Frontiers of South Asian Culture 1032231696, 9781032231693

Citation preview

“Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-​Nation and Beyond is a fascinating collection of essays on postcolonial literature, film, and culture. The collection covers a broad geographic range –​and it also incorporates recent theoretical approaches such as ecocriticism, humour studies, food studies, and graphic art criticism.” Donna L. Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Washington State University, Pullman, USA “A thoroughly engaging and timely intervention in the debates on nationhood, globalism, and regional cultures. Moving consciously away from existing frameworks, Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-​ Nation and Beyond offers new insight and provocations on the significance of transnationalism as both a context and methodological approach to literature and cinema. The book’s great value lies in its marshalling of original material and reflections to shed light on the complex entanglements found in India’s diverse territorial imaginations.” Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India “In the wake of decolonisation, the process of national identity formation in the independent countries of South Asia inhibited mutual understanding and discouraged collective scrutiny of the human condition. With its emphasis on the entangled cultural and political histories of South Asian locations, regions, and nations, Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-​Nation and Beyond realises a commendable academic milestone.” Senath Walter Perera, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka “Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-​Nation and Beyond by Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya offers a rich palette of essays that look at a range of cultural practices and texts to flesh out imaginaries of the nation and beyond. Working along literary and cinematic registers, the edited collection confronts the challenges of understanding borders and boundaries, yielding valuable insight on the conundrums of our contemporary existence.” Lakshmi Subramanian, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India “This is an eclectic collection of scholarly essays that together map the regional imaginary of ‘South Asia’, considering literature and cinema, sometimes regarded as stand-​alone media forms, sometimes as driving each other. We see how the trans/​national is configured in specific regional locales –​Sri Lanka, Goa, Assam, Pondicherry and Bangladesh, besides

West Bengal. At the same time, the essays look at flows –​of rivers, trains, ideas, and people as they traverse across spaces. This unique volume combines the scholarship of the young as well as the established in the fields of comparative/​literary studies and film studies.” Nikhila H., Professor, Department of Film Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India “This capacious volume richly extends the very idea of the frontier and space-​time –​artistically, as well as politically. The comparative framework of the regional-​national frees us from the narrow precincts of nationhood and the detached local as well as from the ersatz universality of the global. The porosity of encountering cultural seepage is a tantalizing possibility. Through the lens of the transnational, the volume grapples with the deeper questions of tradition and modernity, style and meaning, space and temporality. An abundant experience.” Prasanta Chakravarty, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi, India

Frontiers of South Asian Culture

This book is one of the first of its kind to significantly concentrate on trans-​nation, transnationalism and its dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Taking the absence of discussion on transnationalism in South Asia as a conspicuous lacuna as well as a point of intervention, this book pushes the boundaries of scholarship further by organizing a dialogue between the nation-​state and many nationalisms and the emergent method of transnationalism. It opens itself up for many cross-​border movements, formulating the trans-​South Asian discursive exchange necessitated by contemporary theoretical upheavals. It looks at such exchanges through the prisms of literature and cinema and traces the many modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, trying to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-​nation. Parichay Patra is Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India. Amitendu Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani –​K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India.

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures

Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-​anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney Maternal Fictions Writing the Mother in Indian Women’s Fiction Indrani Karmakar Postsecular Poetics Negotiating the Sacred and Secular in Contemporary African Fiction Rebekah Cumpsty Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City Mapping the Mean Streets of Mumbai and Naples Maria Ridda Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction Sarah Knor Frontiers of South Asian Culture Nation, Trans-​Nation and Beyond Edited by Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya

For more information on this series, please visit www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Resea​rch-​in-​ Postc​olon​ial-​Lite​ratu​res/​book-​ser​ies/​SE0​404

