member of the Irish Research Council (2016–). Rita Banerjee is Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, India. She was teaching at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi as an Associate Professor earlier. She specialized in early modern literature and culture studies. Her research interests include early modern drama and poetry, Shakespeare, travel narratives, and Renaissance historiography. Her articles have appeared in Études Anglaises, Studies in Philology, Comparative Drama, and ROMARD among others. She has contributed book chapters in several anthologies and published a book Ideology and Identity: The Transnational Journey of a Genre in Early Modern Europe (2018). Her monograph “Representing India in Seventeenth-Century English Travel Narratives: Ethnography, Protestantism, and Enlightenment” is due to be published in 2020. Pramod K. Nayar is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. Among his several books are Women in Colonial India: Historical Documents and Sources (edited, 2013) and English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics  (2008). His recent works include  Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic (2017), The Extreme in Contemporary Culture (2017), Human Rights and Literature (2016), and The Postcolonial Studies Dictionary (2015) besides essays on graphic auto/biography, genomic cultures, colonial discourse and other topics in Biography,  a/b: Auto/biography Studies,  Asiatic, South Asia, and others.

viii  Contributors Philipp Zehmisch is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His research interests lie at the intersection of postcolonial studies, political anthropology, and migration studies with a regional focus on South Asia. From 2015 until 2017, he completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich. His Ph.D. thesis “Mini-India: The Politics of Migration and Subalternity in the Andaman Islands” won the Dissertation Prize of the Faculty for the Study of Culture, LMU Munich, as well as the Frobenius Society’s Research Award 2015 and has been published in 2017. Further, he has coedited Manifestations of History: Time, Space, and Community in the Andaman Islands (with Frank Heidemann, 2016) and Soziale Ästhetik, Atmosphäre, Medialität: Beiträge aus der Ethnologie (with Ursula Münster, Jens Zickgraf, and Claudia Lang, 2018) as well as authored several book chapters and journal articles. Tapan Basu taught at the Department of English, Hindu College, University of Delhi, for more than twenty-eight years before joining the Department of English, University of Delhi, as Associate Professor. His teaching and research interests include American literature (especially African American literature) and Indian literature (especially Dalit literature). His publications include Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (coauthored, 1993); Translating Caste: A Critical Anthology of Writings on Caste (edited, 2001); Listen to the Flames: Texts and Readings from the Margins (coedited, 2016), and Crossing Borders: Essays on Literature, Culture and Society in Honor of Amritjit Singh (coedited, 2017). He has received several academic awards, including a Fulbright fellowship. Debarati Das is Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Tripura, Agartala, India. She is currently working on her doctoral degree at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, Indian novels including the fictional works of Mahasweta Devi, modernist poetry of Meena Loy and Marianne Moore, feminist literary theory, and disability studies. Her MPhil dissertation was on Mahasweta Devi’s works and she has presented papers on Devi at many national and international conferences. Arpita Mitra has a doctorate in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (2015–2017), where she worked on the monograph Beyond Neo-Vedanta: Revisiting the Debate on Swami Vivekananda. She  specializes in Indian intellectual history. P. K. Yasser Arafath is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Delhi University. Recently, he completed the Dr. L.M. Singhvi Visiting Fellowship at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. His research focuses primarily on Kerala, and areas of interest include Islamic intellectual traditions and the social history of healing in the Indian Ocean region. His

Contributors ix research works have been published in edited volumes and journals, including Economic & Political Weekly, Social Scientist, and The Medieval History Journal. He has edited (with Haris Qadeer) Sultana’s Sisters: Gender, Genres, and Histories in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (2020). Currently, he is completing a book project titled “Intimate Texts: Malabar Ulema and Lyrical Resistance in the Age of Fasad” (1500–1875). Dr Nishat Haider is Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi (India). She is the author of Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry (2010). She has held numerous administrative and scholarly positions on boards and committees, and has also served as the Director, Institute of Women’s Studies, University of Lucknow. A recipient of the Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize (2016), C. D. Narasimhaiah Award (2010), and Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award (2011), she has presented papers at numerous academic conferences and her essays have been included in a variety of scholarly journals and books. She has conducted numerous workshops on gender budgeting and gender sensitization. She has lectured extensively on subjects at the intersection of cinema, culture, and gender studies. Her current research interests include postcolonial studies, translation, popular culture, and gender studies.

Acknowledgments

This book took shape in a national seminar on “Writing India: Revisiting Historiographies, Ideology, and Genre,” held at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, in January 2017. I am especially grateful to Saugata Bhaduri, Coordinator of the Special Assistance Program and my colleague at the Centre for English Studies, for enabling me to organize the seminar and assisting me with resources. He took a lively interest in the seminar and encouraged me to publish the proceedings, providing useful advice, and I would like to thank him for his kind assistance. My colleagues at the Centre, G.J.V. Prasad, Makarand Paranjape, and Udaya Kumar also took part in the seminar and encouraged me in various ways for which I am thankful. I would like especially to thank the Routledge reviewer whose important suggestions helped me improve the book substantially. I am thankful to Sohini Ghosh for her assistance in initially formatting the script and proofreading. I am very grateful also to the editorial team of Apex CoVantage, LLC, led by Padmavathy Srinivasan, for their careful copy-editing, important suggestions, and kind assistance.

Chapter 3 is reproduced with permission, Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, Pramod Nayar, Bloomsbury, 2020.

Introduction

Of late, historiography has attracted the attention of researchers and readers alike. When we think of the historiography of India, examples of books like Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), Approaches to History: Essays in Indian Historiography (2011), come to mind. The present volume, however, seeks to avoid an official historiographic approach, which such an anthology offers. The aim of this edited collection of essays is to explore the alternate ways of writing history. The “histories” we select are not conventional histories, but marginal histories, which do not examine political or economic events so much as cultural practices, neglected regions, subaltern groups. Since the work focuses on people, their customs, and beliefs, it is concerned chiefly with cultural history. Drawing on travel narratives, oral history, songs, fictional works, and films, the book focuses on unverifiable testimonies and perceptions and the “might have been[s]” of history (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 192), which form the subject of alternative historiography.

History, fact, and fiction This book foregrounds the issue as to what may or may not be considered as “history.” The word history owes its origin to Latin “historia” (narrative of past events, tale, story) as well as its Greek counterpart (“a learning or knowing by inquiry, an account of one’s inquiries, narrative, story”) (OED). History was a narrative, often of past events, whether fictitious or true. The Greek word highlights the element of learning, a narrative one acquires by inquiry, which gestures toward its current signification. What is obvious, however, is the connection between narrative and history. History required the construction of a narrative, whether imaginary, or based on facts. During the early modern era, certain kinds of plays, poems, journalistic narratives were all popularly considered as history (Woolf, 1990, p. 16). However, a move towards representation of facts in history is discernible during the Renaissance. Peter Burke shows in his account, mostly of Italian historians like Niccolo Machiavelli, how history was moving towards pragmatism and objectivity and broke with the humanist tradition of rhetoric, which produced invented histories. Simultaneously, history was moving away from the providential design toward a representation of facts, which may be discovered and analyzed. According to

2  Introduction Peter Burke, “ ‘Fortune,’ that favorite medieval and Renaissance concept, became less and less anthropomorphised, less and less the goddess one must grasp by the forelock, and more of a name for the impersonal forces in history,” which appear to be “susceptible of analysis and calculation” (1969, p. 77). Burke argues that “the new awareness of evidence is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of Renaissance Europe” (Burke, 1969, p 76). Johann Sleidan (1506–1556), “who wrote Commentaries on the reign of Charles V,” aimed to be as objective as possible, stating facts “nakedly, simply, and in good faith, just as everything actually happened” (cited in Burke, 1969, p. 124; emphasis added). However, while history was moving toward a break with the humanist tradition of rhetoric, which produced invented histories and learning to value factual correctness and an impartial stance, literary genres continued to remain popular in history-writing. Not only history in the Western world but historiography in India which began under the colonial auspices showed a similar trend. The first history of India in the Bengali language, Rajabali (1808), written by Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, a Sanskrit teacher at Fort William College, was based on puranic history, beginning with the legendary period of satyayuga. The narrative vindicated the victory of Robert Clive at Plassey and saw a providential design in the establishment of East India Company rule: “When, because of the misdeeds of certain emperors, kings, and nawabs . . . this land of Hindustan was facing utter destruction, the Supreme Lord willed that the rule of the Company Bahadur is established” (cited in Chatterjee, 1999, p. 85). However, the providential design of the Plassey victory in the 1808 book was superseded in Kshetranath Banerjee’s 1872 Bengali textbook by material and political causes, namely Mir Jafar’s betrayal of Siraj-ud-daulah. The text avers: “If this battle had continued for some time, then Clive would surely have lost. But fortune favoured the English, and weakened by the betrayal of Mir Jafar, the Nawab was defeated and Clive was victorious” (cited in Chatterjee, 1999, p. 89). Although fortune (which appears as accidental circumstances) finds a mention, human agency and material causes receive greater attention. Bengali historiography was turning to analysis of causes and data, which were also checked for authenticity. For instance, Kshetranath Banerjee refused to accept Siraj-uddaulah’s role in the “Black Hole” incident. It is important to realize that along with reliance on facts, the later years of the twentieth century simultaneously developed a certain skepticism regarding the infallibility of facts. Since many of these chapters are concerned with fictional or semi-fictional texts, or imaginatively construct history, it is important for us to understand the role of facts in history writing. Over the years, we have become aware of the closeness of historical and fictional narratives and even occasionally the scarce distinguishability of fact and fiction. Where do we draw the line between fact and fiction? The past speaks to us through written and oral accounts, through “vestiges” which provide clues to “the past,” like the archeologist’s finds, such as the urns, tools, coins, and images (Ricoeur, 2006, p. 170). According to Paul Ricoeur, “this sequence of definitions – science of men in time, knowledge by traces, written and

Introduction 3 unwritten testimonies, voluntary and involuntary testimonies – assures the status of history as a discipline and of the historian as an artisan” (2006, pp. 170–171). Examining the role of clues which need to be tracked down, Ricoeur follows Carlo Ginzburg in recognizing that history is conjectural for one cannot identify facts indubitably: “All this explains why history never became a Galilean science. . . . As with the physician’s, historical knowledge is indirect, presumptive, conjectural” (cited in Ricoeur, 2006, p. 174; emphasis added). “Writing, textuality, which dematerializes orality, changes nothing, for it is once again and always individuals that historians deals with” (Ricoeur, 2006, p. 174). Burke has pointed out that “the boundary between fact and fiction, which once looked firm, has been eroded in our so-called ‘postmodern era’ ” (1992, p. 127). Hayden White argues that the historian’s claim to write “what actually happened” was a fallacy for historians often “organize their accounts of the past around recurrent plots or mythoi,” progressing, for instance, in the narration of a Civil War from “a condition of apparent peace, through the revelation of conflict, to the resolution of conflict in the establishment of a genuinely peaceful social order” (cited in Burke, 1992, pp. 126–127). The narrative design that is conceived predominates over mechanical recording of facts and is a result of manipulation of facts. Moreover, Ginzburg emphasizes the “intrinsically selective and partial” nature of any point of view on reality (1999, p. 24) and the fallacy of arguing that sources offer unrestricted access to truth or reality. In his view, “sources are neither open windows,” nor “fences obstructing vision.” Instead they may be likened to “distorting mirrors.” “The analysis of the specific distortion of every specific source already implies a constructive element” (Ginzburg, 1999, p.  25). Words like “selective,” “partial,” “constructs,” and “distorting mirrors” make us aware of the process of composing, of piecing together narratives, which effectively controvert declarations of objectivity and reportage of “what actually happened” (Sleidan quoted in Burke, 1969, p. 124). Significantly, the illusion of objectivity and mathematical certainty in historical narratives is undermined by instances of selective usage of even statistical or quantitative data to formulate a theory. Even an influential architect of the “quantitative revolution,” Ernest Labrousse, had been “criticized on occasion for forcing his data to fit the model” (Burke, 1990, p.  62). Moreover, the relativity of perspectives renders the search for a monolithic historical truth futile. Ginzburg emphasizes the “rhetorical nature of truth, even scientific truth” (1999, p.  21). History and fiction are interwoven in texts, and “all forms of writing, including historiography, take place within an extended theory of reading” (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 180). Discussing the representative function of historical imagination, White says The past is what I would have seen, what I would have witnessed if I had been there, just as the other side of things is what I would see if I were looking at them from the side from which you are looking at them. (cited in Ricoeur, 1988, p. 185)

4  Introduction It is the historical imaginary that prevents the Other from being incomprehensible or inexpressible. “It is always through some transfer from Same to Other, in empathy and imagination, that the Other that is foreign to me is brought closer” (Ricoeur, 1988, p.  184). It is the historical imaginary that enables the writer to bring alive the lost past before its readers. It is the role of imagination, for instance, in the construction of the narrative of Aryan invasion of Bhikshu Bodhanand (Chapter 5), despite the reliance on scriptural evidence, that makes the past real for his readers. The closeness of history and literature is discernible in the necessity for plotting or designing historical narratives. Emplotment is intrinsic to narratives. “Once we have admitted that the writing of history is not something added from outside to historical knowledge but is one with it, nothing prevents us from admitting as well that history imitates in its writing the types of emplotment handed down by our literary tradition” (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 185). Historical patterns inevitably emerge as the selection and interpretation of facts and past events shape them for the reader. The master narratives of civilization that colonizing narratives construct or of progress that postcolonial governments circulate are no less dependent on selective manipulation of evidence than the local and marginal accounts that question it, as we see, for instance, in Chapter 4 of this volume. Both history and fiction are narratives, and the narrative mode of representing the past brings home an awareness of unexpected similarities. History is quasi-fictive once the quasi presence of events placed ‘before the eyes of’ the reader by a lively narrative supplements through its intuitiveness, its vividness, the elusive character of the pastness of the past, which is illustrated by the paradoxes of standing-for. (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 190) What was probable, even though it might not actually have happened, or not established to have happened by verifiable evidence, still relates the reality of the past in a way similar to verifiable history. Ricoeur agrees that “verisimilitude” or the mode of realism places fiction on the “same plane as history.” He acknowledges that “the great novelists of the nineteenth century can be read as auxiliary historians or, better, as sociologists,” although for him it is the liberating role of fiction in realizing the possibilities, not actualized in the realm of history, that enables the quasi-historical status of fiction (1988, pp. 191–192). Many of the chapters in this volume interrogate the relation between “verifiable history” and literature. For example, Mahasweta Devi’s semi-fictional biography of Birsa Munda and the history of the Munda Rebellion interpret recorded facts in a way that entails the emergence of a narrative, which counters the official, British account (Chapter six). Nandita Das’s Firaaq deploys fictional situations to bring home to its audience the traumatic aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat Riots. Many of the chapters in the book examine literature’s role in recovering the possibilities which might not have materialized in history. By choosing literary, semihistorical, and peripheral genres like travel narratives, novels, stories, songs, and

Introduction 5 films for representing the past, the present volume presents alternative historiographies for its readers.

Cultural histories and encounters with others The emphasis on culture studies as opposed to political or economic history establishes the collection’s claim to alternative historiography. Cultural studies focus on histories of cultural encounters and exchanges. According to Melissa Calaresu, Filippo de Vivo, and Joan-Pau Rubiés, cultural encounter has become one of the key areas of cultural history (2010, p. 24). Cultural encounters offer a comparative perspective. The history of cultural encounters brings under its purview the “history of travel and travel writing, perceptions of ‘otherness’, multi-ethnic interactions in colonial contexts, translations, frontiers and the history of world history” (Calaresu et al., 2010, p. 24). Focusing on inter-cultural exchange, the first section of this book explores how European travelers and philosophers view India and its cultural practices in the precolonial period as well as how Indian travelers perceived other worlds and re-viewed their homeland and themselves during the late colonial period. Both Daniel Carey’s and Rita Banerjee’s chapters relate to the precolonial period of English/European and Indian encounters. Carey examines John Locke’s investigation of Indian customs and especially Indian religion, drawing on travel narratives and related commentaries by J. A. von Mandelso, François Bernier, and others. Referring to it in his unpublished lectures during the 1660s and a draft of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke cited the practice of ‘sati’ as a social custom that went against the natural law of self-preservation and demonstrated the power of cultural conditioning as well as religious dictates. Carey also examines Locke’s investigation of Hinduism and his enquiries into the subject of religious enthusiasm. Locke’s inquiries and recording of data suggest the systematic organization of religious information and knowledge, which proved useful for religious anthropology and cultural history. His investigation of Indian religions demonstrates how he sought to interpret cultural practices of India in terms of Enlightenment ideas of rationality, instinct, customs, and tradition, and as examples to reach larger conclusions about the world. Rita Banerjee traces the reportage of the custom of ‘sati’ in diverse European travel narratives, like those of Edward Terry, Peter Mundy, François Bernier, and John Ovington, over the seventeenth century to show how the narrators often sought to distance themselves from the practice and social values associated with it by exoticizing and sometimes even demonizing it. However, their admiration for the courage of the sati as well as their belief that such practices could prevent husband-murder betrays the affinity of values that dominated both societies. Moreover, the move toward ethnographic recording of the custom, as discernible in the course of years, shows a relatively neutral stance toward other cultures during the Enlightenment era, just as the later narratives of English intervention anticipate Western attitudes during the colonial period.

6  Introduction Pramod K. Nayar describes the process of self-fashioning of Indian colonial travelers through the nineteenth-century travel narratives they write. The chapter shows how his awareness of his Indian identity and the subject position gets modified during the cultural encounter with the imperial center. Nayar argues that mobility across cultures and geographical spaces enabled colonial subjects to fashion themselves in different ways other than the one envisaged for them by the Empire. The travel writings show what he terms as a “vernacular cosmopolitanism” and, finally, “a cosmopolitanism imbued with a national identity as well.” The Indian subject traveler’s initial awe and sense of enchantment give place to an awareness of the defects in English society, the plight of the subalterns in Europe, and the “connections between Europe’s imperial grandeur and the contradictions of colonial exploitation or class privileges,” which often lead them to reassess India’s position in the world. The travelers’ comparative accounts of the colonial and the colonized countries’ politics, administration, educational and belief systems, etc. demonstrate a critical distance from the object of review and an informed understanding.

Subaltern culture, local and alternate historiographies There are two related issues associated with people’s histories. Alternate histories focus on the stories of opposition to the master narratives of colonial civilization or state-sponsored progress, while they also write of the narrative of neglected popular culture, as opposed to political and archival histories. The first characteristic shows how people’s histories offer an alternative to state-centered narratives. For instance, the grand narrative of progress, which the West chalks through the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, tells the success story of civilizing other cultures. However, this “triumphalist” story ignores not only as Burke says, the “contributions of other cultures” and marginalized social groups in the West (Burke, 2008, p. 45), but also suppresses the alternative histories of resistance of these non-Western cultures. Similarly, in an erstwhile colonized state like India, the nationalist narrative of gaining independence is the single success story of the nation-state. The master narrative of India as a nation traces the trajectory of the liberation of the nationstate and its economic and political development. As Ranajit Guha points out: “The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism  – colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism” (Guha, 1982, p. 1). But this history conceals the alternate history which would give agency to the people: What is clearly left out of this unhistorical [elitist] historiography is the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and intermediate strata in town and country – that

Introduction 7 is the people. This was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter. (Guha, 1982, p. 4) It is these concealed histories which ascribe agency to the subordinated groups and are excluded from the mainstream or elitist nationalist history that form the subject of alternative historiography in the present volume. In his study of “The Nation and Its Pasts,” Partha Chatterjee, like Guha, gives us an account of the “suppressed histories” of a region or a state like Bengal, which posits, as he says, “a great disjuncture” with the history of India, centered on a classical Aryan past and centered on northern India. When Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay writes of Bengal, being home to many “jatis,” like the “Aryan,” the “non-Aryan Hindu,” the “Hindu of mixed Aryan and non-Aryan origin,” and the “Bengali Mussalman,” he envisages a localized alternative history of Bengal, which countered the mainstream monolithic narratives of Islamic propagation of faith by the power of the sword and the massacre of innocent Hindus (Chatterjee, 1999, pp. 113–115). The chapters in the second section are concerned with the discovery of these concealed histories of the people. Philipp Zehmisch’s chapter on the history of the Andaman Islands is opposed to mainstream history-writing. It narrates the conflict between the stories of the later migrants to the Andaman Islands and the earlier ones, who had come before 1942, especially descendants of those who had come after 1857. Zehmisch shows how in the first decades of the twentieth century, the popular perception of Kala Pani made the Islands an integral component of anticolonial discourse. After 1947 Andaman Islands had become associated with the history of the anti-colonial struggle which memorialized the sacrifices and hardships of freedom fighters. However, such hegemonic forms of memorialization also led to the omission and subsuming of local histories of ordinary convicts and their local descendants. Zehmisch’s chapter seeks to recover the representation of these subaltern histories in narratives framed by members of local communities. In their alternative version, the convict-ancestors during the pre-1942 period feature as the settlers who had colonized the Islands at a great cost, fighting “adverse climatic conditions,” “wild jungles,” and “ferocious savages” and even contributed to the liberation of India by their resistance to the colonial authorities. By writing and speaking publicly about their subaltern ancestors’ lives and their role in nationalist movements like the 1857 War of Independence, Zehmisch contends, the local people strive to “create local awareness and consciousness about the silenced histories of the Andamans.” The next two chapters, Tapan Basu’s chapter on Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya and Debarati Das and Banerjee’s chapter on Mahasweta Devi’s works show the histories of subaltern groups, like dalits and tribals. The chapter on Bhikshu Bodhanand’s Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya shows how the Aryan conquest of India and the institution of the caste system established by the invaders suppressed the history of the ancient past. Bodhanand’s 1930 text is a critical reflection on the

8  Introduction beginnings of varnavyavastha, as it constructs a story of how the hierarchies of caste had emanated out of the ruthless defeat and dispossession inflicted on the indigenous populations of India by marauding alien tribes. Chapter 6 shows how Devi’s short stories and novels reveal age-old systems of bonded labor, unfair percentages of sharecropping, kamiya-whoredom, (prostitution of bonded laborer), and more recent trends like the forcible extraction of money by political lumpen elements continue to plague the tribal population of India. Persistent drought and famine in the fringes of the Green Revolution belt belie the success story of the Indian agricultural revolution. Devi turns to myth, historical fiction, and partial history to bring alive the resistance narratives of the adivasis from the time of the Birsa Munda Uprising until the present day against the eviction of the age-old indigenous inhabitants of India from their legitimate sites, invasion of their cultures, and attempts to strip them of history and identity. Competing with the dominant narrative of Indian development, Devi’s works produce rival histories which belie the nationalist claims. All three chapters discussed in this section seem to evince the validity of Sanal Mohan’s claim about radical historiography: historiography has acquired a radical turn with the coming of the ‘history from below’ and the debates on alternative histories. It has necessitated a critique of the dominant paradigms. This opens up the possibility of various articulations of history by subordinated social groups to explore the prospect of a radical practice of the discipline. (2010, p. 357) Unlike the three chapters discussed earlier, the last chapter in section two does not focus on subaltern studies. However, while Sister Nivedita’s work might not defy conventional generic categorization as a history text or claim to represent history from below, her concept of the synthetic unity of India during the colonial period challenges, as Arpita Mitra argues, at least two dominant historiographical premises of the colonial period. Nivedita posed an alternate history by opposing the claims of a) the British, who refused to recognize the unity of India as a nation because of its variances of languages, religions, and cultures and b) that of India as a predominantly Hindu nation. According to Mitra, by using alternative concepts like the primacy of place in determining history, the concept of synthesis and of sequence, and the idea of the evolution of the city as “a sort of lotus, divided into numbered whorls” (derived from Patrick Geddes), Sister Nivedita produces a unified history of India, accepting its diversity, and opposing the idea of ethnographic and religious divide. As stated above, the concept of alternate historiography also takes into account the neglected popular culture. The connotations of culture have changed over the years. While earlier, ‘culture’ was construed as high culture, of late, it has extended “downwards,” as Burke says, “to include ‘low’ or popular culture.” In History and Social Theory, Burke has specifically emphasized the “attitudes and

Introduction 9 values of ordinary people and their expression in folk art, folksongs, folktales, festivals and so on,” as instances of low culture (Burke, 1992, p. 119). Even in the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore had argued that the history that we read in textbooks focuses on struggles for power, invasions, and conquests of kingdoms by Pathans, Mughals, Portuguese, French, and English. But that history of political conspiracies, invasions, and conquests is not the real history of the people. Even during such times of calamities, these fights and assassinations were not the most important matter of India. One cannot accept that the storm is the principal event even at the time the storm rages. Even that day, beneath the dust-covered sky, in the lowly cottages in the villages, the flowing current of life and death, of happiness and sorrow, which lay concealed, was of primary importance to people. (Tagore, 1362 BS, p. 378; my translation) Tagore considered that the real history of India is the history of the people and their everyday lives, not of kings and their conquests. In his Introduction to History in the Vernacular, Chatterjee has pointed out that Tagore’s powerful plea to discover the history of “samaj” (or society) led to a movement for the collection and preservation of artefacts, “folklore,” “artistic and performative practices.” “Ethnography and folklore, rather than archival history, became the preferred methods for studying the so-called true history of the people” (Chatterjee, 2008, p. 16). Das and Banerjee’s chapter especially depends on tribal folklore, myths, and oral songs. Devi retrieves past history from oral songs and conversations with the tribals to reconstruct the lost tribal narratives. Like Chatterjee, Bernard Cohn, in his discussion of “proctological history, the study of history ‘from the bottom up’ ” states the necessity of alternate sources, “oral traditions,” “use of songs, folklore,” etc., which enabled historians to access “the life patterns of the inarticulate” (1987, p. 39). This concept also helps us to understand the subaltern history related in Chapter 8. As we shall see there, P. K. Yasser Arafath focuses on the medium of letter-songs, recorded in cassettes, to tell the story of the migration of Malabarese males to the Gulf and its impact on society. The songs show how such migration affected familial and marital relations of the common people of Malabar during the 1970s until the 1990s. Cultural history especially relies on interdisciplinary studies. From the 1960s to the 1990s, cultural studies drew on anthropology. “Historians and anthropologists have a common subject matter, ‘otherness’; one field constructs and studies ‘otherness’ in space, the other in time” (Cohn, 1987, p. 19). Zehmisch’s study is based on ethnographic data generated during twenty-two months of fieldwork in the Andaman Islands and collection of data from local newspapers, booklets, pamphlets, and online representations. Instead of archival research, he relied on oral reports, informal interviews, and conversations with the local people of Andaman for his historiographic research. Zehmisch’s as also Arafath’s chapter

10  Introduction might have elements in common with micro-history, which was a reaction against the focus on general trends “without communicating much sense of the variety or specificity of local cultures.” As Burke put it, “the microscope offered an attractive alternative to the telescope, allowing concrete individual or local experience to re-enter history” (Burke, 2008, pp. 44–45). Cultural history, therefore, revives interest in the specificities of regional historiography, as we see in the two chapters of Zehmisch and Arafath.

Peripheral genres and alternate historiography Although earlier chapters of the book have shown the use of literary or semiliterary genres in narrating history (e.g., travel narratives and fiction), it is the two chapters in the last section which discuss songs and film as history. By eschewing the dominance of the written word that we find in academic history writing, Arafat and Nishat Haider rely on auditory and visual media for presenting history. Arafath shows how Kathupattukal (Letter Songs) emerged as a major Islamic literary genre in the late 1970s when large numbers of Mappila Muslims from Malabar migrated to the Gulf in search of job opportunities. This resulted in emotional trauma, related to separation for long periods, for spouses – both the wives who were left behind and the husbands who had to leave home and family to earn money but were apprehensive of marital dishonesty on the part of the abandoned wives. As a new poetic sub-genre, the Kathupattukal, which were recorded in cassettes, captured the emotional exchanges between ‘pravasi husbands’ and their wives and articulated their states of feelings. The final chapter of the book is an exploration in film of postcolonial history, through a multi-voiced, non-linear narrative, which shuns the cause-and-effect chain of narration and the authoritarian, single narrator-historian. Engaging with the issue of the legitimacy of the film’s representation of the past, Haider notes the emergence of a new paradigm in historical research, which engages with memory as a cultural trope and discusses how Firaaq explores the relation between “memory and history, between remembrance and representation.” Not concerned with evidence as a source of information, the film is, by its own profession, “a fictional story, based on a thousand true stories.” Firaaq relies on “popular memory” for reconstructing this suppressed history. Unlike history proper, mnemohistory is concerned not with the past as such but only with the past as it is remembered. The film wrests out the traumatic memories of the past from the realm of the unconscious to show how people coped with the precariousness and “vulnerability of life,” and suggests how some kind of healing can be achieved by “working through” the harrowing experiences. As an alternative to established narratives of history, the film Firaaq serves as a very effective vehicle for recapturing the disjointed, fragmented past of the traumatic period of the Gujarat Riot and its various after effects. The discussion here shows various forms of alternative histories that the collection centers on. This book does not aim to produce a sustained discussion of any single aspect of historiography related to India; nor does it limit itself to a

Introduction 11 particular period. Instead, it addresses various aspects of cultural studies, exploring alternative histories of India which may be presented often in non-academic genres. The alternate histories may be concerned with non-dominant narratives, subaltern histories, and regional histories and engage with various media like fiction, songs, films. As I have pointed out at the outset, this volume has fundamental differences with conventional historiographies like Approaches to History: Essays in Indian Historiography (2011). The book has similarities of subject and methodology with prior publications like Writing the Mughal World: Studies in Political Culture (2011). The latter throws light not only on what the Mughals thought of history writing and the changing trends, but also how literary works interweave motifs and elements, common to literary narratives, along with reflections on contemporary politics and kingship. However, the present volume does not seek to limit itself to the historiography of a specific period, but to engage with the issue of alternative historiography by looking at diverse alternate histories of India, which provide glimpses of cultural encounters and suppressed narratives that cover present-day India as well as the precolonial and colonial periods. The first section of the book draws on such books on travel writing as IndoPersian travels in the age of discoveries, 1400–1800 (2007) which discuss intercultural exchange. But, as I have said, the scope of this volume is larger as we discuss other aspects of historiography. Kate Teltscher’s India inscribed: European and British writing on India 1600–1800 (1995) and Pramod K. Nayar’s English writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing aesthetics (2008) also examine precolonial and colonial representations of India. But, they aim to look at European perceptions of India and are restricted solely to cultural encounters between Europeans and Indians. The present volume breaks new ground by bringing together a number of studies on representations of India, its encounters with alien cultures over the years, the multiple histories of its neglected people, stories of popular culture and resistance, diverse regions which, by their historical specificities, highlight the limitations of a monolithic narrative of the nation-state, and the conflicts and divides which produce traumatic experiences. It raises the question of alternate genres of history-writing, popularized by non-historians. By the production of alternative histories, the book situates itself in the debate as to what may or may not be considered as “history” in India today.

References Alam, M., & Subrahmanyam, S. (2007). Indo-Persian travels in the age of discoveries, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alam, M., & Subrahmanyam, S. (Eds.). (2011). Writing the Mughal world: Studies in political culture. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Bhattacharya, S. (Ed.). (2011). Approaches to history: Essays in Indian historiography. New Delhi: Primus: & ICHR. Burke, P. (1969). Renaissance sense of the past. London: Edward Arnold. Burke, P. (1992). History and social theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

12  Introduction Burke, P. (2008). What is cultural history? (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Burke, P. (1990). The French historical revolution: The Annales school, 1929–1989. Cambridge: Polity Press. Calaresu, M., de Vivo, F., & Rubiés, J. P. (2010). Introduction: Peter Burke and the history of cultural history. In Calaresu et al. (Eds.) Exploring cultural history: Essays in honour of Peter Burke (pp. 1–28). London and New York, Routledge. Chatterjee, P. (1999). The nation and its fragments. The Partha Chatterjee omnibus. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, P. (2008). Introduction: History in the vernacular. In R. Aquil & P. Chatterjee (Eds.), History in the vernacular (pp. 1–24). Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Cohn, B. S. (1987). History and anthropology: The state of play. In An anthropologist among the historians and other essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ginzburg, C. (1999). History, rhetoric, and proof. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Guha, R. (Ed.). (1982). Subaltern studies (Vol. I). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mohan, S. (2010). ‘Searching for old histories’: Social movements and the project of writing history in twentieth-century Kerala. In R. Aquil & P. Chatterjee (Eds.), History in the vernacular (pp. 357–390). Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Nayar, P. K. (2008). English writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing aesthetics. London: Routledge. Oxford English Dictionary. Ricoeur, P. (1988). Time and narrative (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans., Vol. 3). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ricoeur, P. (2006). Memory, history, forgetting (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Tagore, R. (1362 BS). Bharatbarsher Itihas. In R. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali (Vol. 4, pp. 377–387). Calcutta: Visva Bharati. Teltscher, K. (1995). India inscribed: European and British writing on India 1600–1800. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Woolf, D. R. (1990). The idea of history in early Stuart England: Erudition, ideology, and the light of truth from the accession of James I to the Civil War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Part 1

Investigating cultural practices, fashioning identities, and travel literature

1 John Locke’s India Religion, revelation, and enthusiasm1 Daniel Carey

John Locke’s intellectual encounter with India, based on his reading of travel literature and contacts with individuals who traveled there, is more substantial and sustained than critics have recognized.2 His attention to the New World is well known, not least due to his connections with the Carolina colony and role in drafting its constitution, but also in relation to indigenous peoples and colonial settlement (see Armitage, 2004; Castilla Urbano, 1986; Tully, 1993). Elsewhere his interest in China has received separate discussion (Talbot, 2015). But Locke’s understanding of India remains neglected, in part because the traces survive in unpublished sources. In this chapter I  concentrate on Locke’s relationship to Indian religion and Hinduism in particular. The evidence that he compiled was absorbed into a larger comparative analysis of religious belief and practice, drawing on testimonies of those who described exotic peoples in travel narratives and related commentaries. India provided a potent instance of religious tradition, especially among the Hindus, of interest in itself but also as an illustration of problematic human tendencies, perhaps the most serious of which concerned religious enthusiasm. This issue preoccupied Locke for many years and eventually became the subject of a separate chapter of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the fourth edition (1700). Locke’s deployment of Indian exempla began with sati, the self-immolation of Hindu wives following the death of their husbands. But it was not as a specifically religious practice that he initially described it. His transition to seeing the custom as a religious one and the country more generally as a repository of enthusiastic and other extravagant beliefs came about especially from his reading of the work of François Bernier, the French physician and associate of Pierre Gassendi, who spent twelve years in India at the court of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. We have to study the manuscript sources to recognize the trajectory. While the Essay makes no mention of India in the chapter on enthusiasm, we can see from a wider investigation that Locke was deeply engaged in creating an anthropology of religious custom and belief, of which enthusiasm formed a key component. His correspondence and reading confirm the significance of India in this inquiry.

16  Daniel Carey

I  Locke and sati The evidence of John Locke’s notebooks, journals, correspondence, and published work testifies to his longstanding commitment to investigate social practices through the accumulation of testimony about non-European peoples around the world, both primitive and polite in his terms. He relied to a large extent on travel literature (broadly defined) as his source of information. Works of this kind populated his library on an impressive scale (Harpham, 2017) and he engaged in avid exchange with various contacts about new accounts and points of discussion arising from his reading throughout his adult life (Carey, 2006). The full range of Locke’s interests came into play in this context, from medical cures to weights, measures, currency, and concerns with natural law, religion, and moral custom, and beyond. Locke’s attention to India forms part of this larger commitment. We can trace, for example, a recommendation in Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) to a passage in Edward Terry’s A Voyage to East-India (1655) which Locke read.3 Terry had reported: For the stature of the Natives of East-India they are like us, but generally very streight, for I never observed, nor heard of, any crooked person amongst them. And one reason may be, because they never lace nor girt in their bodyes. (Terry, 1655, p. 132) Locke marked this page for attention in his copy.4 In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he warned against the effect of hard bodices and clothes that pinched, claiming that they resulted in “ill Lungs, and Crookedness” (Locke, 1989, §12, 91). Among the customs that drew his attention, the most significant instance early in his career is that of sati,5 but it was not as a religious practice that he first described it. Elsewhere I have discussed Locke’s relationship to sati (Carey, 2014). In the present context we can consider it more briefly as a prelude to his later assessment of India in religious terms. Descriptions of sati proliferated among Western travel accounts, including works in English, Dutch, German, and Italian, many of which then circulated yet more widely in translation.6 Locke read and reflected on one such account in the early 1660s – an English translation published in 1662 of a travel book by the German nobleman, Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo, based on Mandelslo’s journey to India in the late 1630s.7 During the period in which Locke encountered the work he held a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, and was appointed censor of moral philosophy in 1664, a post that entailed responsibility for presiding over scholastic disputations in the college. In this capacity he prepared a group of eight disputations of his own on the subject of natural law. Although he contemplated over many years the possibility of reworking them (with particular encouragement from his friend James Tyrrell, see Locke, 1976– 89, vol. 4, p. 109), he never published the material. The manuscripts were only printed for the first time in 1954 (John Locke, 1954/1988).

John Locke’s India 17 Locke referenced Mandelslo when discussing the chief tenet of natural law, self-preservation.8 The right of self-preservation was foundational for the whole system, providing the logical basis from which his deductions flowed. Could this crucial law be known from common consent, that is to say, from the actual practice of peoples? Locke showed otherwise by referring to sati. Locke reported: among the [East] Indians the weak and timid female sex dares to make light of dying and to hasten to rejoin departed husbands by passing through the flames and through the gate of death. They allow the nuptial torches to be extinguished only in the flames of the funeral pyre.  .  .  . Of this fact Mandelslo, in the recently published itinerary of Olearius, declares himself an eye-witness. (Locke, 1954/1988, p. 173; Olearius & Mandelslo, 1662, Bk 1, pp. 40–41[sig. Ffff4v-Gggg1r]) Locke stresses that his source, Mandelslo, observed these events himself, and that the information was current. He continues: As he himself [Mandelslo] relates, he saw a beautiful young woman who after the death of her husband could not be prevailed upon, or restrained from murdering herself, by the advice, entreaties, and tears of her friends. At length, after an involuntary delay of six months, with the permission of the magistrate, she dressed as if for a wedding, triumphantly and with a joyous face ascended a pyre set up in the middle of the market-place, and cheerfully perished in the flames. (Locke, 1954/1988, p. 173) Locke drew from this episode a philosophical conclusion about “the power of custom and tradition based on traditional ways of life,” consistent with his suspicions about forms of authority that did not derive from reason. At the same time, we can see that as the story develops Locke has responded to the sati as a figure of romance. His manner of telling it suggests that, at this stage of his career, travel literature had begun to supplant the romances that had once engaged him, by providing information of philosophical importance while satisfying the narrative desire supplied by fiction.9 It is noteworthy that in focusing on the question of self-preservation Locke ignored the religious dimension of the story present in Mandelslo’s narrative in the English translation that he read.10 This account clarifies first of all that the sati was a Rajput widow, not more than twenty years old, and that her death occurred in Cambay in Gujarat. This was territory under Mughal control, and as the passage notes the authorities were Muslims who attempted to “abolish this heathenish and barbarous custome.” The governor caused a delay in order to confirm that the husband, who died in Lahore, had indeed passed away. Eventually the governor relented since the widow’s passion to follow her husband was unabated, and he

18  Daniel Carey “permitted her to comply with the Lawes of her own Religion” (Olearius & Mandelslo, 1662, p. 40).11 Locke elides religion from his account, and his reference to the act as proceeding with the magistrate’s permission makes it appear to have social and political sanction from the authorities, a misleading report. Aspects of Locke’s argument survived in the process of developing what eventually became the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). In Draft B of the Essay (1671), Locke remained concerned by specious arguments that rested on consensus, but he concentrated more closely in the draft on rejecting the supposition of innateness.12 He returned to sati in this context, compressing the account and adding an important dimension to his analysis. Locke disputed the claim that the idea of God and the principle of self-preservation qualified as “imprinted” and universal. As far as the Deity was concerned, he noted that wide swathes of humanity actively deny His existence. On the subject of self-preservation he returned once more to sati. “He that shall read the historys of the East Indies,” Locke pointed out, “would find quite the contrary accounted a principle even of their religion, and self-murder a very necessary and glorious duty” (Locke, 1990, p. 111). On this occasion, Locke jettisoned the focus on gender and romance evident in his first discussion, while consolidating the conclusion that this social practice received reinforcement from religion and was upheld, above all, as a principle. In short, those who became satis did so not merely from a personal desire but with social and religious affirmation.

II  Locke’s inquiries When Locke published the Essay in 1690, he devoted the first book to an extended attack on innateness in order to set the scene for his positive construction of the sources of human knowledge in the ensuing thee books. He dropped sati from his repertoire of examples at this time. Elsewhere I have tried to reconstruct his reasons for doing so (Carey, 2014). In the present discussion I wish to concentrate on the transition in Locke’s reflections on India towards seeing the country as rich in examples of questionable religious custom and enthusiasm. Locke’s shift in attention was spurred on by his encounter with the work of François Bernier in particular. But we can also situate it in the context of his wider attempt to capture the diversity of religious practices, an investigation framed by a number of important assumptions. Before turning to Bernier we can benefit from consideration of the questions Locke posed when he approached exotic religions and the attitudes that inform these questions. An undated Locke manuscript, possibly from the early 1670s, provides some insight. The manuscript survives in a guard-book assembled by Public Record Office archivists from materials in the Shaftesbury papers (Locke entered the household of the first Earl of Shaftesbury [then Lord Ashley] in 1667 and lived in Ashley’s residence, Exeter House in the Strand, until 1675). In the manuscript, Locke recorded a series of inquiries designed to elicit the salient aspects of religious belief and practice in foreign countries. The questions may have been specific to a particular, although unnamed, religion, as J. R. Milton has suggested

John Locke’s India 19 (1996, p. 127), but I suspect that they are generic, and intended to provide the basis for a thorough anthropological assessment regardless of where travelers found themselves. In this short manuscript, Locke proposed attention to the following topics: What they believe concerning God Spirits good & bad The soule & its state after this life Heaven Hell The world its beginning & duration And upon what grounds their belief concerning these things is founded? What is the obiects, Manner, Time & Place of their religious worship Whether they have priests. How distinguished from others?  & whether they are good men? Whether they pretend to any Revelation from heaven of their Religion & Miracles to confirme it? And when this was. And what probabilitys offerd Whether there be any Apparitions, Oracles, Praedictions, Conjurations or inchantments amongst them? (The National Archives PRO/30/24/47/30, fol. 44) The practice of developing inquiries that Locke adopts here had a long history, but the immediate influence on his approach can be traced to Robert Boyle and the Royal Society. The Society enthusiastically adopted the method of producing inquiries for exotic destinations, which they discussed in meetings and then circulated through the journal produced by the Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, the Philosophical Transactions. Boyle took on this approach and prepared an important synoptic set of inquiries, “General heads for the natural History of a Country, great or small,” published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1666.13 Adapting this method of natural history to his own purposes, Locke seeks to document the basic substance of religious views. Part of this investigation is conducted through attention to certain formal aspects of religious life: is there a priesthood? How are priests marked off from the laity? When and where do the people worship? What are the objects of veneration? Beliefs similarly have a kind of structure, some of which are predetermined, since to qualify as a religion certain things are required: a conception of the deity, some account of the soul, creation, notions of heaven and hell, and the existence of spirits, either malevolent or benevolent. But the inclusion of “Apparitions, Oracles, Praedictions, Conjurations or inchantments” on the list indicates the scope for impositions and distortions to form a component of the religious system. When Locke asks “upon what grounds their belief concerning these things is founded,” he introduces a further dimension into the investigation. The answer, perhaps, might be tradition or some form of sacred text, but it may also suggest an understanding of religious belief as implicitly propositional, requiring grounds and justifications. Locke’s question about “whether they pretend to any Revelation from heaven of their Religion” is

20  Daniel Carey not an assertion of the falsehood of the claim (although as a Christian he could only accept the legitimacy of the Bible as a revealed text), but rather a desire to know in simple terms whether the claim of divine revelation constituted part of the belief system. The issue of whether miracles supported the assertion of revelation is significant given their role in the Judeo-Christian scriptural tradition, and equally the way that they figured in Locke’s later deliberations over religious enthusiasm. The request to know about the “probabilitys offerd” suggests that he presumably wanted to know what kind of probabilities were cited that tied such events to a divine source affirming a divine revelation.

III  Locke and Indian religion The specific questions posed in the manuscript resonate with Locke’s reading practice; depending on the date of manuscript, they may have arisen directly from his reading or they may have structured in advance the kinds of things he was looking for. In any case, the evidence of Locke’s notebooks and journals reveals a concerted attempt to compile a substantial repertoire of examples of diverse religious belief and practice. The earliest evidence of his efforts to acquire an understanding of India occurs in this context. The first fruits of this appear in extensive notes he took on the English translation of Arnoldus Montanus’s Atlas Japannensis (1670). Montanus, a prolific Dutch author who trained in theology in the Dutch Reformed tradition in Leiden, became a minister and teacher in a town near Amsterdam (Hesselink, 2002). The Atlas, as the English edition called it (Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen [Memorable Embassies] in the original), contained substantial digressions on religion and other matters in the midst of an account of Dutch diplomatic efforts in Japan in 1649–1650. Locke took an avid interest in the discussions of religion. His indexing of topics in the commonplace book Adversaria 1661 is most extensive in connection with Japanese religion, but there are also separate pages of the notebook with subject headings on religious issues related to Formosa, China, the Druids, and what he called “Brachmannorum Religio,” i.e., Hinduism.14 Locke’s headings under the latter are Deus O.M., Spiritus, Anima seperata, Cultus, Ethica, and Revelatio. The limited information on India available in Montanus resulted in a paucity of entries under the headings in Adversaria 1661.15 Locke needed to look elsewhere for more. He seems to have begun reading the work of François Bernier in translation at this time (perhaps after seeing a summary in the Philosophical Transactions).16 Bernier (1620–1688) was the author of four volumes based on his Indian experience where he lived from 1658/59 to 1669. An associate of the philosopher Pierre Gassendi, he trained in medicine at Montpellier before his extensive travels. In India he attended to Darah Shikoh (eldest son of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and heir-apparent) as physician. Darah was supplanted (and later executed) by his younger sibling, who became the emperor Aurangzeb (1618–1707, Mughal emperor 1658–1707; see Truschke, 2017). Bernier joined the court of Aurangzeb from c.1659 to 1667 where he served Daneshmand Khan (Mullah Shafi’a’i), a major official and savant who had emigrated from Yazd in Persia. Bernier traveled

John Locke’s India 21 very widely in India, in connection with the movements of Aurangzeb’s court and also on his own volition (see Dew, 2009; Beasley, 2018). In his first notes on Bernier’s work in the commonplace book Adversaria 1661, Locke recorded the value of Indian currency and, on the subject of religion (under the heading “Revelatio Indorum”) he noted that “The Gentiles of Indostan have fower books of law w[c]h they pretend were given them by god through the hands of Brama” (Adversaria 1661, p. 102; citing Bernier, 1672b, p. 108). This entry pre-dates Locke’s four-year period of travel in France (1675–1679). During his journey there, Locke commenced reading Bernier’s volumes in the original.17 In April  1676, while at Montpellier, he studied Bernier’s Voiage de Kachemire (1672) as Locke referred to it.18 A range of things caught his attention, among them questions of religion. In his journal entry of 7 May he noted: “Pretensions to miracles among both heathens and Mahumetans of Indostan” (Bodleian Library, MS Locke f. 1, p. 251; referenced to Bernier, 1672a, pp. 82, 118; Lough, 1953, p. 231). He moved swiftly on to Bernier’s Histoire de la Derniere Revolution des Etats du Grand Mogol (1670a), the companion volume, Evenemens particuliers (1670b), and the first volume of the Suite des Memoires du Sr Bernier sur l’Empire du Grand Mogol (1671a). Regarding the latter, his journal in May records entries of note on Muslim holy places, together with “The Religion & Superstitions of the heathen of Indostan,”19 “The way of falling into an Extasie” and “Pretensions to revelation.”20 In relation to ecstasies in particular, Locke added a further conjecture: “Q Whether Extasie be any thing else but dreaming with the eyes open or whether dreaming be any thing else but the appearance of Ideas in the minde without knowing the cause that produces them there as wide wakeing” (MS Locke f. 1, p. 256; not reproduced by Lough, 1953). We can see that Locke’s attention was prepared for the narrative that Bernier supplied and that it complemented the inquiries he had developed on the subject of religion and his reading of Montanus. Bernier’s perspective in the Suite coincided with Locke’s, evident in Bernier’s designation of the work’s theme (as Locke himself recorded), as “the superstitions, strange Fashions, and doctrine” of the Hindus, “Whence may be seen, that there are no Opinions so ridiculous, and so extravagant, which the Spirit of man is not capable of” (quoted from the English translation of Bernier, 1672b, p. 103). Locke’s journals during his time in France indicate that he met Bernier in Paris on at least three occasions – the first time in October 1677. Locke noted the following about their conversation: Mr Bernier told me that the Heathens of Indostand pretend to great antiquity; that they have books  & historys in their language; that the nodus of their numbers is at 10 as ours  & their circuit of days 7. That they are in number about 10 to 1 to the Mahumetans & that AurengZebe had lately ingaged him self very inconveniently in wars with them upon the account of religion, endeavouring to bring them by force to Mahumetanisme; & to discourage & bring over the Banians or undoe them, he had given exemptions of Custome to the tradeing Mahumetans, by which meanes his revenue was very much

22  Daniel Carey lessened, the Banians makeing use of the names of Mahumetans to trade under & soe eluding his partiality. (Locke, 1953, p. 177; see also p. 282) The topics of religious belief and practice, according to this summary, remained peripheral to the discussion, although religion intruded on the military conflicts that Bernier had reported on in his first volume. Nonetheless, we know that Locke continued to turn to Bernier for information of relevance to religion through the mode of the inquiry. In 1678, he noted a question for him relating to sati (MS  Locke f. 28, p.  60; see also Locke, 1953, p.  177n), and in a letter to his friend Nicolas Toinard of October 1681 he asked if Toinard could check with Bernier about whether he had observed, “parmi les Orientaux tant Turcs que Paiens quelque Sorcelerie. Spectre, Oracles ett21 et si le Diable se fait vaire [sic] a ces gens la comme en l Amarique,22 la Lapponie et autre part parmi les paiens” (Locke, 1976–89, vol. 2, p. 454) (among the Orientals, both Turks and pagans, any sorcery, specter, oracles, etc., and if the devil appears to these people as in America, Lapland, and elsewhere among the pagans).