Frontiers of South Asian Culture Nation, Trans-​Nation and Beyond Edited by Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya to be identified as the authors 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Region/Nation/Trans-Nation: Literature-Cinema Interface (Conference) (2019 : Goa, India) | Patra, Parichay, 1985– editor. | Bhattacharya, Amitendu, editor. Title: Frontiers of South Asian culture : nation, trans-nation and beyond / edited by Parichay Patra & Amitendu Bhattacharya. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge research in postcolonial literatures | “This book owes its genesis to an international conference on the theme of ‘Region/Nation/Trans-Nation: Literature-Cinema Interface’ that was organized and hosted by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani - K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India, from 31 January to 2 February 2019”– CIP galley. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023010076 (print) | LCCN 2023010077 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032231693 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032550183 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003428572 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Transnationalism in motion pictures–Congresses. | National characteristics, South Asian, in motion pictures–Congresses. | Motion pictures–South Asia–History–Congresses. | South Asian literature–History and criticism–Congresses. | Transnationalism in literature–Congresses. | National characteristics, South Asian, in literature–Congresses. | LCGFT: Conference papers and proceedings. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.T6855 R44 2019 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.T6855 (ebook) | DDC 791.430914–dc23/eng/20230330 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010076 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010077 ISBN: 9781032231693 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032550183 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003428572 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003428572 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of Contributors

x

Introduction

1

PART I

Nation and Its Porous Frontiers 1 The Politics of Spectatorship: Textual Traditions, Cinematograph and the Moral Dilemma of the Natives of Assam in British India (1900–​1935)

9

11

K A U S H I K TH AKUR B H UYAN

2 Then and Now: Nation and Transnational Identity in Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s Joymati (1935) and Jahnu Barua’s Ajeyo (2014)

23

A S H A K U TH ARI CH A UDH URI

3 Humour and Cinema: A Study of Language Politics in Assam

35

S I M O N A S A R MA AN D SUKRITY GO GO I

4 The Transnational City of Pondicherry: Elite Indian Identity Crisis and Cortes’ Receding French Image

49

A N D R E A R O DRIGUE S

5 Cartography of Goa: Analysis of the Tangible Loci of Culture in the Sketches of Mario Miranda A M R I TA B I S WAS

64

viii  Contents PART II

Nation, Cultural Histories, Trans-​Nation: The Cinematic Imagi-​Nation

81

6 That Which Flows

83

M O I N A K B I S WAS

7 Ray at Large: Cinema In and Out of Literature in Region, Nation, Transnation

93

K A U S H I K B H AUMIK

8 Beckett and Avikunthak: Lineages of the Avant-​Garde

108

BRINDA BOSE

9 The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity Formation in Tanvir Mokammel’s Films

121

FA K R U L A L A M

PART III

Nation, Cultural Histories, Trans-​Nation: The Literary Imagi-​Nation

137

10 Region, Nation, Border: Histories of Land and Water

139

S U P R I YA C H A UDH URI

11 Travelling On: Bengali and English Literatures of Transnational Worlding

156

A R K A C H ATT O PA DH YAY

12 Capitalist World-​Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve

172

S O U R I T B H AT TA CH ARYA

13 Modernity on Wheels: Reading Trains as Sites of Encounter and Disaster

184

A N U PA R N A MUKH E RJE E

14 “The lights cut out quickly”: Nation, Nationalism and City-​lit during 1980s–​1990s D I B YA K U S U M RAY

198

Contents  ix PART IV

South Asian Transactions: Between Subcontinental Flow and Transnational Frictions

215

15 Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Ceylonic Indigenization Movement

217

S A M A N M . K A RIYAKARAWAN E A N D S. S. A . SENEV IR AT HNE

16 From Villain to Superhero: Reimaginings of Ravana in Twentieth-​and Twenty-​First Century Sri Lanka

233

K A N C H U K A DH ARMASIRI

Index

249

Contributors

Editors Parichay Patra is Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India. Amitendu Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani –​K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India. Authors Fakrul Alam is Director, Sheikh Mujib Research Institute for Peace and Liberty, and Supernumerary Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Sourit Bhattacharya is Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, North Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, India. Amrita Biswas is a Ph.D. candidate, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. Moinak Biswas is Professor, Department of Film Studies, and Coordinator, Media Lab, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Brinda Bose is Associate Professor, Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

newgenprepdf

List of Contributors  xi Arka Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India. Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri is Professor and former Chair, Department of English, Gauhati University, Guwahati, India. Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Kanchuka Dharmasiri is Senior Lecturer, Department of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Sukrity Gogoi is ICSSR Doctoral Fellow, Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India. Saman M. Kariyakarawane is Development Officer, Southern Provincial Ministry of Education, Sri Lanka. Anuparna Mukherjee is Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal, India. Dibyakusum Ray is Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India. Andrea Rodrigues is an independent researcher and fiction writer with a specialization in urban literature. Simona Sarma is a Ph.D. candidate, Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India. S. S. A. Senevirathne is Professor of English, Sabaragamuwa University, Sri Lanka.

Introduction

This book owes its genesis to an international conference on the theme of ‘Region/​Nation/​Trans-​Nation: Literature-​Cinema Interface’ that was organized and hosted by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani –​K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India, from 31 January to 2 February 2019. The conference attracted considerable academic attention and was attended by nearly 150 delegates who entered into a spirited scholarly dialogue with one another. The sheer range and quality of the presentations and audience interventions made it a conference with a difference. The obvious and inevitable consequence of an event of such significance and magnitude is the publication of a book on the conference proceedings. As we started planning for the book, suddenly, an organism indiscernible to the naked eye transgressed zoonotic boundaries and rampaged through the human species. While the COVID-​19 pandemic claimed precious lives, disrupted normal activities, and thwarted predetermined plans, it also afforded time for introspection. The pathogen effectively exposed certain ugly truths about society and politics that the mainstream media and intellectual discourses were unsuccessful in doing. For instance, it was apparent why the nations ruled by authoritarian and hyper-​nationalistic regimes were worst hit by the coronavirus. As the pandemic somewhat subsided, a totalitarian state wanting to resurrect their lost empire waged a war in Eastern Europe. In recent years, South Asia, which is the region of focus in the book, too was convulsed by upheavals as glaringly exemplified in the rise of aggressive majoritarianism in India and in the unprecedented economic crisis in Sri Lanka. All these developments seriously challenged our normative understanding of the connection and disjunction between the local, regional, national, and global –​thereby offering further provocations for a book on nationalism and transnationalism.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-1

2  Introduction This book mainly consists of expanded and revised versions of some of the papers presented in the conference, but hitherto unpublished. Carrying contributions by some of the experienced as well as budding researchers from the subcontinent, the present volume is possibly a first-​ of-​its-​kind book that significantly engages with such emergent conceptual apparatuses as trans-​nation and transnationalism, and the latter’s dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Transnationalism as a method has not been very frequently explored and deployed in South Asian academia. This is despite the fact that a transnational approach to inquiry and analysis is prevalent in the Euro-​ American context, especially in contemporary cinema studies research –​ the discipline freely borrows from comparative literature methodologies. In the South Asian social science research scene, however, the focus has primarily remained on the various modes and critiques of the nation-​state and nationalism(s). Taking this lacuna as a point of intervention, this book intends to push the boundaries of scholarship further by facilitating a dialogue between the emergent method of transnationalism, and the existing critiques of the nation-​state and nationalisms. This volume also seeks to expand the discipline of South Asian studies, which has for a long time tended to exclude India’s neighbors, making the discipline a euphemism for India studies. Broadening its scope, the book goes beyond the borders of the Indian state to engage with other countries of South Asia such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The discussion on the cross-​border movements and resultant exchanges this book embodies is necessitated by contemporary theoretical innovations. These exchanges are examined here through the prisms of literature and cinema. Tracing the various modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, the book tries to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation, and trans-​nation. These locations act as contact zones where cultural interfaces manifest themselves in various forms. Regional nationalisms, the residues of a federal republic, linguistic identity politics, and India’s cultural negotiations with the phenomenon of trans-​nation all converge in these locations. Given the wide-​ranging nature of the work included here, this book covers most of these issues. It opens with a section on such porous frontiers of the Indian nation as Goa, Pondicherry, and the Northeast, and the regional nationalisms located therein. From such marginal nationalisms and their spatial-​cultural histories, it proceeds to the transition from the nation to trans-​nation through the dual prisms of the literary and the cinematic, through the inter-​coalesced histories of the text and the image. Finally, it transcends the porous frontiers to arrest the subcontinental flow of culture, relocating its various signifiers in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. This collection of essays offers a novel intervention in that it substantively deals