IV  Organizing religious knowledge Locke had clearly begun to widen out his anthropology of religion and was attempting to make it systematic. To gain a better sense of how he structured the topic and where religious enthusiasm fits into the picture – enthusiasm was one of his great themes and an issue that surfaced in India, as we will see – we can return to his early notes on reading Montanus, the Dutch expositor of Japan. Locke’s page in the Adversaria 1661 commonplace book headed “Religio” and “Iapannensium Theologia” contains a number of sub-topics broken down in many cases into further branches. The schema is more elaborate than the notes on “Brachmannorum Religio” from the same book, presumably due to the greater abundance of discussion of Japan in Montanus. The major headings are: Deus O.M., Idola, Spiritus, Anima seperata, Mundus Creatus, Cultus, Preces, Oblationes, Ethica, and Revelatio. The breaking down of these topics into further sub-headings is especially notable in the case of Ethica where he introduces Virtutes, Vitia et peccata, and Indifferentia, with yet further sub-headings (for example in the latter, Homicidium, Suicidium, and Polygamia) (see Adversaria 1661, pp. 140–141). Given the issues that we find Locke inquiring about directly in relation to Indian religion (discussed earlier and further in this chapter), the headings that relate to Spiritus and Revelatio are especially interesting. Under Spiritus, Locke’s sub-headings include: Spectra, Incantatio, Obsessio, Divinatio, Necromantia, Praestigia, Magia, and Daimones. There is overlap in quite a few of these categories with the sub-headings provided under Revelatio, which include: Divinatio, Necromantia, Praestigia, Spectra, Incantatio, Obsessio, and Exstasis. He crosses out Spectra, Incantatio, and Obsessio, probably on the basis that they belonged more properly (as he seems to have concluded) under Spiritus (there are more page references when they appear under the latter heading). In a separate column

John Locke’s India 23 divided by a vertical stroke Locke added further sub-headings: Prophetia (with Extasis added once again, perhaps as an additional branch), Vaticinia, Oracula, Insomnia, Visiones, Divinatio (again, with an additional page reference this time). Finally, he concludes the list, significantly, with Enthusiasmus. There is a line drawn between the crossed out Obsessio and Enthusiasmus, perhaps suggesting that Locke saw them as related (Adversaria 1661, pp. 140–141). These headings and lists indicate an ongoing effort by Locke to shape the disparate information he absorbed regarding religion. While they remain provisional to an extent and evidently subject to revision, they point to the survival, in effect, of Ramist tabulation of knowledge in which structured brackets distribute species and genera. This approach of course had a long history (Feingold, Freedman, & Rother, 2001; Hotson, 2007), but it was also well-established in the domain of travel as a way of ordering observation (Carey, 2013). We can see this, in fact, in Boyle’s widely circulated “General Heads,” which influenced Locke. Locke’s topical organization is more elaborate than the religious questionnaire I discussed earlier (PRO/30/24/47/30, fol. 44), which may mean that the PRO document derives from an earlier period of Locke’s reflections and attempts to conduct a survey. The religious headings adopted to structure his reading of Montanus form part of a larger attempt by Locke over an extended period to produce a plan of the sciences, reflected in a range of manuscript sources, some dated and others undated. In a forthcoming volume in the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke, J. R. Milton is providing an edition of thirteen of these classifications produced by Locke from the early 1670s to the late 1680s. Milton has divided these into two series, A and B. The earliest (Series A) appear, notably, in the commonplace book Adversaria 1661 where Locke’s notes on Montanus were recorded. For our purposes, the Theologia category is especially significant. In various efforts to organize his plan formally, we find Locke including numerous sub-divisions under this category, once again under the headings of Deus O.M., Spiritus, Revelatio, Anima Seperata, Mundus, Cultus and Ethica (Locke, forthcoming). They coincide with the way he structured his notes on Montanus. The question is which came first, the reading or the division. Whatever the priority, his reading and divisions became intermixed over time. J. R. Milton points out that three plans in the Adversaria 1661 commonplace book and the version called “Sapienta 72” by Locke see him making yet more elaborate classifications, e.g., in relation to modes of divine worship.23 The Series B plans of the sciences were composed in all likelihood in autumn 1677 when Locke was in Paris. The material that he assembled regarding religion and morality was ranged by Locke under the heading “Adversaria Historica” (adversaria here relates to books read; see Locke, 2019, pp.  33–34). It encompassed, as a 1677 journal entry makes clear, opinions about God and moral matters, divided into opinions or traditions concerning the divine, revelation, prophesies and miracles; duties, sins and matters indifferent; atonement and how blessings are obtained; and supernatural matters reflected in magic and predictions (MS Locke f. 2, pp. 247–252). In other versions, Locke designated the overall category as “Historia Civilia” and in

24  Daniel Carey one of them “Historica Religiosa” (MS Locke c. 28, fo. 51; 12 November 1677). They include such sub-headings as Creatione, Revelatione, Prophetia, Miraculis, Anima, Paradisus, and Gehenna.24

V  Indian religion: new pursuits The continuation of Locke’s researches on Indian religion has some continuity with these categories. In April 1683, he wrote to a young man travelling to India as a member of the East India Company with a range of inquiries designed to elicit further detail on subjects of importance to him. His correspondent was Charles Cudworth, son of the leading Cambridge Platonist philosopher, Ralph Cudworth, and sister of Locke’s friend, Damaris Masham. Masham’s philosophical interests had led to noteworthy exchanges on religious enthusiasm with Locke (see Hamou, 2008; Di Biase, 2012, pp. 89–104). In his letter to Cudworth, Locke apologized for addressing him with impatience before describing the specific issues on which he hoped to learn more: Some of those who have traveld and write of those parts, give us strange storys of the tricks donne by some of their Juglers there, which must needs be beyond leger de main and seeme not within the power of art or nature. I would very gladly know whether they are really donne as strange as they are reported, and whether those that practise them are any of them Mahumetans, or all (which I rather suppose) heathens, and how they are looked on by the Bramins and the other people of the country, whether they have any aparitions amongst them and what thoughts of spirits, and as much of the opinions religion ceremonys of the Hindos and other heathens of those countrys as comes in your way to learne or enquire. (Locke, 1976–89, vol. 2, p. 591) The focus on religion reflects Locke’s encounter with Bernier, both through his writing and personal conversation with him. But the “strange storys” may also have been derived, possibly, from texts noted by Locke that Bernier recommended in his work, specifically the Dutch preacher (predikant), Abraham Rogerius (referred to as Roger in Locke’s notes) and the English cleric Henry Lord.25 The reference to “Juglers” may come from a different source – Robert Hooke’s preface to Robert Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681). Hooke noted that the reader of the book would find out not only about the language, learning and laws of Ceylon but also “their Magick & Jugling” (Knox, 1681, sig. (a)4r). We know that Locke purchased the book in 1681 and he paraphrased Hooke’s preface in a manuscript (see MS  Locke f. 5, p.  115 for purchase; see MS Locke c. 42, p. 248 regarding the paraphrase of Hooke). In any event, the letter to Cudworth indicates that Locke sought new insight into Hindu religious belief and practice in particular, together with other “heathen” faiths. At the same time, Locke did not restrict himself to these topics. He hoped that Cudworth could also notify him more generally about “their languages learning government manners.” In other words he asked for a wide anthropological

John Locke’s India 25 survey according to standard heads or topoi, particularly in relation to the Mughal emperor Aurangzebe, the subject of Bernier’s first book. Locke concluded the letter with a request for an account of how Eastern peoples keep time in relation to weeks, months and years, as well as whether they used a system of arithmetic based on 10 (Locke, 1976–89, vol. 2, pp. 591, 593). Sadly, Cudworth died not long after his arrival, depriving Locke of a potentially valuable correspondent. Locke’s grasp of aspects of Indian religion nonetheless remained somewhat insecure, as appears in an important letter of 4 August 1690, composed after the Essay Concerning Human Understanding came out. The letter, written to his friend James Tyrrell, responded to criticisms of the Essay communicated by Tyrrell that had been made by various figures, focusing on the relationship between divine law and the law of nature in Locke’s account.26 Locke replied somewhat testily that he was merely trying to point out how “men came by moral Ideas or Notions,” which he maintained was either from divine law, “municipal” law, or what he called the “law of reputation or fashion.” In relation to divine law, he sought only to show that some people judged their actions “by the law of Moses or Jesus Christ.” He added that “the Alcoran of the Mahumetans and the Hanscrit of the Bramins” could not be excluded from consideration, although he feared the confusion that mentioning them might cause (Locke, 1976–89, vol. 4, pp.  112–113). Locke’s “Hanscrit” for Sanskrit derives from Bernier’s Suite des Memoires (Bernier, 1671c, pp. 84, 96–98), and ultimately from Athanasius Kircher’s book China Illustrata, Bernier’s source.27 The treatment by Locke of “Hanscrit” as equivalent to the Koran suggests that he may have regarded it as a particular book rather than a language.

VI  India and religious enthusiasm As we have seen, Locke includes enthusiasm among the sub-headings relevant to his reading of Montanus on the religion of both Japan and Formosa (Adversaria 1661, pp.  141, 143) as well as in his plan for the sciences. In a journal entry, dated 19 February 1682, Locke assessed this issue, drawing in part on his study of Bernier. He defines enthusiasm in the entry as “A strong and firm persuasion of any proposition relating to religion for which a man hath either no or not sufficient proofs from reason but receives them as truths wrought in the mind extraordinarily by God himself.” Locke’s propositional understanding of religious claims leads him to interpret enthusiasm as lacking in evidence and ungrounded, existing beyond the bounds of what he regards as knowledge. He goes on to note that “Christians, Mahomedans, and Brahmins all pretend to it (and I am told the Chinese too).” In support of this, Locke cites Paul Rycaut’s account of Turkish dervishes in The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1665) and Bernier’s Suite des Memoires in the English translation by Henry Oldenburg, indicating that he had refreshed his acquaintance with the work after his reading in France. Locke recorded from Bernier that “the Jaugis [Yogis] amongst the Hindoos talk of being illuminated and entirely united to God.”28 Locke’s efforts to assess religious enthusiasm culminated in a chapter added to the fourth edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1700).

26  Daniel Carey Although he does not provide specific anthropological examples in this chapter, his conclusions about the human proclivity to indulge in unwarranted religious belief and to appeal to “inspirations” deriving directly from God were reinforced and to some extent influenced by his reading of travel accounts, of which the Indian material was clearly a resource. Locke’s views on enthusiasm were no doubt principally shaped by his experience of the ferment during the Civil War period, when he came to maturity, and there is evidence that he directed his critique partly at Quakers in particular (Anstey, 2019). But he sought a wider foundation for his argument, as in so many areas of his intellectual endeavor, in order to seek the sources of the problem and to articulate a remedy. Locke considers enthusiasm as a ground of assent which explains why he places it in the Essay after a run of chapters on judgment, probability, degrees of assent, reason, and finally the distinct provinces of faith and reason. The latter chapter is significant in understanding the continuity in Locke’s position between his notes on his reading, his inquiries for travelers and the argument he sets out formally in the Essay. At the close of the chapter on faith and reason he maintains that if we do not keep these two areas distinct “there will, in matter of Religion, be no room for Reason at all; and those extravagant Opinions and Ceremonies, that are to be found in the several religions of the World, will not deserve to be blamed.” He was prepared to attribute “those Absurdities, that fill almost all the Religions which possess and divide Mankind” to the downplaying of reason in favor of faith. The neglect of reason allowed people to “let loose their Fancies, and natural Superstition,” resulting in “strange Opinions, and extravagant Practices in Religion” (Locke, 1975, p. 696 [4.18.11]). In the chapter on enthusiasm, Locke presents it as a third ground of assent, distinct from faith and reason, which sets aside reason in favor of personal inspiration or revelation. Locke’s purpose – without denying the possibility of revelation – is to ensure that reason guarantees the authenticity of the revelation according to tests in the form of testimony and proofs (Locke, 1975, p. 698 [4.19.4]), including miracles. His rigorous adherence to reason as the guarantor is therefore intended to take in all those instances of religious belief, whether Christian, Muslim or Brahmanic, that rest on appeals to direct illumination, as his journal entry of 1682 had observed. Locke continued his reflections on these issues after the appearance of the chapter on enthusiasm. In an unpublished “Discourse of Miracles,” dating from 1702, he set out the complex case for how the miraculous should be evaluated and what role such events played in Judaism and Christianity. Miracles represented credentials in effect. They certified the status of figures whose appearance was accompanied by such miracles as messengers of divine religion. According to Locke, we only have a clear account of three figures (Moses, Jesus, and Muhammed) who professed to come in the name of the one true God and to bear His law with them. He added at this point: For what the Persees say of their Zoroaster, or the Indians of their Brama (not to mention all the wild Stories of the Religions farther East) is so obscure or so manifestly fabulous, that no account can be made of it.29

John Locke’s India 27 Strictly speaking, Locke attributes the “stories” or fables with no validity to what believers report rather than to the religions themselves, although he may have thought that these faiths suffered from the same defect.

VII  Locke’s last Indian correspondent Locke’s desire to receive further intelligence about Indian religion was undiminished. Towards the end of his life he corresponded with an individual named John Lock (later Sir John), possibly a relation, who worked for the New East India Company.30 It is evident from the response that Locke received from Lock that he asked him a similar set of questions to those he communicated to Charles Cudworth years before. We do not have Locke’s original letter to Lock, but it arrived to the latter in Surat and his first letter back (dated 23 November 1701) apologizes for his focus, as a merchant, on commercial matters. He remarked that the “search into the Pollicy, Religion, Government, and the products of these Forreigne countries . . . is difficult for mee to doe that goe noe deaper than a Sea Port” (Locke, 1976–89, vol. 7, p. 509). Nonetheless he persevered, no doubt encouraged by Locke, whose reputation was well-known to him. Having received praise from Locke for what he reported in the initial letter, he followed up in April 1702 with another lengthy letter of interest, touching medical cures and Aurangzeb (drawing on testimony from the ambassador Sir William Norris). In relation to religion, Lock wrote: We have Braminees of Several Casts here, but never had any acquaintance with any they not understanding our Language nor wee theres, but since you are pleas’d to point out to mee what may bee both usefull and pleasant, I shall this Season when the Ships are gon make some Search after those that are most Likely to furnish mee with some knowledge of their Religion, and Morals and the Laws of their Country. (Locke, 1976–89, vol. 7, p. 614) Lock made good on his promise and wrote again to Locke in January 1703 in a letter that arrived in England eventually in December of that year (Locke, 1976–89, vol. 8, pp. 142–143), ten months before John Locke’s death. Lock devoted a substantial part of the letter to discussing what he had learned of Indian religion, concentrating in particular on the Brahmins. He described them as “mighty Ignorant in the history of their Religion,” which he attributed to knowledge being handed down by tradition rather than through study of books, making them “know little of former ages who was their first Prophet and Instructer and how Long their Religion has continued from him.” Lock noted the existence of several castes, and singled out for attention the “Vertiats” (Jains) whose beliefs he outlined in some detail (Locke, 1976–89, vol. 7, pp. 736–737). His source in this instance was a Jesuit priest, whom he commended as sober, learned, and inquisitive; yet this individual found it difficult to obtain a proper knowledge of their customs. The quest

28  Daniel Carey in that sense continued, with Locke in characteristic fashion seeking to advance his knowledge incrementally through his contacts and reading. In assessing Locke’s approach we can identify his assiduous and methodical way of accumulating information and testimony. The search for individuals experienced in India with whom he could correspond (and in Bernier’s case meet in person) suggests a desire to develop a more direct and unmediated relationship with these sources of insight. The printed material he encountered was meanwhile tabulated to render it a form of knowledge under the rubric of religious anthropology, taking narrative and making it relatively discrete. But it is striking that the texts on which he relied were heavily embedded in webs of commentary – this is true in quite different ways of Montanus and Bernier, his main resources, as it is of Terry and Rogerius. Montanus’s views were inflected by religious principles, as they were with Lord, Rogerius, and Terry (Carey, 2017), while Bernier wrote with a libertin sensibility (Tinguely, 2006). For all their differences they terminated in a representation of Indian religion that described it as distorted, a viewpoint that informed Locke’s analysis even as he expanded it to encompass a wider track of humanity. Locke’s long engagement with India carried on, effectively, to the end of his life, through the study of travel books, in his correspondence, and use of inquiries. His initial interest in the country focused on sati, a subject that he introduced in order to make a philosophical point about natural law, but his attention widened to include medicine, political history, and above all the anthropology of religion. These investigations formed part of a much larger commitment to explore the world methodically, to harness information, and to assess it philosophically. The fruition of these efforts came in the Essay and elsewhere, in influential and lasting contributions to European thought in the emerging Enlightenment, not least in the assessment of religious enthusiasm.

Notes 1 I am very grateful to John Milton for suggestions on sources in Locke’s manuscripts and for valuable comments on a previous draft. 2 India is briefly referenced in Talbot, 2010. 3 Locke drew on Terry in devising names for characters in a plot scenario for a projected stage romance, “Orozes, King of Albania,” that he probably composed between late 1661 and late 1663 (Locke, 2019, pp. 23–24). 4 Bodleian Library, Oxford, shelf-mark Locke 6.1. See the three-line list of pages for attention in ink on the back flyleaf. He also marked 199 for attention, where Terry repeats the observation. 5 The word sati refers specifically to the wife who dies in the flames (after the goddess Sati or Dakshayani), but it has also become the common term for the ritual itself. Here I use “the sati” (with the definite article) or satis to refer to widow or widows who take their lives and “sati” to refer to the rite. 6 Subrahmanyam, 2017, p.  23, remarks that descriptions were repeated “ad nauseam in the course of the sixteenth century. Practically every travel account needed to have such a scene of widow-burning, and travelers vied with each other for improbable descriptions of their own conversations with such widows while on the way to the funeral pyre.” For further discussion of early modern descriptions, see Teltscher, 1995;

John Locke’s India 29 Archer, 2001; Banerjee, 2003; Rubiés, 2000; Major, 2006; Weinberger-Thomas, 1999; Fisch, 2006. For discussion of the custom, particularly in the colonial period, and its banning by British authorities in 1829, see Chakravorty Spivak, 1988; Loomba, 1993; Sunder Rajan, 1993, pp. 15–39; Mani, 1998; Atwal, 2016. 7 Mandelslo was born into a noble family in Schöneberg in Mecklenburg in 1616. He entered the court of Frederick III, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, at the age of thirteen, serving as a page. The duke commissioned a diplomatic mission in 1633 to Moscow and subsequently Persia to negotiate access to markets for spices and silks. Mandelslo joined the retinue as a gentleman of the chamber (and later écuyer), with his friend Adam Olearius, who was secretary to the embassy. Mandelslo received permission to leave the group and travel alone, arriving in Surat at the age of twentyone in 1638. He died in 1644 after returning to Europe, and his manuscript account was prepared for publication by Olearius, reaching a wide audience through multiple German editions and translations into Dutch, French, and English. See Mandelslo, 1942, pp. v–x, 177–184; Mandelslo, 2008, pp.  9–26. The textual history is complicated. Mandelslo, 1658 appeared after his death in an edition, based on Mandelslo’s journal, prepared by Olearius. Olearius intervened substantially in the text editorially with additions and changes of various kinds. For an edition of the original manuscript, see Mandelslo, 1942. 8 On Grotius’s promotion of the conceptual importance of self-preservation in defining natural law, see Tuck, 1993, pp. 173–176; on self-preservation in Hobbes, see Tuck, 1996, pp. 188–191. 9 On Locke’s reading of romances, see Woolhouse, 2007, p. 24; McInnis, 2014. Locke composed a plot scenario for a stage romance (see note 3). 10 Locke relied on an English translation of Mandelslo by John Davies, published in 1662 (Olearius & Mandelslo, 1662). Davies based his translation on the French version produced in 1659 by the Dutch diplomat, Abraham de Wicquefort (Olearius & Mandelslo, 1659). This is the second volume of the Relation du Voyage d’Adam Olearius en Moscovie, Tartarie et Perse. Augmentee en cette nouvelle edition de plus d’un tiers & particulierement d’une seconde partie contenant le voyage de Jean Albert de Mandelslo aux Indes Orientales. 11 The German edition introduces the story with the phrase “ja Religion vermag dass” (Mandelslo, 1658, p. 80). 12 His convictions on this topic were already clear from one of the natural law lectures which rejected innateness as a possible foundation. See Locke, 1954/1988, lecture III: “An lex naturae hominum animis inscribatur? Negatur” (pp. 136–145). 13 Hunter, 2007. For Locke’s relationship to Boyle in this context and his use of inquiries, see Anstey, 2011, pp. 61–62. For a broader study of this tradition, see Carey, 2013. 14 See the commonplace book Adversaria 1661, pp.  140–141 (Japan), 142–143 (Formosa), 152–153 (Druids), 154–155 (Brahmins). This manuscript is privately owned but a microfilm is held in the Bodleian Library MS. Film 77. I am grateful to John Milton for directing me to this source and for his advice on dating. 15 Deus O.M. has a one-page entry; there are two under Cultus; five under Anima seperata; and none under Spiritus, Ethica, and Revelatio. Adversaria 1661, pp. 154–155. 16 Review of Bernier, 1672b, in Philosophical Transactions, 6 (no. 75) (1671), 2263– 2264. The title page reads 1672 but it was clearly available beforehand to Oldenburg, editor of the Transactions and translator of the work. The reviewer (presumably Oldenburg himself) points to the interest of Bernier’s description of the “Extravagant Opinions of the Gentiles of Indostan”; the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and “of the Creation, Preservation, and Destruction of the World;” their “odd Belief concerning Eclipses” and scientific books; their “pleasant Tenets” in astronomy, geography, and chronology; opinions on plants and animals; the description of Delhi and Agra; the account of Kashmir and its natural history and productions; the monsoons; and the

30  Daniel Carey closing letter on the doctrine of atoms and the mind of man in India. Locke owned a complete run of the Philosophical Transactions, at least through 1674. MS Locke f. 28, p. 73. See also Harrison and Laslett, 1971: #2302. 17 Bernier’s four volumes appeared in Paris 1670–1671: Bernier, 1670a, 1670b, 1671a, 1671b. For a valuable edition of his Indian works, see Tinguely, 2008. 18 This is the Suite des Memoires du Sieur Bernier in the edition published in the Hague (1672), in the volume containing the letters to de Merveilles (Bernier, 1672a). 19 MS  Locke f. 1, p.  255. This is Locke’s recording of the title of the letter to Jean Chapelain, “Touchant les Superstitions, étranges façons de faire,  & Doctrine des Indous ou Gentils de l’Hindoustan” (Bernier, 1671c, p. 119). Locke later added a further reference to this passage in an entry in Adversaria 1661, p. 155. 20 MS Locke f. 1, p. 256. This is referenced to Bernier, 1671c, p. 158 (referring to Yogis), 166 (referring to the Vedas). Lough, 1953, p. 231. Locke cross-indexed these passages in his notebook “Lemmata Ethica.” See MS Locke d. 10 under the headings in parenthesis, p. 41 (Extasis), p. 105 (Miracula), and p. 145 (Revelatio). See also MS Locke c. 33, fol. 14r. 21 Presumably this is a mistake for “etc.” or an alternative abbreviation. 22 On this topic see a journal entry from 15 April 1680 relating an account of the religion of the inhabitants of Hudson’s Bay from Edward Manning in 1673 (MS Locke f. 4, pp. 70–71). Locke’s source may have been James Tyrrell. 23 MS Locke c. 28, fo. 41. I am grateful to John Milton for sharing his general introduction to the volume in draft where these complex documents are described. 24 Leaf in Adversaria 1661; MS Locke c. 28, fo. 50; MS Locke f. 15, p. 119; MS Locke f. 15, p. 123; MS Locke c. 28, fo. 51. 25 For Locke’s noting of Bernier’s acknowledgment of Rogerius and Lord, see the entry in his journal for 15 May  1676 (MS  Locke f. 1, p.  257); see also Adversaria 1661, p.  296. Rogerius served the Dutch East India Company, first in Surat in 1632 and then in Pulicat (Tamilnadu) from 1633 to 1642, before moving to Batavia where he remained until 1647. In 1651, his posthumous De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom (The Open Door to Hidden Heathendom) appeared (Rogerius, 1651). Locke read the annotated French translation (Rogerius, 1670). Locke’s journal and notebook references to Rogerius indicate that he was more drawn to what Rogerius had to say on aspects of Indian geography, weights and measures, the age of the earth, and division of the year into weeks and months (MS Locke f. 1, pp. 363, 376, 388, 396; Lough, 1953, p. 233). See also Adversaria 1661, pp. 272, 296. Locke’s notebook MS Locke d. 10 (Lemmata Ethica) contains frequent citations of the text, often in relation to books and sources mentioned by Rogerius (or his editors and annotators). There is less evidence of intensive reading by Locke of Lord, 1630. He owned the book. Harrison and Laslett, 1971, #1807. Locke summarized a passage on Persian religion in MS Locke d. 10, p. 133. 26 In the first edition of the Essay, the disputed passage appears in Book 2, chapter 27, §7 and 8; in later editions, this becomes chapter 28 (Locke, 1975, p. 352) with §8 revised. 27 Kircher, 1667, p. 162. (The running title of the book is “China Illustrata” by which it is better known.) He includes a chapter “De Literis Brachmanum,” with sheets illustrating the “Elementa Lingua Hanscret,” based on information from a fellow Jesuit, Henry Roth. 28 MS  Locke f. 6, pp.  20–25. Printed in Locke, 1997, pp.  289–291. The passage cites Bernier, 1672b, vol. 1, p.  36. The correct reference is p.  136. For the French, see Bernier, 1671c, p. 156. 29 Locke, 2002, p. 45. His knowledge of Zoroastrianism may derive from Lord, 1630. 30 E. S. de Beer identifies him as the eldest son of Samuel Locke, who was “perhaps a second cousin of Locke, but the relationship cannot be established.” Locke, 1976–89, vol. 6, pp. 499, 645.

John Locke’s India 31

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32  Daniel Carey Di Biase, G. (2012). La morale di Locke: fra prudenza e mediocritas. Rome: Carocci editore. Feingold, M., Freedman, J. S., & Rother, W. (Eds.). (2001). The influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in sixteenth and seventeenth century philosophy and sciences. Basel: Schwabe & Co. Fisch, J. (2006). Burning women: A global history of widow sacrifice from ancient times to the present (R.K. Rajan, Trans.). London: Seagull Books. Hamou, P. (2008). Enthousiasme et nature humaine: À propos d’une lettre de Locke à Damaris Cudworth. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 3, 337–350. Harpham, J. S. (2017). Locke and the Churchill catalogue revisited. Locke Studies, 17, 233–241. Harrison, J., & Laslett, P. (1971). The library of John Locke (2nd ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hesselink, R. H. (2002). Memorable embassies: The secret history of Arnoldus Montanus’ Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen. Quaerendo, 32(1–2), 99–123. Hotson, H. (2007). Commonplace learning: Ramism and its German ramifications, 1543– 1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunter, M. (2007). Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society: A reciprocal exchange in the making of Baconian science. British Journal for the History of Science, 40(1), 1–23. Kircher, A. (1667). China monumentis, qua sacris qua profanes  .  .  . aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata. Amsterdam: Jacob à Meurs. Knox, R. (1681). An historical relation of the island Ceylon. London: Printed by Richard Chiswell. Locke, J. (1953). Locke’s travels in France 1675–1679 as related in his journals, correspondence and other papers (J. Lough, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, J. (1954/1988). Essays on the law of nature (W. von Leyden, Ed. and Trans.). Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1975). An essay concerning human understanding (P. H. Nidditch, Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1976–89). The correspondence of John Locke (E. S. de Beer, Ed., 8 Vols.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1989). Some thoughts concerning education (J. W. Yolton & J. S. Yolton, Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1990). Drafts for the “Essay concerning human understanding”, and other philosophical writings, Vol. 1: Drafts A and B (P. H. Nidditch & G. A. J. Rogers, Eds., 3 Vols.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1997). Political essays (M. Goldie, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, J. (2002). A  discourse of miracles. In V. Nuovo (Ed.), Writings on religion (pp. 44–50). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (2019). Literary and historical writings (J. R. Milton, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Locke, J. (Forthcoming). Abridgements of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and other philosophical writings, 1672–1689 (J. R. Milton, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loomba, A. (1993). Dead women tell no tales: Issues of female subjectivity, subaltern agency and tradition in colonial and post-colonial writings on widow immolation in India. History Workshop, 36, 209–227. Lord, H. (1630). A display of two forraigne sects in the East Indies. London: [By T. and R. Cotes] for Francis Constable.

John Locke’s India 33 Lough, J. (1953). John Locke’s reading during his stay in France (1676–79). The Library, 5th ser., 8, 229–258. Major, A. (2006). Pious flames: European encounters with sati 1500–1830. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mandelslo, J.A. von. (1658). Morgenländische reise-beschreibung. Hamburg: Christian Guth, and Schleswig: Johan Holwein. Mandelslo, J.A. von. (1942). Journal und observation, 1637–1640 (M. Refslund-Klemann, Ed.). Copenhagen: Andr. Fred. Høst & Søn. Mandelslo, J. A. von. (2008). Voyage en Perse & en Inde (1637–1640). Le journal de Johann von Mandelslo (F. de Valence, Trans.). Paris: Chandeigne. Mani, L. (1998). Contentious traditions: The debate on sati in colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press. McInnis, D. (2014). ‘Orozes, King of Albania’: An unpublished plot for a stage romance, by John Locke. Review of English Studies, 65(269), 266–280. Milton, J. R. (1996). Locke’s manuscripts among the Shaftesbury papers in the Public Record Office. Locke Newsletter, 27, 109–130. Olearius, A., & Mandelslo, J. A. von. (1659). Suitte de la relation du voyage en Moscovie, Tartarie, et Perse, avec celuy de I.A. de Mandelslo aux Indies Orientales. . . . le tout traduit de l’Allemand & augmenté par A. de Wicquefort. Paris: Iean du Puis. Olearius, A., & Mandelslo, J. A. von. (1662). The voyages & travels of the ambassadors sent by Frederick Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy, and the King of Persia . . . whereto are added The travels of John Albert de Mandelslo . . . into the EastIndies (J. Davies, Trans.). London: Printed for Thomas Dring and John Starkey. Rogerius, A. (1651). De open-deure tot het verborgen heydendom. Leiden: Françoys Hackes. Rogerius, A. (1670). La porte ouverte, pour parvenir à la connoissance du paganisme caché. Amsterdam: Jean Schipper. Rubiés, J.-P. (2000). Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European eyes, 1250–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subrahmanyam, S. (2017). Europe’s India: Words, people, empires, 1500–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sunder Rajan, R. (1993). Real and imagined women: Gender, culture, and postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Talbot, A. (2010). “The great ocean of knowledge”: The influence of travel literature on the work of John Locke. Leiden: Brill. Talbot, A. (2015). Locke and China: Thinking about thinking matter. International Sinology, 2, 70–87. Teltscher, K. (1995). India inscribed: European and British writing on India 1600–1800. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Terry, E. (1655). A voyage to East-India. London: Printed by T. W. for J. Martin  & J. Allestrye. Tinguely, F. (2006). Un paradis sans miracles: Le Cachemire de François Bernier. Études de lettres, 3, 55–67. Tinguely, F. (2008). Un libertin dans l’Inde Moghole: les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669). Paris: Chandeigne. Truschke, A. (2017). Aurangzeb: The life and legacy of India’s most controversial king. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tuck, R. (1993). Philosophy and government 1572–1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

34  Daniel Carey Tuck, R. (1996). Hobbes’s moral philosophy. In T. Sorrell (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Hobbes (pp. 175–207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tully, J. (1993). An approach to political philosophy: John Locke in contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weinberger-Thomas, C. (1999). Ashes of immortality: Widow-burning in India (J. Mehlman & D. G. White, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Woolhouse, R. (2007). Locke: A biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2 Encountering the “sati” Early modern English travel narratives and the politics of exoticization Rita Banerjee When seventeenth-century Europeans, among them the East India Company (hereafter EIC) employees, came to India for trade and other purposes, they were struck by the rite of widow-burning (or, the practice of burning the living widow along with the corpse of her husband), which they might have heard of before and which many of them witnessed for the first time. Their representation of the cultural practice in the travel memoirs they wrote, designed for a wide readership at home, might be deemed to provide a cultural history of India from the Western perspective. As a form of alternate historiography, travel narratives provide us with a mixture of eye-witness and partially fictionalized accounts of the practice, sometimes perpetuating stereotypical explanations of the custom and occasionally giving us genuine insight into prevalent European as well as Indian social values. In this chapter I look at various accounts of the practice as portrayed by some European travel writers (the majority of them being British) over the seventeenth century – Edward Terry, Peter Mundy, François Bernier, Thomas Bowrey, and John Ovington. This chapter contends that the desire to negativize non-Christian religious practices on the one hand and the simultaneous uneasy recognition of the prevalence of similar patriarchal beliefs, cultural values, and prejudices in the West, on the other, produce deeply ambivalent portrayals of the practice of “sati” in some narratives. Moreover, in view of a perceptible shift toward ethnography in the later accounts, one notices a relatively neutral portrayal at times, an attempt to rationalize from the Western perspective and also, in some accounts, to privilege universal human impulses that motivated the act. The later seventeenth century also shows attempts at English intervention, which looks forward to the colonial era. In this connection, for a clearer understanding of the way the early modern Europeans viewed the practice, it might be relevant to examine the etymology of the word itself. Sati was the name of Shiva’s consort, who gave up her life on hearing her husband abused by her father, thereby demonstrating her absolute love for her husband. In Indian languages, the word sati denotes a woman who exemplifies unflinching loyalty and faith to her husband, although in the European usage, the substantive was transferred to the “suicidal act instead of the person” (Yule & Burnell, 1994, p. 878). The emphasis on the act rather than the person in European languages suggests the curiosity and interest aroused by this exotic custom among the Europeans.

36  Rita Banerjee In Indian usage, only a secondary sense of the word connotes the woman who accompanies her husband in death by burning on his pyre, generally designated by the words “anumarana” or “sahagamana.” According to John S. Hawley, “In its origin, sati is a Sanskrit feminine participle derived from the verb ‘to be.’ ” He adds that “Indic speech prefers the phrase ‘being’ or ‘becoming’ sati (sati hona) and finds it awkward to think of ‘performing’ or ‘doing’ sati, but the connection remains close – perhaps even essential.” The climactic moment of her display of virtue and loyalty is when the virtuous woman (or sati) forsakes her life and accompanies her husband in death. Hawley argues that “because this is the moment at which such virtue becomes fully visible, however, there is a sense in which sati as person depends on sati as practice – the actual act of immolation” (1994, p.  13). In this chapter, I  use the word sati to denote the woman. When I refer to the act, I enclose it in quotation marks. Almost predictably, the practice produced a gamut of reactions, ranging from admiration and awe to pity and scorn for gullibility, and often a mixture of both. During these early years of the encounters between cultures, we find variant portrayals of the sati as a heroic and courageous woman, a deluded, pitiable victim, a possessed witch, and even an avenging murderess that ensures just retribution for her partner in crime. Despite seeking critical distance from an alien, apparently morally reprehensible, cultural practice, the European representations of the ritual indicate the existence of similar patriarchal beliefs, cultural values, and prejudices, which produce deeply ambivalent portrayals of the practice. Among the early travelers, Edward Terry, the chaplain of Roe, describes the practice of “sati” in some detail. In his account, widow-burning appears as entirely a voluntary practice, the wives making the choice deliberately for the sake of honor. After their husbands’ death, Hindu widows never remarry, but they cut their hair and live an utterly neglected life. And he deduces that self-immolation frees them from such a life of neglect and dishonor and confers upon them much honor. Terry lauds the firm resolution and self-sacrificing ardor of the woman: “when she [the widow] comes to the Pile, which immediately after turns her into ashes: yet she who is once thus resolved, never starts back from her first firm and setled resolution, but goes on singing to her death,” and again, “though she have no bonds but her own strong affections to tie her unto those flames, yet she never offers to stir out of them” (Terry, 1777, p. 324). However, while Terry showers praise on her steadfastness and love in confronting courageously a painful death, as a Christian clergyman, he must needs pity her ignorance and illusory belief as Satanic: But for those poor silly souls who sing themselves into the extremity of misery and thus madly go out of the World . . . through flames that will not last long into everlasting burnings . . . led hereunto by their tempter and murderer . . . deserve much pity from others, who know not how to pity themselves. (1777, pp. 325–326; emphasis added) Terry is unable to give his moral sanction to an act of suicide, which forms part of the beliefs of a heathen religion, and the feat of resolution and steadfast faith

Encountering the “sati” 37 gets transformed into a devilish deed. Likewise, the resolute and constant woman undergoes a transformation into the “poor silly soul” (as mentioned earlier) and the flames which she mistakenly believes would carry her to an everlasting life of union with her husband herald the prospect of “everlasting burnings” (as mentioned earlier) in hell. The language of implicit admiration passes almost imperceptibly into the language of pity and condescension. Terry draws the Biblical analogues of the “Ammonites,” who sounded drums and tabors, while they made their children “passe through the fire to Molech” to compare the practice of the Hindus in drowning the cries of the burning widow. His rhetoric of pity is also of Christian piety which induces him to exhort them as “poor wretches,” who serve such a “hard Master,” a Satanic god who compels them to be their “own executioners” in the “flower of their youth and strength.” The repetition of the contrasts between Satan and God recurs as the chief motif throughout Terry’s sketch of the “sati,” culminating in his astonishment that the “Devil should have such an abundance of servants in the World, and God so few” (Terry, 1777, p. 325). It is significant that the practice of “sati” had time and again given rise to similar ambivalent reactions. As pointed out by Lata Mani, in nineteenth-century India, Rammohun Roy, while arguing for the abolition of the practice of “sati,” had manifested a similarly contradictory stance, praising the sati as the exemplar of heroic courage on the one hand, and highlighting her “vulnerability” on the other. Exalting feminine courage and steadfastness, he writes: “in a country where the name of death makes the male shudder, that the female from her firmness of mind offers to burn with the corpse of her deceased husband” evokes admiration. However, soon after, he writes: “by considering others equally void of duplicity as themselves . . . from which they suffer much misery, even so far that some of them are misled to suffer themselves to be burnt to death” (cited in Mani, 1989, p. 106). Terry’s response to the practice suggests that the sati could serve as an exemplar of wifely devotion and unwavering chastity to European women. Pompa Banerjee points out that “widely known texts such as The Book of Common Prayer (1549) reinforced wifely ideals of absolute obedience and surrender that were not unlike the selfless renunciation of the sati” (2003, p. 114). “A Vertuous Widow,” which features in Sir Thomas Overbury’s Thirty-two New Characters1 seems akin to this wifely ideal. “A Vertuous Widdow” shows that the widow suffers a near-death in the death of her husband, because the joys and pleasures of living cease to matter for her: shee thinks shee hath traveld all the world in one man; the rest of her time therefore shee directs to heaven . . . she hath laid his dead body in the worthyest monument that can be: Shee hath buried it in her owne heart. To conclude, shee is a Relique. (1615) A relic suggests the venerable remains of a dead person. Therefore, without relinquishing her life, the “vertuous widdow” becomes the remains of her husband, almost a lifeless object rather than a living human being. The metaphor suggests that she forsakes her interest in life, so closely is her remaining life associated

38  Rita Banerjee with her dead husband. Her characterization as an object rather than a living human being whose desires are directed entirely to heaven closely resembles that of the sati who gives up all desire for life and seeks to join her husband in heaven. That seventeenth-century English texts on wifely virtue make of the widow a “relique” of the dead husband indicates the presence of common ideals with respect to the figures of the wife and widow. Terry’s praise of the constancy and self-sacrificing courage of the sati draws on similar values. As Ania Loomba writes: even the harshest colonial criticism included a sneaking admiration for the sati as the ideal wife who represented ‘the wholly admirable sentiment and theory that the union of man and woman is lifelong and the one permanent thing in the world’. (1993, p. 211) In this connection it would be pertinent to look at Michel de Montaigne’s reference to the custom of “sati” in his chapter “On Virtue” (1580). He draws on classical sources like Propertius and Cicero for the description of the practice, but might possibly have borrowed from contemporary sources as well. In the chapter, he contrasts sudden inspirational acts of virtue, “miraculous flashes which appear far to exceed our natural powers,” and acts of courage and heroism, which had become a settled habit of thought with the actor. “It is hard to believe that we can so steep and dye our soul in such elevated attributes that they become ordinary and natural to her [the sati]” (2003, p. 799). Since the sati meditates on her act of heroism of burning herself with her dead husband for a long time, Montaigne suggests that it becomes a habitual thought with her (2003, p. 801). His description shows how on the day of her death, she shows no sadness or reluctance but cheerfully and courageously throws herself into the fire. Montaigne emphasizes the widow’s courage and desire for glory more than her faithfulness, and unlike many travel narrators, his description neither touches upon her gullibility nor her impiety in going contrary to Christian dictates. Giving tacit endorsement of the diversity of customs in societies and the values they privilege, “On Virtue” seems to suggest that the wife’s constancy, courage, fearlessness, and cheerfulness make the act of “sati” an act of virtue. Unlike others, Montaigne seems to unqualifiedly laud what is considered an un-Christian act. What he emphasizes particularly is the way one can train oneself to an act, socially recognized as virtuous and endure considerable pain for the objective. This attempt to rationalize the act looks forward to the arguments of Bernier and Locke, as we shall see later. Even if Montaigne’s chapter does not quite represent the values of Western society, endorsement of “sati” also appears in diverse forms in literature. Seventeenthcentury English drama occasionally introduced the practice of “sati” as a signifier for chastity and wifely devotion. Dryden’s Aurengzebe shows the Muslim Melesinda burning herself to death like the Hindu sati to rejoin Morat, her husband, after life. Dryden’s stance toward her is ambivalent. Melesinda contrasts not only

Encountering the “sati” 39 with Nourmahal, as Dryden had explicitly intended, but also with Indamora, the heroine, who possibly represents India and is to marry Aurengzebe, the central character. In his dedication of the play to John Earl of Mulgrave, Dryden presents Melesinda as A Woman passionately loving of her husband, patient of injuries and contempt, and constant in her kindness, to the last: and in that, perhaps, I may have err’d because it is not a Virtue much in use. Those Indian Wives are loving Fools, and may do well to keep themselves in their own Countrey, or, at least, to keep company with the Arria’s and Portia’s of old Rome: some of our Ladies know better things. (1967, p. 108; emphasis added except in proper names) Although Dryden calls Melesinda a “loving fool,” and her characterization demonstrates many comical moments, the depreciatory statement veils a positive stance, as shown in the invocation of the classical examples of feminine courage, Arria and Portia. Melesinda’s last utterance on stage echoes the language of the sati, who promises herself glory in heaven and eternal union with her husband: “For I will die; die is too base a word; / I’ll seek his breast, and kindling by his side, /Adorn’d with flames, I’ll mount a glorious Bride”(1967, p. 185). The contrast with the supposed wisdom (“some of our ladies know better things” quoted earlier) of English widows and wives is evidently ironic. That the liberty of English ladies often led them to promiscuity and adultery at the expense of their faithful husbands was a common charge against women in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Therefore, the implicit eulogy of the sati as representing the patriarchal ideal of feminine constancy recurs in English texts. However, representations of Hinduism as false and Satanic and the allusion to the Satanic god compelling the victims to be their “own executioners” in Terry’s narrative gesture toward later portrayals like that of Bernier of the women themselves as virtually witches allied to Satan. Writing to Monsieur Chapelain in October 1667, several years after Terry’s visit, about the customs and superstitions of the “Indous or Gentiles of Hindoustan,” Bernier seeks to present the resolute, unrelenting widow as one possessed by the devil. She seems unequivocally to be possessed by an evil force and comes to resemble the witch who was often forcibly burnt in European society. The difference lay in the fact that, in this case, it was the “witch” who chose a voluntary death rather than compelled burning. Both Terry and Bernier and even later travelers state that the Mughal emperors had tried to stop this practice. Since Terry was writing of the time of Jahangir and Bernier during Aurangzeb’s reign, it seems to have been a common policy of the Mughals to prevent self-immolation of widows. According to Bernier, the Mughals did not prohibit the practice by law because of their policy of granting all sections of the people the free exercise of religious pursuits, although they laid down that the burning could take place only with the permission of the governor who would try to persuade the woman to refrain from the act. However, often the women refused to heed such reason, and in the kingdoms of the Hindu

40  Rita Banerjee rajas who owed only a nominal suzerainty to the emperor, no Muslim governor was appointed. Despite the attempts to prevent the practice, therefore, the number of immolations was very high. Bernier relates an eye-witness’s account of a few instances of the custom of “sati,” including one in which he directly intervened and succeeded in preventing it from taking place. At the death of one of Bernier’s friends, a clerk in the employ of the Daneshmand Khan, an important court official of Aurangzebe, for whom apparently Bernier also worked (he says “my Aga”), the widow decided to burn herself. Being requested by her friends and his employer, Bernier went to dissuade her. He however made very little headway by his exhortations to her to live for the benefit of her children, on whom her husband’s employer offered to settle a pension, until Bernier threatened her with the prospect of the death of her children by starvation. At first sight, Bernier likens the ceremony to the witches’ “Sabat”: Je vis en entrant un Sabat de sept ou huit Vieilles horribles à voir avec quatre ou cinq vieux infatuez & écervelez de Brahmens qui crioient tous par reprises & en battans des mains à l’entour du mort, & la femme toute échevelée, le visage pâle, les yeux secs & étincelans, qui estoit assise, & qui crioit en battant aussi des mains en cadence comme les autres aux pieds de son mary. (1671, p. 23) According to Larousse’s Dictionary, “sabbat” signifies “Assemblée nocturne de sorciers et de sorcières qui, suivant une superstition populaire, se tenait le samedi à minuit sous la présidence de Satan.” Bernier likens the scene to a midnight assembly of evil spirits under the supervision of Satan, which was “horrible” to sight. The English version of Archibald Constable translates “un Sabat” as “a regular witches’ Sabat” (2008, p. 307). The seven or eight old women, whom he has already associated with the devil, along with four or five distracted and disordered (my translation; “excited, wild,” in Constable’s translation, p. 307) old men, surrounding the dead body, “gave by turns a horrid yell, and beat their hands with violence” (2008, p. 307). The description of the widow enhances the sense of unnaturalness in the scene – her disheveled hair, pale face, and dry and shining eyes and the action of beating her hands (“en battant aussi des mains”) and crying like the rest. Constable’s translation reveals her unnatural state of excitement, which might pose a contrast with calm grief at the death of a loved one, “her eyes were tearless and sparkling with animation” (emphasis added) while she participated in the “horrible concert” (Bernier, 2008, p. 308) with gusto. Bernier’s description of the scene emphasizes the devilish nature of the activities. His allusion to the “sabat” of sorceresses reminds us of the practice of witchhunting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. While often old and ugly women were called witches, the word also had the associated connotations of evil spirit or “demon,” a female spirit “having dealings with Satan” (OED). Bernier’s emphasis on the horror, “horribles à voir” (as cited earlier) and his reference to the

Encountering the “sati” 41 widow’s possession by a diabolic spirit would recall associations of the popular view of the witches. Bernier at first seeks to dissuade her by saying that Daneshmond Khan has offered to extend a pension to her sons and assures her that she would not incur any infamy should she refrain from burning herself. However, when the widow refuses to listen to Bernier’s plea and offers to kill herself by dashing her head against the wall, he considers her as possessed: “Quelle diabolique fureur te possede” (2008, p. 25). Significantly, as soon as he threatens the woman that if she continued to act unnaturally, he would forthwith return and ask Daneshmond Khan to annul their pensions so that her children would die of starvation, and exhorts her to burn them along with her after cutting their throats “égorge les and les brule avec toy” (1671, pp.  25–26), she apparently comes out of the spell and her head drops on her knees. The old women and the Brahmans who had persuaded her to commit suicide also slink out, as if they realize that their charm has no power any longer. The description is reminiscent of an act of exorcism, thereby linking the ritual all the more convincingly to witchcraft. The words and images suggest that Bernier associates the practice of widowburning with the devil and sees the old women and Brahmans as accomplices of the devil. It was common to associate witchcraft with devilry and other religions, including the Jewish sometimes, were frequent targets. Alison Rowlands writes: From the late fifteenth century and increasingly from about 1560, however, elites who had come to believe that witchcraft was the renunciation of Christianity in favour of an alliance with the Devil gave peasants the opportunity of ridding their community of witches through legal channels. (2004, p. 42) Reginald Scott shows how easily and unreasonably women could be condemned as witches: “If any man, woman, o: child do saie, that such a one is a witch; it is a most vehement suspicion (saith Bodin) and sufficient to bring her to the racke: though all other cases it be directlie against the lawe” (1584, p. 26). Scott elaborates the enormity of superstition that was associated with such understanding of witchcraft: “In presumptions and suspicions against a witch, the common brute or voice of the people cannot erre . . . the behauiour, looks, becks, and countenance of a woman, are sufficient signes, whereby to presume she is a witch” (1584, p. 26). Bernier’s depiction demonstrates that any behavior that appeared to him as unnatural in European culture, in this case, the determination to die with her dead husband, could easily be construed as witch-like or devilish, just as those who encouraged and abetted such activity could only be witches. Banerjee contends that Europeans were obsessed with sorcery and demonology as being pervasive in India. Therefore, “references to witches and devils embedded within European discourse of widow-burning anxiously summoned the buried analogy between the two kinds of burnings” (2003, 61). As an eye-witness to another episode, Bernier seems to insinuate that the widow’s composure, her determination, and courage are signs of her possession by

42  Rita Banerjee the devil. He refers to the presence of his compatriot Monsieur Chardin and several Dutch and English witnesses to this act and despairs of representing to his immediate, intended audience, Monsieur Chapelain, or a later collective readership the strange behavior of the middle-aged woman who burned herself: cette intrepidité bestiale & gayeté feroce qui se remarquoit sur son visage; avec quelle fermeté elle marchoit, se laissoit laver, parloit à l’un, parloit à l’autre; avec quelle assurance & insensibilité elle nous regarda, considera sa petite Cabane . . . entra dedans cette Cabane . . . prit un flambeau à la main, & mit le feu elle-mesme par dedans. (1671, pp. 38–39) That the terms of description are incompatible, oxymoronic at times (e.g., “intrepidité bestiale,” “gayeté feroce,” “assurance & insensibilité”), demonstrates the contradictions latent in his thinking. His inability to place what he found difficult to comprehend within his preconceived notions of what may be construed as courage leads him to degrade the woman to the status of an animal. Her look of confidence can only be construed as “insensibility,” her intrepidity in the face of imminent death as “bestial.” Her courage in the face of imminent death cannot be identified as courage but only indicates her inability to comprehend the implications of her action. In his attempt to reconcile the contradictory epithets, Constable modifies the phrasing and translates “assurance and insensibilité” as “the look of confidence, or rather of insensibility,” modifying the oxymoronic juxtaposition and combination of the two words into a replacement of the first by the second. The sati’s reactions seem to appear as ignoble and “brutish” (Constable’s translation, 2008, p. 312) to Bernier because the scene lies beyond his expectations. The widow defies Bernier’s conception of modesty in women. He does not seek to re-present the scene factually, as he sees it, but to construct it, relating the appropriate reactions for a European, and aiming to evoke similar reactions in his readers. The difference with Montaigne especially is revealing for Bernier’s construction suggests a reluctance to concede courage and virtue in women belonging to a non-Christian and alien culture. This results in an attempt to demonize the other or to render her sub-human. However, Bernier’s simultaneous attempt to rationalize the custom, showing how a woman is persuaded to believe that burning oneself on the dead husband’s pyre constituted an act of honor demonstrates the contradiction in his thinking. Only a few pages before the last incident described, he describes the strange custom: Mais j’ay bien reconnu depuis que ce n’é toit qu’un effet de l’opinion, de la prévention & de la coustume; & que les meres infatuées de jeunesse de cette superstition comme d’une chose tres-vertueuse, tres louable & inévitable à une femme d’honneur, en infatuoient de mesme l’esprit de leurs filles

Encountering the “sati” 43 dés leur tendre jeunesse; quoy qu’au fond ce n’ait jamais esté qu’un artifice des hommes pour s’assujettir davantage leurs femmes, pour les obliger à prendre des soins particuliers de leur santé, & pour empescher qu’elles ne les empoisonnassent. (1671, pp. 33–34) Bernier thereby shows how custom and accepted views of people condition the minds of women. The instructions of mothers who believe in the virtue of the sati and inculcate in their young daughters that it behoves every woman of honor to perform this rite on the death of their husbands perpetuate the tradition. Bernier also correctly comprehends and condemns the role of the patriarchal system which enables men to take advantage of the custom to keep “wives in subjection,” secure “their attention in time of sickness” and “deter them from administering poison to their husbands” (2008, pp. 310–311). Bernier’s argument accords with John Locke’s contention of the power of custom in human society in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “and custom, a greater power than nature, seldom failing to make them worship for divine what she hath inured them to bow their minds and submit their understandings to” (Locke, 1924, p. 35). This suggests a shift toward the primacy of rationality in assessing society and looks forward to the Enlightenment. However, that Bernier’s earlier and later portrayal of the sati as an evil, “brutish” figure, siding with Satanic forces (witches’ Sabbath) are implicitly contradicted by such statements underscores the ambivalence with which the Europeans invested the cultural practice. I shall have occasion to return to the condition of “deterrence” from poisoning as suggested here. In contrast with the two previous accounts related here, Peter Mundy’s account, which however, was written earlier (Mundy’s travels in India took place during 1628–1634, and his description refers to a case of “Sati” at Surat in 1630), shows an ethnographer’s fairly neutral representation of the self-immolation he had witnessed. The neutrality of his stance and his language suggests his curiosity about the diversity of customs he witnesses as an onlooker, looking forward to a trend we see during the Enlightenment. He too points out that the Mughal emperor (at this time Shah Jahan) had prohibited the burning, and the widow could get special permission from the governor through “much importunity.” Mundy’s description of laying the dead man near the river with “his feet and part of his body in the Water,” the washing ceremonies performed by his wife and other women who “stood up to the middle” in the river, the making of the funeral fire, etc. (1914, p. 35) show the process of ethnographic recording and are free from emotional markers. For instance, there was readye made the pile or place for the funerall fire, layeinge a good quantitie of wood on the floore round about, which were stakes driven in, on which are put a great quantitie of a small kind of drye Thornes and other Combustable stuffe, fashioned like a little lowe house with a doore of the same to it.