Introduction  3 with the variegated aspects of the region–​nation–​trans-​nation nexus in the South Asian context. The chapters in the book do not revolve around a central theme. The mode of mapping here is conceptual rather than thematic. The exploration begins with the multiple issues that plague the fluid border regions of India. These issues have been long in the making and have their origins in the refugee and migrant influx into India (from Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Pakistan). They have recently been spotlighted due to certain controversial decisions made by the present regime in India such as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Though the NRC and CAA sparked nationwide protests and debates, the book does not directly address these issues. However, it actively contributes to the ongoing discussions by focusing on the border regions and former non-​British colonies in India that have not received adequate academic attention. Moreover, in literary, cultural, and film studies, the Eastern, Western, and Southern frontiers of India have mostly been overlooked in favor of the Northwestern. The significance of the present book lies in its determination to remedy this deficiency. From the frontier issues, the book journeys to the many nationalisms and transnational issues as they are captured by and expressed through literary and cinematic imaginations. The two mediums find a common site of inquiry here and they often intersect. Such movements between forms and mediums lead to the final section on cultural flows and transactions in the wider subcontinental context, effectively moving beyond the India-​centric approach of contemporary South Asian studies. Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan’s chapter (Chapter 1) discusses the mingling of community memory and advances in the print and visual media producing new linguistic and cultural idioms that have the potential to forge ideologies of the region and nation. Taking the development of cinema in colonial Assam to be his subject-​matter, Bhuyan argues that the cinematic medium was instrumental in fashioning middle-​class sensibilities in the early twentieth-​century Assam. He establishes his contention by demonstrating how language operates in varied registers to either uphold or undermine governing ideologies and how it eventually aids in the process of identity formation. Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri (Chapter 2) reads back the present connotations of the term ‘transnation’ to a moment when the Indian nation-​state was still in the making. In her reading of two Assamese-​language films –​made almost 80 years apart, in 1935 and 2014, and depicting the temporal juncture when the idea of India was taking shape –​she discerns both centralizing and decentralizing forces in operation inasmuch as the films’ depictions of the same time–​space–​nation matrix is concerned. Chaudhuri’s analysis of the notions of borders as well as of national and transnational identity takes into account the political upheavals that affected Assam after 1947.

4  Introduction Through their study of humor in mainstream Assamese films, Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi (Chapter 3) underscore the existence of a linguistic hierarchy in the state that privileges the language spoken in ‘upper Assam’ and relegates to an inferior status the language of ‘lower Assam’. This linguistic hierarchization and the consequent marginalization of the people of ‘lower Assam’ are mirrored in Assamese films where an exclusive association is established between comic scenes and the language of ‘lower Assam’. In addition to examining the link between the comic language of films and linguistic identity politics in Assam, Sarma and Gogoi investigate whether the deployment of a particular type of language can render ineffectual urban–​rural divisions and gender binaries. They further inquire if the gender identity of the comic characters is purposed merely for comic relief or for providing a critique of society. With the end of French colonial rule in Pondicherry in 1954, the overlapping French and Indian regional identities in the Pondicherrians underwent a deep rupture, resulting in them being placed in a state of identitarian quandary. This phenomenon is captured in certain cultural texts, most notably in Sebastian Cortés’ Pondicherry. In her chapter, Andrea Rodrigues (Chapter 4) detects a postmodern approach in such texts as Cortés’ where a parallelism is drawn between the waning transnational identity and the diminishing state identity, thus creating a fragmentary view of the present and a tenuous conception of the nation. In an effort to buttress her argument, Rodrigues studies the literary representations of the colonial French negotiating with cultural pluralism and relates her findings to Pondicherry’s shrinking transnational culture. Amrita Biswas’s chapter (Chapter 5) concentrates on the cultural spatiality of Goa, the erstwhile Portuguese colony, and the location of the conference. A space with several controversies and contestations rooted in its histories and in its present geopolitics, Goa becomes a site of inquiry through its representation in the visual art of Mario Miranda, one of its most celebrated cultural ambassadors. The heterogeneous space of the bazaar is pitted here against the processes of cultural homogenization, as local resistance to the latter and global cultural flows feature simultaneously in the visual texts of Miranda. Kaushik Bhaumik (Chapter 7) goes back into the 1960s Bengal and reconsiders the notion of the avant-​garde in the ‘postmodern’ works of Satyajit Ray, the global auteur from Bengal. Bhaumik’s approach is strikingly original as he situates Ray within the limitations of a (Bengali) literary modern and locates him moving beyond it through his cinematic means, creating a site where the regional and transnational meet through the avant-​gardist tendencies of the then global art cinema as such a site, Bhaumik argues, was beyond the reach of the literary cultures of Ray’s location.

Introduction  5 Brinda Bose’s and Moinak Biswas’ individual essays (Chapters 8 and 6, respectively) move consistently between the literary and the cinematic and also between many locations and times. Brinda Bose looks at Samuel Beckett’s modernist literary and not-​so-​frequent cinematic practices and travels to the avant-​gardist films of Ashish Avikunthak who adapted the works of Beckett. Interested in a ‘transnational churning’ of the avant-​ garde, Bose intends to trace the lineages of the latter, even though her method is not ‘genealogical’. The historicity of the avant-​garde is often specified by space and time, so she concentrates more on the textual movements, associations, after-​effects, and implications. Moinak Biswas, on the other hand, focuses on Bengali ‘wet’, watery novels and the regions that they explore, as the latter went to East Pakistan after the Partition and now exist in Bangladesh. His cinematic adaptations and instances come from both sides of the demarcating wall in the west, India and Pakistan. The flows of elements from one medium and location to another, the logic of their transnational transformation effortlessly move into Biswas’ chapter being aided by dense philosophical evocations on water and the perception-​image as imagined by Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze. Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan) returns strongly in the chapter of Fakrul Alam (Chapter 9) who writes on Tanvir Mokammel, a lone filmmaker and an independent voice in contemporary Bangladesh who has been consistently and unceasingly exploring the many challenges of the oppressed religious, ethnic, and other minorities produced by the Partition and the 1971 Liberation War. Alam’s essay intends to introduce Mokammel to an international readership (and, probably, an international audience) as his works remain mostly unheard of outside Bangladesh (one of his films has been banned in his home country as well). Supriya Chaudhuri (Chapter 10) reads selected twentieth-​ century Bengali fictional and cinematic texts that represent the transnational region of Bengal to probe the concepts of ‘region’, ‘nation’, and ‘border’. She argues that the emphasis on the local and regional in these texts, rather than being a shortcoming, serves a two-​fold purpose: tackles the notions of the nation and of political borders and highlights the ecological histories of deltaic Bengal. According to Chaudhuri, the depiction in the chosen texts of the precarious lives of the poor and marginalized in the capricious riparian terrain invalidates the complacent poetics of imperial and capitalist geography. Together, these texts conjure the idea of the global modern along with its links to concomitant social and aesthetic factors. The trope of travel is the fulcrum of recent theoretical advances in world literature whereby a text is placed at the intersection between cultures and at the crossroads of global literary circulation. Arka Chattopadhyay (Chapter 11) utilizes this idea of travel in Bengali-​Indian and Anglophone