44  Rita Banerjee His sketch shows this room. His deduction about Hindu rituals is also matterof-fact: “they attribute much holynesse to great Rivers (especiallie to Ganges), and much of their religion consists in Washinges” (1914, p. 35). The statement is grounded on what he had witnessed about the rituals associated with the river and water and partly on prior knowledge like the reference to the Ganges. Mundy specifies details that strike him in the spirit of an ethnographer. For he relates how the woman sat with “life in her, holding upp both her Armes, which might be occasioned through the scorchinge and shrinckinge of the Sinnewes, for shee held her handes under his head until the fire was kindled” (1914, p. 36). However, there is a slight contradiction here for the sketch he has drawn shows the woman as holding one arm up, while the other hand is placed beneath her husband’s head. More importantly, the importance of the raised arm of a sati suggests that probably Mundy’s memory had belied him here. Most pictures of the sati show her uplifted hands. Catherine Weinberger-Thomas states: “The traveler who passes through the sites of Jodhpur, Bikaner, or Jaisalmer cannot but help notice on these fortified archways row upon row of little hands pointing upward as a sign of their ‘determination.’ ” She further informs the reader: the hand, and most especially the finger, that extremity of what is already a luminal region of the body, had “powers” attributed to them – on the fringes of Hindu orthodoxy, but nonetheless in intimate accordance with it – which nineteenth-century ethnographists and folklorists brought to light. (1999, pp. 52–57) Mundy details the spectacle with the keen interest of a careful ethnographer who, however, was seeking to provide a rational explanation of what he witnessed, despite some lacunae in his information. Lacking knowledge of specificities, for instance, he merely notes the importance of water in Hindu rituals. However, Mundy’s narrative, based on empirical observation, provides material for natural history and cultural history at the time. It is relevant that Mundy’s background was very different from that of Thomas Roe, Terry, Bernier, or Ovington. When he was fourteen years old, he accompanied Captain John Davis “as a ‘cabin boy,’ which appears to mean as an apprentice trader” to San Lucar in Spain “to work in merchants’ offices there for a couple of years.” Afterwards he went to Seville and worked for two years (Pritchard, 2011, p. 6). As an employee of the EIC, he served initially as a writer and then as an under-factor. During his early years he had developed the habit of taking notes during his journey, which he continued in later life. He took a lively interest in plants, animals, and people and he wrote accounts of his travels, “collected in a manuscript journal titled Itinerarium Mundi,” which was “concluded in 1667 and acquired by the Bodleian Library in 1734.”2 He certainly intended it for readers who were interested in travel to distant lands, although some of the details suggest that the diary was useful for trade. “Some of the writing,” as R. E. Pritchard says, “is contemporaneous with the events described, but much of it was amplified later on, at different times in Mundy’s life” (2011, p. 2). It seems that he had intended

Encountering the “sati” 45 the work for circulation among friends, relations, etc. (Pritchard, 2011, p. 3). But, I would not rule out an intention of publishing it as a book, which imparted knowledge about alien lands and customs and aimed at a wider readership. Unlike Mundy’s, Ovington’s account of the practice of “sati” (written toward the end of the century, 1690) seems based on the information he had received from others (as he does not describe the ritual as being witnessed personally by him), although his description of the natural world and sketches indicate empirical observation. Being a Christian and especially a clergyman like Terry, Ovington had to brand the practice of self-immolation as “impious,” but he refers to such suicide generally as a past custom. However, both Terry and Ovington seemed to have found such absolute love as displayed by the wife who accompanied her husband in death as laudable. But, while Terry finds religious mandate as the sole cause of this practice, Ovington searches for other causes to explain the custom. His description of the “sati” seems a concoction of various theories he partly invents and partly derives from the information he has gathered. He links the cultural practices of early marriage and the self-immolation of the sati, attributing the courage and absolute love of the sati to the mutual conjugal love that was nurtured and cultivated by long union: And some of the Gentile Sects, before they feel any great Warmth of this amorous Passion, are by their Parents join’d together in their very Infancy, at three or four Years of Age. From which time they endeavour mutually to kindle this tender Passion, till the growing Years blow it into a lively Flame . . . they endeavour mutually to stamp their Affections upon their Infant Souls, which like melted Wax are pliant and easie to receive the Impression . . . And thus being happily prepossessed by a mutual good liking even as it were from the Womb, as if they had been born Lovers, they are taken off from all Objects, and freed from the Disappointments of fickle Mistresses, and from being wearied with Whining addresses to coy Damsels. Which, besides others, may be some Reason why the Indian Wives committed themselves with so much chearfulness into the Funeral Flames with their Dead Husbands; because their Sympathetick Minds, linked together from their Infancy, were then fed with such early Tastes of Love, as became the Seminary of those strong and forcible Inclinations in their riper Years, and made the Pains of Death become preferable to a Life abandoned the society of those they so entirely lov’d. (1690, pp. 322–323; emphasis added) The image of the “Souls,” as “melting wax” on which impressions are stamped recalls the “tabula rasa” image of Locke and Ovington’s familiarity with Enlightenment thought. However, by “souls” he is probably referring to “the seat of the emotions, feelings, or sentiments” (OED) rather than the mind which gives rise to thoughts. By putting the emphasis on mutual love, a natural human emotion, as a motivation for the practice of “sati,” Ovington shifts the blame from the corrupt priests or the relations who seek to gain by the widow’s death and thereby the

46  Rita Banerjee stigma from the false religion of heathens. This suggests toleration of difference and willingness to accept the diversity of customs prevalent in the world. Ovington’s reason for the practice of “sati” is evidently speculative. But, his explanation of the growth of love and desire for companionship in young couples implies his belief in the presence of selfless and benevolent human impulses. The attraction for a particular person derives from the impression received from the outside world, but the nature and capacity for affection seems innate. Belief in the innate goodness of human beings comes close to the views of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury. According to Shaftesbury, in the passions and affections of particular creatures, there is a constant relation to the interest of a species or common nature. This has been demonstrated in the case of natural affection, parental kindness, zeal for posterity, concern for the propagation and nurture of the young, love of fellowship and company, compassion, mutual succor and the rest of this kind. (Cooper, 1999, p. 192) The self-sacrificial love, as envisaged by the conjugal couples in Ovington’s account, evidently owes to the emotions mentioned by Shaftesbury. However, although Ovington’s speculation about the benefits of child marriage implies toleration of diversity, it tacitly endorses the ritual of “sati,” which upholds the ideal of the constant woman. Moreover, Ovington’s argument that child marriages preclude the youth’s reliance on the favors of a “fickle mistress” or do away with the inane Western courtship ritual like “Whining addresses to coy Damsels” (see earlier) also suggests his belief in cultural stereotypes not only regarding women in England but women in general. Despite the English attempt at exoticizing the alien, inhuman ritual of “sati,” therefore, one is struck by the presence of common feelings and stereotypes in both cultures. Significantly, conflicting explanations of the custom of “sati” in Ovington’s account also demonstrate his ambivalent stance about the practice. Ovington ascribes the origin of the practice of “sati” to the treachery of the woman: “And this Heathenish Custom was introduc’d, because of the libidinous disposition of the Women, who thro’ their inordinate Lust would often poison their present Husbands, to make way for a new Lover” (1690, p. 343). Here he makes the custom “heathenish” and shows women, and especially Oriental women, as lascivious and possessing murderous desires. There was a widely circulating narrative which appeared in many of these travel accounts, namely the story of the revenge of a woman who failed to induce her lover to elope with her after she had killed her husband in the hope of a life with her lover. She uses the rite of “sati” to further her revenge. The story might have formed what Stephen Greenblatt termed the “mimetic capital” (1991, p. 6) which was in frequent circulation, as we see from the references to it by Bernier, Mundy, and Ovington. We remember Bernier’s suggestion about “sati” serving as a deterrence from poisoning, stated earlier. The lover in his narrative is a Muslim, a tailor, and also a player of the tambourine. After his

Encountering the “sati” 47 refusal to run away with her, the widow takes care not to show her anger. But when she is going around the funeral pyre of her husband and engaged in the customary gesture of leave-taking, she goes up to her lover who was called to provide music on the occasion as if she intended to take “a last and tender adieu . . . seized him with a firm grasp by the collar . . . and precipitated herself headlong, with the object of her resentment, into the midst of the raging fire” (2008, p. 312). Bernier’s story provides a just retribution to the false lover; but however comical the revenge story might have seemed to the European, its attempt to provide a stereotypical picture of a false woman capable of poisoning her husband is reminiscent of stories of such poisoning and murder in European history and literature. We have Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, where Clytemnestra treacherously murders her husband and triumphs in her relationship with her paramour, Aegisthus. The Roman emperor Claudius was allegedly poisoned by his wife Agrippina. In Elizabethan literature, we have interesting examples of an anonymous play, A Warning for Fair Women, and Hamlet’s devised playlet of The Murder of Gonzago, which was based on the murder of the Duke of Urbino. These plays show wives or their paramours poisoning the husbands. The reason ascribed to the origin of the custom of the immolation of widows in these travel narratives suggests the patriarchy’s fear of excessive and uncontrolled female sexuality and its consequences. While maintaining their distance from a “heathenish,” barbarous, and cruel custom, the civilized Christian’s commentary in these cases suggests his participation in the discourse of misogyny and tacit vindication of the practice he ostensibly decries. Unlike these accounts of “sati,” however, there were others, especially in the latter part of the seventeenth century, which seemed to look forward to the colonial picture of the Englishman as a savior of Indian women. Although European intervention occurs in narratives like that of Niccolao Manucci, Domingo Navarrete, etc. we do not find many English travelogues narrating this. In Bowrey therefore, we have a novel element – the Englishman, ceasing to be an observer and directly intervening to interrupt the customary ritual. He refers to a case he had witnessed in Carrera while on his way from Fort St. George to Masulipatam. The Europeans seemed to consider the practice of “sati” as an exhibition, peculiar to India. On hearing that a “handsome younge Widdow” would be burned with her dead husband, Bowrey “Stayed out of Curiosities Sake to See the truth of Such an action that I had often heard of ” (1905, p. 37). He seems here motivated by the desire to verify the truth of the reports, seeking to make it more credible for his readers. He presents a detailed picture of the location of the event (“about half a mile from the towne, on a greene plaine, was a great fire prepared”) and presents it to his audience as unfolding before his eyes, which makes a convincing eye-witness’s account. “About the third houre in the afternoone, I saw a multitude of men, women, and Children comeinge out of the towne. I went to them on horseback, thereby to get the better Spectacle of this barbarous action.” Later, he rode close up to the fire, where he “cold discerne the body of a man on a light fire, neare to which lay much combustible matter piled round” (1905, p. 37). His account suggests a slowly unfolding vision – a

48  Rita Banerjee progression from a distant view to a close-up, enabling recognition of objects. He also presents the event as a slowly unfolding drama, albeit narrated by the privileged viewer, Bowrey himself. The narrative upgrades the persona from the status of a curious onlooker to a participant, who, intruding on the scene, tries to dissuade the “Seemingly Extraordinary chearefull” young woman who was being induced to sacrifice her life (emphasis added). The recorded details of her appearance, action, and ­gesture – pretended cheerfulness, smile, and her false claim to the happiness she did not feel – suggest a façade – a fictive show. She prevents an outburst of the priests’ anger, who had overheard Bowrey and “Seemed to be angry,” by declaring that it “was the happiest houre that Ever She Saw” (Bowrey, 1905, p. 37). By emphasizing her exaggerated behavior, and strangeness (through words like “seeming,” “Extraordinary,” “great desperateness,” “Strange nimblenesse”), Bowrey indicates the fakeness of the show. His account of the final gesture of the woman “lookeinge Earnestly” at him and extending a gift of flowers from her “beautifully adorned” (1905, p. 38) hair to the European who had tried to save her hints at gratitude and a romantic adulation. Such gestures appear to recur in the later European narratives. Later in his work, Bowrey refers to a rescue of a young sati, which was accomplished by resourceful and prompt English sailors, “without any resistance of the parties concerned, Onely did very much Stomach them, that had not beene Soe Served before, and cold find no remedie for it.” Again, he resorts to personal knowledge, saying that he had “knowne” the rescued sati – “a younge, fresh complexioned Girle not exceeding tenne years of age,” who, later repenting of her act in concurring with such evil heathenish counsels as to commit “sati,” converted to Christianity and lived with the English in their factory at Masulipatam (1905, p. 40). Unlike in the previous narratives, the European trader is not merely a dispassionate observer in the scenario depicted by Bowrey, but an active participant, even a potential, gallant savior. The difference with Bernier is that the latter’s attempts at dissuading the widow were not by his own initiative, but at the behest of his Muslim employer and the woman’s relations. Apparently Bowrey is at some risk for the Brahman priests appeared to be angry with him. As related by Alexander Hamilton, Job Charnock, an EIC employee at Cossimbazar, Bengal, had rescued from certain death a Hindu widow from her husband’s pyre in 1663 and “lovingly” lived with her for “many Years” and had children by her (1995, pp. 8–9). Such romantic, knight-errantly gestures apparently look forward to the later representations of the Hindu widow as silently crying out to the British Government for succor during the colonial period. The responsibility of “saving brown women” from “brown men” lay, of course, with “white men,” who are, by definition, humane (Spivak, 1988, p. 92). Curiously, this claim to the display of humanity was lacking in the practices of heretic-burning and witch-burning, widespread in seventeenth-century Europe. Although the similarity between witch-burning and widow-burning seem fairly obvious, the parallels appear to have escaped the European observers of “sati”

Encountering the “sati” 49 completely. Banerjee construes as “failed repression” the failure of the Europeans to explicitly connect the two practices. She points out that if the travelers perceived European witch-burning as a just penalty delivered by a Christian society to punish the enemies of god, it would be in their interest not to recognize the similarity between the burning witch in Europe and the burning widow in India. (2003, p. 71) One may find an analogy with Greenblatt’s narrative. He demonstrates that there was a systematic attempt by the Spanish conquistador and historian Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who worked under Cortes, to deny the similarities which existed between the Spanish and the Aztec in the sixteenth century. According to Greenblatt, “Bernal Diaz’s The Conquest of New Spain depends upon a radical distinction between Spanish practices and Aztec practices that are disturbingly homologous.” Apparently, the homology escaped Diaz’s perception. Greenblatt points out as an instance, “That the church he [Bernal Diaz] serves was ruthlessly persecuting heretics, Jews, and Moors does not inhibit his intense horror at the inhumanity of Aztec and Mayan priests” (1991, pp. 130–131). In a similar way, the European travelers to India elided likenesses between widow-burning and witch-burning and heretic-burning in their narrations. If there was an uncomfortable feeling of guilt in recognizing one’s own complicity in the burning of women, it was best to displace it onto an alien religion. By distancing themselves from the evil practice of burning women willfully, the narrators show themselves as humane and morally righteous, while portraying the Indian priests as avaricious, dishonest, cunning, and ruthless. Hinduism (which has such ministers), appears, by inference, as an inferior and totally flawed religion as compared to Christianity. Refusal to acknowledge any similarity helped create opposed spaces for Christianity and alien, inferior religions. Writing in British India in the early twentieth century, Edward Thompson praises the Government for abolishing the abominable practice of “sati.” However, he also draws attention to the uneasy kinship between forcible burning of heretics and witches in the West and the practice of widow-burning among the Hindus: It may seem unjust and illogical that the Moguls, who freely impaled and flayed alive, or nationals of Europe, whose countries had such ferocious penal codes and had known, scarcely a century before suttee began to shock the English conscience, orgies of witch-burning and religious persecution, should have felt as they did about suttee. But the difference seemed to them this – the victims of their cruelty were tortured by a law which considered them the offenders, whereas the victims of suttee were punished for no offence but the physical weakness which had placed them at man’s mercy. The rite seemed to prove a depravity and arrogance such as no other human offence had brought to light. (1928, p. 132)

50  Rita Banerjee However, Thompson’s charge does not explain the admiration evinced by narrators for the display of absolute wifely constancy or implicit justification of the practice as a useful mode of deterrence to husband-murder. As we have seen, the reactions to “sati” present a variegated picture. Many of the travel narrators, conscious of their Christian identity, felt the need to exoticize an alien, pagan, and so-called barbaric custom and sought to establish distinct cultural spaces, while eliding similarities. Toward the end of the century, this trend leads to the selffashioning of the English traveler as a savior figure. Moreover, with the approach of the Enlightenment, we find accounts of “sati” resembling ethnographic reports with rational explanations of its origin and prevalence (for instance, in Mundy and Bernier). Other writers like Ovington seek to root the practice in the innate, universal impulses of benevolence and love. But the contradictions in the responses, often displayed by the same narrator, evince the deep ambivalence with which the Europeans invested the rite.

Notes 1 Sir Thomas Overrbury’s Thirty-two New Characters was published anonymously with his poem ‘A Wife’ in 1615. The authorship of the New Characters (commonly known as Overbury’s Characters) is still debatable, though some of them have been attributed to the playwright John Webster. 2 The manuscript was of 510 folio pages, containing 117 illustrations, “mostly drawn and inserted after 1639,” though some must have drawn on earlier sketches. The MS also had six engravings and six “double-page maps by the geographer, Hondius” (Pritchard, 2011, p. 2). There were thirty-six chapters or “ ‘Relations’ as he called them, with several appendices, some transcribed in a clear italic script, some in his own, rather oldfashioned and more difficult hand” (Pritchard, 2011, p. 2).

References Banerjee, P. (2003). Burning women: Widows, witches, and early modern European travelers in India. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bernier, F. (1671). Suite des memoires du Sr. Bernier sur l’empire du Grand Mogol. Paris: Kessinger Legacy Reprints. Bernier, F. (2008). Travels in the Mogul empire AD 1656–1668 (A. Constable, Trans., V. A. Smith, Rev., 2nd ed.). New Delhi: Low Price Publications. Bowrey, T. (1905). A geographical account of the countries round the Bay of Bengal 1669– 1679 (R.C. Temple, Ed.). Cambridge: Hakluyt Society. Cooper, A. A. (1999). Characteristics of men, manners, opinions, times (L. E. Klein, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Originally published in 1711). Dryden, J. (1967). Aureng-Zebe: Four tragedies (L. A. Beaurline  & F. Bowers, Eds., pp. 105–188). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenblatt, S. (1991). Marvelous possessions: The wonder of the new world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, A. (1995). A new account of the East Indies: Being the observations and remarks of Capt. Alexander Hamilton from the year 1688–1723 (Vol. 2). New Delhi: Asian Educational Services (First published in 1739).

Encountering the “sati” 51 Hawley, J. S. (Ed.). (1994). Sati, the blessing and the curse: The burning of wives in India. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Locke, J. (1924). An essay concerning human understanding (Abridged & A. S. PringlePattison, Ed.). Sussex: Harvester. Loomba, A. (1993). Dead women tell no tales: Issues of female subjectivity, subaltern agency and tradition in colonial and post-colonial writings on widow immolation in India. History Workshop Journal, 36, 208–227. Mani, L. (1989). Contentious traditions: The debate on sati in colonial India. In K. Sangari & S. Vaid (Eds.), Recasting women: Essays in colonial history (pp. 88–126). New Delhi: Kali for Women. Montaigne, M. de. (2003). On virtue. In M. A. Screech (Trans. and Ed.), The complete essays. London: Penguin Books. Mundy, P. (1914). Travels in Asia 1628–1634. The travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia 1608–1667 (R. C. Temple, Ed.). London: Hakluyt Society. 2nd Series. Vol. 2. Nouveau Petit Larousse. 1971. Overbury, J. (1615). A vertuous widdow. New characters. Retrieved from Eudaemonist. com./biblion/overbury Ovington, J. (1690). A voyage to Suratt in the year 1689. London. Oxford English Dictionary. Pritchard, R. E. (2011). Peter Mundy: Merchant adventurer. Oxford: Bodleian Library. Rowlands, A. (2004). The conditions of life for the masses. In E. Cameron (Ed.), Early modern Europe: An Oxford history (2nd ed., pp. 31–62). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Scott, R. (1584). The discouerie of witchcraft. London. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Terry, E. (1655; Rpt.1777). A voyage to East India. London. Thompson, E. (1928). Suttee: A historical and philosophical enquiry into the Hindu rite of widow-burning. London: Edward Arnold. Weinberger-Thomas, C. (1999). Ashes of immortality: Widow-burning in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yule, H., & Burnell, A. C. (1994). Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical, and discursive (W. Crooke, Ed., 2nd ed.). New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. (First published in 1903).

3

Indian travel writing in the age of empire Mobility and cosmopolitan nationalism Pramod K. Nayar

In G. Parameswaran Pillai’s London and Paris Through Indian Spectacles (1897/2006), Pillai devotes much of Letters VII and IX to the city’s literary history. Displaying a formidable knowledge of poets, essayists, novelists, and others, Pillai draws a cultural geography of London. This is done in terms of the residence/houses of Pope, Bacon, Walpole, Richardson, and other figures of the literary firmament scattered through the city. He then observes, “The Londoner is certainly not in love with any of these places in the city” (p. 46), implicitly setting himself above the unappreciative Londoner. Lala Baijnath, traveling through England and Paris in 1897, devotes an entire chapter to “Books – Some Characteristics of Modern English and Indian Literature – Free Libraries – News-papers – Public Opinion” in his England and India (1893, pp. 102–126). In the course of his musings, Baijnath evaluates the English authors. He ranks them in the order of their readership, although he does not cite sources for his information, or inference, about the readers. Baijnath states: Shakespeare . . . [is] . . . by far the most read of any poet. Tennyson or Browning or Swinburne are for the select few, so are Carlyle or Ruskin, but Shakespeare is for all. . . . After Shakespeare come novels, whose readers are, I think, by far more numerous than those of any other books in England. (1893, p. 104) In each case, the Indian traveler’s familiarity with London’s literary history immediately positions him as an insider. These are signs of recognition: The colonial subject recognizes landmarks, cultural practices, and artefacts such as poetry. Their fascination for things English, European, and the global are tempered by this “informed enchantment.” Informed enchantment, it has been argued, “allows the Indian traveler to present himself as a cultivated gentleman in the imperial center” (Nayar, 2012, p. 41), generating a cosmopolitanism. This chapter, while taking this cosmopolitanism as a given, is underpinned by a set of questions. What are the constituents, besides “informed enchantment,” of cosmopolitanism in a colonial subject? What is the nature of the relationship between colonial subjecthood and the cosmopolitan role essayed by such travelers? Finally, what, if any, is the relationship between national identity/nationalism with cosmopolitanism in these travelers, and what is the kind of world constructed Reproduced with permission, Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, Pramod Nayar, Bloomsbury, 2020.

Indian travel writing in the age of empire 53 by such a cosmopolitan vision or standpoint? This chapter provides a view of England as well as India, dominated by this “cosmopolitan nationalism” (Reddy, 2010, p. 573), which may be construed as generating an alternate historiography of India during the colonial period. In a perceptive reading of Sarojini Naidu’s poetry, Sheshalatha Reddy proposes that a cosmopolitan nationalism characterizes her works. Reddy argues that Naidu undertook a “strategic co-optation” of a “relatively non-threatening,” feminized “language of Orientalism,” “both through her poetry and through her corporeal body” that then allowed her to “circulate the world.” Reddy further notes: Naidu “structures her cosmopolitan stance through the double consciousness of England as the place of her literary language and initial literary aspirations and India as the place of her national belonging” (2010, p. 573). For Reddy, then, Naidu’s adoption of English as the chosen language of her creative work and the simultaneous emphasis on her Indianness – which had an exotic appeal for her Western readers – are indices of her cosmopolitanism. Reddy’s reading signals a conscious, agential cosmopolitan self-fashioning in Naidu. It is this consciously crafted colonial subject-self, simultaneously nationalist and worldly, that the present chapter treats as a “cosmopolitan nationalist.” Here, I am trying to show that the colonial subject first represents himself, in his travel texts, as an exotic Indian at large, but one who possesses and claims considerable agency through this exoticism. Then, this traveler exhibits a certain “anti-idealism” and “cynical cosmopolitanism” through a certain “cultivated partiality”(Small, 2012, p.  87), all of which constitute a form of knowledgemaking. Finally, the traveling colonial subject shows signs of a cosmopolitan nationalism. This cosmopolitan nationalism, I argue, is the result of concurrences, which are fractioning discourses of oscillating subject positions and which produce concurrent worlds: the Indian subcontinent, imperial England, and the globe.

The exotic Indian at large Lala Baijnath writes about one of his experiences in London: No carriages were allowed in any of the principal streets.  .  .  . Here, as on other occasions, my Indian dress proved to me of some advantage. But for that dress and the kind care of certain friends who accompanied me, I would not have been able to enjoy the sight and return home unmolested by the immense crowd in the streets. (1893, p. 82) Pillai advises future travelers to desist from wearing their ornate native costumes under the impression that “you can make up for your want of eloquence at a public meeting by the attractions of your head dress” (1897, p. 14). He cautions: You are the object of too much attention in the streets when you walk about with a turban on. Who will not covet to be the cynosure of all eyes in London? – and such pretty eyes too! But somehow or the other, you grow nervous

54  Pramod K. Nayar as you walk along and you feel you cannot stand the test of a close scrutiny, particularly by good looking girls. (1897, p. 14) N.L. Doss notes that his “dark complexion” and his “chupkan” (a kind of long coat that resembles a frock, often associated with the Muslim sherwani) “attracted every body’s notice” though “none ever rudely stared.” He goes on to say that when they stopped or turned around to stare, on some occasions, he would “make friends with them by a gentle smile” (1893, p.  37). Jagatjit Singh, the king of Kapurthala, records that in Naples he and his entourage were “immediately surrounded by enormous crowds of Neapolitans” when they alighted from their transport, and observes: “we were evidently looked upon as some strange monsters who had escaped from a traveling show, and the people were glad to have the opportunity of admiring us without going through the form of paying for the pleasure” (1895, p. 17). One notes the iteration of the “exotic Indian” trope in the discourse of travel in each of the four authors. Adopting Reddy’s terminology, I suggest that this constitutes a strategic co-optation that underscores the native’s difference, and which draws the attention of the world/culture he is passing through at that point in time. This positioning of the colonial subject as different and as exotic is an agential act that inserts him into the cultural encounter. It is an assertion of difference and of Indianness in a setting where, as Doss notes, it is bound to induce some “mischief”(his word, 1893, p. 37). Indianness is an interruption, a punctum, in the narrative of Europe itself, even as European literature, art, and culture prevent a homogenous “Indianness.” The agential exoticism of the Indian-at-large in the travel narrative ensures that the exotic is part of a global cultural literacy in the places where he travels. In other words, the colonial subject cosmopolitanizes the places in which he travels, even as he retains the sense of exotic appeal. What Pillai and the others document, then, may be read as the European fascination and wonder at the exotic but also as an engagement with otherness that cosmopolitanizes Europe itself. I further propose that, as opposed to textual exoticisms that the Europeans may or may not have encountered – and this would, at the most, be limited to an elite readership – the presence of actual corporeal presence of colonial bodies in Piccadilly, the museums and the streets of London or Paris would have constituted an entirely different order of exotic spectacle. Bernard Schmidt, tracing the history of exoticism, writes about the Early Modern period: Over a period spanning the final third of the seventeenth century and first third of the eighteenth, a new conception of the world and of Europe’s relationship to it developed in sources of exotic geography. These new materials – a vast body of textual, visual, and material objects  – presented the world as distinctly “agreeable” and thus accommodating in various ways. (2015, p. 3)

Indian travel writing in the age of empire 55 Schmidt’s argument could be expanded to include the Indian body as one of the material objects that presented the world to the European eye. That the Indians are self-conscious and aware of the effect they have upon such a European spectator indicates that the colonial subject is perhaps engaging in what Lisa Lau has termed “re-Orientalism”(2009), a form of orientalism embarked upon, for diverse reasons, by the colonized and the formerly colonized. When, therefore, Pillai or Baijnath underscore the effect he has upon the European spectator, it suggests a certain foregrounding of selfspectacularizing – which would then be an agential act. The Indian piques the curiosity of the European, and if traditionally, curiosity has been the hallmark of the European traveler (Leask, 2002), in this case it is a curiosity manipulated into existence by the Indian colonial subject traversing the world. The colonial subject’s travel discourse is not, in this reading, just a “guest discourse” (Codell, 2007). Rather, it is a guest discourse that draws attention to the effects – affective, mainly, but a social and collective affect – of his guest-appearance among the European viewers. Pillai and the rest, therefore, position themselves as living, organic monitors of racial, stereotypical, and affective responses of Europeans to exoticism. In other cases, such as Jagatjit Singh’s, the nature of the welcome – rapturous – offers another angle to the Indian exotic theme. Singh records how at places such as the World Fair (Chicago), he was “surrounded . . . by this enthusiastic multitude, all trying to press forward and shake . . . [him] . . . by the hand.” Referring to himself as a “visitor from the opposite side of the earth” (1895, pp. 144–145), Singh expresses his astonishment and gratitude at the reception. He spends considerable narrative space documenting the press reports of his tour. Aware, intensely, of concurrent worlds converging within him, the Indian traveler traverses the globe, not seeing it from an imperial, empowered standpoint, but as a powerful interruption nevertheless.

“Cultivated Partiality” Reading George Eliot, Helen Small proposes: the cosmopolitan distance sought is not, Anderson concludes, “a sustained or absolute disengagement – for Eliot a destructive delusion – but rather a cultivated partiality, a reflective return to the cultural origins that one can no longer inhabit in any unthinking manner.” (2012, p. 87) For Small, a certain “anti-idealism  .  .  . seem[s] to mimic the ethical effects of cosmopolitan distance.” Reading Daniel Deronda, Small argues that a realism, or cynicism, enables an “induction into knowledge about the true tendencies of cultural history that overturns and annuls any assumption of liberal progress” (2012, p. 94), that is, it enables the observer to come into the possession of a different order of knowledge itself.

56  Pramod K. Nayar In the colonial subject’s travel narrative such a “cultivated partiality” (2012, p. 87) is neither undiluted admiration for the English/global cultures experienced temporarily nor an unthinking nostalgia for the country/culture of origin. In fact, in most cases, the traveler exhibits the anti-idealism of the kind Small proposes, resulting in a far more critical reflection on the homeland. Take, for instance, the case of G.P. Pillai. Pillai in a chapter on social interactions in England has this to say: While in India, you found it so difficult to separate real, genuine admiration for a woman from passion and love; and you sought the company of only one woman  – your wife. That was due to your training and to the sort of society that exists there. But society as it exists in England makes you admire women, freed altogether from the grosser form of love. The more you move in the company of English women the more you are convinced that it is possible for you to admire the intellectual culture of your friend’s sister or even her personal charms without harbouring any unholy thought in your breast. Society as constituted in India does not recognise this distinction. (1897/2006, p. 55) Lala Baijnath claims that the English justice system is less efficacious in England than in India. He writes: In spite of its defects the codification of Indian law has not only been of incalculable advantage to the people but has also saved the courts from being the victims of much useless wrangling. (1893, pp. 131–132) Baijnath declares that English law is a “mysterious and bewildering maze for the litigant often to get hopelessly involved into” (1893, p. 131). Yet, Baijnath is no less unflattering in his remarks about India. The quantum of litigation in India, says Baijnath, has increased because of the common state of indebtedness of Indian land-holders  .  .  . the isolation in which people live from each other, mak[ing] them lose all respect for local opinion . . . the [revenue] operations are too vast to be made with all the care and accuracy requisite for entries made in the settlement papers . . . fictitious sales by Mahommedan husbands to their wives in lieu of dower and impeachment of their fathers’ transactions by Hindu sons . . . none of these features except the first is seen in England. (1893, p. 132) He is likewise certain that “the education of the people [of India] cannot be left to themselves.” Mass education, he notes, have yielded “unsatisfactory”(1893, p. 156) results. Finally, Baijnath spends some time rejecting the ideal of Western

Indian travel writing in the age of empire 57 education that, he says, inspires many families to send their sons to England. Baijnath notes how certain associations (such as Dr. Leitner’s Institute at Woking) tried to help Indian students in England stay true “to their Indian habits in all matters of food, dress, way of living.” Baijnath notes that “few Indians care to do so in London” (1893, p. 160). Baijnath appears clearly ambivalent about Indians who become cosmopolitanized in the course of their stay. Further, he claims that it is not worthwhile to spend so much money “for mere chances of success in professions which are already showing more disappointments than successes, or for appointments under Government which an Indian education also obtains.” He believes that the Indian parents incur “immense risk” by “sending boys other than the most intelligent to the destruction of the latter’s prospects in life” (1893, p. 162). N.L. Doss notes amusedly the “shop-keeping instinct of the Englishman” (1893, p.  85). Doss elsewhere points to the hypocrisy of Hindus in India who do not object to eating famous biscuits “made and baked by Christians” but who “would move heaven and earth and cry out that their religion is in danger, on the passing of a law the enactment of which is demanded by feelings of humanity”(1893, pp. 103–104). In a comment about the other qualities of the English, Doss writes: Their position as a nation, their power, their wealth, their superiority over others, and their ability to hold their own, even against great odds, are due not merely to their knowledge of books and their ability to read and write, and make speeches in public, which I am afraid overturn the head of many a dreamy Indian youth; they owe these to their great industry, perseverance, energy, skill, and to a determined will to meet with success. (1893, p. 121) There is a palpable shift in the texts from undisguised admiration and informed enchantment (Nayar, 2012) to the cultivated partiality of the above passages. A certain critical distance that engages with the country/culture of origin and the cultures he is traveling through emerges in Doss, Baijnath, and others. I suggest that this cultivated partiality is the anti-idealism of Helen Small. It prevents overt praise, vituperative criticism of the other, and self-abnegation or valorization of one’s culture of origin. It presents the colonial traveler as one alert to dissonances, capable of clear evaluations of cultural practices and of deep reflections. He is not taken in by the sights or by surface-level meaning, but probes beneath the surface. When Baijnath, for instance, explores the ramifications of Western education he studies various dimensions: the economics, the choice of professions, the cultural alienation, the success rate of professions, and the comparative advantages of staying in India or traveling abroad for studies. The cynical cosmopolitan, then, may be said to generate a different order of knowledge, and thus alters the subject-identity of the traveler.

58  Pramod K. Nayar Writing about the knowledge production by imperial traveling subjects Paul Smethurst says: Mobility is the sine qua non of travel writing, and travel writers, having been granted mobility as imperial subjects, then assume the authority to narrate. The duty of imperial travelling subjects is then either to explore and extend the empire, or survey and reconfirm its territories and the “within-bounds” of the places and peoples of empire. They fit experience and anecdotal evidence to existing structures, maintaining order by acting as intermediaries between the world of experience and accumulated knowledge – between the empirical and the imperial. (2009, p. 7) For the colonial subject, the “fit”(2009, p. 7) between experience and anecdotal evidence to existing structures, I suggest, reveals something else: the anomalies within the imperial structure and the originating culture. Take for instance, Lala Baijnath’s sustained reflections on the governments of India and England. He begins with a stunningly bald statement: There is no parallel between the Government of England with its democratic institutions and its party politics . . . and the Government of India which is a despotic Government, conducted by means of a close bureaucracy, but which, unlike eastern despotism, is a benevolent despotism, ruling after civilized methods and guided by public opinion. (1893, p. 64) He then lists the various advantages that have accrued to India as a result of British rule: the law, public education, communication, among others. He compares this favorably with local/native rulers. The Indian mind, he writes, “which had been debased under the influence of weak and tyrannous despotisms, has vastly expanded under the present system of education” (1893, p. 65). After nearly two full pages of praise, Baijnath turns to critique. He believes, there has been “some failure in and adequately understanding the wishes of its subjects” (1893, p. 66). He then proceeds to list things the British government must do. He is quick to note that England has benefited greatly from its imperial connection with India. He expresses astonishment that in the House of Commons: more attention was bestowed upon the case of a shop girl, whom an overzealous policeman had wrongly arrested and an incautious magistrate had wrongfully tried, than on a budget discussion affecting the welfare of millions. (1893, p. 70) Baijnath is also astute enough to see that these discussions by parties in the English parliament are based on electoral hopes, and concludes his chapter with this: If English politicians treat Indian questions not on their own merits but with reference to their influence at the elections, the natives of India cannot do

Indian travel writing in the age of empire 59 better than convince the British public that they recognize no party distinctions but wish all questions concerning their country to be discussed in a spirit of fairness and on their own merits. (1893, p. 73) Now, Baijnath is offering his critique and his praise for Britain, as well as his comments on India, from an understanding of what the government ought to be. With references to the law, history, and society, Baijnath links the history of the governments, the development of political thinking on questions such as liberty, equality, and the rule of law. I will return to this linkage later in the chapter, but for now it suffices to say that the colonial subject exhibits both wonder and enchantment at the world, and a critical perspective towards the world and his originating country/culture. The traveler is one who possesses or comes to claim, a different order of knowledge about his country and the countries he travels. He is then, an informed subject of the Empire, one who can employ his knowledge to reflect on the nature of imperial rule itself, but also ponder over questions of national identity.

Colonial subjects and cosmopolitan nationalism Diana Brydon, Peter Forsgren, and Gunlög Fur (2017) suggest that exploring concurrences across nations, geographical territories, and cultures is a more productive way of examining the global, enabling a movement beyond the center/ periphery binary. They write: To focus on concurrences is to recognize the different ways in which epistemic communities may develop concurrent claims on reality without necessarily engaging with one another. By “epistemic community,” we refer to various knowledge-producing groups, such as different disciplinary formations within the academy or cultural communities of diverse kinds outside it. Interdisciplinary engagements . . . are one type of response to this situation, in which different archives yield contradictory, complementary, or merely concurrent views and voices. (2017, p. 5) Brydon et al. think of concurrences as “connecting differences without either conflating them or fetishizing them” (2017, p. 7). They also see such concurrences as enabling a new way of thinking about global intellectual history. However, they also underscore one key feature of their use of the term: “While to concur may suggest shared agreement, we use the term more broadly to indicate points of convergence or confluence where there may be gaps in communication, failures to connect, or forms of coming-together where friction predominates” (2017, p. 4). I suggest that the colonial subject’s cosmopolitan nationalism is the effect of such convergences. When Baijnath, Doss, and the others develop arguments about women’s freedoms, education, or government, they bring to bear upon the theme their experiences with Hinduism, local knowledges and a sense

60  Pramod K. Nayar of the forms of government in the subcontinent (from local rajas to British imperialism) – their alternative epistemic community – all of which they carry with them to England. Thus, the Indian traveler in England is a member of an epistemic community where, by focusing on anomalies, gaps, and failures alongside successes and triumphs of both, the empire and their originating cultures, he serves to highlight the deficiencies and advantages of both. Baijnath, Doss, Malabari, and the others produce a set of data and knowledge about both India and England but through a prism that is itself the product of messy intersections: of Western and Eastern religion, education systems, beliefs, and literacies. Cosmopolitanism is not, in these travelers, either distancing or cynicism, but a concurrence, without necessarily shared agreement, of/with competing knowledge forms, cultural beliefs and modes of cultural training that cuts across, merges (without exact correspondence) geographical and cultural borders. Thus, Baijnath does not concur with other Indians in the matter of the benefits of Western education. And here is N.L. Doss on women and labor in Tasmania: I noticed in some places women being employed as station-masters, signalmen, &c. on these railways. . . . In England I had seen a great deal of Post Office work being done by women, and I  was therefore not unprepared to find the softer sex pressed into the railway service in this colony, where labor is dear. With the march of civilization and the increase of the requirements of man, things are changing even in the remotest corners of the world and among people of stereotyped conservativeness; but I hope the day will not come, when in India woman will in this manner push her way to the forefront of business life, and displace man, and be his rival in the great competition of winning bread. (1893, pp. 148–149) Or here is Behramji Malabari, mortally offended at men and women eating in public places and eating prodigious quantities of meat at that: Men and women eat freely at shops, in the street, tram, bus or railway carriage. There is an absence of delicacy and deliberation about the matter, at which the grave Oriental may well lift his eyebrows. Bismillah! How these Firangis do eat. . . . Nor is it a pleasant sight to see women devouring pork, bacon, beef ham at restaurants, with the usual accompaniments. Many of them send for these things every day for dinner I suppose it IS easier and cheaper perhaps to do so. But how much better for themselves and their families if they knew how to cook a simple meal at home. The existence of so many hotels, restaurants and tea shops seem to me to be destructive of the home life of the people. It may destroy the very idea of home, if it does not also dry up the spring of family affection. (1893, p. 47)

Indian travel writing in the age of empire 61 Malabari then proceeds to make a specific comparison of customs: A drunken man is bad enough, a drunken woman is infinitely worse. If she is a mother, she rages like a moral pestilence round the homestead. . . . I have seen respectably dressed matrons reeling in the streets of London. I have known of a number of cases, beginning with just a glass and ending with the jail or the lunatic asylum. . . . God forbid this vice should ever approach our women in India, or our men either. There is no custom so deleterious as that of infant marriage. But if I were asked to choose between drunkenness and that, I think I  would keep to my own national custom. For one thing infant marriages hardly ever lead to those cruel forms of prostitution to which drunkenness in women sometimes leads. (1893, pp. 51–52) Malabari believes that the West offers more freedom to men and women to not marry. Marriage is not the be all and end all of existence, nor are children male or female the only means of salvation . . . There is more leisure in England for public work at home, or patriotic enterprise abroad, more freedom, more selfrespect for individuals. Men and women may live free of the domestic fetters, and are none the worse for such life, if regulated on high principle. Married life begins much later than with us and amongst the better classes seldom without adequate provision for the future. The parties have a larger capacity for appreciating the duties as well as the privileges of married life  .  .  . the little husband brings his wife less than himself, to the paternal roof, and there, under its umbrageous shade they grow into man and woman father and mother. It IS a parasitic growth more or less and perpetuates what we call the joint family system. In England husband and wife set up a house for themselves immediately after marriage. (1893, pp. 66–67) Narratives of individual freedom, equality and such, borrowed from the circulating English discourses of liberalism, create the concurrences within Doss and Malabari here. They concede the advantages but are uncertain as to how these translate for India. Developing attitudes toward women, the gendered division of labor or education proceed from various intersecting influences, and to read travel narratives such as these is to develop frames for an unsettling history of modern Indian liberalism, anti-colonial struggles, and nationalism itself. I  term this set of concurrences cosmopolitan nationalism with the cautionary proviso that the “nationalism” is schismatic, contradictory, and never homogenous, where ideas of freedom are not necessarily extended to, say in Doss, women. Cosmopolitan nationalism arrived at through mobility may valorize freedom as defined by and embodied in Euro-American cultures, but the Indian traveler is unsettled by it

62  Pramod K. Nayar when it extends to women and wage-labor, and hence Doss quickly qualifies it. The epistemic community which traveling inserts them into is not coterminous with the Euro-American or global one, given that Doss is making his observations in friction with the dominant thinking on the subject. Baijnath criticizes the current British government because The European of to-day does not generally see anything good in the native nor show much desire to be intimately acquainted with the Indian character, with the result that the work of administration, though it goes on with mechanical regularity, does not show that sympathy with the ruled which it did in the past. . . . On the other hand, the Indian, though quick in gauging his rulers’ character, has yet to learn to imitate it in its better parts. (1893, p. 42) Baijnath is occupying two positions here: as colonial subject and as a nationalist. As noted earlier, Lala Baijnath focuses on the merits and demerits of the English and Indian governments in a dedicated chapter. He links the two, demonstrating mutual benefit, but also documents a history of negligent attitudes and indifference. Baijnath, I suggest, is mapping as a cosmopolitan nationalist concurrences and messily linked histories. His text, like that of others, alerts us to the discrepant histories of the Western world when he does so. Lisa Lowe writes: Liberal forms of political economy, culture, government, and history propose a narrative of freedom overcoming enslavement that at once denies colonial slavery, erases the seizure of lands from native peoples, displaces migrations and connections across continents, and internalizes these processes in a national struggle of history and consciousness. The social inequalities of our time are a legacy of these processes through which “the human” is “freed” by liberal forms, while other subjects, practices, and geographies are placed at a distance from “the human.” (2015, p. 2) Lowe’s argument is that we need to create “unsettling” genealogies for politicointellectual projects such as (Western) liberalism: [Studying] liberalism as a project that includes at once both the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor, and free trade, as well as the global divisions and asymmetries on which the liberal tradition depends, and according to which such liberties are reserved for some and wholly denied to others. In this sense, the modern distinction between definitions of the human and those to whom such definitions do not extend is the condition of possibility for Western liberalism, and not its particular exception. (2015, p. 2)

Indian travel writing in the age of empire 63 Lowe’s project is the “intimacies” across continents, where, for instance, we need to study [The] links between settler colonialism in North America and the West Indies and the African slave trade; or attention to the conjunction of the abolition of slavery and the importing of Chinese and South Asian indentured labor; or a correlation of the East Indies and China trades and the rise of bourgeois Europe. (2015, p. 5) I propose that texts such as those produced by globe-trotting Indians in the heyday of Empire may be profitably read as enabling such a study as Lowe suggests. Linking the fortunes, profits, intellectual history, economic dependencies, political futures, and even familial connections and conjunctions between England and India, as noted in the Baijnath text, provides an entry point into reading cosmopolitan nationalism. Why would (does) England deny the very liberties it built its liberal government on? Why is England’s social hierarchic apparatus readable (as Baijnath does) as “caste” (1893, p. 61), and how does one impact the other in the building of the Empire? Cosmopolitan nationalism, then, is the intellectual arm and philosophical articulation, if one can call it that, of linked genealogies of idea(l)s like liberal governments that figures like Baijnath embody in their discourses when writing about England and India. It is the consequence of a friction (concurrences produce friction): between being insiders to India and their outsider perspective because of where they are traveling (the world), between their colonial subject position and the nationalist one. More importantly, this set of often-conflicting observer positions the Indian traveler occupies in the course of the journey prevents any static representation of England, the world or India than it would be if they were to be occupying what Walter Mignolo terms “zero point”(cited in Hållén, 2017, pp. 62–63), the privileged traveler–narrator position characteristic of Western (Eurocentric) travel texts. One notes that most of these travelers also make comparative observations: about government, art and culture, the working class, women, education, politics. Such an oscillating position is significant – and produces cosmopolitan nationalism – because it resists any totalizing viewpoint (a trademark of Western travel writing). In Nicklas Hållén’s reading of postcolonial travel writing, Non-relativist, non-exoticizing representation of otherness in travel writing can be used as a rhetorical means to demonstrate the provinciality of the standpoint of the zero-point epistemology, by serving as a literary world where worlds can exist concurrently. (2017, p. 73) In the discursively constructed world of these travelers, who are at once colonial subjects subject to imperial technologies and frames of seeing, yet free themselves

64  Pramod K. Nayar on occasion by turning to their own epistemic community and participating in a cosmopolitan worldview, they create concurrent worlds.

References Baijnath, L. (1893). England and India: Being impressions of persons and things English and Indian and brief notes of visits to France, Switzerland, Italy and Ceylon. Bombay, India: Jehangir B. Karani. Brydon, D., Forsgren, P., & Fur, G. (2017). What reading for concurrences offers postcolonial studies. In D. Brydon, P. Forsgren, & G. Fur (Eds.), Concurrent imaginaries, postcolonial worlds: Toward revised histories (pp. 3–32). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill-Rodopi. Codell, J. (2007). Reversing the grand tour: Guest discourse in Indian travel narratives. Huntington Library Quarterly, 70(1), 173–187. Doss, N.L. (1893). Reminiscences, English, and Australasian, being an account of a visit to England, Australia, New-Zealand, Tasmania, Ceylon, etc. Calcutta, India: M. C. Bhowmick. Hållén, N. (2017). Travel writing and the representation of concurrent worlds: Caryl Phillips’ The Atlantic Sound and Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland. In D. Brydon, P. Forsgren,  & G. Fur (Eds.), Concurrent imaginaries, postcolonial worlds: Toward revised histories (pp. 59–76). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill-Rodopi. Lau, L. (2009). Re-Orientalism: The perpetration and development of orientalism by orientals. Modern Asian Studies, 43(2), 571–590. Leask, N. (2002). Curiosity and the aesthetics of travel writing, 1770–1840: “From an antique land”. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Lowe, L. (2015). The intimacies of four continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Malabari, B. M. (1893). The Indian eye on English life, or rambles of a pilgrim reformer. Westminster, England: Archibald Constable and Company. Nayar, P. K. (2012). Colonial subjects and aesthetic understanding: Indian travel literature about England, 1870–1900. South Asian Review, 33(1), 31–52. Pillai, G. P. (2006). London and Paris through Indian spectacles. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi (Original work published 1897). Reddy, S. (2010). The cosmopolitan nationalism of Sarojini Naidu, nightingale of India. Victorian Literature and Culture, 38(2), 571–589. Schmidt, B. (2015). Inventing exoticism: Geography, globalism, and Europe’s early modern world. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Singh, J. (1895). My travels in Europe and America, 1893. London, England: George Routledge and Sons. 1895. Small, H. (2012). George Eliot and the cosmopolitan cynic. Victorian Studies, 55(1), 85–105. Smethurst, P. (2009). Introduction. In J. Kuehn  & P. Smethurst (Eds.), Travel writing, form, and empire: The poetics and politics of mobility (pp.  1–18). London, England: Routledge.