6  Introduction Indian fiction in order to engage with transnationalism in world literary studies. He demonstrates how the transnational mobility of texts reinforces narrative credulity. Furthermore, Chattopadhayay considers texts with cosmological ambitions, texts engaging with the environmental notion of the transnational, and his chapter effectively arrives at our contemporary discussion on planetarity. Sourit Bhattacharya (Chapter 12) argues that despite the recent developments in the theorization of ‘colonialism’ and ‘neocolonialism’, and despite the issue of food scarcity having distinct colonial and neocolonial roots, food insecurity does not occupy a prominent position in postcolonial criticism. Through his reading of Kamala Markandaya’s novel Nectar in a Sieve, Bhattacharya illustrates how literary texts, besides affording different perspectives on envisioning scarcity in sociological terms, also represent the negotiations made both at individual and community levels to tackle scarcity in everyday life. Anuparna Mukherjee’s chapter (Chapter 13) examines the dichotomous history of the railways in India. The much bandied about perceptions of the railways as a symbol of economic and material progress, heralder of fresh ideas of autonomy and mobility, connector of distant cultures and regions, shaper of national unity and identity, and changer of the quotidian rhythms of life are contrasted with that of the railways’ inextricable links to violent and uncanny experiences, social disquietude, and colonial and capitalist exploitation. Mukherjee uses her analysis of the ambivalent role of the railways in India to address the larger question of the contested nature of modernity and its representations in South Asian literature. Dibyakusum Ray (Chapter 14) traces India’s journey toward neoliberalism through his study of its urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. The Indian nation and its nationalisms underwent historic changes in the decade that works as a watershed between the politically turbulent 1970s and the onslaught of globalization and economic liberalization in the millennium. Ray offers an informative contextual history, and it is followed by his literary case studies, with his exploration of urbanism’s many implications leading to speculations on the future of Indian urban cultures and its citizenry. The two contributions from Sri Lanka offer two distinctively different ways of exploring the complex politicality of the many nationalisms and emergent neoliberalism in a country torn by ethnic strife, unending wars and, presently, a devastating economic crisis. The chapter by S. M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne (Chapter 15) offers interesting insights into the indigenization movement in the island nation that shaped its nationalism during and after the colonial period. Exploring the careers of Ediriweera Sarachchandra (1914–​1996) and Sunil Santha (1915–​1981), two major cultural figures active in the movement, it argues that, despite

Introduction  7 their training in Santiniketan, Tagorean cosmopolitanism did not affect their Sinhala nationalist-​indigenist thought. The chapter offers a critical standpoint on the latter as its religious and ethnic biases, the authors suggest, led to the devastating ethnic strife that engulfed Sri Lanka. Kanchuka Dharmasiri (Chapter 16) traces many cinematic and theatrical-​ performative ‘transcreations’ of the mythological figure of Ravana within Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms, offering lesser-​ known retellings of the Indian epic Ramayana as the latter has become increasingly important in South Asian politics since the 1990s. Dharmasiri refers to Sri Lanka’s tension-​ridden association with India in the context of its handling of the Tamil question, ending her discussion with an open-​ended reference to the post-​truth era of digital intervention and image-​making. The chapters, despite being apparently disjointed, often connect to each other through shared interests and preoccupations. Andrea Rodrigues’ engagement with urbanity in a former French colony initiates a dialogue with Dibyakusum Ray’s discussion on the changing dynamics of urbanity in ‘mainland’ India. Even though they explore separate domains, Sourit Bhattacharya and Anuparna Mukherjee critically reconsider many nuances of colonialism and its residues. Considerations of the ecological and the planetary loom large in both Supriya Chaudhuri and Arka Chattoapadhyay’s works. Moinak Biswas and Supriya Chaudhuri occasionally concentrate on the same film-​texts of (and on) the river, but while Chaudhuri moves toward the historical, political, and ecological registers, Biswas proceeds to a philosophical understanding of waterity. As the Bengal delta –​with its borders, border-​crossing and making of nations –​ often becomes their site of inquiry, its post-​Partition histories of violence make their way into Fakrul Alam’s exploration of a not-​so-​well-​known yet indefatigable filmmaker. Such associations may be infinitely established throughout this volume. We are grateful to the staff and students of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani Goa Campus for their cheerful help and support in the hosting and organizing of the conference. The conference was generously funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), and the Department of Tourism, Government of Goa. We would also like to thank the General Editors and the South Asia Series editors of Routledge USA, the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, and our respective institutions (Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur; and BITS Pilani). We faced several challenges in the preparation of the book as the not-​so-​memorable COVID years came in between the conference and the book. So we would like to express our indebtedness to the contributors who patiently waited for its publication and helped us in all possible ways. We would also like to thank Nabajyoti Ghosh for his generous help with the review process.

Part I

Nation and Its Porous Frontiers

1 The Politics of Spectatorship Textual Traditions, Cinematograph and the Moral Dilemma of the Natives of Assam in British India (1900–​1935) Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan Introduction The chapter attempts to emphasise the interrelationship of the literature/​ cinema –​region/​nation contextualisation in four propositions. First to understand, how spatiality of historical time, geography and community sensibilities are intertwined to making of Assam’s first talkie film vis-​à-​vis colonial engagement in the north-​eastern frontier of British India post the Treaty of Yandaboo, 1824–​1826. Secondly, to analyse how the historical ‘context’ of Joymoti embedded itself to the nationalist ‘imagining’ in Assam. The reform of women of indigenous races in the vernacular I argue allows scope to interrogate how similarly or differently regional elites of the peripheries of the colonial metropolis negotiated the gender question in shaping social history of India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The third section will discuss significance of cinematograph in colonial India wherein English education and development of novel writing together transformed colonial notions of modernising ‘India’s oriental pasts’. Joymoti is proposed as an important signpost to examine an ‘alternative analysis’ beyond the predominant focus of existing scholarship on what and how cinema has sustained the gender trope in addressing Indian nationalism. The context in the film is chosen as a record to emphasise why the retrieval of Joymoti and beginning of cinematograph spectatorship were governed by historical specificities aided by a flourishing regional textual tradition. This historical gap has scarcely been acknowledged in locating the history of Assam in the twentieth century vis-​à-​vis cinema. Assam in the Nineteenth Century The British intervention since the Treaty of Yandaboo (1824–​ 1826) (Goswami 2012, 1) led to gradual undermining of the old feudal Ahom monarchy. Incapability and misadministration by dynastic bureaucracy DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-3