Part 2

Alternate histories, divergent concepts, and subaltern spaces of resistance

4 Patriots in Kala Pani? Writing subaltern resistance into the nationalist memory1 Philipp Zehmisch

The active construction of historical “realities” can be regarded as a medium of collective communication about the past, the present, and the future (Straub, 1998). Located at the temporal and spatial crossroads of numerous oral and literary traditions, as well as various empires, colonial, and postcolonial powers and their ideologies, the historiography of India must be regarded as a constant struggle to revise and rewrite historical “reality.” During the last few decades, the project of “writing India” has gained a new momentum through the increased production of popular social history, often articulating explicit or implicit political claims to belonging, identity, and space (Chatterjee, 2006). This chapter examines one particular case of a regional historiography, that of the Andaman Islands,2 that illustrates the tension between the project of writing the “narration of the nation” (cf. Bhabha, 1990) and local attempts to produce and accommodate an alternative social history into the national memory. To analyze and discuss this tension, I am going to highlight the interwoven regional history of the Andaman Islands as a British penal colony to where criminal convicts, anticolonial rebels, and political prisoners had been deported from 1858 onwards, and the postcolonial Indian nation state that emerged, among other reasons, as a result of the struggle for Independence. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Andaman Islands had come to be gradually linked to the popular imaginary of the trope of Kala Pani (black waters). Departing from earlier meanings as a site of overseas displacement, Kala Pani transformed into an epitome of the British yoke when newspaper reports about the incarceration, torture, and martyrdom of revolutionaries in the Andamans reached the public. Causing widespread outrage, Kala Pani turned into an integral component of anti-colonial discourse. Further, it had particular impacts on nationalist representations and perceptions of the Andamans after Partition: they became a “pilgrimage” site of the anti-colonial struggle (Vaidik, 2010), which memorializes the sacrifices and hardships of freedom fighters. Such hegemonic forms of memorialization also affected various practices of omitting and subsuming local histories of ordinary convicts and their local descendants. This chapter shows how the hegemonic master narrative of the anti-colonial struggle on the subcontinent has both framed and silenced alternative subaltern3 narratives of the past. Further, it aims to critically discuss the ways in which the

68  Philipp Zehmisch hegemonic narrative of the postcolonial Indian nation state impacted collective modes of self-definition and belonging as well as epistemic resistance. In so doing, it concentrates on the reception and localized opposition to attempts by the center to write the regional narrative of the contemporary migrant and settler society of the Andamans into the “imagined community” (Anderson, 1980) of the Indian nation.4 The representation of these subaltern histories in writings and narratives framed by members of local communities (mostly descendants of colonial convicts, laborers, settlers, and traders), highlights a particular politics of place and belonging. In this diasporic overseas location of the Indian nation state, “Indianness” is not necessarily self-evident, but has to be pinned down in writing, performed and, thereby, proven to the imagined national community. Such processes of “writing back”(cf. Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2002) by local amateur or nonprofessional historians are accompanied by struggles over local belonging and community. The most prominent symbolic struggle is that of the pre-42 communities, a category that encompasses several groups of convict descendants and early migrants who had settled in the islands during the colonial period, before Japan occupied the islands between 1942 and 1945. Various pre-42s frame their subaltern ancestors’ rebellion or insubordination as acts against the British Empire, which had helped to liberate the nation from colonial control, and thus as legitimate parts of the anti-colonial struggle. As I will show, pre-42 claims to recognize their ancestors as “freedom fighters” are also intimately linked to racial discriminations as “criminals” by more recently migrated communities.

The trajectory of Kala Pani Across South Asia, the widely known allegory of Kala Pani triggers a diversity of memories linked to the violent and exploitative history of the British Raj. Literally, Kala Pani signifies the black waters of the Indian Ocean over which subaltern prisoners and indentured labor – and, along with them soldiers, overseers, traders, crews, etc. – were transported from the subcontinent to overseas destinations across the globe. This transnational network led to the transfer of South Asian populations as far as the West Indies, Guyana, East Africa, and Mauritius, as well as eastwards to the Andaman Islands, Malaysia, Singapore, and Fiji, causing irrevocable transformations of the social, cultural, political, material, and ecological composition of these places. Contract and convict labor was instrumental in colonizing new territories, exploiting forest and marine resources, and in setting up infrastructure and exportoriented plantations. Most of the deported settled down in these “new worlds,” redefined their social boundaries, and “creolized” their cultural identifications.5 Those who returned, however, lent imaginative power to the idea of Kala Pani, which implied the threat of losing caste identity and belonging when traveling across the Indian Ocean.6 Overseas transportation meant that many convicts and indentured laborers did not return to their homelands. The dread, anxiety, and

Patriots in Kala Pani? 69 uncertainty of their relatives and friends who stayed back on the subcontinent was subsequently associated with the trope of Kala Pani. The expression sazaa-e-kala pani (imprisonment in the black waters) has turned into a common trope that haunts the contemporary cultural memory across South Asia. It is reminiscent of a historical process that unfolded when the British installed a penal colony in the Islands in 1858 in order to shift prisoners, who had been convicted during the Mutiny or Rebellion of 1857, from overcrowded mainland jails to the islands; in the following decades, tens of thousands of other prisoners – the vast majority of ordinary “criminal” convicts and a minority of political prisoners – were transported to the Andamans too. The Islands’ broader imaginaire is aptly exemplified in L.P. Mathur’s book Kala Pani: In the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century the mere mention of the name of the picturesque islands . . . brought before the mind of an Indian a dreadful vision of a place where dangerous criminals were banished for ever in dark and dingy cells. It was commonly believed that nobody returned to the mainland from these inaccessible islands. (1984, p. 1) I have quoted Mathur’s description because it demonstrates the most characteristic, but also problematic and one-dimensional representation of the Islands within postcolonial discourse. This hegemonic discourse links the imagery of the Islands to the trope of incarceration of political prisoners in the “dark and dingy cells” of the iconic Cellular Jail. Situated on a hillock in the center of Port Blair on South Andaman Island, the jail became functional in 1906, almost 50 years after the inception of the penal settlement in the aftermath of the Mutiny or Rebellion of 1857 (Anderson, 2004; Sen, 2000; Vaidik, 2010).7 The elevated position of the Cellular Jail as the primary monument that signifies the anti-colonial struggle in the Islands must be understood in the context of dominant mainland conceptualizations of the Andamans “as a muktitirth, a site of pilgrimage, where the sons of Bharat Mata, or Mother India, sacrificed their lives in the service of the nation” (Vaidik, 2010, p. 1). According to the dominant narrative, anti-colonial nationalists suffered the hardships of imprisonment, torture, and humiliation inflicted on them in the compounds of the Cellular Jail, in order to attain swaraj (independence) and azadi (liberation or freedom). In 1937, several hunger strikes by political prisoners against their inhumane treatment were strongly supported by the anti-colonial movement on the mainland. Due to public pressure on colonial decision-makers by anti-colonial elites, all political prisoners were subsequently transferred to the mainland (Tamta, 1991). This imaginaire of the Cellular Jail as embodiment of the horror of Kala Pani may be explained by taking several factors into consideration: First, all over South Asia, nationalists targeted the institution of the Jail as a primary symbol of colonial governance. In the 1920s, the Jail and the penal colony had become central tropes of political struggles (Anderson, 2007). During this period, nationalists metaphorically referred to colonial India as a vast prison (Arnold, 1994). Concurrently,

70  Philipp Zehmisch both jail-going and hunger-striking became key techniques of resistance (Anderson, 2007). As jails symbolized colonial subjection in general, imprisonment in the Cellular Jail was interpreted as “sacrifice” for the nation-to-be.8 Second, the Cellular Jail gained dubious popularity among bourgeois-nationalist sections due to narratives and memoirs written by revolutionary ex-inmates after their release (Arnold, 2004).9 Their reports about systematic abuse, torture, and other injustices inflicted on them within the Jail compounds contributed considerably to India’s anti-colonial politicization (see Arnold, 2004, p.  32; Srivastava, 2003; Vaidik, 2010, p.  102). As a result, the Islands were transformed “into a site of valiant anti-colonial struggle and martyrdom” (Anderson, 2007, p.  17). Beyond that, knowledge produced by ex-prisoners trickled into the postcolonial historiography of the Andamans and had major ramifications for local definitions of belonging (Anderson, 2007; Sen, 2000). When these representations became part of the hegemonic discourse in postcolonial India, they produced an imagery of the Cellular Jail – and of Kala Pani – as a site of ill-treatment of political prisoners. Based on the testimony of former political prisoners, this one-dimensional narrative omitted the fact that the Jail primarily housed newly arrived “ordinary” (Vaidik, 2010, p.  96) convicts and prisoners convicted for crimes within the penal settlement. The Cellular Jail, thus, rather marked a dimension of punishment within the penal colony, but it never dominated its affairs as such. While tens of thousands of subaltern convicts had been deported to the Andamans since 1858, less than approximately 500 inmates of the Cellular Jail were political prisoners (Majumdar, 1975, p. 145 as cited in Sen, 2000, p. 264). The history of these other non-elite convicts, who were both housed in the Cellular Jail as well as in other local jails, such as in Viper and Chatham Island, had been largely silenced; this silence may be understood as being part of hegemonic cultures of memorialization that wrote the regional history of the Andamans as a history of the anti-colonial struggle.

Across Kala Pani: the production of new subjectivities Since deportation to Port Blair on South Andaman Island had begun in March 1858, Kala Pani embodied a very different meaning for colonial and postcolonial audiences on the subcontinent as opposed to those who had gone across Kala Pani and started a different life in this “new world” on the Islands – the latter encompassing different categories of “criminal” and “political” offenders “free” settlers and migrants as well as their descendants. The “receiving” end of colonial transportation policies thus deserves particular attention as it brings the so far hardly acknowledged history of various subaltern communities to the fore. In order to understand the emergence of local modes of self-definition as a result of movement across Kala Pani, it is worthwhile to investigate the genealogy of processes of subjectivation in the Andamans.10 The production of local subjects is linked to processes of state rule and institutionalized domination. Moreover, localized responses to these very processes can be observed in the manifold practices of adaptation, co-optation, accommodation, and epistemic resistance.

Patriots in Kala Pani? 71 Delinquent subjects from all over the subcontinent and Burma, belonging to diverse socio-economic, linguistic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds, were transported to the Islands in order to be punished, reformed, and rehabilitated. In the Andaman penal colony, an experiment to create new classes and categories, new forms of labor and housing as well as new models of political and economic collaboration was put into practice (Sen, 2000). However, the very act of isolating convicts from their places of origin as well as their previous social contexts, including traditional hierarchies, logics of separation and interrelation, purity and pollution, etc., opened up new spaces of agency and self-definition. The convicts’ social transformation processes started with their voyage to the Andamans, which may be regarded as a “sort of rite de passage” (Vaidik, 2010, p. 89). During the voyage, all jahajibhai (ship brothers) “sat in the same boat”; thus, they were dependent on the solidarity of others who were in the same situation (cf. Lloyd, 2012, p. 114). Further, on board and after their arrival in the penal colony, convicts were confronted with people speaking various mother tongues, belonging to other creeds, and having a different caste status. Somehow, all of them had to work and live together, either within the penal colony or at its expanding fringes at the frontier between settled zones and the dense tropical forests that were inhabited by the indigenous hunting-gathering Andaman Islanders. Since survival was a key challenge for every convict, it can be assumed that normative preoccupations with social prestige, religious taboos, and caste status did not assume primary importance among them. Mutual dependence on each other may have also caused partial redefinitions of pre-existing hierarchies (Zehmisch, 2017). Within the penal colony, different categories of convicts were treated according to their legible position within the universe of Indian criminality (Anderson, 2004).11 In 1864, the British introduced a system of five classes that were visually marked with specific forms of dress (Anderson, 2004).“Political offenders” like ex-sepoys who had been convicted during the Mutiny or Rebellion of 1857 for undermining colonial authority had a higher social status than “ordinary offenders” such as murderers, dacoits (armed robbers), thieves, etc. (Vaidik, 2010, pp. 57–58). So-called “habitual offenders,” including “criminal tribes” and “hereditary offenders,” were regarded as incorrigible, “professional” criminals because they had committed crimes against property (Sen, 2000, p. 51). No matter how well they behaved, they were the least likely to be released. In turn, people who were perceived to stem from ordered, hard-working, and loyal backgrounds, but who had committed random acts of violence out of “emotion” or “passion” – such as killing a person “in a sudden fit of anger” – were categorized as “irrational criminals” (Sen, 2000, p.  55) or as “decent killers” (Sen, 2000, p.  58). Consequently, they could be reformed and were able to move from the bottom to the top of the five-class system. The mentioned categories were basically produced by colonial administrators with the intention to classify, know, and rule the convict and settler population. These significations of the Other through “imperial eyes” (Pratt, 1997) crucially affected the criminalized population on an everyday basis. They were, however,

72  Philipp Zehmisch not only victims of power–knowledge relations. By performing, repeating, and subverting existing stereotypes, and thereby contributing to their continuous flow, these subalterns were able to manipulate the production of knowledge about them too. Through particular forms of self-representation, they actively influenced the writing of gazettes, manuals, surveys, and other official documents that were designed to throw a light on the often obscure and shifty spaces of the colony (cf. Temple, 1909). Certain literate convicts, who were employed in the local bureaucracy as munshis (writers), contributed even directly to the production of administrative knowledge. For example, Fazl-e Haqq Khairabadi, an elite convict, who had played a key role during the Rebellion of 1857 in Delhi, wrote an account of his transportation to the Islands and his life in the penal colony (Malik, 2016; Vaidik, 2010). Further, the Wahhabi convict, Maulana Mohammed Jafar Thanesari, produced in his function as chief clerk of the deputy commissioner in Port Blair, among others, a significant assessment of relations between Muslims and Hindus in the penal colony during the 1860s and 1870s (Sen, 2009).

Crafting a new world in Kala Pani The development of a penal settlement in the Andamans coincided with the larger aim of the Raj to colonize these strategically important Islands with a permanent population (cf. Vaidik, 2010). As a result, the regime sought to create a sizeable settler population that would contribute to agricultural sustenance in order to reduce the costs of food imports. Therefore, the policy to settle reformed prisoners at the end of their term – after having risen from the bottom to the top of the fiveclass system – as self-supporting colonists (C. Mukhopadhyay, 2002) turned into a significant social engineering project, crucial for the crystallization of Andaman subjectivities. The British plan to create a settler population of rehabilitated convicts was linked to the transportation of female prisoners to the Andamans from 1862 onwards. Allowing convict women to marry male self-supporters, who had proven themselves to be loyal to the regime and who were of “decent”(Sen, 2000, p. 1), racial and social background, was intended to stop “unnatural vices”(samesex love) and to recreate an Orientalist vision of Indian society as an ordered (heteronormative) agricultural society of sedentary peasant families (cf. Zehmisch, 2017). Generally, most convict marriages transcended linguistic, ethnic, caste, and class barriers, which would have been more likely to be observed in the Indian mainland (Temple, 1909). As it was not possible to reconstruct the complexity of the caste system on the subcontinent, and because of the low ratio of female to male convicts, the introduced system led to various forms of cultural hybridization. Inter-caste and inter-community marriages became the order of the day – a practice that has continued until the present day and must be viewed as one of the key characteristics of the Andaman society. The offspring of convict unions was termed Local Born, which became the official administrative classification for this ethnicity-in-the-making. While the term was derived from a descriptive category, Local Born gradually transformed into a

Patriots in Kala Pani? 73 nomenclature for a community of “hybrid” (Bhabha, 1994) regional, ethnic, linguistic, and caste parentage, and it provided an overarching sense of local belonging, too. Creolization and incorporation of difference, defined by heterogeneity, became a norm in the Local Born’s place-making processes. In addition to the majority of convicts, who served their term as individuals within the penal colony, there were two groups of convicts that had been collectively deported to the Andamans in the twentieth century: the Bhantu and the Moplah. Due to their separate settlement in spatial isolation from the penal colony and the Local Born, both groups were defined as separate communities. Belonging to an area north of Delhi, the Bhantus had been classified as a “criminal tribe” by the British because of their nomadic lifestyle that implied active resistance to sedentariness and wage labor. All transported Bhantus needed to be disciplined through their settlement as farmers and thereby taught to give up their “criminal activities.” Forcing them to “learn” order and discipline would enable their transformation into productive and subservient subjects of the colonial state (Coomar, 1997, p. 23). The Moplahs were a group of 1885 Muslims from Kerala, who had fought in the Malabar Rebellion against the colonial regime and Hindu landlords (Dhingra, 2005). They were brought to the Andamans for rehabilitation between 1921 and 1926 and settled on agricultural land near Port Blair (C. Mukhopadhyay, 2002). They still speak a dialect of Malayalam, which, according to some interlocutors, is clearly reminiscent of their region in the 1920s. The Moplah are today the biggest Muslim community in the Islands. Apart from convict communities, several non-convict groups, like soldiers, convict overseers, settlers, traders, and laborers had migrated to the Islands. Among them were the Karens, a “hill tribe” from Burma, who came as pioneering settlers; and the “Ranchis” or “Ranchiwallahs,” an amalgamation of various ethnically and linguistically distinct tribal groups of the Central Indian Chota Nagpur Plateau, who had been contracted as specialized forest labor (cf. Zehmisch, 2016, 2017). In the light of colonial migration, social engineering, and subjectivation processes, the experience of Kala Pani entailed much more than horror, subjugation, and suffering; thus, Kala Pani became the multi-layered site of a settler colony, in which subaltern actors were able to exert solidarity, to craft novel places, landscapes, and identities, and to reconstruct, redefine, and creolize social and cultural relations for themselves in a “new world” overseas. However, in contrast to the hegemonic narrative of the Andamans as a destination of bourgeois freedom fighters, this subaltern history has been largely silenced in state-centered historiography of the region.

Local “martyrdom” during the Japanese occupation During World War II, Japanese forces occupied the Andaman Islands. Before Japanese troops landed on the Islands in 1942, most British and Indian bureaucrats, soldiers, and civilians, including migrant laborers and free settlers, had left for the Indian mainland (Mathur, 1984). The population that stayed on mostly belonged

74  Philipp Zehmisch to the Local Born community, the Bhantus, Moplahs, Karens, Ranchis, and Burmese. After Independence, these communities were classified as pre-42 populations. Senior interlocutors belonging to those pre-42 groups stated that they had not left because they had no other place to go. They had been born and brought up in these Islands and had therefore lost their family links to their places of origin. The fact that they stayed back is vested with discursive power in the contemporary political scenario in the islands, where different communities compete with each other for recognition, and linked to it, welfare and affirmative action, provided by the central government and the local administration. By claiming to be “real islanders,” who had not abandoned their homelands, but endured the terror and oppression inflicted on them by the Japanese until the Andamans became part of the Indian nation state, they articulated an important argument of local belonging. However, as the Japanese initially presented their rule to the Andaman population as “liberation of Asian brothers”(Tamta, 1991, p. 42) from the yoke of foreign colonialism, they were welcomed, and many locals collaborated with the occupying force in various capacities. During this period, the regional history of the Islands came to be entangled with another significant symbol of the Independence movement: the Bengali nationalist Subhash Chandra Bose, called Netaji, who commanded the Singapore-based Indian National Army (INA). Netaji had sided with the Axis powers against the Allied forces in Southeast Asia. Supporting Japanese forces in their Southeast Asian campaign against the British, he reached the Andamans in December 1943, where a local branch of the INA’s Provisional Government of Free India had already been instituted. The local chapter of the INA government remained indeed provisional as the Japanese did not hand over any executive powers to it (Anderson, Mazumdar, & Pandya, 2015; Mathur, 1984). An event that assumed particular significance for postcolonial cultures of memorializing the islands as a location of the freedom struggle was Netaji’s arrival at Port Blair. Acknowledging the Cellular Jail as an important site of the Independence movement, he paid a visit to the jail, where the Tiranga, the tricolored national flag, was hoisted on “liberated Indian soil” for the first time. In his speech, he emphasized that “[t]hese islands have symbolic importance for the Indians because generations of Indian revolutionaries had served long prison sentences in the Cellular Jail” (Bose, 2006, p.  181). Further, he suggested that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands be renamed as Shaheed (martyr) and Swaraj (independence), according to their importance in the freedom struggle (cited in Singh, 1978). The tide of harmonious collaboration between the pre-42 populations and the Japanese quickly turned due to British bombing raids against Japanese supply ships and spying activities in the Islands (Anderson et al., 2015). As a reaction, the occupiers suspected numerous locals of collaborating with the enemy. These suspects were forced to labor in road construction, imprisoned, tortured, raped, and executed (Mathur, 1984). Local interlocutors also speculated that the lack of provisions as a result of British attacks had caused the Japanese to massacre civilians in order to reduce the number of people who needed to be fed. Two massacres are especially remembered today: the first, memorialized by a monument

Patriots in Kala Pani? 75 in Homfray Gunj on South Andaman, where 44 suspected spies were tortured and executed, the second, a willful killing near Havelock Island, where the Japanese threw 236 men into the sea (Anderson et al., 2015), and, according to local interlocutors, fired rounds of bullets on them. The Havelock incident became part of orally transmitted local folklore due to one cannibal survivor of the massacre, who had allegedly landed on Havelock Island and survived by feeding on corpses that had floated to the shore. The total number of people who died during the Japanese occupation is difficult to ascertain, but it can be speculated that the death toll went far beyond 1,000 persons (cf. Pandey, 2000). After the Japanese capitulated in 1945, the British reoccupied the islands until the dawn of Independence. The horror of the Japanese occupation has, since then, formed an integral part of the lesser known cultural memory of the pre-42 communities – a trope that may be regarded as a direct continuation of the horrors of Kala Pani. The remaining witnesses of the time have transmitted their memory of the atrocities committed via oral history to the younger generation. This knowledge, in turn, influenced the production of some written accounts of the Japanese occupation, too (cf. Anderson et al., 2015; Lall, 2000; Pandey, 2000; Roychowdhury, 2004). When I  interviewedpre-42 interlocutors during the last decade, I repeatedly came across their complaint that the Indian central government and the Andaman administration had so far not adequately acknowledged the older generation’s sacrifices and their martyrdom for the nation state. If the pre-42 had not stayed back and suffered under the Japanese occupation, the Islands would not have been integrated into the present Indian Union but, speculatively, become British, Burmese, or Pakistani territory. Characteristic of such official negligence is a still outstanding compensation claim by those locals who were victimized by the Japanese occupation. While Japan had allegedly paid a hefty amount to the Indian Government as war relief, compensations have never reached the affected islanders (Anderson et al., 2015). The horror story of the Japanese occupation and the martyrdom of the pre-42, which helped the islands become integrated into India, have so far hardly surfaced in the postcolonial historiography of Andaman.

Postcolonial transitions: from Kala Pani to Mini-India When Independence and Partition approached in August 1947, rival claims of India, Pakistan, Burma, and Great Britain left the future status of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands unclear. The British sought to keep the strategically important islands as a “dominion” (Tamta, 1991, p.  69) or to settle Anglo-Indian exservicemen and repatriates in the Andamans and to declare it as an independent state within the Commonwealth (Port Blair Archive Judicial/Revenue File 9 and File 3, 1946). Finally, for reasons that await more thorough historical investigation, the Islands were given to the Indian Union, despite the presence of a sizeable pre-42 Muslim population that would have justified accession to Pakistan as well. According to Tamta (1991), this decision was based on the British insight that the islands were a symbol of the “Indian”(p. 69) freedom struggle and thus inseparable from the Indian Union. I suggest that we interpret this statement (Tamta was

76  Philipp Zehmisch a former development commissioner’s) as characteristic of bourgeois-nationalist efforts to “write India” into the regional historiography of the Andamans. Here, he replaced the representation of a complex process of negotiation through his assumption of the quasi-teleological manifestation of the Islands’ “patriotic destiny” of becoming a part of India; this example serves to illustrate the hegemonic narrative of Independence. As a result of colonial and postcolonial knowledge production and consistent discursive hegemony of the center over the marginal Andaman Islands, one can very visibly observe a particular state effect of classification processes on local modes of self-definition in the contemporary island society. Here, certain racial, linguistic, ethnic, and religious identifications intersect with subject-positions that were produced in colonial times and took on their trajectory in the unfolding of political and social dynamics. These subjectivities were and are in a constant process of redefinition, as they are appropriated in negotiations of locality and patriotism. Consequently, genealogically transmitted colonial subject-positions such as “freedom fighters” and “criminals” are displayed, performed, and adapted for the negotiation of otherness and sameness, as well as reified and essentialized in local political discourse.12 Postcolonial politics have been crucially affected by the establishment of numerous other diasporic communities due to settlement policies and unplanned, independent migrations. These caused a total increase of the Island population of around twelve times between 1951 and 2011.13 Presently, the numerically largest communities are Bengalees, Ranchis, Tamils, Telugus, and Malayalees (Dhingra, 2005). Some of these communities were settled by the government under colonization and rehabilitation schemes: Partition refugees from East Bengal, Burmese and Sri Lankan repatriates, and landless people from Kerala and the Chota Nagpur region. In addition, many people came independently as migrants from all over India in search of a variety of things such as employment, land, escape or adventure (Zehmisch, 2017). The migration process contributed to the formation of a multi-ethnic society, characterized by its incorporation and cultural creolization of elements from diverse geographical and social contexts. Since the late colonial period, this local conglomerate represents a diversity of communities of South and Southeast Asia – from Peshawar to Rangoon and beyond; as a result, it had been termed a “miniature India” or “Mini-India” (Naipaul, 1991, p. 6).14 Within nationalist discourse, “Mini-India” has been transformed into an allegory for the Andaman society. Various authors state that the “Indian-ness” of settlers and migrant communities serves as a link for the otherwise diverse population (Das, 1982, pp.  74–75; Dhingra, 2005, p. 155; Naidu, 2003, p. 246). As a response to nationalist representations of their society as secular and cosmopolitan, many interlocutors represent themselves to live according to the propagated ideals of the secular nation state. They emphasize that their society depicts the “unity in diversity” (Zehmisch, 2017, p. 85) of India. Such open displays of allegiance to the nation may be regarded as a successful outcome of state attempts to encompass local forms of belonging within the hegemonic narrative of the nation. These representations are, however, also

Patriots in Kala Pani? 77 informed by empirically observable norms, values, and practices: one can indeed encounter a heightened sense of harmonious cooperation and solidarity between individuals and groups from all walks of life, as well as an absence of communal or caste-based violence in the society – I call this observed characteristic of a subaltern consciousness as the “island mentality” (Zehmisch, 2017, pp. 90–91). One problem of post-Independence migrations that fuels conflict over representational politics is the fact that the pre-42 populations have become a minority in MiniIndia. The ever rising numbers of fresh migrants, who come to the Islands mostly through networks of chain migration, tend to view themselves, in the first place, not as Islanders but as diasporic communities with specific linguistic, regional, ethnic, religious, or social practices. The concurrent emphasis on their difference to earlier settled communities as well as political conflict causes them to label the pre-42 communities as criminals. Such discriminatory practices must be regarded as a result of dominant interpretations and discursive appropriations of the ways in which the history of the freedom struggle in the Islands has been told and written.

Who represents the Andamans? The formation of a nationalist memory in the Islands has been influenced by two key forms of historiographic writing: first, autobiographic accounts of former bourgeois inmates of the Cellular Jail, who had been subsequently acknowledged as “freedom fighters” by the nation state; second, administrative histories, written by ideologically preoccupied government servants, as to who reproduced state narratives in their interpretations of the past. However, the question who gets recognition as a freedom fighter, as well as how, when, and why, needs to be further investigated, as it illuminates some of the workings and logics of the postcolonial condition. The introduction of the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme for accomplished freedom fighters by the Government of India in 1980 marked a watershed in the statist discourse on the welfare of national “heroes.” Until August 2016, altogether 171,605 freedom fighters and their eligible dependents have been sanctioned a pension. Relevant for the discussion centered on the Andamans is the precursor to this all-India scheme, the Ex-Andaman Political Prisoners Pension Scheme. It was introduced in 1969 to honor and to provide compensation to 285 freedom fighters, who were among the 500 political prisoners incarcerated in the Cellular Jail. This scheme was sanctioned due to initiatives of the Ex-Andaman Political Prisoners Fraternity Circle, who had approached the Government of India to recognize them as freedom fighters. In the same year, the association had successfully stopped the planned demolition of the Cellular Jail, which was concurrently declared as a national memorial. The association also demanded that their offspring should be acknowledged as “honorary families” of the Andamans and thus be sanctioned free travel and ten acres of land in the Islands. This claim about the “inheritance” of entitlement by descendants is probably linked to the fact that freedom fighters’ widows and children do receive their late husbands’ monthly pensions.

78  Philipp Zehmisch Welfare policies restricted to freedom fighters and their families provide a characteristic picture of the intricate workings of hegemonic nationalism in postcolonial India. The fact that only those persons who were classified as “political” prisoners of the Cellular Jail were acknowledged as “freedom fighters,” implies, at the same time, an utter neglect of the capacity of ordinary or subaltern convicts to rebel against the oppressive structures of colonialism. It is thus open to debate if acts of resistance against the colonial state, which were routinely labeled as criminal, could be interpreted as guided by an anti-colonial agenda. The bourgeois provenance of most “political prisoners” as opposed to the subaltern genealogies of “ordinary convicts” played a major role in shaping the framework of state recognition. Former bourgeois-nationalist freedom fighters were able to make their voices heard within public discourse and to speak to hegemonic state frameworks, among others, by writing about their experiences and contributions to the struggle. This class dimension and the fact that bourgeois-nationalist ex-prisoners received the status of being authorized representatives of the freedom struggle may have influenced postcolonial agendas to write the story of the Andamans as the story of the Indian Independence movement. For example, the works of Aggarwal (2006), Iqbal (2004), Majumdar (1975), Mathur (1984), Singh (1978), and Tamta (1991) placed the Islands firmly within the movement for freedom struggle (Anderson, 2007). Here, the elevated status of the Cellular Jail was confirmed by, for example, calling it the “university” (Tamta, 1991, p. 38; Roychowdhury, 2002, p. 118) of the liberation movement, or, in continuation of earlier accounts, an “Indian Bastille” (Sinha, 1939/1988). Aggarwal (2006, p. XIII) even hinted at contemporary global debates about anti-imperial resistance and counterinsurgency by comparing it to the infamous American torture prison Abu Ghraib in Baghdad (cf. Zehmisch, 2017). Asa visible, everyday manifestation of the discursive labeling of the Andamans as a primary location of the anti-colonial struggle, the Cellular Jail has been depicted on one-rupee coins and on postage stamps; it has also become an iconic motive depicted on calendars, works of art, miniature models, or on book covers. In front of the jail building, there is a Martyrs’ park displaying the statues of freedom fighters who died as a result of hunger strikes against colonial oppression. India even submitted an unsuccessful application for the Cellular Jail on the tentative list of UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The residues of the Cellular Jail play an important role in the contemporary, urban public space of Port Blair. Visitors to the Cellular Jail National Memorial get information from a museum displaying the history of the Andamans as a history of the anticolonial struggle. Tourists are able to inspect an original wing of cells, models of gallows, and torture instruments. The highlight of any visit is, however, the sound-and-light show. Performed in the original prison yard, a setting with a strong inclination to communicate national history, the show illustrates the horrors of imprisonment. For many of those, whom I  talked to after their visit, the violently disciplined bodies of the convicts signify their martyrdom for the whole body of the liberated Indian nation. Here, a community of “shared

Patriots in Kala Pani? 79 suffering” (Svasek, 2005, p. 208), of affection and emotional commitment with the prisoners is created by appealing to the national psyche. In March 2006, I attended the Centenary Celebrations in the Cellular Jail. In order to honor the first batch of transported freedom fighters from 1906, three freedom fighters and about fifty widows from freedom fighters’ families had been brought to Port Blair. Public speeches in presence of the representatives of the local administration were delivered to emphasize the importance of the freedom fighters for the Indian nation and vice-versa. In a characteristic articulation of patriotism, a speaker addressed the Cellular Jail as a visual marker of the anti-colonial resistance in the following way: “Today, the Andamans are a pilgrimage of the freedom struggle, and the Cellular Jail is its temple” (Zehmisch, 2017, p. 121). While watching the ritual, I was asking myself why apparently no crowd of local people had gathered to watch the spectacle. Shortly after the speech, I asked some employees of the neighboring hospital why no one was watching what was happening outside and received the prompt answer: “We are no foreigners. We are not interested.” As I found out later, various islanders clearly disapprove of celebrations of “freedom fighters” from the Indian mainland. Many local interlocutors from pre42 communities claim that their convict ancestors colonized the Andamans at the cost of lives despite adverse climatic conditions, “wild jungles,” and “ferocious savages.” Without their contribution, the Islands would neither have been transformed into a livable place, nor would they have become part of the independent Indian nation state. In their formulation, their ancestors were the “real colonizers” of the Islands, while the celebrated freedom fighters had gone back to their homelands after their release. As these elite prisoners had not contributed to developing the settler colony, their elevated status within the regional historiography of the Islands appears as unjustified. Further, interlocutors complained that public space in contemporary Andaman was replete with monuments, statues, and buildings, which, to a large extent, remember leaders from the Indian national movement or, even, political leaders from the subcontinent who have nothing in common with the Andamans. Various streets and places are named after big shots and VIPs from the distant mainland, omitting local contributions by subaltern convicts and their descendants.

Freedom fighters or criminals? Countering the hegemonic representation of the freedom struggle, some articulate members of the Local Born community link their belonging to another celebrated history: the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857. Many rebels were the first to have been transported to the Andaman penal colony in 1858. Deriving their ancestry from these rebels, these spokespersons wonder why only the Cellular Jail is celebrated as a significant place for the freedom struggle. Political prisoners had been detained much earlier, right after the 1857 Rebellion in jails on Chatham and Viper Island (Anderson, 2004). They often refer in their argument to the Hindu nationalist freedom fighter, Veer Savarkar, who was himself incarcerated in the

80  Philipp Zehmisch Cellular Jail. In retrospect, Savarkar was the first to name the Rebellion of 1857 “the first war of Independence” (cf. Dirks, 2001, p. 127). But the pre-42 do not only long for recognition of their history by the government or the broader island society. As a means to acquire collective status, they also counter biologist and racist accusations of other, later settled communities that devalue them as having “criminal blood.” After Independence, many stereotypes about criminality have endured in a genealogical sense. In 1965, the Dean of the Faculty of Law at Lucknow University wrote in a book about the principles of criminal law and the Indian Penal code, that “[i]n India there are many castes of professional criminals the members of which follow thieving as a hereditary calling” (Nigam, 1965, p.  257). Such forms of stereotyping owe a great deal to colonial processes of classification in connecting crime either to the nature or nurture of the “criminal,” that is, his or her race or socialization. I found similar conceptualizations among interlocutors belonging to different communities. Islanders from all classes and ethnic groups are convinced that common characteristic traits like virtue, shrewdness, or deviousness are collectively inherited. They simultaneously believe that propensities for crime are genetically transmitted from “criminal” convict ancestors to their descendants. Some interlocutors, however, admitted that certain “social” aspects of criminality might have been reduced through reform and rehabilitation programs.15 The majority depicted inherited criminality as a societal menace and spoke of the pre-42 as “criminals by their blood” because of their convict descent. The characterization of a Local Born by a recent migrant demonstrates the functioning of this stereotype: They are all the sons of murderers, thugs and thieves. For example .  .  .’s grandfather killed six or seven people, before he was transported to the Andamans. He has this criminal blood. Besides working for the Electricity Department, he is a pimp who even prostitutes his own sister. Corresponding to this representation, many of my interlocutors adhered to the racist idea that the character of a person is intimately connected to his or her biological origin or blood. One informant opined that when speaking in public, members of the Local Born community would try to conceal the crimes of their ancestors, but, when quarreling with others, refer to them to intimidate their opponents. Some maintained that a descendant of a quaidi (prisoner, captive) was, in principle, a goonda (gangster) and a potential killer. In order to counter such essentialist and discriminating stereotypes, Local Born interlocutors have forged a narrative that aligns their convict ancestors with the anti-colonial struggle by claiming genealogical links to the rebels from 1857. Some Moplahs claim to be descendants of rebels or freedom fighters, who fought against the British in Malabar. Such representations of political subversion may be linked to preconceived notions or transmitted legacies of the categorical distinction between “morally degraded criminals” and “grievous political offenders”(Anderson, 2007, p.  132) that existed in colonial India. People seek

Patriots in Kala Pani? 81 political reputation by getting their ancestors acknowledged as “political offenders” because it implies that  – within the dichotomous framework of nature or nurture – the individual carries the blood of a freedom fighter instead of a criminal.

Writing subaltern resistance into the national memory The production of amateur historiography has gained considerable significance in recent decades (for books produced by non-professional historians, see Aggarwal, 2006; Bera, 2005; Lall, 2000; Mujtaba, 2005, 2006, 2010; Naidu, 2003; Pandey, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 2000; Phaley, 2009; Shivram, 2009; Veni, 2012). Articulate civil society members, the majority from pre-42 backgrounds, and especially, the Local Born community, have established discursive links between the history of the penal colony and the nationwide anti-colonial struggle. By researching the past and writing as well as speaking publicly about their subaltern ancestors’ lives, they seek tore-inscribe silenced histories of the Andamans in official narratives and schoolbooks. Their research and collected stories have been published in local newspapers such as The Light of Andamans and on web blogs, as well as in books or pamphlets printed by local publishing houses. For many of these non-professional writers, often retired government servants or journalists, writing history is a medium of self-expression and serves as an important means of recognition vis-à-vis the Indian state and its hegemonic memory. They frequently juxtapose their own versions of popular social history, based on their own research and knowledge of oral history, with existing dominant forms of historiography. However, while their positions appear to be fragmented due to differing political agendas, their common denominator seems to be an agenda of raising public awareness about subaltern histories (Zehmisch, 2017). Some of these so-called Andaman subaltern historians also told me that they sought to promote public acknowledgment of the contributions and sacrifices made by their ancestors. Having formed the Swadheenta Sangram Senani Vanshaj Samiti (Association of Freedom Fighter’s Younger Generation), this group of local intellectuals traveled across the islands in order to disseminate the outputs of their research and knowledge among the population. They visit colleges and schools in order to teach aspects of subaltern local history that are not part of the official curriculum and to educate youngsters about the untold subaltern history of Andaman – especially the history of the early freedom fighters of 1857 who had been transported to the Islands. Moreover, a seminar on the topic of this first freedom struggle was organized on 10 March 2010, the so-called Andaman Day, which remembers the arrival of the first batch of convicts on 10 March  1858. Every year, the Local Born Association holds a special program on Andaman Day as well as other events seeking to evoke a popular consciousness of local history (Zehmisch, 2017). Contrary to those who seek to rewrite and reinterpret the Islands’ subaltern histories, other interlocutors told me in personal conversations that they did not view the Rebellion of 1857 as part of the freedom struggle. In their view, excessive

82  Philipp Zehmisch intentionality was attributed to the insurgents’ motivation to liberate the country several decades before the actual nationalist movement emerged. Accordingly, the mutineers or rebels acted according to the circumstances and not because they had the ideological conviction that the country needed to become independent from the Raj. These assumptions draw from historical evidence that the British classified both straightforward mutineers and ordinary offenders who had committed plunder or dacoity (armed robbery) during the Mutiny as guilty of political insubordination (Anderson, 2007). Questioning the Local Born genealogies of the rebels of 1857, some interlocutors argued that because most rebels had been released from the penal colony, they had not married female convicts and founded Local Born families.

Backlashes of memorialization The popular desire to reread various subaltern histories in the light of dominant nationalist representations has become entangled with local modes of selfdefinition on several levels. It is safe to assume that written and orally transmitted notions of suffering and sacrifice have received public articulation in later generations. Even if descendants have not suffered in the same way as their ancestors, such inter-generational transmissions demonstrate clearly that “communities of sentiment” had been forged through the master narrative of a “chosen trauma.”16 Remembering and “feeling” the suffering of ancestors, relatives, or friends as part of a “common experience” that shaped the everyday experience of previous generations, enables individuals to integrate their suffering into their own embodied subject-positions (Zehmisch, 2017, p. 134). During my fieldwork, I  observed that local communities regularly speak of their collective history of migration and settlement as part of a historical process in which they themselves were personally affected. While the pre-42 communities emphasize their ancestors’ suffering during the British colonial period and the Japanese occupation as well as their contributions to the colonization of the Islands, Bengali Hindu refugees from East Bengal, as well as Sri Lankan and Burmese repatriates represent themselves as having suffered from displacement as well as neglect and backwardness through lack of state infrastructure. One effect of such attempts to “write back” to the hegemonic memory of the nation state is a marked difference in how the past is represented in local discourse. Several articles in an anthology by the Andaman administration, which commemorated the centenary celebrations of the Cellular Jail in 2006, linked the history of the Andamans to the first war of independence in 1857, the Moplah Rebellion in Kerala, the Manyam Rebellion in Andhra Pradesh and the martyrdom of the Andamanese under Japanese occupation (Andaman and Nicobar Administration, 2006). Gradually, the administration has begun to take pre-42 sensibilities into consideration, and official speakers now frequently pay tribute to the suffering and contribution of the rebels of 1857 to the development of the Andamans (Zehmisch, 2017). Further, there are plans to add a section about the history of the freedom fighters of 1857 in the exhibition of the Cellular Jail.

Patriots in Kala Pani? 83 Another effect that may have been influenced by the foregrounding of subaltern histories is a process that I term “freedom-fighterization.” Characteristic of this process are attempts by members of local communities to relate their group identities to certain freedom fighters from their homelands on the subcontinent: for example, the Ranchi community has set up several statues of Birsa Munda, an anti-colonial freedom-fighter from the Chota Nagpur Region. After the Ranchi village Kumraketti was shifted by the government, the villagers named their resettled village Birsanagar. There was another Birsanagar in Middle Andaman Island. In 2016, there was the Birsa Munda Rolling Cup Open Hockey Championship organized at Port Blair. By referring to a freedom fighter as political hero of a community, the community seeks to enhance their overall reputation in the larger Island society. I came across various other cases of freedom-fighterization in Andaman public space. For instance, the owner of a Tamil restaurant in Port Blair called Kattabomman told me that he named it after the popular rebel Kattabomman Nayakkar (cf. Ludden, 2002). Also, Telugu migrants from the village Baruva in Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh “never forget to mention that their village played some role in the national movement for independence” (K. Mukhopadhyay, 2002, p. 24). Again, in February 2013, journalists from Manipur came to the Islands and requested the administration to allocate land for the construction of a memorial to remember Manipuri freedom fighters, who were incarcerated in the Cellular Jail, as well as a guest house at Port Blair (Andaman Sheekha, 2013). Therefore, it is no exaggeration to state that the freedom struggle pervades various levels of the contemporary Andaman society. The project of writing India into the Island history has come full circle.

Conclusion This chapter has critically analyzed the interconnected histories of the Andamans and the anti-colonial struggle in postcolonial India. Looking at the visible material and discursive effects of hegemonic politics of memorialization in the Islands, it views collective modes of self-definition and subjectivization, as well as various forms of epistemic resistance, as outcomes of a dialectic between state domination and local agency. The discursive overemphasis on the Cellular Jail in the regional historiography and reception of the Islands must be regarded as a manifestation of the colonial narrative of Kala Pani, inspired by the nationalist press and by anti-British politics. The postcolonial ideological trajectory of Kala Pani came to be employed in creating a nationalist memory by putting emphasis on the agency and martyrdom of political prisoners. By manufacturing a hegemonic imagination of the Andamans as a major location of the freedom struggle, the Islands have been ideologically landscaped as a place of nationalist pilgrimage. This move, in turn, produced manifold elisions and silences of alternative, and more localized, subaltern histories. As a reaction, local non-professional historians and members of the pre-42 communities have

84  Philipp Zehmisch exerted epistemic resistance by writing and speaking back to the state. Contemporary descendants of subaltern convicts, who had been transported across Kala Pani claimed to belong to “freedom fighter” families by demanding acknowledgment of their ancestors’ contribution to the anti-colonial struggle. By denying a “criminal” ancestry, they claim that their subaltern ancestors belonged to the mutineers or rebels from 1857 whose acts of insubordination or resistance against the British must, in retrospect, be understood as forming an early part of the anticolonial struggle. One may interpret these claims as politicized interpretations of the past with a clear intention to “manufacture,” craft or “write India” from a local perspective in the present. They demonstrate a desire to recover localized, subordinated, often orally transmitted histories, as opposed to the master narrative of the freedom struggle.

Notes 1 This book chapter is based on the article “Freedom Fighters or Criminals: Postcolonial Subjectivities in the Andaman Islands, South-East India” that was published in Kontur 22 in 2011. I have considerably rewritten and reformulated the earlier article and inserted ideas that I have elaborated on in Zehmisch (2017). 2 The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are located in the Bay of Bengal in the geographical vicinity of Southeast Asia, more than 1,000 kilometers from the Indian subcontinent. Due to a differing colonial and postcolonial trajectory, my work concentrates on the Andamans. These two groups of 572 islands presently constitute the Indian Union Territory Andaman and Nicobar Islands. As a strategically important location, the Union Territory is under direct rule of the Indian central government in New Delhi. 3 Gramsci (1999) was the first to utilize the term “subaltern” in order to describe peasants, non-organized laborers, and others who had no class consciousness and who were denied access to the means of production controlled by the dominating classes (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1998, p. 215). Writing a South Asian “history from below,” the Subaltern Studies historians highlighted suppressed or silenced accounts of subaltern women, minorities, disadvantaged, or dispossessed groups, refugees, exiles, etc. (Guha  & Spivak, 1988, p. VI). Since issues of identity and subjecthood are raised, Subaltern Studies may be understood as a sub-discipline of Postcolonial Studies (Chaturvedi, 2000). For a methodological and ethnographic conceptualization of an “anthropology of subalternity,” see Zehmisch (2017). 4 The chapter is based on ethnographic data generated during twenty-two months of fieldwork in the Andaman Islands and an analysis of historiographic works, local newspapers, booklets, pamphlets, and online representations. 5 Cultural creolization implies that diverging values, norms, and practices are mutually enmeshed and enmeshing (Knörr, 2014, p. 28). Ghosal (2001, p. 206) described creolization as a defining feature of the Andaman society. 6 Going back to an ancient precolonial prohibition, the Laws of Manu forbade travel over the Kala Pani in order to avoid “pollution.”An additional etymological interpretation of Kala Pani links the term to “kalpani” (kal [Sanskrit]: times of the Death, pani: water). In this reading, kalpani means waters of death or a place of death from which only the luckiest return (Pandey, 1997a, p. 3). 7 With a central watchtower and double-story wings on seven radiating arms (Vaidik, 2010, p.  96), the Cellular Jail is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s description of Bentham’s Panopticon in his seminal book Discipline and Punish (1994). 8 Contemporary Pakistani progressives told me that they continue to link the notion of Kala Pani to the act of “sacrificing oneself” when going to jail for a better cause.

Patriots in Kala Pani? 85 9 Bourgeois-nationalist prisoners’ literary activity had a meaningful side-effect: they turned prison narratives into sites of observation and representation of subaltern inmates as “common criminals.” As a result, today a collection of some otherwise unconsidered narratives about subaltern convicts exists (Arnold, 2004). 10 In a reading of Foucault (1982), subjectivation demarcates not only the social evolution of how certain subjects come into being, it is about processes by which specific ideas about subjectivity or “the subject” are produced in a social field – often through classifications of collective groups and appropriations of these classifications in selfdefinitions of subjects. 11 In the British “universe” of Indian criminality, essentialist ascriptions of race, caste, class, language, religion, and gender, were closely intertwined with normative assumptions about “criminal” group identities. An important factor differentiating colonial views on Indian criminality from British criminality was the belief that most criminal behavior was determined either by “nature or nurture” and therefore had a collective root. 12 In South Asian politics, antagonistic conflicts between different groups are often played out in the politicalarena, especially, when they are competing for funds and status (Spencer, 2007). In these conflicts, community identifications are expressed on the basis of norms and values that build on their difference toOthers. 13 1951: 30.971; 1971: 115.133; 1991: 280.661; 2001: 356.265 (Dhingra, 2005, p. 168). The release of provisional data of the Census 2011 gives a total population of 379,944 people (The Daily Telegrams, 2011). This number seems to be incorrect in the light of continuous migration to the islands and biased as well as incomplete methods of demographic measurement. Local interlocutors estimate the total number of people in the islands to be around 500,000. 14 Widening the focus by looking at other destinations of overseas transportation that were originally coined asKala Pani, too, Naipaul (1991) describes how, due to the circumstances of their migration from the subcontinentto the West Indies, Indian overseas migrants have clung to their “Indian” belonging. Similar to the Andamans, internal religious boundaries and caste hierarchies gradually disappeared and gave way to new forms of social and cultural distinction (Naipaul, 1991). Resembling my fieldwork context, Naipaul (1991) also uses the term “miniature India” to describe the diasporic amalgamation of South Asians asa way of dealing with cultural diversity. 15 There is even a whole ethnography on Bhantu community that can be read as being highly influenced by biologist prejudice. Without questioning the social construction of the “criminal,” the author P.C. Coomar (1997) testifies to the successful rehabilitation and reform of a “criminal tribe” that gave up its “criminal activities.” 16 The emergence of such a consciousness may be explained with the concept of “the politics of chosen trauma.” If “discourses and practices of collective victimhood” are repeatedly conducted “in an attempt to gain political influence and to claim compensation for their suffering,” this way of memorializing the past contributes to the shaping of “communities of sentiment” (Svasek, 2005, pp. 195–204).

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Patriots in Kala Pani? 87 Iqbal, R. (2004). Unsung heroes of freedom struggle in Andamans: Who’s who. New Delhi: Farsight. Knörr, Jaqueline (2014). Creole identity in postcolonial Indonesia. New York/Oxford: Berghahn. Lall, B.B. (2000). A regime of fears and tears: History of the Japanese occupation of the Andaman Islands. New Delhi: Farsight. Lloyd, G.E.R. (2012). Being, humanity, and understanding. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Ludden, D. (2002). Reading subaltern studies: Critical history, contested meaning and the globalization of South Asia. London, England: Anthem Press. Majumdar, R.C. (1975). Penal settlement in the Andamans. New Delhi: Ministry of Education and Culture, Government of India. Malik, J. (2016). The Andaman Islands in Muslim cultural memory and Fadl-e-Haqq Khairabadi. In F. Heidemann  & P. Zehmisch (Eds.), Manifestations of history: Time, space and community in the Andaman Islands (pp. 17–35). New Delhi: Primus. Mathur, L.P. (1984). Kala Pani: History of Andaman & Nicobar Islands with a study of India’s freedom struggle. New Delhi: Eastern Book Corporation. Mujtaba, A. (2005). The silent past of Andamans: Few freedom fighters of 1857. Port Blair, India: GCM Press. Mujtaba, A. (2006). Jama Masjid: Aberdeen, Port Blair (1885–2005). Port Blair, India: GCM Press. Mujtaba, A. (2010). Ekta Andaman me: Anekta me Ekta. Kolkata, India: Insha Publications. Mukhopadhyay, C. (2002). Economic profile of Port Blair town. The Journal of the Anthropological Survey of India, 51(4), 27–46. Mukhopadhyay, K. (2002). Ethnic profile of Port Blair town. The Journal of the Anthropological Survey of India, 51(4), 5–26. Naidu, S. (2003). The chronicles of Andaman and Nicobar Islands (British Era). Port Blair: Phenomena Publications. Naipaul, V.S. (1991). India: A million mutinies now. London, England: Heineman. Nigam, R.C. (1965). The law of crimes in India (Vol. 1: Principles of Criminal Law). London, England: Asia Publishing House. Pandey, G.S. (1997a). The Cellular Jail: The national memorial (2nd ed.). Port Blair, India: Sangeeta Publishing House. Pandey, G.S. (1997b). Viper Island: The pharos of Indian penal settlement. Port Blair, India: Sangeeta Publishing House. Pandey, G.S. (1997c). Ross Island: The head quarter of Indian penal settlement. Port Blair, India: Sangeeta Publishing House. Pandey, G.S. (2000). Patriots of Andaman in freedom struggle movement 1942–45. Port Blair, India: Sangeeta Publishing House for Homfraygunj Martyrs’ Memorial Committee. Phaley, B. (2009). The land of martyrs: Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Nagpur, India: Saraswati Prakashan. Pratt, M.L. (1997). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. New York, NY: Routledge. Roychowdhury, R. (2002). Creative activities with reference to Port Blair. The Journal of the Anthropological Survey of India, 51(4), 115–122. Roychowdhury, R. (2004). Black days in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. New Delhi: Manas Publications. Sen, S. (2000). Disciplining punishment: Colonialism and convict society in the Andaman Islands. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

88  Philipp Zehmisch Sen, S. (2009). Punishment on the fringes: Maulana Thanesari in the Andaman Islands. In S. Agha & E. Kolsky (Eds.), Fringes of empire: Peoples, places, & spaces in colonial India (pp. 139–168). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Shivram, S. (2009). Andaman keitihaskasafar (2nd ed.). New Delhi: Confluence International. Singh, I.N. (1978). The Andaman story. New Delhi: Vikas. Sinha, B.K. (1988). In Andamans, the Indian Bastille. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House (Original work published 1939). Spencer, J. (2007). Anthropology, politics and the state: Democracy and violence in South Asia. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Srivastava, P.K. (2003). Resistance and repression in India: The hunger strike at the Andaman cellular jail in 1933. Crime, History & Societies, 7(2), 81–102. Straub, J. (1998). Geschichten erzählen, geschichte bilden: Grundzüge einer narrativen Psychologie historischer sinnbildung. In J. Straub (Ed.), Erzählung, identität und historisches bewusstsein: Die psychologische konstruktion von zeit und geschichte (pp. 81–107). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Svasek, M. (2005). The politics of chosen trauma: Expellee memories, emotions and identities. In K. Milton  & M. Svasek (Eds.), Mixed emotions: Anthropological studies of feeling (pp. 195–214). Oxford, England: Berg. Tamta, B.R. (1991). Andaman and Nicobar Islands. New Delhi: National Book Trust. Temple, R.C. (1909). Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In U. Jain (Ed.), Imperial gazetteer of India: Provincial series. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Vaidik, A. (2010). Imperial Andamans: Colonial encounter and island history. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Veni, K. (2012). Andaman ka Ross Island. Port Blair, India. Zehmisch, P. (2011). Freedom fighters or criminals? Postcolonial subjectivities in the Andaman Islands, south-east India. Kontur, 22, 4–16. Retrievedfromhttp://kontur.au.dk/ fileadmin/www.kontur.au.dk/Kontur_22/ZEHMISCH_MOD1.pdf Zehmisch, P. (2016). The invisible architects of Andaman: Manifestations of aboriginal migration from Ranchi. In F. Heidemann & P. Zehmisch (Eds.), Manifestations of history: Time, space and community in the Andaman Islands (pp. 122–138). New Delhi: Primus. Zehmisch, P. (2017). Mini-India: The politics of migration and subalternity in the Andaman Islands. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

5 Reading Bhikshu Bodhanand’s Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya Reflections on an alternative history of the “beginnings” of “Indian civilization” Tapan Basu I shall begin with a quotation, in English translation (my own), from “Adi-vansh Ka Danka,” (“The Bugle of the Adi Hindu”), a poem written by Swami Acchutanand “Harihar,” who is often credited with being the first Dalit author from the Hindi belt. Acchutanand (1879–1933), a scion of a chamar (traditionally leatherworkers), family from Mainpuri district in the present Uttar Pradesh region, outgrew his long-held Arya Samaj affiliation and founded an influential anti-caste organization named Adi-Hindu Mahasabha. His contribution toward fighting the orthodoxies of Hinduism lay, first and foremost, in his theorization that caste oppression within Hindu society was the product of the subordination of the indigenous peoples of the territory which was to become Hindustan by “foreign” invaders in the pre-Hindu era. Blow, blow, blow the bugle of Adi-Hindu folk, It is high time that they from their slumbers awoke. We are, of our Hindustan, the oldest brood, Self-conscious we are, and independent in mood. To our rights we now address our mind, Let’s organize into a community all of our kind. (Singh, R. R., 2009, p. 75) The purpose of my chapter will be to explore the radical possibilities in the charting out of an alternative history of the “beginnings” of “Indian civilization” by looking at the “beginnings” through the prism of certain subversive narratives against the varna-based social order which was subscribed to by nearly all members of the so-called upper castes within the dominant Hindu community. These heterodox narratives, which date back to the early decades of the twentieth century, were somewhat similar to the narrative of Gulamgiri (1873), authored by Jotiba Phule, the iconic crusader against the caste system from the then Bombay Presidency region. However, the former emerged not from West India, the most familiar site of lower caste self-assertion till then, but from several locations within the erstwhile United Provinces territory of North India. While the narratives, both

90  Tapan Basu verse and prose, of Swami Acchutanand, whose work has been cited earlier, are relatively well known, those of one of his most earnest fellow-travellers, Bhikshu Bodhanand (1874–1952), the free-thinking Brahmin who became a Buddhist anti-caste intellectual, have not received equal attention. Bodhanand, author of the tract, Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya (1930), like Achhutanand, reflected critically on the notion of “beginnings.” I use the word “beginnings” here in the Saidian sense, signifying not “origins,” and certainly not “Origin,” both with their transcendental, and even sacred connotations, but as points of departure against which to track continuity (or discontinuity). To cite Edward said himself, from his book, Beginnings: Intention and Method, Variations of the concept “beginning” designate a moment in a time, a place, a principle, or an action. Just as obviously, these designations are verbal constructions employing variations of the term “beginnings” in a relatively welldefined way, thus, the concept “beginning” is associated in each case with an idea of precedence and priority. Finally, and most important, in each case a “beginning” is designated in order to indicate, clarify, or define a later time, place, or action. In short, the designation of a “beginning” generally involves also the designation of a consequent intention. We might not actually say as much every time, but when we point to the beginning of a novel, for example, we mean that from that beginning in principle follows this novel. Or, we see that the beginning is the first point (in time, space, or action) of an accomplishment or process that has duration and meaning. The beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional production of meaning. (Said, pp. 4–5) In the context of the anti-caste narratives aforementioned, the suggested “later time, place, or action” or a “consequent intention” (Said, pp. 4–5) more or less always pertains to the era of the Aryan invasion and thereafter. The Aryans, it is claimed, conquered the territories below the Himalayas, subjugating the natives (the dasas or the dasyus, as the Aryans contemptuously referred to them) who were ethnically different from them. Thus began the process of the degradation of India’s indigenous peoples to the ranks of the lowest within an evolving caste system. However, to return to Bodhanand, a key figure among the earliest generation of twentieth-century anti-caste intellectuals of North India, what was no doubt the most remarkable feature about him was the complex conjuncture of cultural resources which constituted his subject-formation. Born Mukunda Prakash Lahiri to Bengali Brahmin parents domiciled in Varanasi, he was, due to the premature death of the couple, brought up under the care of an aunt who lived in Varanasi itself. Here he acquired a conventional, if not conservative, education which provided him with a sound scholarship in the Hindu scriptures. Much later, he was to write about his own transformation: I have assiduously studied the Hindu scriptures and the Hindu ethos, but I could not find peace; I came to know how Hinduism subscribes to a terrible,

Reading Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya 91 birth-determined, caste system, as a result of which the plight of a vast mass of human beings, in other words, the Shudras and the outcastes, has been downtrodden, and deprived of opportunities for advancement and development in all including the religious, the social, the political and the economic sphere of existence. Their inborn rights as human beings and their higher aspirations have been, with great cunning and cruelty, curtailed. By the power of their antecedents, upper-caste Hindus have, for thousands of years, used the birth-determined caste system to take undue advantage of those in the lower rungs. Witnessing this state of affairs, I am rendered full of worry, sorrow and depression. (Singh, Gulab 2009, pp. 258–259) At one point, Bodhanand had exhorted the subaltern castes to come to their senses: Each of you needs to fight this Brahminical varnavyavastha to get complete independence from the melancholy cycle of misfortune. Remember, the varnavyavastha is truly and terribly poisonous, and has converted 16 crore human beings into shudras and outcastes. This is in no way worthy to be tolerated in human society. This deserves to be rooted out in its entirety. (Singh, Gulab, p. 259) Not belonging to one of the subaltern castes himself, Bodhanand did not attempt to speak as one of them. Instead, he helped to set up an alliance of like-minded individuals who had positioned themselves against Hinduism’s social order, and established a nodal institution called the Navratan Committee. The founder members of the Navratan Committee, as per records, were 1. Swami Achhutanand; 2. Rai Sahab Ram Sahay Pasi; 3. Rai Sahab Ram CharanMallah; 4. Kudratullah; 5. Advocate Shivdayal Singh Chaurasia; 6. Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu; 7. Mahadev Prasad Dhanuk; 8. Vaidratna Bodhu Ram Rasik; and 9. Advocate Gauri Shankar Pal (Prasad, Mata, 2015, p. 16). This rainbow coalition of anti-caste crusaders, spanning several castes, but of course predominantly undercaste in its composition, made the battle against casteism broad-based and not necessarily the preserve of the undercastes alone. It is from this vantage-point that Bodhanand was able to elaborate upon the history of the so-called varnavyavastha of the Hindus. In the second of the three books – Bhagwan Buddha, Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya, and Baudhacharya Paddhati – which he wrote, he, like Phule and Achhutanand prior to him, premised his thesis on the perceived deficiencies in the existing Indian histories of the ancient Indian past. Without dwelling upon the motives of the historians concerned for allowing major lacunae to creep into their accounts, he hails the efforts of Western researchers of modern times toward filling in the gaps. Applauding their investigative acumen and their ardor for learning, he deems it fortunate that the colonial encounter afforded them the opportunity to bring to bear archeological and anthropological explorations of an ambitious magnitude onto the project of unraveling of India’s pre-history.

92  Tapan Basu It needs to be remembered that the period in which Bodhanand’s writings appeared, and indeed also the writings of several of the adi-nivasi (original inhabitants) theorists from across the Indian subcontinent, i.e., the 1920s and the 1930s, was roughly co-terminus with the period of the first excavations in sites in and around Harappa. The excavations established, indubitably, the flourishing of preAryan human settlements within this geographical expanse. According to Romila Thapar: The archeological picture . . . shows a large variety of cultures, none of which can be identified as specifically Aryan. Nor does the evidence suggest that there was a single dominating culture which slowly spread throughout North India bringing the various diverse cultures into the field, which is what one would expect if the popular notion of the spread of Aryan culture be accepted. (Thapar, 2000, pp. 311–312) In the case of Bodhanand, however, the evidence marshalled by him of the existence of pre-Aryan settlements in India is neither archeological nor anthropological, but literary – from literatures indicative of “beginnings” before and beyond the Aryan era in India. Bodhanand, in fact, laments that, in spite of the powerful proof available in the ancient Sanskrit texts, Indian historians have more or less always obfuscated or glossed over evidence of the memorable accomplishments of the original inhabitants of India in their historical narratives, and instead have used the same texts to provide celebratory versions of India’s “timeless Hindu heritage.” Whatever might be the reasons for historians not recording the truth, a study of the Sanskrit texts reveals that in them the verities of history have been so distorted and doctored that none can access the actual happenings of the days of yore. (Bodhanand, Bhikshu, 2009, p. 39) On the other hand, Western researchers, according to him, had managed to glean from these very texts information about happenings in antiquity, finding, in the process, the Vedas, especially the Rg Veda, to be a useful source of illumination. They learnt from these documents that the Aryans were not the original inhabitants of the land, but had come to the land from colder climes at a specific moment in time with a specific purpose. The relation between them and the natives was nothing but the relation between the conqueror and the conquered. The progeny of these two groups in contemporary society, Bodhanand holds, are the oppressed low castes, Shudras, and the outcastes, on the one hand, and the upper-castes comprising the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, and the Vaishyas, on the other hand, respectively, the latter having systematically and thoroughly obliterated the history of the former during the intervening centuries. It is this history that Western researchers have sought to recover in the course of their investigations.

Reading Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya 93 Thus far Bodhanand’s narrative is similar to that of Phule in Gulamgiri, but where he supersedes Phule is in the selection of sample passages from Hindu scriptures, the Rg Veda, the Yajur Veda, and the Manusmriti, with the aim of showing the hiatus between the Aryans and the non-Aryans and the derogation and the denigration of the non-Aryan other, the so-called dasas, dasyus, rakshasas, daityas, danavas, and asuras by the Aryans and their descendants. Further, the passages chosen for illustration of his point by Bodhanand are translated from the Sanskrit into Hindi to facilitate the comprehension of the modern reader. Indeed, the close reading of passages from the scriptures with the purpose of deciphering hidden and not-so-hidden connotations of age-old conflict is a key feature of Bodhanand’s against-the-grain account. For example, he has picked up almost two dozen citations from the Rg Veda alone, with the intention of highlighting the legacy of pride and prejudice derived from their ancient past by present-day Hindus. It is through an examination of this inheritance, according to Bodhanand, that historians from the West have arrived at theories of racial and religious antagonism between the aboriginals and the aggressors in the area now known as the Indian sub-continent. Bodhanand laments, however, that a certain species of intellectuals continued to persist with attempts to naturalize the historical conflict and bestow on the opposing parties the moral tags of “good” and “evil” respectively, and thus to create a metaphysic out of this actual confrontation. To conceal this historical truth, these days some people try to propagate that the Aryans and the non-Aryans were not distinct ethnic communities; rather that the nomenclatures derived from ethical attributes, the term “arya” carrying connotations of virtue and the term “un-arya” carrying connotations of various kinds of vice. Such designations provide justifications for the Aryan project of decimation of the non-Aryans. (Bodhanand, Bhikshu, 2009, pp. 44–45) Further, Bodhanand extracts textual references to the natives, the original inhabitants of the land below the Himalayan range of mountains, from select passages of Buddhist and Jain manuscripts, and then, most notably, from modern, sometimes unlikely, sources of information such as the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, the historian Romesh Chandra Dutt, the litterateur Mahabir Prasad Dwivedi, and the scientist Prafulla Chandra Ray. In his presidential address at the 39th session of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi tracked the roots of the untouchability taboos among Hindus to the Aryan invasion, while comparing the Aryan invasion to the British invasion and colonization of India many centuries later. Tagore too, it is claimed by Bodhanand, remarked upon the enrichment of Aryan culture by the manifold influences on it of the non-Aryan, Dravidian population whom the Aryans eventually dispossessed of all that belonged to them. And Jawaharlal Nehru, in one of his many letters to his daughter, explained in

94  Tapan Basu detail, how the non-Aryan people were forced to flee their hereditary habitations because of the repeated attacks launched on them by the marauding Aryans. Bodhanand’s comprehensive dissertation concludes with a chapter in which he engages with the possible apprehensions which might be articulated, from various quarters, regarding the viability and the desirability of putting under focus matters pertaining to the indigenous peoples of India and their plight before and after the Aryan arrival. In this chapter he takes it upon himself to rehearse some of these “doubts” and respond to them as well. 1

Isn’t there a conspiracy afoot, plotted by the Muslims and the Britishers, to spread disaffection toward the upper-caste Hindus among the Shudras and the outcastes and thereby to instigate the Shudras and the outcastes toward participating in anti-national activities? 2 While, on the one hand, the people of the country are being mobilized to fight for self-rule and efforts are afoot to initiate social reform, why should the talk of social revolution be ushered in through anti-caste resistance? 3 What is the point of interrogating varnavyavastha, the essence of Hinduism, which is an integral portion of India’s age-old heritage, subscribed to by many and among them the most powerful? 4 Granted all the objections targeted at the birth-determined varnavyavastha, would worth-determined varnavyavastha based on the aptitudes and abilities of individuals be more acceptable? In each and every case, Bodhanand’s repartee, rather, his rebuttal, of the potential criticisms of his theorization of the knowledge – power nexus between the “Mool Bharatvasis” and the “arya” is unflustered, measured, and erudite. He is absolutely clear that there can be no natural justification of the caste system, and that the system cannot be defended just on the basis of its antiquity. The bogeys of anti-nationalism and instigation from outside are predictable ruses to ward off any critique of caste. As to switching over from a birth-determined varnavyavastha to a worth-determined varnavyavastha based on the aptitudes and abilities of individuals, there would be numerous insurmountable problems attendant upon this transition, not the least of them being the definition and determination of what is meant by “worth” and how “worth” should be evaluated and rewarded. The thrust and tenor of Bodhanand’s arguments, targeted against apologists of caste, anticipate those of Babasaheb Ambedkar in his magnum opus, Annihilation of Caste (1936). Interestingly, the young Ambedkar came into contact with Bodhanand in the 1920s, on the occasion in which Bodhanand was a delegate at the All India Depressed Classes Conference convened in 1928. Bodhanand had already converted to Buddhism in 1904 and subsequently set up a picturesque Baudha Vihar in Lucknow in 1925. It was here that he was visited by Ambedkar who procured from him the valuable, albeit out-of-print, treatise called The Essence of Buddhism by P. L. Narasu (2015). As Gulab Singh, a student of Bodhanand’s philosophy,

Reading Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya 95 has summed up, Bodhanand pioneered the twentieth-century Buddhist revival in North India. Yet, unfortunately, his role in this context has been hardly recognized or acknowledged. At least two important books on the spread of Buddhism in modern India, Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (2003) by Gail Omvedt and Debrahmanising History: Dominance and Resistance in Manbhar, Indian Society (2005) by Braj Ranjan Mani, have failed to take cognizance of Bodhanand’s radical enterprise. Insofar as it is an effort at recounting history, how is one to categorize a narrative such as Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya? Influenced by Dorothy Figueira, and on the lines of Michel de Certeau’s theorization of history as a staging of the past, I shall describe Bodhanand’s narrative as “anti-myth.” In the opinion of Certeau, historians translate (“carry over”) elements of the past embedded in the consciousness of the present and re-package these elements to emerge in their own configurations. The historian thus creates a heterology or a discourse of the Other, by which strategies are employed to convert alterity into something assimilable within the prevalent contours of knowledge. Taking a cue from Certeau’s theorization, Figueira posits that all historiography “becomes the treatment of absence” and the numerous histories of the Aryan in India “all address concerns central to the heterological process,” predicated upon a banished non-Aryan Other. According to her, on the flip side of each and every imagining of India as Aryan country, therefore, is “an unassimilable residue [which] escapes interpretative control in order to return and upset organizations of meaning. The Aryan and the Other appear as phantasmal projections, rather than as effectively ‘real’ populations” (Figueira, 2015, p. 4). From this point of view, the Mool Bharatvasi, who are the subjects of the history recorded by Bodhanand, inhabit the terrain of anti-myth, from which foothold they persistently haunt the borders of the mythic high ground to which they do not belong. Bodhanand ends his book with a fervent appeal to the scion of the Aryans, the upper-caste Hindus, to abjure their oppressive and repressive heritage, and correspondingly, with a clarion call to the Shudras and the outcastes to unite across their caste-mandated distinctions and shake off their shackles. The anti-myth narrative is simultaneously a manifesto for the emancipation of the lower castes and outcastes. And finally, how would such a text be assessed from the perspective of historiography? There is no doubt that Bodhanand’s account of a history before history, of “beginnings” so to say, is, to a substantial extent, premised upon conjectures and speculations. But, as Ambedkar was to remark at the end of his monograph, The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables, it is permissible for [a student of history] to use his imagination and intuition to bridge the gaps left in the chain of facts by links not yet discovered and to propound a working hypothesis suggesting how facts which cannot be connected by known facts might have been inter-connected. I must admit that

96  Tapan Basu rather than hold up the work, I [would] have preferred by this means to get over the difficulty created by the missing links which have come in my way. (Babasaheb Ambedkar, pp. 239–279) In other words, history is not merely about events which have happened; it is equally about events which might be presumed to have happened. The genre of “imaginative history,” as R.G. Collingwood (1946–1994) called it, uses a “historical imagination” to “re-collect” or “re-construct” events as they are said to have happened in the past, in this case the imagining of a devastated civilization and of a sovereignty deprived. In the field of the philosophy of history, Collingwood famously propounded the doctrine of “re-enactment.” By stressing the importance of “re-enactment,” Collingwood sought to argue that since the historian could not possibly achieve understanding of the chosen object of study by describing what happened from an external point of view, it was crucial to be able to reproduce in the reader’s mind the thoughts that were going through the minds of the principal actors involved in historical events concerned (Lemisko, 2004, pp. 1–9). While imagination is popularly associated with the fictitious, Collingwood argued that the imaginary is not necessarily false. Imagination is simply a process which humans use to construct or reconstruct happenings, images, or ideas, in human minds. The historical imagination recreates concepts related to actions and reactions that really occurred. While a writer of fiction is free to imagine anything as long as his narrative falls in line with the plot, a historian has to use imagination within the limits of a specific historical context, and according to existing historical evidence. If a historian cannot demonstrate that the hypotheses arrived at are consistent with historical evidence, those hypotheses would be regarded as mere fantasy. Without some kind of historical archive, such as tombstones or relics, or parchments to assist the imagination, a historian would not know anything about what had transpired. Evidence from historical sources provides the grounds upon which a historian imagines the past, but the past thus imagined would have no less validity than a past discovered by more “scientific” methods. With the aid of evidence drawn from ancient scriptural texts, writings of politicians and writers like Gandhi, Nehru, Tilak, Tagore as well as from archeological excavations, Bodhanand has constructed a history of the Aryan invasion of India which reduced the indigenous inhabitants of the land to servitude. The story he tells is an imaginative reconstruction of what might have happened in the past, yet within the precincts of probability. By countering the dominant narrative of the Aryans, Bodhanand’s text provides an alternate historiography of the suppressed castes. [All translations of Hindi texts into English in the above article have been undertaken by me.]

References Ambedkar, B. R. (1980). The untouchables: Who were they and why they became untouchables. Babasaheb Ambedkar. Writings and Speeches, 7, 239–279. https://www.mea.gov. in/Images/attach/amb/Volume_07.pdf

Reading Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya 97 Ambedkar, B. R. (2002). Annihilation of caste. (This 1936 text by Ambedkar is included in The Essential Writing of B. R. Ambedkar, ed. Valerian Rodrigues.) New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bodhanand, Bhikshu. (2014). Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya. New Delhi: Samyak Prakashan. Figueira, D. M. (2015). Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorising authority through myths of identity. New Delhi: Navayana Publishing. Lemisko, L. S. (2004). The historical imagination: Collingwood in the classroom. Canadian Social Studies, 38(2), 1–9. Mahasthvir, Bhikshu Bodhanand (2005). Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya. Aligarh, India: Anand Sahitya Sadan. Mani, Braj Ranjan. (2005). Debrahmanising history, dominance and resistance in Manbhar, Indian Society. New Delhi: Manohar Books. Narasu, P. L. (2015). The essence of Buddhism. New Delhi: Gautam Book Centre. Omvedt, Gail. (2003). Buddhism in India: Challenging brahmanism and caste. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Prasad, Mata. (2015). Swami Acchutanand ‘Harihar’. New Delhi: Samyak Prakashan. Said, E. (1985). Beginnings: Intention and method. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Singh, R. R. (2009). Swami Acchutanand “Harihar”: Byaktitva aur Krititva. New Delhi: Siddharth Books. Singh, Gulab. (2005). Pujya Bhadant Bodhanand Mahasthbir, Byaktitva aur Krititva. In A. R. Akela (Ed.), Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya (pp.  258–259) by Bhikshu Bodhi and Mahathir Mohamad. Aligarh, India: Anand Sahitya Sadan. Thapar, R. (2000). Cultural pasts. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

6 Enacting resistance in history and fiction Counter-narratives of tribal historiography in Mahasweta Devi’s writings Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee The end of Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Douloti the Bountiful” shows us the sick, emaciated and “putrefied with venereal disease” body of the “bonded labour,” “kamiya-whore Douloti Nagesia,” “spread-eagled” across the carefully drawn map of India for the Independence-day celebration on the 15th of August, 1975. The practice of kamiya-whoredom, spreading across “the entire Indian peninsula from the oceans to the Himalayas” (Devi, 2001b, p. 94) tells its own tale, providing a counter-narrative to the laudable mainstream story of India’s Independence and progress. Devi’s engagement with the stories of isolated and oppressed tribes and their improvised resistance takes the form of an alternate historiography in contemporary India. This chapter will look at selected narratives of the writer to examine this alternate history of the tribals. Devi’s narratives show how the dalits and adivasis of India defend their identity against encroaching forces which attempt to silence or exclude them from the discourse of the dominant structures. These encroaching forces are manifold. They may be the nation and the oppressive state apparatuses, the caste system, capitalism, patriarchy, etc. In most of her works, Devi focuses on the spaces which are relegated to the margins when we consider the idea of the nation. Her novels and short stories demonstrate the effort to inscribe the marginalized’s presence in a fast-eroding space. These works voice a protest against age-old systems of bonded-labor, unfair percentages of sharecropping, eviction of tribals from their legitimate sites, invasion of their cultures, and attempts to strip them of history and identity. When we talk of the spaces of resistance, we do not refer merely to physical space. According to Henri Lefevre, space is not “a thing,” but “rather a set of relations between things (objects and products)” (1991, p.  83). Spaces are not just physical or mental but social spaces which are produced and they “interpenetrate,” “collide,” “superimpose,” and “interfere” with each other (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 87). The fundamental premise of conflicts, or social change can be traced back to these dialectics of space. In his Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha discovers an ambivalence about the concept of the nation: “in that large and liminal image of the nation” there “is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 99 those who write of it and the lives of those who live it” (2008, p. 1). In the contemporary world, Bhaba sees the concepts of “national culture” and “historical traditions” being redefined: “the very concepts of homogeneous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities – as the grounds of cultural comparativism – are in a profound process of redefinition” (1994, p. 7). Bhaba talks of “national cultures being produced from the perspective of disenfranchised minorities” (1994, p. 8). Partha Chatterjee suggests that there are many instances of how the condition of colonial rule, which posits the “other” as radically different and therefore by definition inferior, is replicated in non-colonial situations, “even within populations that the modern institutions of power presume to have normalized into a body of citizens endowed with equal and nonarbitrary rights” (1999, p. 33). This is what we see in Devi’s narratives on tribals, who do not feature in the success story of mainstream India. The space that Devi writes from is the “space of difference, in decolonized terrain” (Spivak, 1987, p. 105). In her chapter “Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Douloti: The Bountiful,’ ” Gayatri Spivak shows how the de-colonized state evinces signs of a neo-colonial regime: But the political goals of the new nation supposedly are determined by a regulative logic derived from the old colony, with its interest reversed: secularism, democracy, socialism, national identity, and capitalist development. Whatever the fate of this supposition, it must be admitted that there is always a space that cannot share in the energy of this reversal. This space had no established agency of traffic with the culture of imperialism. Paradoxically, this space is also outside of organized labor, below the attempted reversals of capital logic. Conventionally, this space is described as the habitat of the subproletariat or the subaltern. (1989–90, p. 106) By inscribing and naming the villages, the towns, the forests and the hills that generally witness the violence of oppression but are never a part of mainstream depiction of the country, Devi brings alive the tribal world, the subaltern site of resistance and opposition. By writing her historical and semi-fictional narratives, she brings alive the fight of the adivasis and dalits against the nation state, which seeks to displace tribal histories and cultural resources. In Aranyer Adhikar (1977/2006), which is a historical novel, Devi portrays the uprising of the Mundas (1874–1901) and bases it on the life of the Munda leader Birsa. It is chiefly a biography, although she uses fiction to supplement the known events. For example, Amulya, the Bengali friend of Birsa, who relates to us Birsa’s prison-life and writes in his diary about what happened to the other Munda prisoners is evidently a fictional character. Devi acknowledges her debt to K. S. Singh’s book on the uprising, which was first published as Dust Storm and Hanging Mist. She had taken substantial matter from the book as well as the district gazetteers of Ranchi, Palamau, Santal Pargana, etc., but fictionalized parts

100  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee to rewrite the narrative of Birsa’s movement as a story of the struggle for the survival of the forest as well as of the tribals whose lives are so closely connected with the forest. Devi concedes that the movement certainly gained in force and intensity because of the insecurity and sense of injustice among the tribals, arising from their eviction from their land (2006, p. 8). But her narrative merges the two stories into one. The narrative of tribal resistance serves as an alternative history because it tells the story of the isolation and exploitation of the Mundari tribe, their migration to Chotanagpur region, their work of settling and cultivating the land and the propagation of the khuntkati system of land tenure, and their subsequent unjustified eviction from their own land. The semi-fictional version of Mundari history traces the story of the tribe’s subsequent deprivation, as to how they were entangled in debt and reduced to impoverishment and servitude, and forced into unpaid labor or “bethbegari.” The narrative of tribal deprivation and isolation from the mainstream communities of colonial India contradicts the official tale of the progress of colonial India under British rule. The tribe’s suffering and degradation is concurrent with the ecological imbalance produced by over-exploitation of land for commercial purposes. In Devi’s novel, the movement for the adivasi rights to the land that they had first cleared and cultivated was in close accord with the movement for the preservation of the pristine purity of the environment. The environmental issue is of especial relevance in today’s society. By emphasizing Birsa’s presentation of himself as “dharti aba” (2006, p. 14), Devi suggests that Birsa’s movement for the ownership of Mundari land was also a struggle to preserve the environment and land against capitalist exploitation. Devi’s narrative counters the version of Birsa’s history propounded by the British as that of a failed attempt by a trickster to gain leadership by projecting himself as a godhead for personal gain. The British dubbed him a fraudulent miracle-worker, who talked of sheep kneeling before him and a bullock saluting him. The lightning turned his body yellow like the “yolk of an egg” and then transformed it into white like cotton (Cited in Singh, 1993, p. 52). The missionaries and the Government personnel referred to such stories, intending to trivialize and satirize his actions as evidence of his fraud. In the “News from Murhu,” July and October 1895, Reverend Lusty observed: I now began to think this nonsense had been going on long enough . . . if the cattle were to be allowed to eat up all the crops, the result would undoubtedly be a famine. As a matter of fact, besides his doing his best to produce a famine, Birsa had pre-announced one. So, as I said, I thought it was time to do something to stop this nonsense, and I accordingly sent a note to the D.C. suggesting that he should take some steps in the matter. (cited in Singh, 1993, p. 225)

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 101 The missionaries deflated Birsa as “an unprincipled fanatic who was being canonized by some people, anti-missionary and anti-Christian. They objected to his being called bhagwan, dharati aba and avatar, and said that the Munda Catholic women felt insulted at his name and picture being on saris as Birsa had a dubious moral character” (Singh, 1993, p. 192). The official reports emphasized these events, hearsays, and rumors, which reinforced the figure of Birsa as a trickster, whose incitement to rebellion was motivated by his desire to propagate his own image as a divinity. They sought to underplay the political and economic purposes of the rebellion. But the counter-narrative, as conceded in a confidential report sent by the local authorities in 1940, suggests that the real reason for Birsa Munda’s endurance in popular memory was political: It is a fact that Birsa Munda’s name is known throughout this district and outside, largely because of his rebellion and common belief that the establishment of khuntkatti right was the result of his sacrifice. The local Adivasi leaders consider the advent of Birsa Munda to be the beginning of the aboriginal awakening . . . there appears to be deep respect for him. . . . The name of Birsa Munda undoubtedly stirs them. (cited in Singh, 1993, pp. 191–192) In the estimation of Jaipal Singh, the President of the Adivasi Mahasabha, the remembrance of Birsa Munda in Mundari imagination was attributed to similar causes: ‘“the Birsa rebellion, is the one best known to the administrators and the Adivasi alike, to the former because Birsa Munda effectively forced the government of the day to meet his demands even half way and to the latter because he remains the one and the only man who has concrete achievement to his credit in Adivasi reckoning. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Acts are a living proof of the brigandage Birsa Munda had checked’” (cited in Singh, 1993, p. 193). Likewise, Devi’s biographical narrative highlights the political and economic significance of the movement that Birsa stood for. But, she differs from Singh in trying to link the Mundari battle for the rights to the khuntkatti system to the battle of the tribals for the right to the forest, to nature, and preservation of the environment. Devi draws facts from recorded sources, but she selectively marshals them to shape her narrative. Her history emerges from the way she reads the recorded facts and reads the silences and fissures in the official statement of facts. Devi reduces the picture of the miracle-worker Birsa, making him cure diseases and reduce epidemics like cholera (haija) by common sense and elementary, practical, medical knowledge that he had acquired at the mission. She enhances the vagueness surrounding some of Birsa’s directives like letting cattle loose in the fields or eating up one’s crop by insinuating “Nobody knew whether all that was

102  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee heard as Birsa’s words was really Birsa’s” (2006, p. 82).1 Retaining his claim to godhead, Devi suggests that as a god, he foretells the misery of Mundari life and indeed of tribal life in India and summons the Mundas to resistance, struggle, and blood-shed: “I am your God. I will neither take you in my lap and rock you, nor deceive you with soft caress. You have been waiting for me and now you have got me. I will make you cry, and give you pain; I will make you smile and give you happiness. . . . The happiness of living free in an independent Munda land” (2006, p. 140). Birsa points out the future path of action for the Mundas – the path of battle and resistance – and that is the secret of his godhood in Devi’s fictional history. In Amulya’s version, Birsa attains divinity because, like the son of God or Jesus, he too was betrayed. It was a few treacherous Mundas who betrayed his presence in the forest to the British in order to get Rs 500 as prize money for capturing Birsa. As I have said, in Aranyer Adhikar, the counter-narrative of Birsa’s movement for the Mundari ownership of land mingles with the cult that he popularized, “aranyer adhikar,” the right of the forest. While Jaipal Singh declares: “Missionaries are being silly if they think that he is worshipped. . . . The Birsa cult is a myth as far as the Adivasi Movement is concerned. . . . Birsa Munda will find a place in Indian history” (cited in Singh, 1993, p. 193). The Birsa cult, as seen by most historians, is, in many ways an intermixture of Mundari religion, Hinduism, and Christian practices. Strategically, Devi retains for her history the core of Birsa’s religious cult, shearing off the accretions of his miracle-lore. Birsa discouraged dancing, drinking, and festive celebrations during the traditional festivals of Karam, Sohrai, and Holi because such celebrations lulled them into a state of oblivion about the reality of their existence and made them lose sight of the important goal of getting an independent Mundari homeland. In his mother Karmi’s realization, Birsa as “dharti aba” had become one with the earth. The Mundari conception of the sanctity of the earth as a life-giving force of nature invests the “dharti aba” Birsa with divinity. However, the sanctity of the earth and environment has clearly a different kind of relevance in today’s world where people are fighting environmental degradation, and that is why Devi highlights it as the central core of Birsaite faith. Although Devi’s work at many points shows that she closely follows the archival, documentary evidence of Birsa’s life and the movement that he led, there are spaces that she creates with the help of oral history and imagination. Birsa’s upliftment to godhood provides an example of the last. K. S. Singh records two versions of the oral tradition regarding Birsa’s godhead. The second version says how when Birsa had gone with a friend to the forest during early monsoon, he was struck by a lightning and became “transfigured: his face appeared not black but red and white to the astonishment of his friend,” who preceded him to the village and announced his transformation (cited in Singh, 1993, p. 46). However, Devi locates the last story of the miracle into the dawning consciousness of Birsa as the father of the earth. The storm and lightning that appears in Aranyer Adhikar

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 103 is preceded by an imaginary conversation between Birsa and mother earth that resonates in today’s context of the environmental debates. The instinctive knowledge that Birsa gains from his blood, his body, is that of the defilement of mother earth through the commercial exploitation of land, the bargaining, selling and re-selling of land by capitalist landowners, the sahibs and zamindars. The forest regards the Mundas as her children as they always had a symbiotic relationship with her and considered her as sacred and life-giving. But, the new owners merely exploit her as a tool for money-making. Mother earth speaks in his veins. In his imagination Birsa sees Mother Earth as a naked Munda young woman, who cries out to him to purify her, hide her shame, and cover her up. In order to fulfill this charge, he would have to be her father: “Can anyone hide the shame of the earth unless he becomes her father?” (Devi, 2006, p. 74). Birsa comes back from the forest to the thunderous sound of the drum-beat of Mundas. While the “sky laughs in the thunder and lightning and pours water, Birsa comes with upraised arms, his eyes strangely lighted and terrible, like the future of the Mundas” (Devi, 2006, p. 46). In Devi’s narrative, Birsa features as a “modern man,” because he understood the secrets of time, the fate of the tribal society in perennial conflict with the ruthless exploiters of the resources of land and forest and destroyers of the ecological balance. Dharti’s complaint has an especial significance today when people have recognized that environmental pollution by irresponsible industrialization and commercialization has depleted natural resources and destroyed the natural rhythm. In the preface to 2006 edition, Devi represents the hero of Aranyer Adhikar as one “who, according to his knowledge, intelligence, consciousness, and conscience, taught people to protest and called upon the people of the world to be sentinels for the protection of the forest, water and environment” (2006, p. 15). Almost all of Devi’s later works replicate this resistance narrative. Devi shows how she had resorted to the oral tradition in order to reconstruct the story of Birsa and his movement. As she herself says in the preface to Aranyer Adhikar: Oral tradition cannot be defeated. Birsa became a “legend” because he had received a place in the oral tradition even during his lifetime. Even in today’s world which is sick with documents and application of documents, it is necessary to attack and influence the awareness of the people with the oral tradition. It is a tested weapon of popular resistance. (2006, p. 14) Devi argues that Birsa was in advance of his society in thinking. He tried to believe the missionaries and became a Christian. But when the missionaries turned away from the Sardar Rebellion, he realized that he had to struggle against the rulers who were sahibs, and the sahib missionaries were kin to these rulers. Proclaiming “sahib sahib ek topi hai,” he relinquished the mission. He turned to the Hindu sadhus and vaishnabs, but found that the latter as well as the Christian missionaries thought of the Mundas as black, animists, and uncivilized. As “dharti

104  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee aba,” he appealed to the tribals’ fundamental sentiments. It was easy for the adivasis to understand this concept. At the time when the British Government with their attendant land-hungry, profiteering zamindars, police, and lawyers were busy trying to evict the Mundas from their land and introducing their own system of land revenue, Birsa was able to feel the pulse of the time. That is why he became the “dharti aba.” Birsa, therefore, appears in Aranyer Adhikar as a proponent of the rights of the original tillers of the soil against rampant capitalist profiteering and sale of land, an advocate for preserving the environment. Birsa Munda’s concept of “dharti aba” represents an existence tied to nature and characterized by the community life of shared and limited gains and of love for land and nature as opposed to the colonial and postcolonial narrative of conquest of nature and a trajectory of material progress depleting natural resources. The imperative for revenue gains for the British government led to the destruction of the ancient cultivation system of the tribals, the khuntkatti system, and led to its replacement by the permanent settlement of zamindars and middlemen who deprived the tribals of their land and living. Devi’s alternate narrative suggests that Birsa was killed by the British jail authorities because he opposed what they represented. He was diagnosed with cholera although there were no cholera cases in the jail, and he seemed not to have taken food or drinks outside the jail. “Although Anderson (the Jail Superintendent) made careful enquiries, he could come to no conclusion as to how he contracted the cholera” (Singh 1993, p.  134). Devi makes Birsa foretell his death not because of his prescience but because of his shrewd calculation of the state’s intent. He tells Amulya, “I do not have cholera. Nobody knows it better than the Superintendent. Don’t you understand that they will not let me go out alive?” (Devi, 2006, p. 193). To lend credence to his words, Devi narrates how the superintendent declared that nobody would enter Birsa’s room but himself. In her interview by Spivak, “Telling History,” Devi attributes Birsa’s death to “slow arsenic poisoning,” which she deduced from a conference with doctors (Spivak, 2002, p. xxii). Reports produced within a few decades of Birsa’s uprising and even later historical assessments recognized the positive gain that resulted from Birsa’s rebellion, namely the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, which conferred some benefits on the Mundas and even tried to preserve the khuntkatti system in a few villages. However, this was scarcely enough to achieve a permanent solution to the tribal problem of loss of land and inheritance and systematic impoverishment. Devi’s text emphasizes the ongoing nature of the struggle – “there is no end to ulgulan (uprising) and no death for God” (2006, p. 28). Even if the individual Birsa dies, the battle for Mundari rights and the resistance to encroachments on the forest continue. In her fictional story of Chotti Munda, written in 1980, which seemed to take off from the Birsa Rebellion, we see the 1899 uprising reenacted. But, it is not Chotti’s story alone, in different ways, almost all of Devi’s works on tribals show economic and political exploitation of the people and the natural resources and the resistance of the people. Sometimes they achieve limited success, sometimes they

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 105 do not, but they succeed in raising the consciousness of the people around them, as in “Shishu,” for instance. And the message emerges that the battle continues. As Devi says, “tribal history is not seen as a continuity in Indian historiography” (Spivak, 2002, p. x). Yet, one perceives a continuous narrative of resistance in the rebellion of Tirka Majhi (1780–1785), the Kol Rising (1831–1832), the Santal Insurrection (1855–1857), the Sardars’ intermittent conflicts during the 1890s and the Birsa Uprising. The motivation for their agitations was also, at bottom, the same – the right to regain and own the land that they and their ancestors had tilled. The results were also similar. According to Devi, Yet after each rebellion – always related to land and labour – they were evicted from their home places. In the context of the tribal world of Eastern India, which is what I know, they migrated towards Bengal, they were taken to Assam as tea garden labourers, kept in Bengal to clear the mangrove forests in the Sundarbans, the indigo planters brought them, this is continuing history, there is no break in it. (Spivak, 2002, p. x) Chotti Munda, although fictional, carries forward that narrative in independent India, where a form of neo-colonialism persisted to deprive the tribals of their land. In her interview by Spivak, Devi says that she feels Birsa Munda’s uprising could not end with the death of Birsa. By handing his arrow to Chotti, Dhani Munda wishes a continuation of the tradition of Munda rebellion: “This arrow is a symbol for the person who will carry on that continuity. Chotti is an emblem of that” (Spivak, 2002, p. xi). Dhani Munda served as an appropriate figure because he was Birsa’s associate, the perennial rebel who had participated in the Santal Hul, Kherwar struggle, the sardars’ Mulkoi larai, and Birsa’s ulgulan. He keeps alive the story of Birsa’s rebellion, the last battle against the British on the “bloody” Sailrakab hill, which witnessed the death of so many Mundas, and passes it on to another generation. Very appropriately it is he who trains Chotti to gain mastery in archery. As Birsa showed them the way, Dhani tells Chotti, someone will show the Mundas the way again to take back the “right to t’ forest” from the encroaching Dikus (alien) and sahibs. Dhani points to the continuity in their lives: “All t’ reasons remain, Chotti. If such a day comes ye too will kill. And yes, raise Dhani Munda’s name and kill. I’ll be at peace then” (Devi, 2002, p. 19). The tribal life may be seen as a series of struggles against feudalism, moneylenders, and the police who support such landholders and money-lenders, and as time progresses, against the agents of the state who prevent the implementation of the laws and rules, made by the state. Chotti Munda shows us how Lala Tirath Ram, representing the feudal forces, makes the Mundas sign as bonded labor in exchange for a paltry monetary loan or a few kilograms of grain. But, it is not Lala alone who is their enemy. In a period after the departure of the British, when the nation state takes on the mantle of the colonial regime, when the police and the administration along with lumpen elements like the Youth Leaguers (Youth

106  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee Congress) terrorize and oppress the tribals, it is Chotti Munda who teaches them survival tactics – how to fight the bonded labor system of Lala by working with Harbans, the Punjabi businessman, who gives them at least reasonable pay, and to defend themselves against ruffians (supported by the Congress government) who demand shares from their weekly pay. Devi shows the long history of the tribals not only during the precolonial period, but takes us to the periods of Indira Gandhi’s regime and her imposition of Emergency, and the succession of the Janta Government. As Devi says, From ’72 to ’75 – and ’75 brought in the Emergency – Mrs Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay Gandhi and his Youth Congress unleashed a great deal of harassment upon the people. The region in the background of which I have written the novel was one of these areas. During Emergency, nothing happened that did not happen before, although the lumpenization in the lower echelons of politics was perhaps made more systematic. (Spivak, 2002, p. xiii) In order to resist the Youth Leaguers, the Mundas as well as the low-caste agricultural laborers unite with the adivasi activist organization, headed by the educated diku Swarup Prasad. Theirs is a secret organization, similar in aim to the Naxalites, one of whom Chotti had tried to help escape, but failed. Devi builds on facts here because CPI (ML) activists were known to have found shelter in tribal villages. But, the special police or intelligence branch, AAD, seek to eliminate them, and Chotti understands that despite their apparent protection of landless laborers and tribals, people like Shankar in the AAD are totally indifferent to their plight: “Why is he givin’ support? Known snake, givin’ kisses, not bites” (2002, p.  343). In Chotti’s understanding, the conflict between tribals and the “Gormen” is perennial: “When you’re Gormen, you kill Munda Dusad without guilt” (Devi, 2002, p. 343). So tribal history over the years turns out to be a series of conflicts with representatives of economic systems and various governmental organs. And Chotti and his arrow gained fame in the armed struggles that the Mundas undertook. Tribal history is not written or documented. It is a series of songs, orally transmitted by the people over generations. All the struggles, victories, and defeats of Chotti get composed into songs. In the words of Spivak, “in this novel, by insisting like a refrain that everything in Chotti’s life becomes galpakatha [story],” Devi shows this not as a deficiency, but “as a creative principle itself, and of history as well.” She says, What I can do must also be woven into a song and sung, this song continues, then another phase, another song, these songs are sung here and there – that it continues to live, this is also resistance. Thus they are making the thing alive. Chotti here is also a symbol or representation of tribal aspiration. (Spivak, 2002, p. xii)

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 107 When we look at Chotti Munda, we see how songs, for example, can foreground the triumph rather than the defeat, painting a minimal success in strong colors. This can engender later movements of protests. The mythical power from which the Munda and the lower-castes around Chotti Munda draw agency and resistance from is the belief in his spellbound arrow. Only Chotti knows that there is no spell, just regular constant practice. And yet he doesn’t vigorously dissuade anyone from creating the myths around him. Chotti’s multiple interventions in Mundari life – in the matter of wages, bond-labor, loans, drought, famine, harassment from political parties – get transmuted into songs of triumph. The symbol of this triumph is not Chotti Munda himself but rather his spellbound arrow. This arrow becomes the emblem of the many interventions that occupy his long life of resistance. Dukhia Munda was a Munda from the village of Kurmi who trained under Chotti and was one of his first pupils. After Dukhia’s act of beheading the manager of his village at Kurmi and his hanging, the Kurmi tribals stage a walk-out under the pressure of the bond-system. They had put down thumb prints and borrowed money and later left for the Christian mission at Tomaru, leaving their loans unpaid. The pahan, or the village chief, remained behind to symbolically burn the village into a funeral ground before disappearing into the forests. It is because of these incidents that the hunt festival of the Mundas was banned. Both these incidents have been memorialized by the Mundas in songs, which show the interesting transmutation of the myths around Chotti Munda. The first song narrates the reason for the ban, the Daroga’s fear of the power of Chotti’s arrow: Ye raise t’bow, ye hit t’ target Makes Daroga mighty afraid, mate– Ye go to Gormen and tell ‘em our plea Makes Daroga mighty afraid, mate– So they didn’ let ya play yer arrer. Ye taught Dukhia Munda ta shoot Dukhia t’bonded slave, mate– Dukhia cuts t’ manager’s head off Makes Daroga scared, mate– So they didn’ let ya play yer arrer. Which Munda knows t’bowspell? Only ye, mate– (2002, p. 84) Here, we also see how two different episodes of resistance in the village life are knitted together to produce a song which would go on to engender further resistance down the line, like the Kurmi mundas’ abandonment of their village and migration to the mission. The latter move was not so much by Chotti’s advice, but a matter of their independent choice, and the decision was largely Sukha Munda’s. But, Chotti’s association with them led to the composition of a song,

108  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee which credited him with the strategy. It is to be noted that when the experience becomes the song, the element of oppression is relegated to the background while the triumph is foregrounded. In these songs, sometimes defeat is turned into acts of agency. When Tirathnath blinks first after using abusive words, the event becomes a matter of pride for the Mundas. According to the song they improvise, the Lala called Mundas “sonsabitches” (Devi, 2002, p. 134). However at Chotti’s threat that he would burn Tirathnath’s fields with his arrow, the money-lender takes back the word and offers them a loan of paddy, maize. Chotti then calls back his arrows, which were “dancing” to run forward (Devi, 2002, p. 135). The songs produce a tribal counter-narrative to the official or landowners’ version of the incidents. One might discern a parallel between Chotti’s songs and Bashai Tudu’s (another independent and resourceful tribal in Devi’s corpus) activities, which Alakananda Bagchi interprets as “supplementary writing.” Bhabha’s concept of the “performative strategy” suggests that the “supplementary” “disrupts” the “homogeneous, holistic” national narrative. According to Bagchi, the concept has been adopted by the subaltern studies historians like Ranajit Guha to show that popular resistance has always been left out of the purview of neo-colonialist historiography of the nation (1996, p. 43). She writes: “The metropolis is outraged by the ‘supplementary writing’ of Bashai and his men, which points to the ‘minuses’ in the homogeneous totalizing concept of a unified nation” (1996, p. 45). Chotti’s arrow becomes a symbol of resistance associated with the Munda identity. And Chotti’s last act of resistance against the SDO, when he claims to have killed Romeo and Pahlwan, taking on himself the responsibility for the act of Disha, Upa, Somchar, and Lal, becomes related to the arrow. He points out to the SDO that when Romeo and Pahlwan had dishonored the Munda daughters, killed the old pahan and his family, Dukha, Jugal, and nearly killed Chhagan (the latter barely survived after grievous injury), then the SDO sat inactive and aided the miscreants. Chotti warns in a strong voice that if they “raised terror” on the community for the murder of the two, then no one will remain alive (2002, p. 363). When the SDO refuses to believe that an octogenarian Chotti can kill anyone with his arrow, he raises the arrow in Dhani Munda’s name, remembering what the latter had told him, and hit the target with ease. “As he waits he mingles with all time and becomes river, folklore, eternal. . . . Brings all adivasi struggle into the present, today into the united struggle of the adivasi and the outcaste” (2002, p.  363). Through Chotti’s act of defiance, the shooting, Devi conflates all the conflicts of the tribals over generations – the Kol Rebellion, Santal Hul, Munda Sardars’ Larai, Birsa Munda’s uprising. The arrow becomes a symbol of the perennial resistance of the tribals to mainstream politics and injustice of the state. And it is the bows raised upwards by a thousand adivasis and the restraining hands of Chhagan and his untouchable associates that replicate Chotti’s defiant warning when the SDO makes a move to arrest Chotti. Between Chotti on one side and the SDO on the other, a “thousand bows” appear uplifted in the air, and “a warning announced in many upraised hands” (Devi, 2002, p. 364). The novel establishes the continuity of the struggle by the way it ends. As Spivak says, “the

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 109 novel has an open end, a thousand hands raised but the conclusion forever suspended” (2002, p. x). The various movements of resistance of Chotti to the invading and conflicting state apparatuses ultimately merge into a long-term resistance against what Chotti knows is a never-ending erosion of the tribal life, culture, and identity. He prophesies that the tribals will lose their identity in future. As the exploited, they will have to unite with other laborers and field hands. The Munda-identity will surface only at the time of festivals. This fear of loss of identity runs as an undercurrent in many short stories of Devi. In her story, “Shishu,” history and myth play important roles in the acts of physical and symbolic resistance which is a hallmark of her narratives. Like many other stories, in “Shishu” the urban space encroaches on the subaltern space of tribal beliefs and social mores. The actions of the Agaria tribals in “Shishu” are not just acts of defiance against state power. Such acts draw their decisive agency and power from a mythical history which is the source of tribal identity. The Agarias in “Shishu” are descended from the Asuras, the demons, and they used to mine iron ore. However, they have been robbed of a past when they could drink fire and bathe in rivers of fire, as their ancestor Jwalamukhi did. The latter continued a battle with the sun-god, started by his father, Logundi, until he lost it. As the Agarias are still in a state of mourning for the defeat of Jwalamukhi and they consider themselves impure, they cannot cultivate land. They are unable to mine iron-ore because the three demons, Lohasur, Koilasur, and Agaiyasur, guarding iron, coal, and fire prevent them from accessing these substances. The resistance of the Kuva Agarias to the team of geologists sent by the Indian Government who were prospecting iron-ore sprang from their belief that the hills, which were the sacred abode of the Asuras, would be violated if mining and industry went on in the region. It was not only a resistance against mainstream development of their region but also a resistance against encroachment on that private space which constituted their history and identity for generations. The Agarias had already incurred the wrath of the Asuras; further defilement of their territory would result in their total destruction. So the Kuva tribals vanished into the forest after hacking the government team to death and were never found again. The story of the murder and their disappearance is history when the text begins. The well-meaning, honest relief officer who brings government aid to the Agarias during a famine, suddenly finds on one night that relief material from his camp is being stolen by children with the help of some Agaria boys in the camp who were initially helping him in the distribution of relief. Angered by the betrayal of the boys he had trusted and the Agarias who set their children to steal despite the aid that he was giving, he chases the “children,” to the forests until they stop and confront him. They retrace their steps, encircle him, and coming close, reveal their identity as Kuva villagers, whom starvation has reduced to the size of children. With a shock Singh realizes that they were adults, men and women, young, old, and prematurely old, whose reproductive organs had shrunken, so that they were unable to give birth. They were decimated by systematic starvation  – from a hundred

110  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee and fifty reduced to fourteen. They charge him with grudging them just two bags of grains, when he had so many left in the camp and cackled with joy at their revenge. Underneath a “faint moon,” shedding “its weak light” on the “scorched” land of the Agarias, Singh is encircled by adults “no larger than children” who cherished their revenge against Singh’s normal growth and height of “five feet and nine inches.” “His normalcy was the crime they could not forgive” (Devi, 1993, p. 250). As a government agent, Singh was identified as one of those who had blasted their hills with dynamite and brought the Asuras’ wrath on them. It is state interference against their customs and rules and encroachment on and desecration of their sacred hills that led them to kill the government team. State repression and consequent chronic starvation forced them to the status of perennial fugitives and emaciated “children” (as mentioned earlier), who were doomed to die out, lacking the vigor to reproduce. Again, the case of Agaraiya “shishus” demonstrates the conflict between the neo-colonial state and the tribals’ sense of their identity and history. Significantly, the boys who were once grateful to the relief officer and respected him had suddenly turned into “strangers” whom he did not know and understand. They aligned with the Kuva tribals who had committed a crime against the state and not with the rational, sympathetic, honest relief officer. He “couldn’t reach their minds. There was no common meeting point between an honest relief officer and ten Agariya tribals. They were citizens of two different planets” (Devi, 1993, p. 247). The “tribal world,” Devi writes elsewhere, “is like a continent handed over to us” (Spivak, 2002, p. xi), a world which could not be deciphered without extending due respect and sympathy, not condescension and pity of government officers. The novella, Rudali, also illustrates the forcible encroachment of upper-caste Rajputs on the shrinking space of tribal society, and the change that it wrought in the latter’s communal life of harmony. It is also a story of how the tribal women failed to defend themselves against these intruders. Dulan Ganju, advisor to Sanichari and Bhikni, narrates the story of the “ruthless Rajputs” taking into possession the tribal areas and establishing themselves as jotedars (landholders) and “the master of the area” (Devi, 1997/2010, p. 95). The place is Tahad, and Dulan Ganju’s story is the story of the Kol rebellion and its brutal defeat. Dulan responds to Sanichari’s discomfort with the randi-bazaar (the quarters of the prostitutes) and the situations of the women occupying that space. Dulan says, “Do you think we always had so many whores? It’s these Rajput malik-mahajans (owner-moneylenders) who have created so many randis. . . . All the evil things have been brought in by them” (Devi, 2010, p. 94). Here, prostitution as a social phenomenon is seen as a creation of the Rajputs. This is a comment on the invasion of the social space by the Rajputs where the community of the tribals which never had the concept of whores has to accommodate this new concept. It is with this introduction that Dulan starts his narrative of this history where Rajputs not only violently squashed the Kol Rebellion started by Harda and Donka Munda but also started acquiring land through violence and massacre as they settled in the Tahad region.

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 111 In the process, they stratified the hitherto communal space of the tribals and as Dulan says, brought corruption and evil with them. In Dulan’s list of the common things that all maliks possess, feature elephants, horses, “illegitimate children,” “kept women,” “venereal diseases,” and guns which enabled them to keep their ill-gotten lands. Even their “household deities” (Devi, 2010, pp. 95–96) aid their subterfuge of holding of tax-free lands, supposedly dedicated to the deities. After showing the common class characteristics of the Rajputs, Dulan informed the women that since the maliks needed rudalis, or women who congregated and wailed at people’s death to prop up their honor, their necessity provided tribal women with a strategy for survival (Devi, 2010, p. 96). The rudalis survived by lamenting loudly for the dead family members of the zamindars, who competed with each other to show off the greatest number of rudalis. The louder the wails, the greater seemed the stature of the zamindar. The land-owners had to show off their generosity by paying the rudalis large sums of money, the demands of their false prestige taking from their ill-gotten wealth. And the zamindar’s loss was the rudalis’ gain. By appearing as rudalis in large numbers, therefore, the women enacted their resistance against the men who stole their lands and honor. Tribal women have been shown as victims of male lust of the patriarchal Indian society time and again in Devi’s works, for example, Douloti, Gangor, Draupadi, Motia, and Basmati in Chotti Munda. Although in the eponymous “Draupodi” too, we see the tribal woman triumph over her oppressors and political opponents, it is the short story “The Hunt,” that presents most convincingly the victory of the tribal Mary Oraon over such oppression. She kills the lustful Tehsildar from the city, who buys sal trees, cuts the logs, and transports them to Murhai. The capitalist Tehsildar engages in the act of destroying the tribal environment, just as he wishes to destroy the honor of the tribal women. And he tries to seduce her by money. In Devi’s works often women and the environment become subject to the same lust for commercialization and greed. Although not intended to be so, Mary’s revenge becomes effectually also a symbolical vindication of the environmental destruction. And significantly, her revenge against the man is connected with the tribal festival of Jani Parab  – the Oraon women’s festival of the hunt which comes after twelve years. The hunt festivals are an integral part of the tribal culture in India. And Jani Parab provides opportunity for women to hunt once in twelve years. On the day of the Parab, women take up bows and arrows and hunt for animals like men. After the hunt, they have communal feasts, drink liquor, sing, and sit talking before the lighted spring fire. While the “hunt” has become meaningless with the disappearance of the animals, “the day’s joy” remains as “real” (2001a, p. 12). Through Mary Oraon’s act of killing the Tehsildar who had sought to seduce her on Jani Parab, the hunt’s tired “meaninglessness” changes and even the act acquires a new meaning. Devi had met Mary Oraon, a “light-skinned girl in a yellow sari worn in the village way, on the back of a big old buffalo, sitting in the most relaxed manner, chewing sugar-cane” in Lapra (Spivak, 2001, p. xi). She learnt about her hunt on

112  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee the day of the Jani Parab from the songs that had grown among the tribals. The tribal women turned to their advantage the opportunity that the custom of Jani Parab afforded them. Since women are honored in tribal society, Mary, as Devi points out, “resurrected the real meaning of the annual hunting festival day by dealing out justice to a crime committed against the entire tribal society” (Spivak, 2001, p. xi). Such acts of resistance had been enacted by tribal women in the past. Here, the private space of the individual woman is conflated with the sociocultural space of tribal society, and Mary aims to defend this threatened space. She becomes both the bait and the baiter, impatient to capture “the big beast” (Devi, 2001a, p. 15). Her blood boils and the description of her desire to kill is imaged in sexual terms: “A  great thirst dances in her blood. Tehsildar, Tehsildar, I  am almost there. Tehsildar wants her a lot. . . . With how much violence can Tehsildar want her? How many degrees Fahrenheit? Is his blood as wild as Mary’s” (Devi, 2001a, p. 15). She lures him and leads him on by giving “love bites on the lips” and “caressing his face” (Devi, 2001a, p. 16). Gestures of sexuality lend fire to her longing to kill. Her machete comes down on him only when the face of the Tehsildar completely transforms into a beast. The songs, which embody the narrative of her kill, transform the Tehsildar into “a Lakra, a wolf that had been killed” (Spivak, 2001, p. xi). Her surfacing after the kill feels as if a “few million moons” (Devi, 2001a, p.  16) have passed. The repeated violation of the female adivasi body for years is symbolically vindicated by Mary’s killing of the “big beast.” Significantly, after the killing of the civilized “biggest” beast, her fear for smaller wild animals disappears. Mary Oraon’s revenge against the intruding commercial Tehsildar, who gauges women’s honor in monetary terms, is a representative act of resistance against the lustful outsider by tribal women. And it becomes history by the tribals’ act of composing songs. In order to understand how the tribal world is closing all its communication channels and resisting the environmental destruction unleashed by industry and development, we need to look at Devi’s later novella about tribals, Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha, which was written almost a decade after Chotti Munda. It relates the story of the descent of the disturbed soul of the ancestors of the tribals onto Pirtha. Bikhia, the tribal boy, draws a picture of the ancestors’ soul with chalk and then engraves a “being whose wings are webbed like a bat’s, body like a gigantic iguana, four clawed feet, no teeth in the yawning terrible mouth” (2001c, 128). The picture resembles a pterodactyl. And the pre-historic visitor lands in the famine-stricken Pirtha on the night it rains. The ancestors’ soul is unquiet and disturbed because their land is defiled, the graves are desecrated by money-making traders and greedy money-lenders. Shankar, the only literate man among the tribals in Pirtha and the only suitable means of communication with the outside world, speaks the history of the civilization’s incursions into the tribal area “as if he is singing a saga,” in a trance. He talks of the encroachments on their land, the “chasing” concrete roads, schools, and hospitals, which destroyed their “ancestors’ graves,” rendering the people “unclean” and “mute” with “pain.” The “unquiet” ancestors’ soul visits them, “casts its shadow and hovers” (Devi, 2001c, pp. 119–120).

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 113 In Puran’s understanding, the pterodactyl visits the tribals because it has a message for them. They are aboriginals, belonging to times past, but the prehistoric visitor is “much more ancient, more originary than his [the tribal’s] experience,” but both their existences are “greatly endangered.” The pterodactyl cannot communicate with the present world. “ ‘Today’ does not know the ‘past’, the ‘ancient’ ” (Devi, 2001c, p. 156). Puran himself tries to decipher its message by looking at its lidless eyes. He imagines that the pterodactyl wishes to tell the present world that just as the prehistoric animals were wiped out by “geological evolution” (Devi, 2001c, p. 157), human beings would also be eradicated by nuclear explosion or war or contemporary aggressive civilization. The technologically advanced civilizations have destroyed nature and the sustaining earth by applying “man-imposed substitutes” (Devi, 2001c, p. 158), so that the soil will not yield the crops it naturally did. Along with nature, the current generation has not honored or tried to understand but only destroyed ancient cultures and societies which are gradually disappearing from the earth. The unquiet soul of a destroyed ancient culture visits the restless, fast-paced, supposedly progressive modern society with its own message of warning and caution for the latter. The threat to environment is linked to the threat to a culture which teaches people to live in close connection with nature and preserve it. By contrast, the ideal of industrial and scientific development is motivated by the desire to conquer nature. The so-called developed and civilized societies are also characterized by greed and excess, economic inequality, and communal disharmony as opposed to the truly civilized tribal society, which leads a communal life in peace and harmony with nature. The pterodactyl’s message leads us back to Birsa’s uprising. The “dharti” that spoke to Birsa about her shame and exploitation repeats her message to the tribals in the form of the prehistoric animal. The rule of the Indian government and the colonial government are similar in many respects. The tribals are at variance with both. The success story of India’s progress is a history of perennial conflict with ancient cultures. The refusal of the tribals in famine-stricken Pirtha to participate in and benefit from the various economic and technological projects like the Green Revolution or the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Program, and the various tribal welfare projects, their refusal to use the high-yielding seeds and fertilizers suggests their rejection of the endeavor to forcibly extract from land more than the land is capable of yielding them. It is their self-sustaining ancient culture’s rejection of the greed and excess associated with technological advancement. The incommunicability of the tribal is witnessed in their imperviousness to even Puran Sahay, who actually sees the pterodactyl and brings rain to Pirtha, and to the BDO Harisharan, who is sympathetic to their plight. However, even the latter fails to understand the tribal sense of shame in flaunting their poverty and distress in a film to arouse strangers’ sympathy. Harisharan does not decipher their self-respect that would not let them appear as beggars, even if it brings money and aid to Pirtha. The pterodactyl has been interpreted variously by critics. David Farrier suggests that “according to one interpretative frame, the pterodactyl as the eruption

114  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee of what Michael Löwy calls the ‘irreal’ represents a critique of the physical and ontological violence of the ecological regime of India’s Green Revolution” (2015, p. 7). Critics like Farrier associate the prehistoric visitor in Devi’s novella with the gothic because in the capitalist society the idea of the division of capital and labor gives rise to the violence and terror intrinsic to the gothic. “The pterodactyl is the eruption of the irreal which exposes capitalism’s ‘phantom objectivity’ ” (Farrier, 2015, p.  8). The Green Revolution signifies the transition from the traditional methods of cultivation to hybridity and fast-paced growth provided by artificial methods introduced by multi-national corporations, a “tearing apart both nature and society” (cited in Farrier, 2015, p. 8). In Puran’s first encounter with the pterodactyl the presentist bias of the commodity cycles (symbolized by the road along which Puran travels to Pirtha), which flatten space and time, is implicitly contrasted with the fantastically revenant deep time of a past geologic era. (Farrier, 2015, p. 8) The government is not willing to accept that Pirtha is a famine prone area because it is situated in the fringes of the Green Revolution belt of Madhya Pradesh, and does not even consider sending aid on an emergency footing as it should. The Green Revolution certainly benefited the large farmers, but did very little for poverty-stricken tribals, trapped in debt and bonded labor, who scarcely received the aid meant for them. We do not read the appearance of the pterodactyl necessarily as an “eruption” of the Gothic horror, but rather, as Puran suggests, as a “myth and message from the start” (Devi, 2001c, p. 196). Whether it existed in fact or not, it scarcely mattered. It had a message to give, and the non-tribals like Harisharan, the SDO, and Puran, even though sympathetic, missed the “message” in their fearful or skeptical search for a real pterodactyl. Neil Lazarus suggests that the continuity and sustainability of human life depends on returning to the ideals of aboriginal society. Journalists like Puran Sahay who are able to connect with the tribals even if not fully and are enabled to see the soul of the ancestors would be able to establish the link (2013, pp. 523–536). Devi does leave a message for her readers both inside and outside the world of “Pirtha,” that only an overwhelming love, which inspires one not to think of oneself as superior to the tribes can achieve the link and communicate with the tribals, who are a forgotten “continent.” But, Puran has failed to achieve this “love,” and the message of the pterodactyl is unread. Although to the urban journalist, Puran, the prehistoric creature’s eyes are unresponsive or make only half-understood signals, to Bikhia it sends the message that the places it has visited belonged to the tribals. And it is a message that only enhances their resolution not to abandon their abode, the hills, caves, and rivers, where their ancestors’ graves lay and move to fertile plains, where Kausalji or Harisharan might direct them. And tribal resistance in the narrative takes the form of refusal to move. Pterodactyl is not a “pessimistic” story (Spivak, 2002, p. xvi), as Devi insists in her conversation with Spivak. At the end, Pirtha’s tribals

Enacting resistance in history and fiction 115 declare that they would “plant thorns and eat the tuber. They are learning to cope with the modern, they aren’t accepting defeat” (Spivak, 2002, p. xvi). Besides, their silence is a form of protest, of resistance, as Spivak senses when she says, “that kind of uncanny silence, that resonant silence of the Sabars, which is its own kind of resistance, that’s in Pterodactyl” (Spivak, 2001, p. xvii). Behind this late novella, Spivak finds Devi’s knowledge of the Sabars. Tribal resistance to the progress of mainstream India takes different forms at different times and in different settings. But, the import remains the same. Through Birsa Munda’s message to his fellows or the pterodactyl’s speechless communication to Bikhia, Devi shows the continual battle for survival of an ancient community, whose existence is closely linked to nature, and directly opposed to the traits of modern civilization. The economic and political structures that facilitate exploitation of nature and individual profit-making remain perennially opposed to a society of communal living, limited gains, and natural sustenance. Devi’s narratives seek to acquaint us with the ancient culture through an imaginative reconstruction of their past and give us a sense of the histories of its resistance to the mainstream through a mingling of fact and fiction. In place of archival information, in her narratives, the unwritten, collective, improvised, and orally transmitted songs of the adivasis acquire an important place. They are ways of remembering and honoring resistance that had transpired in tribal history. Devi’s works translate these songs into another form and a different language, a counternarrative of semi-fictional historical discourse which contradicts the narrative of progress and advancement of mainstream India.

Note 1 All translations of Aranyer Adhikar have been done by Rita Banerjee.

References Bagchi, A. (1996). Conflicting nationalisms: The voice of the subaltern in Mahasweta Devi’s Bashai Tudu. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 15(1), 41–50. Retrieved fromwww.jstor.org/stable/463971 Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (2008). Nation and narration (2nd ed.) London and New York, NY: Routledge. (First published in 1990). Chatterjee, P. (1999). The nation and its fragments: Colonial and post-colonial histories. The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Devi, M. (1993). Shishu (P. Bhattacharya, Trans.). In S. Tharu & K. Lalita (Eds.), Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Devi, M. (2001a). The hunt. In G. C. Spivak (Trans.), Imaginary maps (pp. 1–18). Calcutta: Thema Books. Devi, M. (2001b). Douloti: The bountiful. In Imaginary maps (pp.  19–94). Calcutta: Thema Books. Devi, M. (2001c). Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha. In Imaginary maps (pp. 95–198). Calcutta: Thema Books.

116  Debarati Das and Rita Banerjee Devi, M. (2002). Chhoti Munda and His Arrow (G.C. Spivak, Trans.). Calcutta: Seagull Books. Devi, M. (2006). Aranyer Adhikar. Calcutta: Karuna Prakashani. (Originally published in 1977). Devi, M. (2010). Rudali. In A. Katyal, M. Devi, & U. Ganguly (Trans.), Rudali: From Fiction to Performance. Calcutta: Seagull Press. (First published in 1997). Farrier, D. (2015, September). Disaster’s gift: Anthropocene and Capitalocene temporalities in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha. Interventions, 18(3). Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1079500 Lazarus, N. (2013). Epilogue: The pterodactyl of history. Textual Practice, 27(3), 523–536. Lefebvre, H. (1991). Production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Singh, K. S. (1993). Birsa Munda and his movement 1874–1901: A study of a millenarian movement in Chota Nagpur. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1987). In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. New York, NY: Methuen. Spivak, G. C. (1989–90). Women in difference: Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti: The bountiful”. Cultural Critique, 14(2), 105–128. Spivak, G. C. (2001). The author in conversation. In M. Devi, Imaginary maps (pp. i–xvi). Calcutta: Thema Books. Spivak, G. C. (2002). Telling history. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak interviews Mahasweta Devi. In M. Devi, Chotti Munda and his arrow (G. C. Spivak, Trans., pp. ix–xviii). Calcutta: Seagull.

7 “We must create a history of India in living terms” Patrick Geddes and aspects of Sister Nivedita’s writings on Indian history1 Arpita Mitra A little-known aspect of Sister Nivedita’s (1867–1911) work in and for India was her efforts toward the cause of (re-)writing Indian history.2 She wrote extensively on the need for developing alternative tools for understanding and writing Indian history. She conceptualized new theoretical frameworks for writing a history of India that would capture “the palpitation of the Indian heart-beat” (Nivedita, 1966, p. 103, emphasis in original) through the diversity of Indian histories and cultures, as also a history that could “read” the “master-document” that “India herself is” (Nivedita, 1915, p. 6). She also advocated the writing of Indian history from the point of view of place – how geography influences the making of history. She wrote on history pedagogy – how history should be taught, the proper place of history as a subject in the scheme of the new education that should be implemented in modern India. And she exerted great influence in the intellectual circles of colonial Calcutta, which included historians like Radha Kumud Mookerji and Jadunath Sarkar and popular writers on Indian history like Romesh Chunder Dutt. Most of Nivedita’s writings on Indian history and its methodology were published roughly between 1907 and 1912, mostly in journals like The Modern Review. These writings were compiled posthumously into the book Footfalls of Indian History published by Longman’s Green & Co. London in 1915. Apart from this compilation, there are essays in other collections of her works (like The Web of Indian Life and Hints on National Education in India) that deal with her theoretical insights into Indian history. Some of these essays were written as early as 1903. An even lesser-known fact about Nivedita’s efforts for re-writing Indian history is that she was influenced by the sociological methods of the Scottish sociologist, biologist, and town-planner, Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932).3 While there is much more to Nivedita’s historical thought than what she borrowed from Geddes, this chapter will mainly deal with the Geddes connection in shaping her ideas about Indian history, which in turn influenced in some respect the practice of historywriting in the Calcutta circle. This chapter will analyze how Nivedita appropriated and applied some of the Geddesian concept-tools in her re-conceptualization of Indian history and how in that process she effected a departure from the Indian historiographical practice of her times.

118  Arpita Mitra This innovation consisted first in highlighting the importance of place in the making of Indian history; at her hands, place appeared as a novel category of socio-historical analysis. Second, she developed an understanding of the Indian past–present–future through the prism of synthesis. She argued strongly that the India of the past has been an organic synthesis and the India of the future will also be so. And in so doing, she differed both from the imperialist idea of India as congeries of many nations, as well as the tendency to read the Indian past only in Hindu terms. Place and synthesis also came together to produce the idea of Indian nationality in Nivedita’s works. Of course, there is essentialization and idealization too in Nivedita’s thought. However, my purpose in this chapter is to describe her understanding of the Indian past, and engage with it critically inasmuch as I can extract the different strands of her thought and underscore their uniqueness compared to other historiographical agendas in place at that time. Nivedita’s contribution to Indian historiography in the early twentieth century is distinctive yet neglected in critical studies of historiography. This chapter hopes to fill in this lacuna.

The Geddes connection Geddes’s legacy is well-acknowledged in the fields of regional survey and education, town planning, geography and allied areas; and his contribution to Indian society is also acknowledged in the fields of town planning and education. But the bearing of his ideas on historiography in colonial India has not been examined closely. And in this regard, Nivedita is not an isolated instance. Jadunath Sarkar had remarked in the Introduction to A New History of the Indian People: “As Professor Patrick Geddes used to warn our scientific students: ‘We have plenty of spinners, who have produced fine threads. We now want a master weaver who will synthesise all these isolated facts’ ” (Majumdar & Altekar, 1946, p. iv). This acknowledgment bears out the far-reaching influence Geddes exerted in the Indian intellectual circles. Many pages later, the same Introduction mentions Nivedita as well in glowing terms as a gifted individual, a “rare foreigner” who possessed “that sympathetic insight which only a native can possess” (Majumdar & Altekar, 1946, p. vi). This goes to indicate that her contribution to the field was significant enough to merit this observation by a professional historian of eminence more than three decades after she passed away. Geddes visited India for the first time in 1914, whereas Nivedita had passed away in 1911. Their friendship pre-dates Geddes’s first visit to India – this could be the reason why a detailed examination of their influence on each other is often neglected in accounts of Geddes’s work in India. Nivedita had known Geddes since 1900. In order to learn from his methods, she joined him as his secretary for the Congress of the History of Religions in Paris that year. Geddes had looked upon the 1900 Exposition Universelle as “a vast laboratory to test his sociological ideas and his system for unifying knowledge” (Leonard, 2015, p. 55). What is well-known, however, is that Nivedita’s book The Web of Indian Life was influenced by Geddesian ideas (Meller, 1990, pp. 154–155). What I would

“We must create a history of India” 119 like to show is that her essays in Footfalls of Indian History were also influenced by her interaction with Geddes. The primacy of place in determining history, the concepts of sequence and synthesis, the idea of the evolution of the city as “a sort of lotus, divided into numbered whorls” (Nivedita, 1999, p. 58) are key Geddesian concept-tools with the help of which Nivedita weaved a history for India in opposition to the “published renderings of our history” that were “so inadequate and so distorted” (Nivedita, 1915, p. 15). She built on his theories with empirical studies of her own. What really appealed to Nivedita in the works of Patrick Geddes was the potential she saw in it to help the Indian national cause. On 24 October 1900, she wrote to Geddes’s wife, Anna Geddes: Not one lecture can I give without blessing the methods of observation that Mr. Geddes has put into my hands. If a Young India arises, to bring about a national rebirth, we shall owe it more to him than either he or we shall ever wholly know. (Nivedita, 2015b, p. 498)

The place of “Place” Nivedita once wrote that Geddes had given her a tool beyond all price. This tool was the theoretical framework to understand the evolution of society in relation to its immediate environment. To Geddes himself, the method of regional survey that he devised based on this framework, was not “a mundane and dull thing but a tool for a new age”(Maclean, 2015, p. 94). Geddes had developed this method based on the works of the French mining engineer and sociologist Frédéric Le Play (1806– 1882), whose ideas he was introduced to by another French sociologist Edmond Demolins (1852–1907). Paris was to become Geddes’s intellectual home (the other French influence being Auguste Comte), where he “drank deeply at the well of the French school of geography; a geography that was more humanistic, more historical and less environmentally deterministic than any other” (Maclean, 2015, p. 93). Le Play is believed to be the pioneer of the field work and case-study methods in the French sociological tradition (Hamel, Dufour, & Fortin, 1993), as also the first to combine personal field observation with statistical survey methods. According to Le Play, the basic units of socio-geographic research were Place, Work and Family. Place denoted the physical environment that determined the occupational work that prevailed in that area; while Work determined the family life; and Family was the fundamental unit of society. Geddes adapted Le Play’s triad and made it into Place, Work, and Folk, which he even denoted as Environment, Function, and Organism respectively (one can discern in this nomenclature the influence of his background as a biologist). His interest was in mapping the interaction between the environment and the organism, without, however, foregrounding the importance of either of the two. That is to say, in his scheme of things, both the environment and the organism were equally important in determining the final result of their interaction.

120  Arpita Mitra It is the result of the interaction between Place, Work, and Folk that finally determines the historical evolution of a particular society. Such analysis involved a confluence of disciplines like geography (place), economics (work) and anthropology (folk). From the above theoretical framework, Geddes derived his theory of the Valley Section – a hypothetical cross-section of the river valley, the quintessential natural region that gave birth to great civilizations. This served as a model to explain the rise of primitive occupations as a result of geographical relief. The resultant occupations and corresponding settlement types of the Valley Section were: “the Miner, the Woodman, and the Hunter on the heights; the Shepherd on the grassy slopes; the poor Peasant (of oats or rye) on the lower slopes; and the rich Peasant (with wheat, and in south it may be wine and oil) on the plain; finally, the Fisher (sailor, merchant, etc.) at sea-level” (Geddes, 1949, p. 166). When the cities emerged, these groups, which had earlier lived in relative isolation, came in contact. According to Geddes, this led to a transformation in occupations: the miner became a blacksmith or toolmaker; the hunter a sportsman and warrior chief; the woodman a builder or civil engineer; the shepherd a spiritual mentor, caravan leader and finally a railway baron; the farmer a manager in banking or insurance, or a great agriculturalist and politician; and finally, the fisherman a merchant-adventurer, emigrant, pirate or mariner. On 2 January 1903, Nivedita wrote to Mrs. Geddes: “There is dynamite in the little check-folded paper about Place – Occupation – Family etc. I teach it wherever I go. I fear I have not myself assimilated it as I ought. Yet even as much as I really understand is tremendous” (Nivedita, 2015b, p. 499). In her essay “The History of Man as Determined by Place” (Nivedita, 1915, pp. 1–5), Nivedita built upon Geddes’s theory of the rise of occupations in a way that the Indian reader could understand the factors that give birth to a civic consciousness superseding the family as a motive and mode of consciousness. She explained that in the last two thousand years, two types of empire had risen: one was the creation of the fisher-peoples of the European coastline, and the other that of the tribesmen of Central Asia and Arabia. She traced how in these two modes of social organization – that was a direct result of their environment and occupation – the ideal of the family came to be superseded by the civic ideal – once again, an influence of their environment. In the first case, the conquest of the sea made the father, the eldest son, and the second son into captain, first mate, and second mate respectively, where “the slightest dereliction from military discipline on the part of one may involve instant peril of death to all” (Nivedita, 1915, p. 2). This self-organization facilitated the sense of unity, which is a pre-condition for imperial aggression. Simultaneously, “the family gives place, in the imagination, to the crew, as the organised unit of the human fabric, and the love of hearthside and brood becomes exalted into . . . civic passion” (Nivedita, 1915, pp. 2–3). The second type of empire – that of the Arabs – witnessed a similar rise of civic consciousness that was filial consciousness transmuted and transformed. Nivedita hailed Mohammed, the Prophet of God as the greatest “nation-maker” of all times

“We must create a history of India” 121 (Nivedita, 1915, p. 3). She wrote that the earliest Arab associations were inwoven with the conception of the tribe as a civic unity, transcending the family as a unit of organization. Furthermore, the necessity of frontier-tribal relationships and courtesies necessarily involved the idea of national inclusiveness and created the basis for a national life. Now, what is the value of such observations for India, for Indian nationalism? Nivedita had written elsewhere: “The problem of the age, for India, as we have constantly insisted, is to supersede the family, as a motive, and even as a form of consciousness, by the civitas, the civic and national unity” (Nivedita, 1999, p. 221). In the case of the Arabs and the Europeans, the molding of individual character so as to lead to the formation of civic-national consciousness was produced “unsought, by [their] history and . . . environment” (Nivedita, 1915, p. 5). But these could serve as “examples of the educational value of tribal and pastoral life in preparing communities for the organisation of nations and empires” (Nivedita, 1915, p. 3). It is “social forms like those of tribe and crew and lion-hunt” that create character – that is, “men accustomed to combined action and sustained co-operation – men who know the grounds of their faith in one another, men who are familiar with certain outstanding principles of conduct, and constantly dominated by them” (Nivedita, 1915, p.  4). People with such character are in turn necessary for the creation of nations. Nivedita argued for a transposition of this learning for the cause of incipient Indian nationalism: “Even the results of a peculiar occupational education may be appropriated by others, through the intellect alone” (Nivedita, 1915, p.  4). She thus made use of the sociological knowledge acquired through “the Le PlayGeddes doctrine of the influence of place on Humanity” (Nivedita, 1999, p. 60) to exhort Indians to develop a civic-national consciousness replacing the narrow attachment to family ties.

Sequential history and the incipient future Nivedita wrote: We must create a history of India in living terms. . . . The history of India has yet to be written for the first time. It has to be humanised, emotionalised, made the trumpet-voice and evangel of the races that inhabit India. And to do this, it must be re-connected with place. Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, are the present view-points! . . . The history of India consists in truth of the strata of at least three thousand years. Ocean-bed and river-sands, forest and marsh, and ocean-floor again, lie piled one upon the other – and in each period some new point is centre. Ayodhya and Hastinapura, Indraprastha and Pataliputra, Ujjain and Delhi, Conjeeveram and Amaravati, what of the vanished worlds of which all these were born? (Nivedita, 1911, pp. 174–175)

122  Arpita Mitra This brings us to the issue of sequence of strata and the histories of cities. In one of her essays, Nivedita referred to a particular lecture by Geddes on sequences (related to the history of the city of Paris) which she had heard in New York in 1900: [Geddes] regarded the growth of the city as falling into historical strata, as it were, which afterward remained piled one upon another, in a mingling of real sequence and apparent confusion. The lecture was illustrated by a blackboard drawing of a sort of lotus, divided into numbered whorls and Paris was shown to include (a) an ancient, (b) a medieval and (c) a modern city. The last-named again, was . . . divided into (1) Revolution, (2) the Empire, (3) the Financial, and (4) the incipient Cities. It was, in fact, this last classification which I found so rich in suggestion. . . . The incipient City was necessarily left undescribed under these heads. For the incipient City will be always what we make it. (Nivedita, 1999, pp. 58–59) Geddes’s private papers for the year 1900 show us details of this theory: [H]ere I take a simple method of studying historical cities generally. Recall the actual geologic strata with their successive super-positions [superimpositions?]. Recall for a moment the growth of a river delta with its daily deposit of mud etc. The river brings down its daily load of fossils from the cities and from the woods, and buries these one below the other – so that each new period is buried below another. In these old cities one of the points which must strike the visitor is the way in which the soil of the historic city is deep below the existing one, so that you walk down into churches instead of walking up . . . while in really ancient cities one has to dig through city after city – e.g. Troy – 7 cities with their separate past. (Geddes, 1900) For Nivedita, this served as a road map for understanding the historical web of Indian cities: [T]aught by the same semi-geological method, we may take up Indian Geography, and watch it fall into its proper sequence of strata. First, then, we may peel off Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. . . . Having done this we stand in an earlier epoch, of which Murshidabad, Poona and Amritsar may, perhaps, be regarded as the most characteristic names in Northern India. (Nivedita, 1999, p. 59) She herself tried to extricate these layered, web-like histories of cities in her essays on the Buddhist cities, tracing the rise and fall of cities, as one port of eminence gave way to another, the abbey of an age gave way to the university of

“We must create a history of India” 123 the next, and as an abbey developed in relation to a city of eminence and a state of patronage (Nivedita, 1915). At a more microcosmic level, this “most fruitful method of thought” (Nivedita, 1999, p. 59) could also be applied to the city of Calcutta: Here we have (1) the Hindu (2) the Mussalman (3) the British and (4) a possible, shall we say civic or nationalised city. In each of the three first we have a series of institutions and developments peculiar to it, and in the fourth, what we are pleased to create for it! (Nivedita, 1999, p. 59) The orientation toward changing the future through a scientific (sociologicalhistorical-geographical) study of the past and the present – and the belief that such a change is possible – is something that Geddes had imbibed from Comte, and Nivedita from both of them. Here, past–present–future itself forms a sequence. The method of Professor Geddes may, perhaps, be defined as one of the establishment of sequences. He solves a problem by showing how that problem came into being, and by what it will be succeeded. (Nivedita, 1999, p. 58) And she followed the method: “India, as she is,” wrote Nivedita, “is a problem which can only be read by the light of Indian history” (Nivedita, 1915, p. 6). Let us note that for Nivedita, the future was not a re-production of the past: The yet-to-be is as a vast unexplored territory of which we are charged to take possession. That age which is discovering nothing new, is already an age of incipient death. That philosophy which only recapitulates the known, is in fact a philosophy of ignorance. (Nivedita, 1982, p. 208) Nor was it to be an undoing of the past; it was to be an evolutionary extension (at once change and continuity) of the principle that guided the past pattern of life: The present is the wreckage of the past. India as she stands is only to be explained by the history of India. The future waits for us to create it out of the materials left us by the past, aided by our own understanding of this our inheritance. (Nivedita, 1915, p. 14) So, what was to be the nature of future India? [W]e might take up the history of India. How much more clearly we can think of it, in the light of such a method [of sequential strata]. First, then, the religious government of caste and Dharma [Hinduism]; second,

124  Arpita Mitra religious government through the influence of a religious order preaching the spiritual and intellectual equality of all castes [Buddhism]; thirdly, the military domination of still another religious idea, the fraternity of Islam; fourthly, the imposition of a great secularity [the British period] . . .; and, finally, the emergence of the India of the future, in whose cities the mutual relation of these various ideas may be expressed by placing temples, mosques, monasteries, and churches indiscriminately on the circumference of the circle, and Civic Hall, the National hearth, unraveled at the centre. (Nivedita, 1999, pp. 58–59) Her answer was: Synthesis.

India as an organic synthesis Geddes was particularly fond of the concept of synthesis which he used in a variety of contexts, and Nivedita drew heavily from this vision. In her letter dated 2 January 1903, she wrote to Anna Geddes: The History of India as an organic unity is slowly revealing itself to me. The future of India as Synthesis, the very heart of Asia – receiving and reconciling alike Mongolian, Arab, and Persian, Buddhist, Moslem, and Christian – is also dawning. One of our monks [Swami Sadananda], a Swami who travels with me is mad over this word ‘Synthesis’ – he loves it so much, and broods over it so deeply. I  cannot help thinking that here in the East Mr. Geddes would be understood in a way, and with a devotion he has never dreamt of. (Nivedita, 2015b, p. 499) And she wrote to Geddes himself on 20 January: I think perhaps the new age is to be dominated by this idea of synthesis [. . .]: It is not this thing or that thing that is not good – It is the all-together. I have seen this so clearly for India. Not one creed or another – not one race, or idea, or state, but the all of them. (Nivedita, 2015a, p. 473) In her seminal essay “The History of India and its Study,” Nivedita wrote: India is and always has been a synthesis. No amount of analysis – racial, lingual, or territorial – will ever amount in the sum to the study of India. . . . all the parts of a whole are not equal to the whole . . . apart from and above, all the fragments which must be added together to make India, we have to recognize India herself, all-containing, all-dominating, moulding and shaping the

“We must create a history of India” 125 destinies and the very nature of the elements out of which she is composed. The Indian people may be defective in the methods of mechanical organisation, but they have been lacking, as a people, in none of the essentials of organic synthesis. (Nivedita, 1915, p. 16) In one stroke, this position challenged a couple of historiographical premises. First, it challenged the argument of the British rulers that India is such a conglomeration of different languages, religions, customs, regional cultures, and so on that Indian nationhood is simply moonshine. Second, it differed from the historiography with a predominantly Hindu slant that argued about Indian history essentially in terms of a Hindu past. In other words, Nivedita advocated a historiography for India that would be able to capture the unity of life and thought in India; the civilizational idea that Indian stands for instead of a merely political one; and the synthesis of cultures that India represents. According to her, India is not merely a mechanical sum of her parts – such an entity would hardly be cohesive. The compound that is created out of the combination of these parts has distinctive traits of its own that makes it impossible for it to be reduced to a mere sum of the parts. The whole exhibits properties that are different from the individual properties of the parts that constitute the whole. While discussing some of the finest works on European history, Nivedita praised how the Western historians were able to bring out the connectedness of things. She wrote: In Indian History, such a point of view is conspicuous by its absence. Some writers are interested in Buddhist India (if indeed we have any right to employ such a term) and some in various stages of Mahratta or Sikh or Indo-Islamic History or what not. But who has caught the palpitation of the Indian heartbeat through one and all of these? (Nivedita, 1966, p. 103, emphasis in original) In other words, the new history of India cannot be a mere tabulation of disjointed histories; it should be able to shed light on the inner movements of the civilizational life; by connecting the part to the whole, it should enable the reader to catch a glimpse of India in the midst of diversity. It was precisely for this reason that she particularly valued the historical works of Romesh Chunder Dutt, who, in her opinion, had succeeded to a great extent in discovering “the Indian mind, as revealed in ancient history and literature” (Nivedita, 1999, p. 262, emphasis in original). Geddes insisted on “the need of a historical outline” (Geddes, 1900), the simplest and briefest of which he would prefer to the most intimate knowledge of the period. He equally insisted that history had lost half its value because of

126  Arpita Mitra over-specialization, “so that to know the history of our own country, of our own nation at some particular period, as that of the French Revolution or the American Revolution, is to get an organized misunderstanding of life and the general stream of history” (Geddes, 1900). For Geddes, such an historical outline served the same purpose as a map: “Just as one can only explain the way from one town to another, from one place to another, from a map, so all discussion of history ends in confusion without a similar and corresponding precision – the same graphic notation of things” (Geddes, 1900). And according to him, “the specialist studies have shut off a portion of the map” (Geddes, 1900). It is evident how Nivedita wanted such a map, a graphic notation of processes and developments, for the Indian past as a whole. An important question in this context was the place of Islam in Indian society and in the making of Indian thought. On the basis of the concepts of sequence and synthesis, Nivedita viewed Islam as an important constitutive element of the Indian national identity. First, she saw Islam as a transition between Hindu culture and occidental civilization: From one point of view, Islam represents a transition between Asia and Europe. An Asiatic people takes on the consolidation, the mobility, and the militarism of a European State. It anticipates the West in so doing by many a century . . . and yet, inasmuch as it does all this in the strength of an idea, inasmuch as its sanction lies in one man’s superconscious inspiration, it remains at heart profoundly Asiatic. (Nivedita, 1950, p. 253) She discussed uncomfortable questions such as so-called Islamic intolerance, cow killing, Hindu icon worship, and so on. She remarked: But indeed the intolerance of Mohammedanism itself has been grossly exaggerated by Christian observers, who seem curiously incompetent to grasp the secret of an Eastern attitude. This intolerance could never, for instance, be compared with that of the Roman Church. (Nivedita, 1950, p. 158) She explained the zeal of the followers of Mohammed in terms of their social and political circumstances. She analyzed the interactions between Hinduism and Islam and pointed out moments of synthesis and points of commonality. In her opinion (and she substantiated it with examples), the sharp differentiation between Hindu and Muslim social groups was of modern growth and owed its origin to “that false interpretation which reads the history of India as an account of the struggle between the two ideas” (Nivedita, 1950, p. 157).

“We must create a history of India” 127 More importantly, Nivedita pointed out that as one reached the higher phases of both Hinduism and Islam, a different perspective emerged. Of that plane of comparison, she wrote: [T]he more completely either is realized, the more perfectly is it fused in the other. Sufism leads the soul by love, and the Vedanta leads it by knowledge, love, or emancipated motive, as the case may be; but for both alike the theme is of a common goal, where all sense of difference shall cease, and the small Self be swallowed up in the universal. (Nivedita, 1950, p. 161) She considered the Sufi ideal of oneness to be practically identical with the ideal of Hindu Vedantism. She concluded: Mohammed, Krishna, Buddha, Shankaracharya, are not so many deplorable obstacles in each other’s paths, but rather widely separated examples of a common type – the radiant Asiatic personage, whose conception of nationality lies in a national righteousness, and whose right to be a leader of men rests on the fact that he has seen God face to face. (Nivedita, 1950, pp. 161–162) Nivedita discussed the place of Islam in the making of the Indian nation. Among the Muslim rulers, she identified Akbar and Shah Jehan as makers of the Indian nation, as it was during their reign, guided by their vision and prowess, that the subcontinent acquired great territorial unity and came under rule by a single dynasty. While acknowledging that it was not absolutely easy to absorb Islam, she said that it was in fact the final absorption of Islam within Indian society that enabled India to emerge as a nation. She wrote: We have seen then, that it is certainly a mistake to read the history of India at any time as the account of a struggle between Hindu and Mohammedan thought, though it is a mistake which is perhaps inseparable from the European conception of the influence of faith on politics. But it cannot, on the hand, be too clearly understood that the problem which the Indian idea has had to face, during the period between Shankaracharya and the nineteenth century, was the inclusion of the Mohammedan element in a completed nationality. From the nineteenth century onwards, it becomes the realisation of that single united nationality, amidst the vast complexity which has been the growth of ages. (Nivedita, 1950, p. 187, emphasis in original) Nivedita’s idea of the Indian nation was inclusive: A nation, a country, is no narrow or limited unit! It has room, and to spare, for all to which it can offer love! The Mohammedan’s gain is not the Hindu’s

128  Arpita Mitra loss, but quite the reverse. The Hindu needs the Mohammedan: the Mohammedan needs the Hindu, if there is to be an Indian nation. (Nivedita, 1982, p. 291, emphasis in original) No wonder, in September 1903, she was invited by several Muslim groups in north India and she was happy to address such Muslim audiences (Reymond, 1953, p. 300). Nivedita’s curious location on the spectrum – at once within and outside the Indian and the Hindu fold – is of import. Being a foreigner complicated the issue. She herself was the evidence that India was “all-containing” (Nivedita, 1915, p.  16), “receiving and reconciling alike” (Nivedita, 2015b, p.  499) all kinds of cultural influences, born on the Indian soil or elsewhere. On the other hand, she ran the risk of being alienated by the British (she was, in fact, called a traitor to her race by the English daily, The Englishman; during her last days, she was under strict British surveillance, which even made her write her letters in coded language) as well as by the narrow-minded Hindus, whose religion she had nonetheless embraced lovingly. But she tilted neither this way nor that, and presented an idea of India that was synthetic and inclusive. Nivedita’s identification with the fiery character Gora from Tagore’s novel,4 an over-zealous defender of everything Hindu, too often obfuscates this inclusive aspect of her thought and her nationalist ideas about India as a civic-national entity. Her appropriation of the Geddesian concept of synthesis to explain the basis of Indian nationhood made her historiography of India a departure in many ways. She addressed the imperialist critique of Indian nationalism by showing that India was an organic synthesis and not a congeries of many nations. Second, in contrast to the tendency to read Indian history as an account of the struggle between Hindus and Muslims, she did not otherize the Muslim in Indian history, nor did she hold Islamic rule responsible for the decadence of Hindu society. On the contrary, she was trying to show how the absorption of Islam within Indian society completed the process of Indian synthesis and led to the creation of the Indian nation. Her conclusion was: “At last, then, Indian thought stands revealed in its entirety – no sect, but a synthesis; no church, but a university of spiritual culture – as an idea of individual freedom, amongst the most complete that the world knows” (Nivedita, 1950, p. 186).

Place and synthesis Amiya Sen takes note of Nivedita’s “persistent desire to disseminate the idea of a common nationality among Indians” (Sen, 2016, p. 21). According to him, “On several occasions . . . her speeches and writings naively overlook or brush aside internal divisions or differences . . . Nivedita deliberately underplayed the linguistic, cultural or political differences that were progressively escalating in contemporary India” (Sen, 2016, p. 21) Sen writes further: [T]here is a utopian sentiment that pervades all her thoughts and writings, a utopia that rested on a passionate, if at times, also sentimental and uncritical

“We must create a history of India” 129 attachment to India and Indians. What in contemporary parlance has come to be accepted as the ‘idea’ of India, might well have originated with Nivedita, but with certain trappings of superficiality. (Sen, 2016, p. 21) Incidentally, in 1917, in his Introduction to Nivedita’s The Web of Indian Life, Rabindranath Tagore had made an observation about Nivedita which addresses the kind of issue raised by Sen: It is a truism to say that shadows accompany light. What you feel as the truth of a people, has its numberless contradictions, just as the single fact of the roundness of the earth is contradicted by the innumerable facts of its hills and hollows. Facts can easily be arranged and heaped up into loads of contradiction; yet men having faith in the reality of ideals hold firmly that the vision of truth does not depend upon its dimension, but upon its vitality. (Nivedita, 1950, p. xii) While it is true that Nivedita’s vision was idealistic and utopian (without which no nationalism is ever possible in any case), it was not purely “sentimental” or superficial as Sen would like to argue. It had a sophisticated intellect working behind it, eager to validate knowledge by a combination of “feeling” as well as “scientific” methods. For instance, one would not miss her incisive remark: “Many persons use the word unity in a way that would seem to imply that the unity of a lobster, with its monotonous repetition of segments and limbs, was more perfect than that of the human body, which is not even alike on its right and left sides” (Nivedita, 1982, p.  269). An attempt at sociological and historical explanations behind what she saw as Indian unity was not wanting in the least. The complementarity of history and geography had been widely appreciated in Europe since the Enlightenment. Nivedita remarked: “History must be viewed geographically and geography historically” (Nivedita, 1966, p.  59). She found geography to be a great tool in understanding the historical evolution of India as a unified civilization. This is where place and synthesis come together. If it is true that “miracles of human unification are the work of Place” and that man “only begins by making his home” and his home ends by “remaking him” (Nivedita, 1982, pp. 263–264), then this has certainly happened in the case of India according to her. She noted that India undeniably possessed to an extraordinary degree the first treasure of a nation – “geographical distinctness.” Speaking about the fundamental laws of nation-birth, she pointed out: Any country which is geographically distinct, has the power to become the cradle of a nationality. National unity is dependent upon place.  .  .  . Complexity of elements, when duly subordinated to the nationalizing influence of place, is a source of strength, and not weakness to a nation. (Nivedita, 1982, p. 264)

130  Arpita Mitra She wrote extensively on factors that laid the basis of national unity. According to her, India’s geography has played a key role in unifying India. She pointed out that pilgrimage circuits and travel routes that have been active in India since very early times, joining the north and the south, have contributed to Indian unity. She further asserted that the revered char dhams of Puri, Badrinath, Dwarka, and Rameswaram dotting the four corners of the land by themselves demonstrate the fact of Indian unity. The epics are also testimony to the connectedness of the geographical landscape of the land. The pre-modern political empires have played an equally important role in bringing about the territorial unity of the country. B. D. Chattopadhyaya is not wrong in noting that R. K. Mookerji’s The Fundamental Unity of India (1914) is one of the earliest historical statements of the idea of Indian unity (Chattopadhyaya, 2017). And it should be noted that this book, in which Mookerji deals with the geographical basis of the unity of India, bears a clear imprint of Nivedita’s influence. Mookerji discusses whether India can be called a single country; he refers to the problem of the whole and the parts; he discusses the term Bharatavarsha as the first articulation of Indian unity; he also examines the reference in the Vedic and later Sanskrit literature to the geography of the land, he writes about the network of shrines and pilgrimages all over the country; and so on (Mookerji, 1914). In 1906, Nivedita had written a letter to Mookerji in which she delineated the path Indian historians should take to uncover the true history of the land (Basu, 2017, p.  74). This portion of the letter was published separately as the article “A Note on Historical Research” (Nivedita, 1966, pp. 96–108). In this Note, she mentioned the need for India’s assimilation of the modern spirit of Geography. She also wrote about the need to adopt the synthetic approach to understanding Indian identity: In Indian History, such a point of view [of the connectedness of the treatment of each life with others] is conspicuous by its absence. Some writers are interested in Buddhist India . . . and some in various stages of Mahratta or Sikh or Indo-Islamic History or what not. But who has caught the palpitation of the Indian heart-beat through one and all of these? It is India that makes Indian history glorious. It is India that makes the whole joy of the Indian places. (Nivedita, 1966, p. 103, emphasis in original) In conclusion, it can be said that in Nivedita one can see a grappling, back and forth, between East and West, ancient and modern, Hindu and non-Hindu. One would be quick to notice an apparent contradiction – on the one hand, she talked about the need of getting at “the Indian idea of India” (Nivedita, 1915, p. 170), and on the other, many of the methods she proposed to get there were drawn from contemporaneous European sociological thought. Nivedita, in fact, mentioned that the discipline of History itself is something that India needs to assimilate from modernity (Nivedita, 1966, p. 99). I do not know if Nivedita herself noticed this, and even if she did, if she considered it contradictory at all, because she was quite

“We must create a history of India” 131 clear in her mind – and mentioned it several times – that the future India would be an India of assimilation, of synthesis – a synthesis of East and West, Indian and foreign, pre-modern and modern, a synthesis of Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and much more. “The tale of her own past that the Motherland awaits,” she wrote, “must combine the critical acumen of the modern, with the epic enthusiasm of the ancient writer. . . . It must not only be critical, but also fiery, proud, constructive” (Nivedita, 1982, p. 311).

Notes 1 This is a revised version of the paper titled “ ‘The History of India Has Yet to be Written for the First Time’: Sister Nivedita and the Writing of Indian History” presented at the National Seminar Writing India: Revisiting Historiographies, Ideology and Genre organized by the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi from 16 to 17 January 2017. I am extremely grateful to the University of Strathclyde Archives, Glasgow, which holds the collection of Sir Patrick Geddes Papers, for quickly processing my request for a document that reached me just on time. 2 I have not come across any work that deals with her writings related to Indian history in depth or even apprehends its importance remotely. While Amiya Sen (2016) in his recent compilation of Sister Nivedita’s works acknowledges her prolific study and writings on Indian history and culture and her extensive travels in India for acquiring firsthand knowledge in this regard, he does not delve deeper into the various dimensions of her writings on Indian history. 3 Geddes’s biographer Philip Boardman (1978) mentions Geddes’s meeting and interactions with Nivedita. Hellen Meller (1990) discusses briefly Geddes’s socio-biological approach and Nivedita’s book The Web of Indian Life. Sofia Leonard’s (2015) essay, mapping Geddes’s travels, interactions, and influence in America, Europe, India, and Palestine, unfortunately does not mention Sister Nivedita. Swami Narasimhananda (2014) narrates the story of their meeting and collaboration – this is the first full-fledged account of their relationship that I know of (I am grateful to him for drawing my attention to the Nivedita–Geddes connection in the first place and for prodding me to explore further). Amiya Sen (2016) mentions Geddes, but nowhere refers to his influence, which, as I shall show, was enormous. I have dealt at some length with the Geddes–Nivedita connection in terms of his influence on her historical works in a different article (Mitra, 2017); the present chapter is an effort at expanding the ideas that were discussed in this article. Murdo Macdonald (2017) too explores the Geddes–Nivedita connection in some depth, but his focus is more on the domain of art. 4 The character of Gora was undoubtedly modeled on Nivedita. She was aware of this and had discussions with Tagore regarding the plot. But the novel was published thirteen years after Nivedita’s death– which means that we do not know for sure what Tagore might have changed since the time of his interactions with the Sister. See Reymond, 1953, pp. 174–75.

References Basu, S. P. (Ed.). (2017). Letters of Sister Nivedita (Vol. 2). Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Boardman, P. (1978). The worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, town planner, re-educator, peace-warrior. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Chattopadhyaya, B. D. (2017). The concept of Bharatvarsha and other essays. New Delhi: Permanent Black.

132  Arpita Mitra Geddes, P. (1900, May  14–15). Lecture notes on the synthetic approach to study, especially history (Patrick Geddes Papers, No. T-GED/6/2/1), University of Strathclyde Archives & Special Collections, Glasgow. Geddes, P. (1949). Cities in evolution. London: Williams & Norgate. Hamel, J., Dufour, S., & Fortin, D. (1993). Case study methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Leonard, S. (2015). Finding Geddes abroad. In W. Stephen (Ed.), Think global, act local: The life and legacy of Patrick Geddes (pp. 50–69). Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited. Macdonald, M. (2017). Finding Nivedita from a Scottish point of view. Prabuddha Bharata, special issue ‘Sister Nivedita: Offered to India’, 122(1), 161–167. Maclean, K. (2015). Patrick Geddes: Regional survey and education. In W. Stephen (Ed.), Think global, act local: The life and legacy of Patrick Geddes. Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited. Majumdar, R. C., & Altekar, A. S. (Eds.). (1946). A new history of the Indian people (Vol. 6). Lahore: Motilal Banarsidass. Meller, H. (1990). Patrick Geddes: Social evolutionist and city planner. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Mitra, A. (2017). An education for India: In the footsteps of Sister Nivedita. Prabuddha Bharata, special issue ‘Sister Nivedita: Offered to India,’ 122(1), 235–253. Mookerji, R. (1914). The fundamental unity of India. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Narasimhananda, S. (2014). Sister Nivedita, the dedicated. In W. Stephen (Ed.), Learning from the lasses: Women of the Patrick Geddes circle (pp. 201–217). Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited. Nivedita, S. (1911). Select essays of Sister Nivedita. Madras: Ganesh & Co. Nivedita, S. (1915). Footfalls of Indian history. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Nivedita, S. (1950). The web of Indian life. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Nivedita, S. (1966). Hints on national education in India. Kolkata: Udbodhan. Nivedita, S. (1982). Complete works of Sister Nivedita (Vol. 4). Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Nivedita, S. (1999). Complete works of Sister Nivedita (Vol. 5). Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Nivedita, S. (2015a). Unpublished letters of Sister Nivedita to Sir Patrick Geddes. Prabuddha Bharata, 120(7), 468–476. Nivedita, S. (2015b). Unpublished letters of Sister Nivedita to Anna Geddes. Prabuddha Bharata, 120(8), 497–501. Reymond, L. (1953). The dedicated: A biography of Nivedita. New York, NY: The John Day Company. Sen, A. P. (Ed.). (2016). An idealist in India: Selected writings and speeches of Sister Nivedita. New Delhi: Primus Books.

Part 3

Writing history and engaging with peripheral genres

8 Cassetted emotions Intimate songs and marital conflicts in the age of pravasi (1970–1990) P. K. Yasser Arafath Academic research on the history of early pravasi (migrants’) emotions of the Keralite diaspora in the Gulf area demonstrates a significant dearth even though scholars in this field argue that almost every family in Kerala has been affected by migration to Gulf countries in many ways (Rajan, 2004, p. 500). This chapter explores how the Mappilas – Muslims of Malabar – registered their internal and external social tensions and moral anxieties in the first three decades of the Gulf migration, beginning with the late 1970s. As social anthropologists of Gulf migration locate it, the gulfan/pravasi Mappila men lived simultaneously “inside and outside cultures and societies” (Osella  & Osella, 2000, pp.  117–119), like any other diasporic population. Thus, Following Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of what constitutes an “archive” (Foucault, 2002), this chapter tries to locate a particular postcolonial Islamicate poetic genre in Malabar – Kathupattukal – as an archive of Mappila migrants’ marital emotions and discourse. By using this unexplored archive, this study tries to fill a gap in the existing South Asian diaspora scholarship that largely focuses on social mobility and demographic displacements. Also by focusing on the cultural history of this migration and exploring the role of the poetic genre of Kathupattukal as a site of such a study, this chapter seeks to explore an alternate form of historiography. The Kathupattukal (letter songs), a new Islamicate poetic genre in Malayalam, emerged from the existing Mappilappattu tradition. They can be considered as a significant archive of Mappila emotions that evolved out of the social and moral premise of diasporic Mappila households in the mid-1970s. According to N.P. Muhammed, a major literary figure in Kerala, the emergence of Kathupattukal can also be located in the widespread unemployment and poverty that the state of Kerala witnessed in the 1970s, apart from the emotional stress and moral anxieties that the Gulf migrations caused in the region from the middle of this decade (Muhammed, 2010). Discovered by Sayyed Muhammed Abdul Jameel, also known as S.A. Jameel (d. 2011), the genre of Kathupattu gives us songs initially sung by male singers, the first being Jameel himself in the age of pravasi, as Muslim women were not allowed to sing them in public. In 1977, Jameel presented the Dubaikkatthu (Dubai letter), as an emotional outburst of Muslim women from pravasi houses as their husbands

136  P. K. Yasser Arafath migrated to the Gulf in pursuit of remittance in the new economy of oil. Being a marital counselor and letter-writing scribe, Jameel was quite familiar with the everyday emotional trauma of “Gulf wives” – the wives of pravasi husbands – in the region of Malabar.1 In the late 1970s, a large number of Mappila men from distressed agrarian/ coastal villages migrated to different Gulf countries where Islamic theocratic state systems began to reshape themselves around the new economic possibilities, emerged from the oil boom. However, such large-scale migration to the Gulf region created a number of emotional and biological issues. Scholars of Gulf migration locate how separation-based loneliness and trauma became one of the major psychotic issues among the “Gulf-wives” in Kerala, as they were unprepared to handle the situations of anxieties that emerged from the long absences of their husbands (Zachariah, Mathew, & Rajan, 2003, p. 329). Jameel lived in the Muslim majority Malappuram district “where one out of two households had an emigrant in 1998” (Rajan, 2004, p. 501). Written in 1977, his Dubaikkatthu, presented the innate tensions and fears of loneliness among the “Gulf wives” in Malabar, and Jameel became an iconic singer in the region by the early 1980s (Elettil, 2010). Jameel’s lyrical design seems to have been influenced by the complex poetic invention of Pulikkottil Hyder (1879–1970) who inaugurated the genre of “letter song” in the Mariyakutti Kathu, in Arabi-Malayalam, responding to the political and social conditions in Malabar in the age of Empire (Hyder, 2005). This pre-pravasi letter song described the pain of a newly married tharavadi (elite) Mappila woman whose husband Hasan was imprisoned in the Ballari jail, a Panopticon-like structure in colonial Karnataka, for fighting the British in the early 1900s (Hyder, 2005). However, this polyglossic katthupattu, laced with Tamil, Malayalam, and Arabic words, was not intended to cater to the emotional need of a particular target audience. Despite this fact, Kathupattus, engaging with specific incidents like imprisonment, continued to be popular in the early twentieth century and Puthur Amina gave a gender twist to this genre in her Kathukurippattu, written in Arabi-Malayalam. According to the available sources, Puthur Amina can be considered as the first Mappila woman Kathupattu writer who took up the genre for a very specific personal purpose in the early 1920s (Arafath, 2017). However, the writers of postcolonial Kathupattukal seem to be more adept at the standardized Malayalam vocabulary and wrote for a specific group of Malayali audience. As the attractions toward the Gulf increased in the mid-1970s, a significant number of Mappila men turned out to be, what can be termed, “absentee husbands” and “absentee fathers,” and Katthupattukal became the immediate consolation of spousal emotions in pravasi locations.2 Jameel’s lyrical subversion in Dubaikkatthu was a clear and conscious effort to make a careful conversation between the absentee husbands and their isolated wives in the Gulf and Malabar respectively. He was quite familiar with the psychotic and emotional tensions among the “Gulf wives” in pravasi villages of Malabar and this song stemmed from his close experiences and knowledge about these tensions (Jameel, 2010).

Cassetted emotions 137 The issues of sentimental alienation that the Gulf wives confided in him were registered in this song and the female protagonist this song says: Madhuvidhu nalukal manassil thalirkkunnu Madanakkinavukal marodanakkunnu Malarmani rathrikal manjil kulikkunnu Maniyarakkattilo madivilikkunnu Engine janurangum Kidannalum Engine urakkam varum [Honeymoon times still sprout in my heart Keeping those sweetened dreams close to my chest Beautiful nights are wrapped in the mist And, our nuptial bed still calls me out loud How will I sleep? How can sleep come to me, even if I lie down? Even if I sleep, those honey-dripping dreams Do break my sleep and I wake And I begin to embrace the pillow]3 Subsequently, the “Gulf wife” talks about her husband’s short visits to his home and reminds him of the son he had with her sometime back. Her husband did not see this child as he had to return to the Gulf when she was pregnant.4 Now, the child has started asking for the father and calls out to the father every now and then. For the Gulf wife, the protagonist in the song, their bedroom turned into a prison, the bed became a catacomb of unfilled sweet dreams, the ocean the husband crossed became sour, and she lost herself in the middle of this deep ocean. She swims in this ocean without seeing the shores, searching for her husband who went missing for long. As a dutiful and religious wife who adheres to Islamic principles of sexual norms, she promises him that her body would not be gifted to anyone who approached her. But, she also cautioned him about her sexual and physical vulnerabilities and reminded him that she was not an angel but a “mere woman.” According to T.K. Hamsa, a Muslim literary scholar, this part of the song could steal sleep away from pravasi Mappila men who seemed to have considered long absences as a normal condition in marital relations (Hamsa, 2010). In the end of the Dubaikkathu, the female protagonist asks an important question: “What is the meaning of ‘money’ if you can’t enjoy it?” Faisal to Elettil, a prominent Mappilappattu singer and lyricist, this particular question hit the pravasi husbands very hard (2010). And she tells the husband that dying after seeing him became the only possible consolation for the long separation and pain she underwent. As the Gulf migration created significant psychosomatic disturbances within and outside of Kerala (Kurien, 2002, p. 72; Kellas, 2013) spousal loneliness emerged as the most important of their problems for a long period. Even though close family members and relatives experienced severe mental trauma and distress, it was

138  P. K. Yasser Arafath always the Gulf wives who showed intense psychosomatic complaints, labeled as “Gulf syndrome” (Kurien, 2002). Thus, like most of the diasporic poetic literatures, Jameels’s Dubaikkatthu reflected on love, separation, marital re-union, and the issues related to children and they seem to have registered the experiences he had with the Gulf wives who visited him for treatments in the 1970s (Jameel, 2010). For the Gulf wives in the post-matrilineal/matri-local Malabar, living in the husband’s house in their absence now emerged as a double pain, particularly when there was no guarantee of their husbands’, as scholars pointed out in other contexts (Myers, 1998). Similarly, the health and behavior of their children began to be affected due to the long absence of their pravasi fathers and many cases of delinquency and alcoholism were reported across the region, irrespective of the communities from the mid-1980s (Nair, 1986; Gardner, 2010). Written in the wake of his Abu Dhabi visit in 1977, Jameel attracted a huge crowd of Mappila pravasi laborers and others, and the song became a huge recitational hit in the Gulf. He was forced to sing it repeatedly at various social gatherings. The musical orchestra, led by Jameel himself, however, shocked the contained emotional sphere of Mappila public both in Kerala and the Middle East, subsequently. It asked pravasi husbands to consider the vows and contracts of their marriage above the labor contracts that they signed for, what can be termed, the petro-theocratic regimes in the Gulf. Dubaikkatthu, thus, challenged and disturbed the Mappila sense of organic marital relation between husbands and wives as it is found in the conventional Islamic theology. Therefore, this song embarrassed a significant section of traditional Muslim scholars who disapproved of the moral content and “sexual innuendo” in the song (Jameel, 2010). In some places, not only ordinary housewives were dissuaded from singing and listening to this song but professional singers like Vilayil Fazila were targeted by the male audience for “hurting” their pride and marital security.5 Many pravasi Mappilas considered the Dubaikkatthu as “scandal song” which simultaneously thrilled, displeased, and warned Muslim families in Malabar. As S.A. Jameel first sang this song, the majority of pravasi audience responded with appreciation and broken sentiments, and the song emerged as a direct channel of communication between pravasi husbands and their Gulf wives in Kerala. According to T.K. Hamsa, thousands of Gulf wives in Kerala considered the singer-lyricist as a genuine communicator of their emotional trauma and believed that he spoke on their behalf (2010). The retired pravasi men I interviewed could recall how pravasi husbands in Gulf countries transformed like the “accused” husband in the song, wiping their tears, crying silently, smoking, and walking aimlessly in the workers’ quarters in the heat of 1977. Many of them would repeatedly say ya-allah (Oh God), venting out their exasperation, “as if they were possessed by the protagonist” in the song. According to C.P. Alikkuty, a pravasi who migrated to the Gulf in 1975 and retired in 2004, a number of such heartbroken pravasi husbands returned to Kerala in 1977 itself before the expiry of their visas for not being able to sustain the pain and separation of the life in the Gulf.6 By Jameel’s own admission, a large number of pravasi husbands from various places such as Kannur, Telicherry, and Chavakkadu returned home immediately after hearing this song (2010). According to Aziz Tharuvana, a well-known

Cassetted emotions 139 Malayalam scholar and writer, many among the early pravasis whom he encountered had memories of their friends who returned home due to the emotional pain that the Dubaikkatthu caused.7 As a matter of fact, only a handful among the early pravasis was in the material and financial position to support their wives and children in the early decades of the Gulf migration. The extensive social, economical, and emotional effects of this song seem to have surpassed the impact of the Gloomy Sunday, “The Hungarian suicide song,” composed by Rezso Seress, the Hungarian pianist and composer, in 1932. However, many emotionally drained pravasi husbands decided to remain in the Gulf as the employment and economic situations in Kerala were uninspiring due to the political instability and the famines of 1970s. But, the pravasi husbands with deep determination were not less in number. Known as mari (steadfast men), they often said that “kathupattu namme thalarthilla, name tholpikkilla” (the letter song will not drain us, they cannot defeat us) and decided to stay on in the Gulf for decades.8 Interestingly, even though the main target of the Dubaikkathu was the absentee husbands in the region of Gulf, it became quite popular among the Mappila migrants and small-scale entrepreneurs in Indian metropolis such as Bombay, Madras, and Bangalore during the same period. As a result, many of these translocal migrants also headed back home to be with their wives and children, while a small and affluent section of them relocated their families in these towns. According to Jameel’s close associates, there were protests against this song in Malabar as it spread, and married men started developing marital anxieties for leaving their wives at their houses in their absence (Kottakkal, 2010). However, a large number of Gulf wives sent private letters to the lyricist-singer in whom they apparently found a communicator and therapist of their worries (Jameel, 2010). After spending eight months in the Gulf on his first visit, Jameel established close contacts with the pravasi Mappilas and saw their conditions in labor camps and outside. His experiences and conversations with pravasi husbands resulted in the composition of the Marupadikkatthu (response letter), the second song in the series and a poetic counter to his own earlier song, the Dubaikkatthu (Jameel, 2010). This song was written on behalf of the exhausted husbands. Jameel presented the pravasi husband as a heartbroken and helpless person who got shattered after hearing the Dubaikkatthu. He is depressed, pained, and unable to respond to the questions raised by his wife. For him, the wife’s words in the Dubaikkathu are like sharp arrows that hit like axes, shattering his heart and soul beyond repair (Jameel, 2010, pp. 85–86). However, the husband is very considerate toward the physical and emotional vulnerabilities of the wife and shows understanding about the possibilities of her sexual transgressions although he admits them with a strong patriarchal caveat that he has been the provider of her new prosperity, status, and comfort. According to Jameel, That husband with no knowledge of wife’s needs, Stupid, he is the reason of her sins Opportunity is the mother of needs

140  P. K. Yasser Arafath The one who gives it a space, Alas! He is the leader of idiots! Are you not listening?! Are we not seeing?!(my translation) Here the lyricist seems to consider himself as the exhausted and belligerent husband, informed by sexual transgressions and moral deteriorations around him. He tries to warn the absentee husbands among the pravasis that their physical absence, emotional silence, and sensual remoteness would create a conduit for their wives to take part in the acts of avihitam (sexual transgressions), as it happened everywhere time and again. Without specifically mentioning them in detail, Jameel seems to evoke here the incidents of sexual digression around him – real, fictional, and possible in the past, present, and future. K.E.N. Kunjammad argues that such verses in these songs clearly reveal the deep crisis in Jameel’s masculine self and partisan worldview, which keeps the onus of maintaining the stability of the family and its moral and sexual boundaries solely on women when men who struggle for family’s prosperity are away (2010). An inter-textual analysis of Jameel’s works that include songs like Gulfukarante Bharya (The Wife of Pravasi) shows an embedded misogynist self of the lyricist-singer. Some of his songs show no restraint about denigrating women using derogatory expressions such as halak (undesirable), keerappazhanchakku (rotten old sack), and Ibleesinte kayar (rope of the wicked devil) (Elettil, 2010). In the Marupadikkathu, the lyricist-singer cautioned the husbands about taking the responsibility of keeping their wives under the normative framework of religion and community life in the region. They seem to do so without realizing the fact that they are the reason for their wives’ transgressions which result from the husband’s long absence from the family. Jameel located such sexual tensions within a particular theory which considers “opportunity is the mother of necessity,” suggesting that their absence creates the “chances” for the wives for the acts of avihitham and dishonesty (Jameel, 2010, p. 86). The male protagonist in the Marupadikkatthu is apparently shocked by the expression: “women are no angels” and the husband shows how his masculine and moral confidence took a beat. He felt them as they were coming toward him from a double-barren gun, hitting deep in the heart and making sharp wounds in the soul. He faces the wife and says, “Women are no angel,” such a hitting sound it is It shoots me like a double-barren gun Aiming at the men with self-pride Alas! Who can answer that expression! It shatters Our masculinity drifts away It shatters, our masculinity drifts away It trembles the mountains of wealth, Shivering deep and wide.

Cassetted emotions 141 Subsequently, the husband promises an immediate return to his home to meet his wife to avoid the imminent marital destruction and sexual explosion. He wants to meet his “son” and get back to his maniyara (bed chamber) with his wife. In the Marupadikkatthu, Jameel uses a range of emotional tropes that include pain, separation, shock, anxiety, female transgression, adultery, wives’ needs, defeated masculinity, wasted youth, death, and rumors (2010). S.A. Jameel’s lyrical designs in the Kathupattukal show certain close resemblance with the Burmmapattu, probably the first postcolonial Islamicate diasporic song in Malayalam which was based on the history of Mappila’s southeastern migration in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The male protagonist in the song says, [I reached Burma one day, Trapped in the busy road of a crowded bazar And you listen to the story, How I was solicited by a beautiful woman] Here the male protagonist, who appears to be a well-established pravasi in Singapore, owning a palatial house (ettuthattulla pura) and a dredger ship (mannumanthi kappal), talks about the “sexual trap” he experienced in one of the busy towns in Burma, present day Myanmar. In an ethnophaulistic verse, he claims to have lived in the palatial house with his son and wife who has chappiya mookk (squeezed nose), a clear pejorative which indicates her ethnic origin. The husband, who has now returned to Kerala after the “War,” had earlier encountered a beautiful woman who solicited him on a Burmese street. However, he was not lured completely and was able to escape from this extraordinarily beautiful (bahumonchati) Chinese-speaking prostitute who wore silk frocks (silkinte kamees) and bangles (tharivala). Now, he lives in poverty (Faqir) after the War, like thousands of other early pravasis who returned from southeastern countries during World War II. Contemporary documents show that, in the early 1930s, before World War II, there were about ten thousand Kakka (Mappila Muslims) in Rangoon/ Burma region alone, who had migrated predominantly from the region of Malabar (Chakravarthi, 1971). Clearly indicating the height of eastern trafficking and spread of sex workers in southeastern countries between the 1920s and 1930s, the Mappila protagonist/poet expresses his moral anxieties about the early Mappila pravasi locations like Burma (Barry, 1995). A large number of sex workers from different parts of southeast Asia thronged to these places that were prosperous with migrant laborers before the World War II. Eastern countries like Burma were known for their expanding economy based on food and fuel exportation (Steinberg, 2001). The sexual tensions and social situations in these regions during the colonial period were also captured by George Orwell in his Burmese Day (2009) which talks about how such women were considered as a “problem” by the elites, the British, and the Burmese. Talking about Mandalay, a Burmese town with such trafficked women and migrants, Orwell painted it as “a disagreeable town – it is dusty and

142  P. K. Yasser Arafath intolerably hot, and it is said to have five main products all beginning with P, namely, pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests, and prostitutes” (Orwell, 2009, p. 253).

Panasonic revolution and sexual anxieties The emergence of diasporic letter songs corresponded with the widespread popularity of the National Panasonic radios and tape recorders, manufactured by Matshushita, the Japanese electronics giant in the 1970s. Their tape recorders became a major commercial success across the world and the Gulf region was not different (“End of a Dream,” 1977). As an ethnically bound migrant community, Mappila pravasis became the major buyers of the National Panasonic stereos and cassettes for recording their voices and playing letter songs. From the earliest known illegal migration to the Gulf somewhere in mid 1950s (“A fifty year old phenomenon explained,” 2015) to the largely legal pravasi period in the late the 1970s, the expansive network of Panasonic and its equipment became an embedded part of pravasi fetish in the early decades of the Gulf migration (“A fifty year old phenomenon explained,” 2015). Along with other two essential items of luggage – Dunlopillo foam mattresses and washing machines – Malayali pravasis were obsessed with Panasonic stereo-recorders. A.T. Yusuf Ali, who returned from the Gulf in the late 1990s remembers how he saw the early Mappila pravasis in his village in Malappuram district sitting at local tea shops and religious gatherings, showing their newly acquired economic and material mobility in the mid-1980s.9 As a matter of fact, Islamic public in the late 1970s was already influenced by cassette sermons that shaped the religious and social structure of Muslims across the Arab world and Iran (Hirschkind, 2006). Familiar with the importance of cassettes in creating an auditory imagination of Islam, Mappila pravasis spread their wings across the Gulf region during the same period. The new techno-auditory experience of the National Panasonic resulted in, what can be termed, the “pravasi acoustics” which engaged with wife, husband, father, and child from Mappila households. This new acoustics of Mappila emotions in the Gulf and Malabar emerged as a new home place for the Mappilas in their everyday life. Along with the long traditions of handwritten letters, now pravasi spouses became the beneficiaries of the Panasonic revolution in the 1980s and this “new” techno-auditory device became useful to re-strategize their marital spaces and sexual norms. As the Panasonic recorders and cassettes that contained the early Kathupattukal like Dubaikkatthu were circulated extensively in the Gulf and Malabar, the behavioral patterns of the Mappila pravasi households were changed. These songs emerged as a major emotional instrument through which Mappila pravasi men and their Gulf wives tried to de-mundanize their everyday routine of labor and rest, respectively. Thus, a Japanese electronics giant, a new acoustic device, and a new lyrical reinvention, together, connected the Mappilas with their marital space, region, community, literati, and religion from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Scholars argue that new technological and media devices have, thus, become the conduits of migrant emotions and communications with their families and home regions that were technologically poor in comparison to their host countries. Such

Cassetted emotions 143 needs and desires to maintain the emotional and material relations with the family through a technological device can be understood as one of the reasons why Kerala evolved as one of the most technologically literate societies in India by the turn of the 1990. As the postcolonial Mappila literati continued to compose Kathupattukal in subsequent decades, pravasi men and their Gulf wives used them to keep their ties with the homeland and the Gulf respectively for reorganizing their marital space and sexual allegiance, an area of study that still remains overlooked completely in south Asian migration studies (Parveen, 2017). The letters and cassettes that contained Kathupattukal reinforced spousal commitments and marital integrity both in the petro-theocratic political economy in the Gulf and distressed Malabar interiors during the period in concern. Poyil Soopy, a pravasi who reached Qatar in 1978, said that he used to carry more than 70 to 80 handwritten letters in the initial years of his life as pravasi on his return to Gulf and he used to spend more than a month delivering cassettes and letters that were entrusted to him by pravasi husbands on his return to Kerala, each time.10 These cassettes and letters echoed the state of domestic tensions and labor anxieties in Malabar and the Middle East respectively. A number of pravasi returnees whom I met during the research remembered the gatherings they had around these cassettes, played in their old Panasonic stereo recorders. They also recollected the ways in which discussions around emotional turmoil and workplace anxieties were conducted when “returning home at will” was almost impossible in the 1980s. While the long waiting time for “letters” and the absence of “sound” in them took away the possibility of “real” communication, the cassettes containing these songs and spousal monologues reproduced the presence and voice of the other in the age of pravasi, like it happened with many diaspora/migrant communities across the world (Quayson & Daswani, 2013). As Roland Barthes indicated in a different literary context, one can argue that diasporic letter songs from Malabar established certain creditable exchange values in the late 1970s (Shell, 1978). New tensions about moral values grew around the new economy, and emotional disturbances emerged from new ideological and aspirational sensibilities in the Gulf and Malabar. As the petro-remittance became the greatest means of Mappila intercommunication in the early decades in the age of pravasi, the letters and cassettes evolved as the wisest medium of expressing marital emotions in private while Katthupattu musical orchestras remained major public expressions of their depression. Nafeesa, a Gulf wife, remembers the popularity of these songs in Malabar villages in the late 1980s, as they emerged as a popular poetic variety for literary competitions in school festivals. Such popularity came out of the fact that these cassettes and songs became “a righteous and invincible weapon” (Onyebadi, 2019, p. 25) for the Mappila pravasi spouses and the songs were designed to wake spouses up regarding their spousal responsibilities within the Islamic norms of marital duties. As the letters and cassettes remained the dominant communicative tools in the age of pravasis, Mappila households in Malabar and pravasis from Malabar across the Gulf region became familiar with a range of emotional categories such as

144  P. K. Yasser Arafath pirisham (love), sukham (wellbeing), vedana (pain), orma (remembrance), swapnam (dream), and ekanthatha (loneliness). The pillows (Talayana) in the bed chamber emerged as the protective shield of such emotions and a physical alternative for embracing and cuddling in the absence of spouses as indicated in kathu songs.11 Kathupattukal, thus, registered the new ways through which pravasi husbands and their Gulf wives negotiated with each other when marital absence became part of their everyday life in the age of pravasi. Similarly, the cassettes also represented the contrast between two different political economies in south Asia in which male and female characters are trapped differently. When marital separation became a reality and regular family interactions an impossibility, cassetted letter songs evolved like a marital therapy by itself. They invoked the unity of pravasi marital bodies. Thus, the Mappilas’ new techno-mediator, Kathupattu cassettes took the shape of human agency for de-freezing the emotionally stuck Mappila marital space in a trans-regional location in the late 1970s. The pravasi anxieties around sexuality seemed to have been fueled by the new sensibilities around intimacy and pleasure that many western protectorate states in the Gulf region began to experience. Female sex workers and designated brothels with female and male sex workers became very common sights in the petro-states like Bahrain, attracting a significant number of sex tourists from different Gulf countries. By the late 1970s, local sex workers were replaced by cross-border migrant sex workers and, subsequently, “cosmopolitan sex workers” (Chin, 2013) from Sri Lanka and Philippines. Sex workers’ network was strengthened by the huge inflow of Russian sex workers in the 1990s as many big towns in the Gulf were developed as global cities. Backed up by their petro-wealth, the local Arabs began to “transgress” the Islamic norms of sexual discipline, leading to new demands for female sex workers and a significant increase in “pimps” and “clients” (Garcia, Voss,& Meerkerk, 2017, pp. 257–258). Similarly, a significant number of Arabs became familiar with different sexual cultures and norms of sensuality in Europe and America in the early 1980s with the development of new visual-media culture and the spread of devices like VCDs. Therefore, it is justified to assume that the pravasi men were also introduced into a new world of sexual experiences, and their fantasies were subsequently enhanced as the Gulf regions evolved as major consumers of pornographic videos and American erotic channels in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, according to a number of pravasis I interviewed. The new sexual developments in the Gulf also corresponded with new erotic discourses in Kerala, heralded by the emergence of popular magazines and weeklies such as Mangalam and Manorama during the period under discussion (Jeffry, 1997). With their appellation as painkili sahityam (dirty literature), such Malayalam erotica periodicals enthralled their readers with intimate stories about extramarital affairs, adultery, romance, inter-caste/religion marriages, and a range of other sexual “transgressions” contributing significantly to the “Malayali sexual revolution” (2005, pp. 361–364) as J. Devika calls it, which started in the 1960s. As the late 1970s witnessed intense competition between such soft-erotic periodicals for circulation and readership, these periodicals reached far and wide in

Cassetted emotions 145 Kerala as well as the Gulf countries. According to early pravasis, these periodicals further strengthened the already prevailing anxieties of the pravasi husbands around marital survival and sexual betrayal. According to my pravasi respondents, Malayalam soft erotica tabloids were sold in Indian stores across the Gulf, and one such shop, Naaz Store at Doha, run by a Bombay-based entrepreneur, was known for its varieties and popularity in the late 1970s (interview with Poyil Soopy). A number of early Gulf wives were able to remember the popularity of such periodicals in the early 1980s. Pothukandi Beefathima, an early Gulf wife whose husband was in the Gulf in the early 1980s, remembers how she struggled to read such literature and got reprimanded by her parents for reading them hidden, sometimes covering them with Islamic literatures. Gulf wives like Beefathima were not allowed to read such periodicals that “contained vulgar thoughts and contents”12 in the early 1980s. Another female respondent remembers how she was prohibited to play Dubaikkatthu cassettes as that “would give rise to anxiety and unease among their husbands’ unmarried younger siblings who wanted to migrate to the Gulf for employment.”13 The rumors and stories around this “new experience” emerging from simultaneous sexual revolutions in the Arab world and Kerala appear to have supplemented the pain and burden of everyday emotions in pravasi labor quarters in the Middle East and pravasi households in Kerala.14 Similarly, the causative elements of Kathupattukal and their widespread circulations could not be limited to the new money mobility, material conditions, and technological access that the Mappilas experienced in the Middle East. The emergence of Kathupattukal was preceded by a new set of purity-based sexual doctrines that appeared in Malayalam didactic texts as a consequence of the PanIslamic theological discourses that gained currency in the post-matrilineal Mappila households in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. With the establishment of a number of Islamic/Islamist sectarian organizations, sexual and marital purity became a major thrust area in the postcolonial Islamic argumentative sphere in Malabar. The religious and sectarian orientation of Jameel, the inventor of this genre in Malayalam, can also lead us to think about such possibilities. Many expressions in these songs and other writings clearly show the religiously structured masculine subjectivity of the lyricist who was strongly influenced by the puritanist salafi argumentative sphere of Kerala in the late 1970s. Probably, Jameel received the puritan thoughts from his father Sayyed Muhammed Jalaluddin Maulana, a modernist salafi thinker and “nationalist” in the first half of the twentieth century (Jameel, 2010). According to Faisal Elettil, S.A. Jameel was a deep Tawhidist (Islamic unitarianist) who was strongly influenced by salafi modernist scholars like Dr. M. Usman, one of the former presidents of the Kerala Nadvatul Mujahideen (KNM) (Kottakkal, 2010). Jameel verbally attacked religious/ritual practices like durgah visits and people’s beliefs in the power of Sufis, and rebuked them asking, “are you not happy with one god?” (Elettil, 2010, p. 132). In his private conversations, as Elettil remembers, Jameel seemed to have wanted to possess the iman (belief) and purity of the Prophet Ibrahim who is known as Khaleelullah

146  P. K. Yasser Arafath (friend of Allah) for his successful defiance of religious impurities and bribery in the face of adversaries.15 As such depression and anxieties proliferated among the pravasi husbands and Kathupattu literati, a new set of religious preachers like M.V. Muhammed Saleem Maoulavi Pulikkal began to preach the importance of sexual and moral disciplining among the pravasi husbands during the same period (interview with C.P. Alikutty). Such preachers asked them to evolve a new method of moral cultivation and sexual discipline, apparently in line with the juridical framework of the religion and excoriating authority of Mahal-Tharavad-Consortium’s in the region of Malabar (Arafath, 2016). In short, the centrality of marital emotions in the “letter songs” and the social, economical, textual, and technological developments across three geographical regions – South Asia, East Asia and the Northern America – show the multiple subjective elements and their connections in the creation and circulation of this poetic literary genre since the late 1970s. Kathuppatukal heralded a new archive of Mappila emotions that stemmed out from new mobility and aspirations that the Mappilas acquired in the context of their migration to South East Asia and the Middle East. The voices in these songs can be understood as the loudest public expressions of Mappila’s conjugal harmony and conflicts that shaped Muslim discursive spheres in the region of Malabar further. Emerged from the changing material and economic situations in a connected geography that stretched from Malabar to the Gulf littoral states, Kathupattukal began to unsettle a range of marital normalcies in the everyday lives of the Mappilas. This poetic genre functioned as a penetrating catalyst which prepared pravasi husbands and their Gulf wives to express their suppressed feelings of intimacy and separation. The songs in this chapter and the numerous other letter songs that came out over a period of time, thus registered a complex history of Muslim emotions in south Asia since the last quarter of the twentieth century. They also tell us how the vigor of the Mappilas in pursuit of money in the 1970s collided with the pursuit of spouses in the 1980s as the National Panasonic stereos, cassettes, and new theological discourses penetrated their lives.

Notes 1 S.A. Jameel was not a trained psycho-therapist. He was a self-trained therapist who was curious to follow the footsteps of his father who was a homeopathic practitioner. According to Jameel, most of his songs are based on real-life incidents and people, and these songs include Dubaikkathu, Marupadikkathu, Gulfukarante Bhyarya, Thangal Kissa, and Kalyanakkessu. See, S.A. Jameel (2010), pp. 18–19. 2 Irudaya Rajan’s study shows that “in the case of about 2.4 percent of the Gulf wives, their husbands had left for the Gulf within days after marriage; almost a-third left within three months from marriage, and about 45 percent left during the first year of marriage. Thus, separation from husbands soon after marriage is indeed a real problem among the Gulf wives as articulated by them. The situation is much worse among the younger wives, about 2.7 percent whose husbands had left for Gulf immediately after marriage.” See Rajan, 2004, p. 505. 3 I took permission from the publisher to use this song with my own translation.

Cassetted emotions 147 4 In the song Arab Nattil, a Kathupattu from the 1990s, the girl protagonist describes her trapped situation as swarnna koottil (golden cage) where she lost her child and the presence of her father. This song also reflects on a large number of migrants who lost their lives the hot desert of Arabia. Many families in Malabar lost contact with their children who disappeared on their way to the Gulf. In this song the child says that the father has remained incommunicado for four years. See www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hjqXh3eJhFY, retrieved on 26 December, 2016. 5 Interview (24 January, 2017) with Poyil Soopy who landed in Qatar in 1978. Vilayil Fazila who was earlier known as Vilayil Valsala before converting to Islam has been one of the major singers of Kathupattukal. She was troubled by a group of male audience members for singing one of the Kathupattus in Kallachi, a small town with a substantial pravasi families in the district of Calicut in the early 1990s. 6 Similar views were expressed by Ibrahim Kottakkal, 2010, p. 139. 7 Interview with Aziz Tharuvana on 25 February, 2018 in Tharuvana, Wayanad District, Kerala. 8 Interview with C.P. Alikkutty on 7 September, 2018 in Vanimal, Calicut District, Kerala. Alikkutty carried more than 300 letters to Qatar on one of his return journeys in the 1980s. 9 Interview with. T. Yusuf A Ali, Director, Malaibar Heritage Project on 12 December, 2018, Malappuram District. 10 Interview with Poyil Soopy; Panasonic recorders and cassettes were spreading across the southeast Asian region as well during this period Padoongpatt, 2017, p. 33. 11 Thalayina kanneeril Mungeedunnoo” (the pillow drowns in the tears), see, Eka Ilahinte, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x_2yiBJrbA. Retrieved on October 28, 2016. The protagonist of this song is a husband who undergoes the pain of viraham (separation). 12 Interview with Pothukandi Beefathia on 2 August, 2018 in Vanimel, Calicut District, Kerala. 13 Interview with T.P. Ayesha on 16 December, 2018 in Tellicherry, Kannur District, Kerala. 14 The song Arab Nattil talks about common sights of airplanes which were rare in the region’s sky in the early 1980s and the Mappilas mostly travelled in ships and dhows, preferably from ports like Mumbai. 15 Interview with Faisal Elettil on 10 August, 2018.

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9 Framing history, precarity, and trauma A study of Nandita Das’s Firaaq Nishat Haider

This chapter seeks to decode the representational matrix of vulnerability in Nandita Das’s directorial debut film Firaaq (2008)1 by situating it within the ongoing debates on “presentist” (Hartog, 2015, p. 1) regime of historicity, gendering of memory, and the politics of mnemonic practices regarding the question of visual culture’s capacity, to work through the trauma of the Gujarat riots in 2002. Although the film is not set in the distant past, it can be said that the film is vitally significant for understanding not only our engagement with the recent past and its affective as well as political legacies, but also how our relationship to the past is inevitably shaped by our present modes of representation. Through the frames of five sets of relationships crisscrossed by multiple positions of religion, gender, class, and ideology, Firaaq shows how people negotiate a barbed journey to acknowledge and recover from the trauma of communal violence, construct a sense of collective belonging, and engage with ethical introspection at the cusp of the individual and the collective. Since acts of cinematic (re)mediation extend the temporal and spatial boundaries of the body in trauma and pain into broader representational resonance, it is essentially the “ambivalent positionality of the screen” as “the medium of injury in its own right as well as the medium that archives injuries and calls back to the imperative to bear witness” (Jelača, 2016, p. 9) that makes the spectators of Firaaq dwell on the dialectic relationship among screen, history, and trauma, and motivates them to work through some of its entanglements. Extending Cathy Caruth’s claim that the language of trauma needs to be “somehow literary” (1996, p. 5) we can possibly consider how enunciations of trauma are progressively becoming “somehow cinematic” and why that might be the case in Firaaq. Adopting Rosenstone’s notion that the cinema is a “legitimate” and a unique way of “representing, interpreting, thinking about, and making meaning from the traces of the past” (1995, p. 3), this chapter explores the strategies, codes, and devices by which Firaaq wrests out the traumatic memories of the past from the realm of the unconscious and provides an adequate empathetic reconstruction. The chapter will also map out aesthetic dispositif, that is, “the system of relations” that can be established between discourses, institution, regulatory decisions, and ethical intentions (Foucault, 1980, p. 194), by delineating how the mainstream Hindi cinema intervenes in constructing the ways in which things can be seen or not seen

150  Nishat Haider and how that cultural text can produce a shift, or what Rancière calls a politics, that can challenge the existing order, the existing “distribution of the sensible” (2004, p. 12) that enable us to explore cinema’s ethical potential.

Framing the frame: ethics, politics, and cinema Adorno’s dictum, “Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived” (1997, p. 6), should remind us how much a text’s power is premised on its intimate involvement with the specific socio-historical circumstances. Acknowledging the limits of the traditional archive that mark the boundaries of our own understanding of the post-Godhra riots and its traumatic haunting legacies of violence in Gujarat, this chapter extends the nature of archive to cinema, as a site of historical and personal/collective memories, so as to establish new frames and outlooks to enable our understanding of how the threat of unrest is etched in the cinematic text. The film Firaaq frames the alarming communal situation in Gujarat, a state in the northwest of India, as a watershed in the recent history of the postcolonial nation. The violent assaults started with an attack by Muslims in the town of Godhra on a train carrying hundreds of karsevaks (Hindu pilgrims), who were returning from the mythical birthplace of Lord Rama in the north Indian town of Ayodhya. A groundswell of devastating communal attacks swept Gujarat beginning 27 February, 2002, and continued for numerous months. The anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat was dubbed as “inevitable” and “understandable” acts by the Hindutva forces to secure the Hindu Self. The (meta)discourse of security offered the forces of Hindutva a tool to legitimize violence as nonviolence, killers as defenders, rape as understandable lust, and death as non-death (Mander, 2002). The post-Godhra riots produced a series of horrors – the urban landscape of burned and broken buildings, the interior landscapes of the minds of people who are either engulfed in unspeakable memories or consumed by irrational and implacable hatred, the mass graves, the experiences of children who witnessed brutalities they have no way of comprehending and of women who were mercilessly raped, the ruined and abandoned homes, businesses, and homes of Muslims, the crass media spectacle. Among other things, this is what gives Firaaq its disconcerting indictment. It reminds one that it is not just the 2,000 dead that make Gujarat riots such an indelible rupture in the national life and psyche. What makes it indelible is that the riots were just the most horrific face of a prejudice that runs much wider beneath the skin. The film delves on the after-effects of the Godhra carnage, and not the incidence in itself. The movie views the carnage not as an event encapsulated in the past, but as a history which is essentially not over, a history whose repercussions are not simply omnipresent (whether consciously or not) in all our cultural activities, but whose traumatic consequences are still evolving in today’s political, historical, cultural, and artistic scene. The storyline of Firaaq is fragmented, jagged, and therefore unsettling. Eschewing didactic representational art, the film, in particular, enables us to meditate on the ways we can bear witness to the trauma and vulnerability through an

Framing history, precarity, and trauma 151 alternative chronosophy, that is, “temporal system” (Bevernage, 2011, p. 92) that follows from certain premises. The way one wrestles with historical injustice and the ethics of history is deeply reliant on the way one considers historical time, that the perceptions of time conventionally used by historians are essentially more attuned to the perpetrators’ than the victims’ perspective, and that breaking with or breaching this structural presumption calls for a fundamental reconfiguration of the predominant notions of history and historical time (Bevernage, 2011, p. ix). In Firaaq, the issues at stake are not only the performative potential of cinema, and the ethical framing of historical injustice and its implications, but also what kind of alternative chronosophy would be better suited to do so. The director subtly manages to say it all through a few parallel stories that converge at particular junctures and pertain to the characters who have been affected by the riots in one way or the other. The narratives in these stories pry open the urban spaces as sites of historical unfolding to make ideational segues into broader issues of marginalization, liminality, and “intricacies of memory and trauma” (Blanco & Peeren, 2013, p. 2). The multi-voiced narrative serves to blur the formation of center (Hindu)/margin (Muslim) binaries from the paradigm of official/national history through the reconstruction of personal memories. The film begins with an overwhelming and disturbing image of the dead, as it launches the stark, nauseating visuals of a mass grave being dug for the charred, maimed, and brutalized bodies of the victims killed in the Gujarat riots of 2002. The mass burial and burning of Muslim men, women, and children not only destroys evidence but also “desecrates Muslim deaths by denying them Islamic burial, and forcing a Hindu cremation upon them; a kind of post-mortem forced conversion” (Sarkar, 2002, pp. 2875–2876). We see the mud flow of ravaged bodies being offloaded from a truck, and a gravedigger imploding in tears being crushed by their awful inhuman weight. The gravediggers recognize friends, family, and neighbors, as they pile up limbs and torsos and explode in rage, threatening to get violent with the dead too. This is the only direct image of aggression in the film, the rest drifts just outside its penumbra, imbuing the film with a kind of edgy disquiet. Alluding to the bodily, experiential component of film spectatorship as conceptualized by scholars such as Vivian Sobchack (1991), Linda Williams (1991), and Steven Shaviro (1993), the scene activates haptic sensations and lends it “a grisly viscerality” (Torchin, 2005, p. 47). The haptic image suggests figures and then withdraws from representing them completely. While the ghastly image of bodies strewn on the ground serves as testimony to atrocities, the film dwells on the socio-political processes behind it rather than the genocide’s physical horror. Rather than making the acts and object of atrocities fully available to view, Das puts them into question, calling on the viewers to engage in its imaginative construction. The engagement of the haptic spectator arises not just in psychic registers but also in the sensorium (Marks, 2002, p. 18). In fact, Firaaq’s greatest triumph is this evocation of violence in absentia. It then shifts focus to the seemingly normal city, where order may have been restored, a few months later, but the polarization between communities seemed to have just begun.

152  Nishat Haider Framing the effects of violence from within multiple voices embedded in imagined daily lives, the film recreates the trauma of individuals who are desperate to pick up the strings of life once again, only to realize that prejudices, fears, and crimes cannot be brushed away or blamed on history. From there, Das takes us on a journey with her characters and we watch them trying to cope with their trauma and come to terms with their life. So, the film not only investigates the traumatic after-effects of political violence, but also enables transformative power that facilitates the artistic reworking, incorporation, and healing of trauma, which empowers us to experience and see the world anew.

Child/hood and trauma Although Nandita Das does not necessarily utilize the discourses of psychoanalysis or trauma theory in her work, her thoughtful narrative of cinema leads with uncanny frequency to reflections on something like the structural features of cinematic sublimation and its containment of social loss. At the center of the story is a little Muslim boy named Mohsin seen moving through the streets, trying to find his missing father. He emerges as the youngest witness to the city set on fire. His memories are filled with trauma; from which he cannot break free. The fear of death haunts him. He has lost his family in the Gujarat carnage. He was a witness to his family being butchered and has escaped from the camp where he had been sheltered, in search of his father. He describes the slaughter: the women, he said, were stripped naked and then burnt alive and thrown in mass graves. The men, he innocently adds, were not stripped naked. They were just burnt. The sexualizing of bodily violence that characterized post-Partition violence has been underscored by Nandita Das’s attention to the spectatorial materiality of bodily violence and pain through Mohsin’s innocent gaze and perception. The film investigates the kinds of “obligation” being entailed “when we witness the theatrical scene of suffering that makes, minimally, moral demands of our bodies – our hearts and tears – as well as, sometimes, political and economic demands on the people and institutions that house that suffering” (Berlant, 2004, p. 6). The child’s experience and view are intertwined with the violent postcolonial history, providing potent metaphors for national damage and vulnerability, and focuses on constructions of citizenship and belonging. Challenging the elisions within postcolonial cinema regarding the absence of children’s subjectivities, experiences, and views in terms of agency and politics rather than solely as aesthetic strategies, Das refracts the historiography of Gujarat unrest through the psychically wounded and traumatized Muslim child’s perspective, thereby investing the account of the past with an objectivity that is rare in cinema. Mohsin becomes a powerful symbol of Muslim vulnerability, pain, and survival. The frame of child/hood not only enables the filmmaker to re-witness the realm of the historical and narrate horrific violence that might challenge representation, but also allows her to explore the ways in which the vectors of family, religion, and society intersect with national identities from a young Muslim boy’s perspective. Through the Muslim child living in the camp, Das represents people

Framing history, precarity, and trauma 153 in conditions resembling what Giorgio Agamben (1998) would call bare life, that of legislated, naturalized exile and exclusion. Some of the situations that Das describes actually approach Agamben’s notion of the state of a bare life. Drawing from Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, Agamben described the bare life in the camps as “Muselmänner” (1998, p. 185). Mohsin, a young boy from the camps for Muslim riot victims, is a “bare life” because “the Muslim” (here, literally a Muslim) is the example of the sovereign power’s authority to construct a subject who is in a state of absolute abjection. Firaaq bears witness to the exceptionalities and the concentrationary structures as juridical – political structures once a state of exception is created. According to the historian, Tanika Sarkar (2002) (who, as a member of the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal, played a major role in probing the events and interviewing witnesses), women are raped during wartime, and many were raped during Partition, but rapes of Muslim women in Gujarat were more sadistic and grotesque. Tanika Sarkar attributes the brutality to the belief that the planned violence on the Muslim woman’s sexuality emasculates and dishonors the Muslim male, and the killing of their children signals the end of Muslim perpetuity. In the film, there are several instances of the morbid manipulation of bodies to sacrilege every aspect of difference.

Cinematic ethics: mapping (in)hospitality and anamnestic solidarity In the opening frames of Firaaq, Das declares that it’s a fictional story based on a thousand true stories. The film is called Firaaq, which means both separation – the estrangement between communities – and quest – a search, for hope and the meeting again of hearts (Mander, 2002). In yet another story in the movie, even one month after the riots, Aarti, a battered middle-class Hindu housewife, is portrayed as suffering from the guilt of not having helped a Muslim victim. Aarti’s episode in the film opens a window not only on to the world of Hindu Gujarati women in conditions of communal conflicts but also on the way in which they have been affected in the fundamental restructuring of their communities. This is important to our understanding of the ongoing communal trouble and the matrix of domination intertwining experiences of class, gender, and religion. The most significant question that arises here is that, while the majoritarian national patriarchy has a stake in controlling Muslim women and their sexuality, why do Hindu women participate in othering the oppressed Muslim members of their own sex? In Firaaq, Nandita Das enunciates the modalities of women’s participation in the communal processes “as reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups, as participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture, as signifiers of national differences” (YuvalDavis, 1989, p. 7). Das shows how distinctively Hindu religious attitudes and beliefs in strife-torn Gujarat result in indiscriminate disregard for Muslims and their vulnerable situation. Aarti refuses hospitality to the Muslim woman who had come to her doorstep, desperately seeking protection from a lynch mob.

154  Nishat Haider This appears to be the manifestation of the haunting legacies of the Partition. Since the creation of a separate state of Pakistan after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent on the basis of religion, the Muslims in India are constituted and represented as the “intimate enemy” or the “stranger” in the nation, as Jacques Derrida says, a nonautochthonous, nonindigenous stranger (étranger) who is not considered a “natural” part of “home” (2000, p. 14). We have borne witness to the complex relations between individuals (self–other) and the state (the personal–collective) based on (in)justice and (in)hospitality. The word hospitality (or theorizing of the stranger), is imbued with political connotations and it has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years, both in the media and in academic research. Addressing the question of opening the doors to one’s border or home, the risks of hospitality, and welcoming the stranger, Emmanuel Levinas (2004), Kearney (2009), and Derrida (2000) develop the idea that our encounter with the stranger challenges and ruptures the sovereignties of the “ego,” the state, and religious institutions, and once this happens one begins to understand oneself differently. In contrast to the laws of conditional hospitality – “a hospitality of invitation” (Derrida  & Roudinesco, 2004, p.  59) – there is the absolute or unconditional hospitality – “a hospitality of visitation” (Derrida  & Roudinesco, 2004, p.  59) – that one would like to offer to a stranger or an unexpected visitor, a hospitality offered “without asking of them either reciprocity,” he says, “or even their names” (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 25). Since attitudes of hostility and hospitality function subtly in our perceptions of who we are, in our ideological principles, and in our religious beliefs and practices, Aarti’s behavior leads us to analyze the situation that pervaded in Gujarat after the Godhra riots. The pervading presence of the Muslim woman’s spectral threat that continues to haunt Aarti implicates her, and the audience, in her continued un-dead and problematic spectrality. Framing Aarti’s guilt regarding her inhospitality to the Muslim woman, Das enunciates “the first protestation or contestation, the first testimony against the whole [ensemble]” (Derrida, 2013, p. 21). This brings about both political and aesthetic acts of transformation, as we can form intersubjective communication with those who have been eliminated from our (diverse) ensembles – those who have been labeled as strangers and enemies. Responding to the stranger or the other is significant for two reasons: 1. It is only then we account for our existence, the existence of ethics (and also of politics); and 2. it also emphasizes the need to reconsider the Levinasian understanding of the ethical responsibility toward the claims of the other through the Derridean theorization of hospitality, where hospitality implies the unconditional welcome offered to all others, including the “wholly other, the absolutely unforeseeable [in anticipable] stranger” (Derrida, 2000, p. 8) to envisage an especially all-embracing and hospitable world. Discussing the historical and political structural links between the stranger and the enemy that have become very visible in post-Partition India, Priya Kumar says, “since the rise to political power of the Hindu nationalist movement . . . India’s

Framing history, precarity, and trauma 155 over one hundred million Muslims are at best guests who live in the country on Hindu sufferance, or at worst the nemesis that must be expunged from the benign and tolerant Hindu nation” (2013, p. 94). In this sense, hospitality presupposes the likelihood of a complete forfeiting of thresholds or frontiers, of distinctions between inside and outside, the domestic and the public, the self and the other. In order to make amends for her inhospitality to the Muslim woman, Aarti shelters a young Muslim orphan boy, Mohsin, and tries to help him. The filmmaker frames and grounds Aarti’s hospitality to Mohsin within a hermeneutics of the Benjaminian idea of “anamnestic solidarity” (1968/1992, p. 253) with the Other/ stranger, which not only necessitates recognition and compassion, but also protective care and assurances against degradation. Arti’s response to Mohsin’s sufferings is compassion in terms of “the demonstrated capacity not to turn one’s head away but to embrace a sense of obligation to remember what one has seen and, in response to that haunting, to become involved in a story of rescue or amelioration” (Berlant, 2004, p. 7). In Firaaq, Aarti’s trauma exhibiting “performative” and “social” qualities have “the potential to create new bonds amongst vulnerable people” (Evans, 2014, p. 97), a conviction shared by Alphonso Lingis who suggests that it is “when one exposes oneself to the naked one, the destitute one, the outcast one, the dying one”(1994, p. 12) that community can be built. Aarti gives him a Hindu name, Mohan, to conceal his identity in order to protect him. The director subtly indicates her husband’s role in the riots and he is later shown as being part of the upmarket mob that raided shops and establishments which belonged to Muslims. The film also highlights the victim’s reaction to the violence experienced. In one of the film’s most disturbing moments, the little boy in search of his father smacks an ant dead with sudden force. Maar diya saale ko [I’ve killed the son-of-a-bitch], he says with unexpected fervor. From a subjective perspective, the child’s trauma and bereavement usually encompass a wide range of conceivable reactions including fear, anger, and resentment. A  child like Mohsin, who has experienced the violent communal inferno, will be troubled by what Abraham and Torok (1994) insist is buried in the psychic tombs or crypts of their surviving family and milieu, even if he does not know of its being or contents and even if the history that constructed the traces of the traumatic past is cloaked in silence. This unconscious transmission is what Abraham defines as the dynamic of transgenerational haunting. Clearly, for the progeny of victims there is no innocent way to approach the personal legacies of violence. Mohsin has borne witness to vast and tiny cruelties. Now, he is a premonition of a new generation of children who have to grasp the horror and deal with their trauma. The filmmaker not only traces the social and psychic sites that emerge from the violent past, but also engages the spectators in an emotionally involved transferential relationship in order to recruit them in the collective task not only of mourning but also of “reparation” (Herrero & Baelo-Allué, 2011, p. xiii), however inadequate it must remain. Furthermore, the viewers’ own affective thinking

156  Nishat Haider mingles with the film and together with the haptic images “implicate the reader or viewer into the (non-)fictional world of the represented Other” (Lemke, 2016, p. 164). Nandita Das draws attention to how the viewers, as heirs to and recipients of a society built on Hindu majoritarianism, are “ ‘folded into’ (im-pli-cated in)” (Rothberg, 2019, p. 1) historical violence and entangled in present-day injustices in Gujarat without being themselves direct agents of harm. Foregrounding the film’s haptic qualities and its ability to summon the viewers’ own embodied histories as sites of reception and understanding, the film serves as a counter-epistemic frame (i.e., figure of rememoration) and ethical gesture that call for justice for the absent Muslim Others. One of the most compelling ways the power relations inherent in filmmaking and the filmmaker–subject relationship is played out is by the filmmaker’s own gender, as well as the gender relations implicit in filmmaking itself. Approaching gendered violence in Firaaq as an important archive, the next section draws upon feminist arguments about the evidential validity of subjectivity (such as memory and testimony) and affective encounters.

Gendered dissent, violence and cinema Every act of archivization or memorialization necessitates the “violence” of leaving something out, “some excision, repression or omission on which it is founded” (Botting & Wilson, 2001, p. 7). Thus, the aesthetico-political archive of codes and images in Firaaq remind us that the filmmaker makes decisions that “affect our reception of the film; decisions that we can understand as the thinking of the film.” Although a film cannot be reduced to its makers’ intentions, however, the film tells us what it “thinks” (Frampton, 2006, p. 117) or suggests about its characters and subjects through choices of framing and focus. A third-world woman writer–director like Das is of particular interest to audiences and critics alike because of the strategies of survival that are continually negotiated in face of the contradictions of cultural heterogeneity, modernity, nationalism, or identity. It is usually believed that men and women speak differently about violence (Das & Nandy, 1985; Kanapathipillai, 1990; Ross, 2001; Scheper-Hughes, 1992). Though the politics of mnemonic and imaginary practices is currently a booming interdisciplinary field, with some notable exceptions as Sylvia Paletschek and Sylvia Schrant (2008) point out, the neglect of gender is visible in the contents and forms of representation of trauma and memory culture. Firaaq remedies this disregard through the framing of individualistic monstrosities, collective aberrations, and societal suicide from the vantage point of women with unsuspecting sensitivity and sensibility. It is remarkable that a film about the most gruesome episode of mass violence post-Partition – in which women and children were subjected to mass rape and were burnt alive only because they belonged to a religious minority group to which the State was hostile – is extraordinarily free of violence. It is set in a single day, a month after the carnage. The killings and arson, by then, had come to a halt. There is no blood flowing on the streets, no fire leaping into the skies, no screams filling the air. There is, instead,

Framing history, precarity, and trauma 157 a harrowing silence, a dense suffering, as devastated people try to come to terms with the shock of loss and betrayal. Das has deliberately chosen not to enact violence in order to facilitate a searing exploration of the post-riot subterranean poisons – guilt, rage, self-hatred, suspicion, and the brutalization of survivors – unleashed by the communal genocide. The subject of violence, which is generally construed as a predominantly masculine domain, in Firaaq underscores the significance of the female gaze with the intent to move toward understanding our troubled times and bringing us closer to a collective healing.

Spectrality and spectropolitics In Firaaq, Nandita Das utilizes the dominant representational paradigm used by trauma films. In the film, Aarti is tied in a meaningless marriage with an abusive and anti-Muslim man. Her trauma of having denied the chance of survival to a Muslim woman remains unresolved for a long time. She portrays all the symptoms of a melancholic for she finds herself trapped in an endless reliving of this traumatic past while acting that past out in a post-traumatic present. Firaaq demonstrates Elsaesser’s point that the traces of trauma, however invisible, “are nonetheless recoverable by a different kind of hermeneutics” (2001, p.  199), a hermeneutics of the affective body. These bodily hermeneutics would situate “the inscriptions of trauma in a repetitive structure of gestures and movements visibly severed from a purportedly original event, yet actively enacting the force of the event in its bifurcation into past and future” (del Rio, 2008, p. 78). Representing Aarti as often “haunted” by the original traumatic event, Nandita Das engages in a “spectropolitics” – “a politics of or for specters” – designed not only to address and criticize the ways the nation-state and majoritarian construct particular subjects as the metaphorical ghosts of our society (social outcasts, religious minorities, or victims of historical injustices) (Blanco & Peeren, 2013, p. 20) but also to underscore disavowed histories or hidden subjects that haunt like ghosts, and figure out how to establish an ethical relationship with repressed otherness. The continued hauntings of the Muslim woman in the film alters Aarti in a way that she can no longer imagine to “be herself” (Brison, 1999, p. 40). The sense of powerlessness and intense shame, deeply embedded in Aarti’s psyche, contribute to another paradoxical bind played out repeatedly in the story – the need to preserve oneself through self-injurious, self-destructive acts. Selfinjury is intended not to kill but rather to relieve unbearable emotional pain, and many survivors regard it, paradoxically, as “a form of self-preservation” (Herman, 1997, p. 109). The “punishment” which is self-inflicted (for not opening the door and saving the Muslim lady) almost makes one bite one’s lips and feel for poor Aarti. If we understand “oneirism” in Bachelardian terms as the shadowy region between memory and imagination played out as a reverie, then it can be said that structurally the pursuit of Aarti’s memory, as the site of spatio-temporal history, in this film follows an “oneiric” movement that is an interweaving, overlapping narrative which fuses the texture of the everyday world with the haunting past (1994, p. 13).

158  Nishat Haider The distinction between the Freudian concepts of melancholia (or acting out) and working through (or mourning), two fundamental forms of remembering traumatic events, reintroduced into the field of trauma studies in the early 1990s by LaCapra, serves well to interpret the response of Aarti to trauma. This speaking body, with its truncated expressions and powerless gestures, also functions as a photographic image, as a literalization of the horror of the death scene, a scene that is both psychically refused and indelibly imprinted upon the flesh. The film makes the violent past available by making it vivid, thereby converting it directly into what Tom Gunning, the film critic, calls an object of embodied “experience” (2002, p. 12). Toward the end of the movie, Aarti seeks to gain “critical distance on a problem” (La Capra, 2001, pp.  143–144) via the process of working through. She refuses to take the physical violence and humiliation lying down. She is shown moving around in the open air enjoying and soaking, all along, a new experience, emancipated from the fetters of her trauma and the stifling conditions of her conjugal relationship. Moving beyond the politically ineffectual position of only feeling, of which Elaine Scarry (1985) was so suspicious, Nandita Das, through the character of Aarti, enunciates “the transformative potential of painful occurrences or atrocities” in modes that transcend the “structural and affective stasis of dominant features of trauma: its temporal and spatial dysfunctions, its repetitive loops and insistent ‘virtuality’ as a non-material (individual or collective) psychic ‘wound’ that locks the individual (or wider collective) in a permanent ‘now’ ” (Dillane, McAreavey, & Pine, 2016, p. 8). Though working through is never complete, it does enable Aarti, both as a victim or secondary observer, to distinguish between the experience that overwhelmed her and her present life. She is thus not wholly trapped in the past. To state the crisis somewhat another way, it is imperative for us to comprehend the intricate ways in which Das dramatically blends trauma theory and corporeal affect to create a cinematic body or ontology that has the capacity to performatively structure and stylize its own versions of the “real.” Through this process of blending the psychoanalytical trauma theory and the body of the trauma, witness comes about through the process of introjection, whereby the subject (here, Aarti) attempts to cure itself, to make itself “whole” (Ferenczi, 1980, p. 40).

Semiotics of terror In another troubling episode in the film, an impoverished young Muslim couple return to the ruins of their home, now burnt and looted by their Hindu neighbors, and weep at the enormity of the betrayal, at their loss and helplessness. Muneera, a poor Muslim mehndiwalli (who applies henna paste for making tattoos on women’s hands on weddings or festive occasions), whose house had been razed in the riots, returns to her plundered home with her infant and husband and ends up suspecting her best friend for the pillage. Blinded by trauma, fear, and prejudice Muneera repeatedly questions her Hindu friend about it.

Framing history, precarity, and trauma 159 The “semiotics of terror” (Sarkar, 2002, p. 2872) and the memories of violence impinge themselves on social practice and on dress codes. Since female Muslim identity is signaled, for Hindu attackers, by the use of veil and the significant absence of bindi (dots usually adorning the forehead of Hindu women), when Muneera goes to the curfew-imposed area of the city to apply mehndi to a Hindu bride she removes her rida (a form of head-scarf worn by Muslim women), uncovers her head and wears a bindi, the embodied markers of Hindu identity. This suggests that though the Hindu majority can experiment with identities, the Muslim minority is over-determined by what marks them as a minority. The threat of communal turbulence results in the formation of simple and reductionist “identitarian claims, or it may author more sophisticated subjective stakes as the marked body evidences various signs of the subjugated, the complicit, the shamed, the inferior, the passive, the gendered and so forth, through the act of violation” (Evans, 2014, p. 108). The Muslim body within the wider majoritarian body-politic becomes the site upon which different forms of violence are brazenly declared and performed. Fear induces amnesia and historical amnesia is a means of social control. Despite being witness to looting and stealing of Muslim property, Muneera’s Hindu friend is reticent to speak about what she saw. Through such “symbolic domination,” as Bourdieu has termed it, not only is evidence suppressed, but the identity of surviving victims is weakened, and hence their capacity to counterorganize (1999, p.  72). In an atmosphere that is ripe with fear and distrust, Muneera’s husband teams up with a gang of frustrated, scared, and angry young Muslim friends, who finding their loyalty challenged, decide to take revenge, as a means to vent out their vulnerability and resentment. Recognizing this vulnerability, as Butler (2004) argues, as “a shared condition”(p. 13) enables coalitions between the different vulnerable subjects to fight against the violence. Muneera’s husband and his friends get their hands on a gun, which they feel will help them to exact their revenge on the rioters. But all efforts turn in vain and they are chased back by the cops. After the Partition of India, the deepest wounds inflicted on the people are a result of the violent estrangement that has been engineered by the religious communities. In Firaaq, Sameer (Muslim male) and Anuradha (Hindu female), the upper middle-class couple, struggle to handle their multi-cultural identity after the riot, which has polarized Gujarati society clearly on religious lines. Sameer is often mistaken for a Hindu because of his name. It is a misunderstanding he does not try to correct for fear of how people would respond when they get to know he is Muslim. He has no reservations about acknowledging that he is too scared to reveal his real identity and goes by the name of Sameer Desai, taking his wife’s surname. The experience of ethical ambiguity here invites further critical and philosophical reflection on the problem of the reduction of individuals to only one form of identity as is more common in representations of the minorities in the majoritarian discourses. While the Hindus have multiple layers of identity, every aspect of a Muslim is supposed to be determined by her/his Muslim beliefs and affiliation.

160  Nishat Haider The determinism of communal discourses dehumanizes the Other and presents it as a danger to the security of the Self. In the movie, one of the up-market stores that is ransacked during the communal riots belongs to Sameer’s Hindu brother-in-law. Sameer is merely a secondary partner in the business. The process of identifying and selective targeting of the Muslim families and their business establishments shows Gujarat in 2002 as a glaring example of a place having what Paul Brass calls an “institutionalized riot system” (2003, p. 377). In the movie, Anuradha’s sister argues that the marauding rioters must have had a database of all Muslim businessmen in Gujarat otherwise they would not have been able to find out that their store was jointly owned by a Muslim. Sameer is traumatized as he is unable to grasp that the community, which he considered himself a member of, has become a site of danger. Despite their best efforts, Sameer’s brother-inlaw and his wife are unable to really understand Sameer’s agony, guilt, and fear. In the aftermath of the riot, Sameer and Anuradha are trying to decide whether they should hide their identity so as to survive, or assert themselves. The couple has made their decision to pack their bags and relocate themselves to the safer environment of the national capital, Delhi, in the hope that they will not have to live with this kind of fear anymore. Sameer’s anguish underscores the intense fear connected with place and displacement, the fragility of safety, which the tormented survivors of traumatic experiences feel and convey to others. Sameer, in the context of the film’s volatile communal statement, becomes a metaphor for the Hindu–Muslim divide, which is now a looming reality in middle-class lives. He suffers from a state of inarticulate sorrow. He is plagued with self-doubts and fear. He has trouble maintaining his “own separate point of view while remaining in connection with others. . . . Things are no longer what they seem” (Herman, 1997, p. 53). This state, as Judith Herman has discussed, is one of opposing, “contradictory responses of intrusion and constriction” one in which the victim finds herself caught “between floods of intense, overwhelming feeling and arid states of no feeling at all, between irritable, impulsive action and complete inhibition of action” (1997, p. 47). His overwhelming stress “takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event” (Caruth, 1996, p. 4). Crucially, trauma, for Sameer, is articulated through memories that are reworked as dreams. The problem of Sameer’s endless reliving of his traumatic past, involving his Muslim “identity,” in his nightmares vanishes when he attempts to wrench trauma out of the realm of the inarticulate and nudge it toward expression. In the end, Sameer has made peace with his environment and the fact that his name is Sameer Sheikh, not Sameer Desai. It is the first step in the healing process. Post-riot, the people who have witnessed the traumatic incidents are unable/ refuse to believe not only the extreme violence that takes place before their eyes, but sometimes even that which happens to them. One of the survivors of the pogrom in the movie is the wizened musician Khan Sahib, who lives in his world of ideals and music, tendered by his faithful retainer of years. In a riot-torn reality,

Framing history, precarity, and trauma 161 he takes recourse to okay his inherent strength and love of music to endure the rising hatred with heroic stoicism and amazing grace. Finally, one day, by accident, he discovers the extent of this mad hatred that has gripped the city. His faith in human beings gets shaken and he receives the first blow when the mazaar (a Muslim mausoleum) of Wali Dakhani, an eminent Urdu poet of yore, has been razed to the ground by the Hindu rioters. Communal violence gets ritualized in the degrading attacks on body, property, and places of worship (Kakar, 1995, p. 25). The people stop coming to learn music from the Muslim maestro and Khan Sahib expresses his weary angst: “I’m worried not because Hindus and Muslims are killing each other, but because humans are killing each other.” He is shaken to the core as he declares, in one of the most moving scenes of the movie, that there will be no more baithaks (musical gatherings). He says that his music is not strong enough to withstand this kind of prejudice. In some way the violence produced what is usually the purpose of social, political, and cultural institutions to conceal: “the absolute fragility and vulnerability of ‘bare life’ or, if one prefers, of the dimension of animal existence at the heart of the human world itself – and thus the destruction of the social bond by society itself” (Balibar, 2015, p. 129). Khan Sahib’s retainer, who shelters him from the ugliness of the world, beseeches him not to give up on the baithak, as the ray of hope in these dark times lies only in people like the Khan Sahib. Traumatic and artistic kinds of knowledge conspire to produce their own mode of recognition. Ashutosh Varshney in his book, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (2002), released just two weeks before the Godhra massacre and the subsequent state-sponsored genocide in Gujarat, concludes that cities witness violence when such institutions, alliances, and networks that foster communal peace are either absent or have been crushed as in Ahmadabad in Gujarat. What we are left with is a “stark atrophied place without hope” (McRobbie, 2002, p. 136). The solution, if any, has to come from the human soul itself. Therefore, Das rightly ends her movie with the image of the old Khan Sahib again having a baithak in his house, with the mattress and white sheet laid out by his long-serving retainer, singing the balmy strains of some old, soothing raga. Music has been hailed as a major expression of syncretic culture. Khan Sahib encapsulates not only the demise of an era of tolerance in his silent lament but also the hope for a better future. Gujarat is, after all, where connoisseurs of music like Rasoolan Bai, Ustad Fayyaz Khan, and Wali Dakhani had sung paeans to syncretic icons like Krishna and Radha, Buddha and Meera. The injury or wound, which the old musician seeks to heal, is the fractured human psyche. It is precisely at this juncture that the movie serves the twin purposes of a social critique and a kind of therapy, as it enacts this loss in our present. Firaaq remedies the age-old tendency in film practice to disregard what Mary Ann Doane describes as the “progressive despatialization and disembodiment of the spectatorial position” (2002, p. 543). Firaaq enunciates “a model of subjectivity grounded in the space between witness and testifier within which that which cannot be known can begin to be witnessed” (Radstone, 2001, p. 20). We, as audience, become witnesses of not simply what happened immediately after

162  Nishat Haider the Godhra riots in Gujarat, but also in its aftermath which continues to unfold even today. Therefore, what we experience provides us a rationalization of why and how harrowing pogroms like those in Gujarat happen, thereby performing a socio-cultural evaluation, which in itself is a form of recovery. As Jacques Rancière elucidates in The Emancipated Spectator (2009), the spectator is an active interpreter, feeling and understanding, composing their own version of what they see with various elements before them; as spectators, we “all the time link what we see to what we have seen and said, done and dreamed” (2009, p. 47). Firaaq reveals how a film can bear witness to violence and atrocity through a reflection on complicity, which primarily means, “to fold together” different “subject positions, histories, and memories,” which implies “an engagement with the complexity of the world we inhabit.” The recognition of complicity “requires us to imagine our sometimes incongruous position within the political fabric of a given moment, as victims, perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders, witnesses, or spectators” (Sanyal, 2015, p. 1). Such recognitions and memory’s entanglement of sites of trauma can shake up established traditions of remembrance and belonging, allowing new ones to emerge across traumatic pasts and ethno-cultural difference. Engaging with the representational, ethical, and political challenges that pertain to articulating, performing, or visualizing the body in pain, Nandita Das enunciates an understanding of the body as the site of “a common human vulnerability” (Butler, 2004, p.  44) as an essential aspect of being embodied, having boundaries, and being bound to others and a surrounding world. Nandita Das weaves very painful personal histories highlighting unfathomable fears and traumas. The final act of young Mohsin running on the streets to locate his father, presumably dead, is quite poignant. In doing this, the movie neither offers a notion of closure nor resolves the traumas. On the one hand, it does offer hope that the next generation will bury the past and forge a new future filled with better understanding so that such violence would never occur again. On the other hand, it also seeks to remind us of how within an impressionable young mind wandering inside a relief camp, taking in the sights of the aftermath of atrocities committed, the seeds of revenge could have been innately planted for further atrocities to be committed, sometime in the future. It’s extremely difficult, but not impossible to break the stranglehold that violence begets more violence. Firaaq is an “historical” representation of trauma: “art that has been reclaimed and transformed back into the fragment of truth that has inspired it” (cited in Langer, 1991, p. 5). Though it is impossible to anticipate the impact of trauma in an age of brutality, the yoke of one’s responsibility to respond is never reduced by one’s failure to find an adequate way to respond. Expressing her own distress and helplessness about the increasing cracks in Indian society, Das says, Firaaq “traces the emotional journeys of ordinary people – some who were victims, some perpetrators and some who chose to watch silently” (2010). It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is art which hides the art. The movie suggests, by its multiple skeins of narrative, that trauma is an inevitable part of life in contemporary society. But it is careful in merging the traumatic events with a politically fraught and communally seething setting. It heightens knowledge by realistic means, but

Framing history, precarity, and trauma 163 its realism and its cinematic technique are kept in a tension that is not entirely on the side of disclosure. The film examines the possibilities and complexities of this relation between the demand for historical knowledge and the traumatic impact that hinders its straightforward access. What is also presented through Firaaq is a certain truth about history that is not otherwise available. The tact and grace with which Firaaq weaves the communal tensions of unrelated characters all joined by their collective fear of a communal backlash are signs of a time when cinema and society at large need to do a serious rethink on their responsibilities. Firaaq is not political polemics or propaganda but an attempt to communicate the trauma, not by means of representation but through the act of “negative performance” (Elsaesser, 2001, p. 199). Here, Das charts a new ethical territory by exemplifying the way in which “[t]he witness, confronted with the sublime object [i.e. the horrible reality of oppression or violence] is rendered . . . speechless and is nonetheless compelled to speak” (Bernard-Donals & Glejzer, 2001, p. xi). The film re-configures the fabric of sensory experience in order to “make the invisible visible,” disrupt established relations, while creating “a shift of perspective: how it can be ethico-political without making overt political statements and make audiences think without telling them what to think” (Chaudhuri, 2014, p. 16). Das directs the film’s sights and voices beyond the limits of the scene toward someone who presumably has to assemble them and respond. In Firaaq, Das shuttles between two methodological approaches potentially relevant to an account of interaction: the “generative approach” that “delineates the operations by which a text comes to be constituted” and an “interpretive approach” that delineates “what the recipient has at his disposal to unveil the text’s meaning” (Cassetti, 1998, p.  12). The former approach suggests that the text constructs the receiver, the latter that the receiver constructs the text. The film produces the politics and effects of dissensus precisely because it neither gives lessons nor has any destination. The film acquires political significance when it interferes with, even disrupts, “the distribution of the sensible,” the commonsensical delineation of what can be seen, said, and thought (Rancière, 2010, p. 140). Firaaq’s engagement with the terrors of modern history and the traumas they have induced is incisive, wrenching, and insightful in articulating the complexities of the relationships between personal memory, historical representation, and meaning. Some of the deepest wounds that the people in the movie carry on their souls are born out of the violent estrangement that has been engineered in their land between religious communities. Committed to the memory and testimony of survivors, Nandita Das attempts to respond to unique voices of human anguish. While one cannot overlook or overgeneralize the representational challenges that pertain to framing, performing, or visualizing the body in pain, Nandita Das integrates that challenge into an affective enunciation of the ethics and politics of mobilizing the body in pain in a specific historical context, and the ethics and politics of witnessing such emotional and/or corporeal suffering. These voices begin to reveal the images and brutal stories of death and survival.

164  Nishat Haider Watching the movie, then, becomes a historical act. Firaaq asks us as viewers to consider our desire for historical truths, our complicity in constructing historical narratives, our investment in the historical present, and so it calls into question subjectivity and historical agency. Firaaq solicits that we deconstruct the historical narrative left us from the Gujarat communal pogrom, hear the voices of the survivors, and become the contemporaries of the dead and so give them their history. The film can be viewed as a historical document that constructs a cinematic expression and discourse that restores individual and collective memories. Remembering, witnessing, and telling the truth about violence, injury, and deeply rooted psychological traumas are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The movie ultimately provides a vehicle for the eventual incorporation, by the audience, of the narrative of survival and therefore “acts to mitigate traumatized isolation and create empathy with the sufferings of others in the present” (Radstone, 2001, p. 192). Because of the reconstruction of memories and individual and collective traumas, Firaaq is, at its core, about acting out, working through and moving on; it is about transformation and integration. The movie, as it intersects with history, not only endeavors to bear witness and testify but also negotiates the fissures between memory and history and remembrance and representation. Das confronts the viewer with a harrowing demonstration of how moral atrocity can be narrated, imagined, and lived as political deliverance. The film leaves one hoping that this traumatic process of historical recognition will continue, enabling the victims’ generation to finally begin to tell their stories. These stories of survival demand “both analytic and affective presence” which is politically effective in a context “where all the spectator wants to do is turn away quickly and harshly” (Berlant, 2004, pp. 9–10). In fact, the spectator begins to feel bad for the others that produces an understanding of the fundamental situations of injustice. This pain, Berlant claims, has the possibility to generate actual structural social change. Das’s enunciation suggests compulsory compassion, a concept coined by Lisa Cartwright (2008) to describe the way whereby spectators are compelled by the desire to act rather than (merely) feeling for the other. This affirmation and response to the call of the other gives Firaaq an explicitly affirmative character. Das links the unconditionality of justice, ethical responsibility, and democracy to an affirmative experience of absolute alterity in her film. Das’s film enjoins “anamnestic solidarity” (Benjamin, 1968, p. 253) with the past and the other. For Benjamin, such solidarity “brushes against the grain of history” (1968, p. 257), and thereby subverts the view of history as the mere pastness of the past. The spectators are not just passively absorbed in the film, instead s/he is an active interpreter (Rancière, 2009, p. 37). Through a synthesis of perceptual experiences and events, Das creates haptic “modes of embodied experience”(Sobchack, 1991, p. 4). The film presents to us a unique and powerful cinematic language for framing ruptures and silence wrenched out from the realm of the unconscious.

Framing history, precarity, and trauma 165

Note 1 Firaaq won the awards for “Best Film,” “Screenplay/Script,” and “Foreign Correspondents Association Purple Orchid Award for Best Film” at the Asian Festival of First Films 2008 in Singapore. The film has also won awards at other international film festivals, including the Special Prize award at the International Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece, the Special Jury Award at the International Film Festival of Kerala, and the Best Editor award for the film’s editor Sreekar Prasad at the Dubai International Film Festival. The film also won an award at the Kara Film Festival.

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Index

absentee husbands 136, 139 – 140 Acchutanand, Swami 89 – 91 adivasis 98 – 102, 104, 106, 108, 112, 115; Mahasabha 89, 101; movement 102; right 100, 104, 105; struggle 108 Adversaria 20 – 23, 25 Agamben, Giorgio 153 Akbar 127 Altekar, A.S. 118; New History of the Indian People, A 118 Ambedkar, Babasaheb 94 – 96; Annihilation of Caste 94; Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables, The 95 – 96 anamnestic solidarity 153, 155, 164 ancestors 68, 79 – 82, 84, 105, 112, 114 Andaman Islands 67 – 83; anti-colonial struggle and 83; freedom-fighters and 67 – 68, 73, 76 – 84; postcolonial historiography of 70; struggle 74 – 75, 77 – 79, 81 – 84 annual hunting festival 112 anthropology 9, 120; of religion (religious anthropology) 5, 15, 22, 28 anti-caste 89 – 91, 94 anti-caste crusaders, rainbow coalition 91 anti-colonial see colonial/colonialism anti-nationalism 94 Arabi-Malayalam Kathupattus 136 Arabs 121, 124, 142, 144 – 145 Aryan (Arya) 4, 7, 89, 90, 92 – 96; Aryan invasion, history of 96; non-Aryan (un-Arya) 7, 93 – 95 Arya Samaj 89 Asura 93, 109, 110 Aurangzeb 15, 20 – 21, 25, 27; see also Dryden, J. Baijnath, Lala 52, 53, 55 – 60, 62 – 63; crtitcs of British government 62;

England and India 52, 63; experiences in London 53; views about English justice system 56 Banerjee, Kshetranath 2 Banerjee, Pompa 37, 49 Barthes, Roland 143 Bengali 2, 74, 90, 99; Hindu refugee 82; historiography 2; Mussalman 7 Benjamin, W. 164 Berlant, L. 152, 155, 164 Bernier, F. 15, 18, 20 – 22, 24 – 25, 28, 38 – 44, 46 – 48; Evenemens Particuliers 21; Histoire de la Derniere Revolution des Etats du Grand Mogol 21; Suite des Memoires 21, 25; Travels in the Mogul Empire 40 – 43, 46 – 47; Voiage de Kachemire 21 Bhabha, H.K. 67, 73, 98; Nation and Narration 98 Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi 1; Approaches to History: Essays in Indian Historiography 1, 11 Birsa Munda 4, 8, 83, 99, 100 – 105, 108, 113, 115; Birsa Cult 102; concept of “dharti aba” 103 – 104; features as a modern man 103; movement 100, 102; uprising 105, 108 Bodhanand, Bhikshu 89 – 96; Baudhacharya Paddhati 91; Bhagwan Buddha 91; converted to Buddhism 94; enrichment of Aryan culture 93; freethinking Brahmin 90; Mool Bharatvasi Aur Arya 7, 89 – 91, 95 bonded labour 8, 98, 105 – 106, 114 Bose, Subhash Chandra 74 Bowrey, Thomas 35, 47 – 48, 50 Boyle, Robert 19, 23 Brahmins (Brahmins, Brahmans, Brahmens) 25 – 27, 40 – 41, 48, 90 – 92; Brahminical varnavyavastha 91

170 Index British 35, 59, 67, 69, 71 – 75, 102 – 105, 123; colonial period 82, 124; government 48, 58, 62, 104; imperialism 60; India 49; Penal Colony 67; Raj (Empire) 68; rule 58, 100 Buddhism 94, 95, 124; Buddhist 90, 93, 95, 122, 124, 131; Buddhist India 125, 130 Burke, P. 1 – 3, 6, 8 – 10; History and Social Theory 3, 8 – 9; Renaissance Sense of the Past 2; What is Cultural History 10 Calaresu, Melissa 5 Carey, D. 16, 18, 23, 28 capital 46, 99, 114; capitalism 98, 114; capitalist 99, 100, 103, 104, 111, 114 caste(s) 71 – 73, 89 – 92, 94 – 96, 106 – 107, 123 – 124, 144; caste-based violence (see violence); caste identity 68; casteism 91; caste oppression 89; caste system 7, 72, 89 – 91, 94, 98 Cellular Jail 69, 70, 74, 77 – 80, 82 – 83; bourgeois inmates of 77; Centenary Celebrations in 79; declared as a national memorial 77, 78; dubious popularity 70; elevated position of 69; imaginaire of 69; “political” prisoners 78; residues of 78 Charnock, Job 48 Chatterjee, P. 2, 7, 9, 67, 99 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra 7 Chotanagpur Tenancy Act 101, 104 Christianity 26, 41, 48 – 49 Class(es) 71 – 72, 78, 80, 94, 111, 153; middle 153, 159, 160; subaltern 6 collective 67 – 68, 80, 83, 115, 149, 154 – 158; belonging 149; fear 163; history 82; memories 150, 164; traumas 164 colonial/colonialism 6 – 8, 11, 47, 67 – 71, 73 – 74, 104 – 105; anti-colonial 7, 61, 67 – 70, 78 – 81, 83 – 84; convicts 68; exploitation 6; governance/government 69, 113; India 69, 80, 100, 118; neocolonial(ism) 99, 105, 110; period 5, 6, 48, 53, 68, 141; postcolonial 67 – 70, 74 – 78, 83, 104, 150, 152; pre-colonial 5, 11, 106; State 73, 78; subject(s) 52 – 56, 58 – 64, 76; travellers 6, 57 commercialization 103, 111 communal 110 – 111, 150, 153, 155, 157, 159 – 161, 163 – 164; conflicts 153; disharmony 113; violence (see violence) convicts 7, 67 – 73, 78 – 82; colonial convicts (see colonial/colonialism);

criminal convicts 67, 69, 80; subaltern 70, 78, 84 Comte, Auguste 119 cosmopolitan nationalism 52, 53, 59 – 64; cosmopolitanism 6, 52 – 53, 60; cynical cosmopolitanism 53; nationalist 53, 62; vernacular cosmopolitanism 6 Cudworth, Charles 24 Cudworth, Ralph 24 “cultivated partiality” 55 – 59 culture 60 – 63, 98 – 99; cultural alienation 57; cultural creolization 76, 84n5; encounter(s) 5, 6, 11, 54; global 56; hegemonic 70; heterogeneity 156; Hindu 126; history 1, 5, 9, 10, 35, 44, 55, 128; intercultural exchanges 5, 11; local 10; memory 69, 75; nonWestern 6; popular 6, 8, 11; postcolonial 74; practices 1, 5, 35, 36, 43, 45, 52, 57; regional 125s; spaces 50; tribal 111; values 35, 36 dalits 7, 89, 98, 99 Das, Nandita 4, 149, 152 – 153, 156 – 158, 162 – 163 demon 40, 109; demonize 42 Devi, M. 4, 7, 98 – 99, 101 – 106, 108 – 113, 115; Aranyer Adhikar 99, 102 – 104; biographical narrative 101; Chotti Munda 104 – 107, 111 – 112; Douloti the Bountiful 98 – 99; The Hunt 111 – 112; Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha 112 – 115; Rudali 110 – 111; Shishu 105, 109 – 110 Diaz, Bernal: Conquest of New Spain, The 49 Doss, N.L. 54, 57, 60 Dryden, J.: Aurengzebe 38 – 39 Dutt, Romesh Chandra 93, 117, 125 East India Company 2, 24, 27, 35 Elsaesser, T. 163 Emergency imposition 106; see also Gandhi, Indira empires 6, 21, 25, 58 – 59, 60, 63, 67 – 68, 120 – 122, 130, 136 Englishman, The 128 Enlightenment 5 – 6, 28, 43, 50, 129 environment 100 – 104, 111, 113, 119 – 121, 160; environmental 100; environmental destruction 111 – 112 ethnography 9, 35 exotic/exoticizing 5, 15, 18, 19, 35, 46, 50; exotic Indian 53, 54; exoticism 53 – 55

Index  171 Farrier, D. 113 – 114 Firaaq 10, 149 – 151, 153, 155 – 157, 159, 161 – 164; aesthetico-political archive of codes and images 156; child/hood and trauma 152 – 153; cinematic ethics 153 – 156; communal situation in Gujarat 150; disconcerting indictment 150; engagement with the terrors 163; ethics 150 – 152; evocation of violence 151; experiential component of spectatorship 151; gendered dissent 156 – 157; haptic qualities 156; “historical” representation of trauma 162; intricacies of memory and trauma 151; politics 150 – 152; semiotics of terror 158 – 164; spectrality and spectropolitics 157 – 158; storyline 150 – 151; traumatic after-effects of political violence 152; violence and cinema 156 – 157 folk 9, 89, 119, 120; folklore 9, 75, 108; folklorist 44; folk songs 9; folk tales 9 Foucault, M. 85, 135, 149 freedom 61, 62, 69, 128; fighters 67 – 68, 73, 76 – 79, 80 – 84; struggle 74 – 75, 77 – 79, 81 – 84 Gandhi, Indira 106 Gassendi, Pierre 20 Geddes, P. 8, 117 – 120, 122, 125 – 126; Exposition Universelle 118; first visit to India 118; Geddes Anna 119 – 120, 124; Geddesian concept-tools 117, 119; legacy 118; Paris–intellectual home 119 “geological evolution” 113 Ginzburg, C. 3 Greenblatt, Stephen 46, 49 Green Revolution 8, 113, 114 Guha, Ranajit 6, 108 Gujarat Riots (2002) 4, 149 – 151; see also Firaaq Gulf migrations 135 – 137, 139, 142; syndrome 138 Gulf wives 136 – 139, 142 – 146; marital absence 144; in pravasi villages 136; psychosomatic disturbances 137, 138; sexual and physical vulnerabilities 137 Hartog, F. 149 Hawley, John S. 36 “hereditary offenders” 71 heretic-burning 48, 49 Hinduism 20 – 23, 39, 49, 89 – 90, 94, 123, 126 – 127 Hindu–Muslim divide 160 Hindu Vedantism 127

historical imaginary 4; imagination 96 historiography(ies) 1 – 3, 5 – 8, 10 – 11, 67, 75 – 77, 95 – 96, 152; alternate/ alternative 1, 5 – 8, 10 – 11, 35, 53, 96, 98, 135; colonial 118; Indian 1, 105, 118, 128; knowledge 59, 72; local 6; neo-colonialist 108; postcolonial 70, 75; radical 8; regional 10, 83 history(ies) 1 – 11, 95 – 96, 117 – 122, 125 – 126, 129 – 130, 149 – 152, 163 – 164; colonial 5; cultural 1, 5, 9, 35, 44, 55, 135; imaginative 96; Indian(History of India) 7 – 9, 117 – 118, 121 – 130; local 7, 81, 82; mythical 109; nationalist 7; natural 19, 44; oral 1, 75, 81, 102 – 103; political 28; postcolonial 10, 152; Puranic 2; regional 67, 74; social 67, 81; subaltern 70, 73, 81; tribal 98, 100, 105, 106, 115; of varnavyavastha 91 – 92; see also Nivedita, sister, idea of history Hooke, Robert 24 hospitality 153, 154, 155; inhospitality 153 Hul, Santal 105, 108 India as an organic synthesis 124 – 128 Indian National Army (INA) 74 Indian nationalism 6, 121, 128 informed enchantment 52, 57 “institutionalized riot system” 160 Iqbal, R. 78 Islam 124, 126 – 127, 142; absorption within Indian society 127 – 128; Islamic intolerance 126; Islamic propagation of faith 7; place in Indian society 126 Itinerarium Mundi 44 Jameel, S.A. 135 – 136, 138 – 141, 145, 146n1; Dubaikkatthu 135 – 136, 138 – 139, 142, 145; Gulfukarante Bharya (The Wife of Pravasi) 140 Jani Parab, festival of 111 Janta Government 106 Japanese occupation 73, 75, 82; horror story of 75; martyrs of 82 Judaism 26 Kakar, S. 161 Kala Pani 67 – 70, 73, 75, 84; backlashes of memorialization 82 – 83; Bourgeoisnationalist prisoners 85n9; community of “shared suffering” 78; crafting a new world in 72 – 73; hegemonic representation of the freedom struggle 79; horror of 69, 75; ideological

172 Index trajectory of 83; “Indian-ness” of settlers and migrant communities 76 (see also Japanese occupation); “political offenders” 71; postcolonial transitions 75 – 77; production of new subjectivities 70 – 72; trajectory of 68 – 70; welfare policies 78 kamiya whoredom 8, 98 Kathupattukal (Letter Songs) 10, 135 – 136, 141 – 144, 146; causative elements 145; emergence of 135, 145 Khairabadi, Fazl-e Haqq 72 Khan, Daneshmand 20, 40 – 41 Khunkatti 100 – 101, 104 Kircher, Athanasius: China Illustrata 25 Knox, Robert: Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon 24 Kol Rebellion 105, 108, 110 Kurien, P.A. 137 – 138 Lajpat Rai, Lala 93 Lall, B.B. 75, 81 Lefebvre, H. 98 Lemke, S. 156 Levinas, Emmanuel 154 Light of Andamans, The 81 local/localized 74 – 76, 138 – 139, 142, 144; Born 72 – 74, 80 – 82; communities 68, 82, 83; history(ies) historiography (see historiography(ies), knowledge) Local Born Association 81 Locke, J. 5, 15 – 28, 38, 43; “Adversaria Historica” 23; attention to the New World 15; encounter with Bernier 24; enthusiasm as a ground of assent 26; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An 5, 15, 18, 25, 43; Indian religion and 20 – 22, 24 – 25; inquiries 18 – 20; insight into Hindu religious belief 24; intellectual encounter with India 15; investigation of Hinduism 5; last Indian correspondent (Lock) 27 – 28; relationship to Boyle 29n13; religious enthusiasm 24 – 27; religious knowledge 22 – 24; sati and 16 – 18; Some Thoughts Concerning Education 16; “tabula rasa” image of 45; Zoroastrianism knowledge 30n30 Ludden, D. 83 Lusty, Reverend 100 Majumdar, R.C. 70, 78, 118 Malabari, Behramji 60 – 61

Malabar rebellion 73 Malayalam soft erotica tabloids 145 “Malayali sexual revolution” 144 Mandelslo, J.A. von 17, 18 Mander, H. 150, 153 Mangalam 144 Manorama 144 Manusmriti 93 Mapilla(Moplah) 10, 135 – 136, 138 – 139, 141 – 146 marital 135 – 136, 138, 143 – 146; anxiety/ destruction/dishonesty 10, 139, 141, 144; integrity 143; relations 9, 137 – 138; space(s) 142 – 144 martyrdom 67, 70, 75, 78, 83 Marupadikkatthu 139 – 141 Masham, Damaris 24 Mathur, L.P. 69, 73 – 74 memories 149 – 152, 156 – 157, 159 – 164; collective (see collective); national/ nationalist 67, 77, 81, 83 Middle East 138, 143, 145 – 146 migration 76 – 77, 82, 100, 107; see also Gulf migration Milton, J.R. 18, 23 Modern Review, The 117 Mohammed, the Prophet of God 120–121 Montaigne, Michel de 38, 42 Montanus, Arnoldus 20 – 23, 25, 28; Atlas Japannensis 20 Mookerji, R.K. 117, 130; Fundamental Unity of India, The 130 Munda 99, 100 – 107, 112; Munda rebellion/uprising 4, 8, 99, 105, 108; Mundari 100 – 102, 104, 107; see also Birsa Munda Mundy, Peter 5, 35, 43 – 46, 50 Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857 7, 69, 71 – 72, 79 – 82 Naidu, S. 76, 81, 53 Naipaul, V.S. 76, 85 Narasu, P.L.: Essence of Buddhism, The 94 nationalism 52, 61, 78, 121, 128, 129, 156; cosmopolitan nationalism (see cosmopolitan) Nayar, P.K. 11, 52, 57 neo-colonialist historiography see historiography(ies) Nivedita, Sister 8, 117 – 131; advocated a historiography for India 125; Contribution to Indian historiography 118; efforts for re-writing Indian

Index  173 history 117; Footfalls of Indian History 117, 119; Hints on National Education in India 117; historical thought 117; History of India and its Study, The 124; idealistic and utopian vision 129; idea of the Indian nation was inclusive 127 – 128; idea of synthesis 8, 118 – 119, 124 – 129, 131, 164; Note on Historical Research, A 130; Web of Indian Life, The 117 – 118, 129, 131n3 Norris, Sir William 27 Olearius, A. 17, 18 Omvedt, Gail: Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste 95; Debrahmanising History: Dominance and Resistance in Manbhar, Indian Society 95 oral history see history oral tradition 102, 103 ‘organic’ ethnic communities 99 Orientalism, language of 53 Overbury, Thomas 37 Ovington, John 5, 35, 45 – 46, 50 Pandey, G.S. 75, 81, 84n6 partition 67, 75, 76, 153, 154, 159; postpartition 152, 154, 156 patriarchy 47, 98, 153; patriarchal 35 – 36, 39, 43, 111, 139 peripheral genres 10 – 11 Philosophical Transactions 19, 20 Phule, Jotiba 89, 91, 93; Gulamgiri 89, 93 Pillai, G.P. 52, 56; London and Paris Through Indian Spectacles 52 Play, Frédéric Le 119 political: offenders 70, 80 – 81; prisoners 67, 69 – 70, 77 – 79, 83 postcolonial see colonial/colonialism ‘postmodern era’ 3 Pratt, M.L. 71 pravasi (migrants): anxieties around sexuality 142 – 146; communicative tools 143; emotional pain 139; emotions of the Keralite diaspora in the Gulf area 135; new world of sexual experiences 144; Panasonic revolution 142 – 146; “pravasi acoustics” 142; in Singapore 141; see also Gulf wives precolonial see colonial/colonialism Pritchard, R.E. 44, 45, 50n2 prostitution 61, 80, 110, 141 – 142

Rajputs 17, 110, 111 Rancière, J. 150, 162 – 164; Emancipated Spectator, The 162 Reformation 6 religious divide/antagonism 8, 93; religious minority 156 – 157 Renaissance 1 – 2, 6 “re-Orientalism”: Lisa Lau 55 resistance 78 – 79, 83 – 84, 94, 98 – 99; tribal 100, 114, 115 Ricoeur, P. 1, 2, 3, 4 Right: Adivasi Right (see adivasi); of/to the forest/Aranyer Adhikar 101, 102, 104, 105 Rig Veda 92, 93 riot/rioters 150 – 151, 153 – 155, 157 – 162; Gujarat riot (see Gujarat Riots (2002)) Roe, Thomas 44 Rogerius, Abraham (Rogerius) 24, 28 Roy, Rammohun 37 Royal Society 19 Rudalis 110 – 111 “sabbat” 40 sacred 19, 90, 103, 109 – 110 Said, E.: Beginnings: Intention and Method 90 Santal insurrection, Rebellion of 105 Sarkar, Jadunath 117 – 118 Sarkar, T. 151, 153, 159 sati 5, 15 – 18, 22, 28n5, 35 – 50; abolition of the practice of 37, 49; act of heroism 38; conflicting explanations of 46; endorsement of 38; etymology of the word 35; European observers 48; motivation for 45 – 46; Mughals policy to prevent 39; Ovington’s account 45; and self-sacrificial love 46 Savarkar, Veer 79; see also Kala Pani “scandal song” 138 Scott, Reginald 41 Sen, S. 69 – 72 Shaftesbury, Earl of 18, 46 (Cooper, A.A.) Shah Jahan/Shah Jehan 20, 43, 127 Singh, Gulab 89, 91, 94 Singh, Jagatjit, the king of Kapurthala 54 Singh, Jaipal 101 – 102 Singh, K.S. 99, 100 – 102, 104; Dust Storm and Hanging Mist 99 Siraj-uddaulah, “Black Hole” incident 2 space(s): cultural 50, 112; geographical 6; marital (see marital); private 109, 112;

174 Index public 78 – 79, 83; of resistance 98 – 99; social 98, 110; urban 109, 151; see also subaltern Spivak, G.C. 48, 99, 104 – 106, 108, 110 – 112, 114 – 115 strategic co-optation 53, 54 subaltern 7, 67 – 68, 77 – 78, 81, 84, 99; convicts (see convicts); history (see history(ies)); spaces 109; Studies 8, 108; subaltern castes 91; subaltern class (see class(es)) Swadheenta Sangram Senani Vanshaj Samiti 81 Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme 77 Tagore, Rabindranath 9, 93, 129 Talbot, A. 15, 28n1 Tamta, B.R. 69, 74 – 76, 78 Terry, Edward 5, 16, 28, 35 – 39, 44 – 45; Voyage to East-India, A 16 Tharuvana, Aziz 138 Thompson, Edward 49 Tilak, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar 93 trauma 136 – 138, 151 – 152, 155 – 158, 160 – 164; collective (see collective); post-traumatic 157 travel narratives 1, 4, 5, 15, 35, 47, 54, 56, 61; post-colonial 63; Western/European/

English travel accounts/narratives/ travelogue 16, 47 tribal(s) 98 – 106, 108 – 115, 121; Agaria(Agaraiya) 109, 110; Kurmi 107; Kuva 110; Oraon 111, 112; resistance (see resistance); woman 110, 111, 112 tribes: criminal 71, 73; hill 73; Mundari 100 upper caste 89, 91 – 92, 94 – 95, 110 Vaidik, A. 67, 69 – 72, 84n7 varnavyavastha 8, 91, 94 Vidyalankar, Mrityunjay: Rajabali 2 violence: bodily 152; caste-based 77; communal 77, 149, 161; gendered 156; political 152; post-partition 152, 156 Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine 44 widow-burning 36, 41, 48 – 49; see also sati witch-burning 48, 49 witchcraft 41 witches 39 – 41, 43, 49 Yajur Veda 93 Zehmisch, P. 7, 9 – 10, 67, 71 – 73, 76 – 79, 81 – 82, 84n1, 84n3