12  Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan brought a disarray of the state. The colonial encounter brought political stability from devastation of the countryside wrought by Burmese invasions of 1824 as well as enlightenment of English education for the illiterate mass of people in the frontier region. Subsequently inflow of missionaries to Assam by 1846 desirous of proselytisation of indigenous populace led to cultural acculturation through education, print, and social awakening inspired from Bengal, the nearest metropolis. These ‘systems of knowledge’ generated by contact with Bengal opened up Assam’s socio-​ geographical isolation as the north-​east frontier of British India in the nineteenth century. Joymoti in the Buranjis As per the Ahom Buranjis record, after discriminate selection among members of the royal family, the Ahom Prime Minister Laliksula Borphukan places a puppet king Lora roja (boy king) alias Sulikpha (1679–​1681) in power. However, the ablest among them, Prince Gadadhar Singha alias Gadapani was not apprehended at the time of conspiracy. The puppet king at the instigation of the cunning prime minister sent his men on a rigorous search for Gadapani. However, Gadapani comes to know the conspiracy to capture him by his wife Joymoti, who asks him to flee to a safe place (Sharma 2014, 82–​91). The Chaudangs (Ahom Militia) sent by the puppet king arrest Joymoti on not finding Gadapani and bring her to Sulikpha raja. The lora roja repeatedly attempts to coerce Joymoti to divulge the whereabouts of her husband. When she refuses to so, she is taken to Jarenga pothar (field) and beaten ceaselessly. After 10–15 days of torture, the young woman dies without giving away any information (Sharma 2014, 82–91).1 Accounts from the Ahom chronicles also add that she did not actually find time to ask where her husband would go. It is recorded that Gadapani fled to the Naga Hills where he bids time until situation is ripe to return and gather his forces at Garhaon, then capital of Assam. The rest of the narrative evokes the ways and means by which Gadapani survives his ordeal and succeeds in defeating the puppet king to restore peace and stability in the kingdom. The story is premised on the theme of dynastic conspiracies to usurp power by the Ahom nobility whenever kingship authority deteriorated or failed. The death and martyrdom of Joymoti is the central subject and focus of the medieval folk narrative (Mahanta 1982, 1–​7). The Banhi records the significance of the episode: Jaymoti Utsav (festival) was celebrated like every year near the Jaysagar tank in Sibsagar district in April 1918. That day, the sub-​divisional officer allowed girls schools to be closed by 4 p.m. It was assuring to

The Politics of Spectatorship  13 see people of Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Assamese, Bengali, Marwari, faith participate enthusiastically in the event. All were present on time. (Bezbaruah 1937, 339–​341) Jyotiprasad Agarwala, popularly called Kalaguru (Master of the Arts), was a poet, author, artist, film maker and nationalist. The making of Joymoti at Bholaguri tea estate at Golaghat district was the first of any kind of visuals produced and exhibited in Assam. Released in March 1935 at Rownac Hall Calcutta, it was shot outdoors in natural lighting conditions. This was a departure from the dominant practice of film directors preferring to shoot indoors as it was less tedious and inexpensive technically. Mr. Agarwala was also inspired by his education in England, meeting the well-​known Bollywood filmmaker Himangshu Rai in Europe and his exposure to German cinema. In 1918, the cinematograph legislations were enacted for censoring and exhibition of cinema in India. Subsequently Censor Boards were set up at major port cities of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Rangoon. As film investment in ‘Indian pictures’ was still at an experimental stage in early twentieth century and audience spectatorship relatively minute, Jyotiprasad’s film unfortunately had to be self-​financed and later as he realised much to his discomfiture, completely a one-​man mission. The sound engineer he had brought from Lahore had faulty audio equipment, and the final reels had no sound. Sitting in his dainty makeshift studio, Mr. Agarwala had to dub all the voiceovers (Sharma 2014, 90–​91), for all the artists in the film within a fortnight to have his film ready for exhibition. To add, it was considered dishonourable for women to be seen in public gaze and he had a hard time searching a female lead for his film. Aideu Handique who played Joymoti remained unmarried and ostracised for life for performing in the film. English Education and the Moral Question While debates over orientalism and utilitarianism played out in Britain over the best possible way to modernise India under company rule in the eighteenth century, Macaulay’s minutes of 1835 on English education for the natives was a major benchmark in colonial politics. While evangelisation secured colonial concerns towards enlightenment of the natives, it also brought the colonial state into clash with the umpteen social evils that plagued Indian religion and society. The government was forced to introspect that educating the governed wasn’t enough. A deeper knowledge of the traditional laws and customs of the colony was felt highly desirable and the state took cognisance to understand native life through Hindu and Muslim jurisprudence in the vernacular assisted by Brahman pundits and Muslim kazis. Social reformers like Raja Rammohan Roy, Ishwar

14  Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan Chandra Vidyasagar, Dayanand Saraswati, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Periyar and others had gauged the philosophical difference between European and oriental approach to textual interpretation and its practice. The colonial inability to comprehend dissensions of class, caste and gender, especially role of the regional vernacular in Indian social milieu, aided indigenous efforts to reform Indian traditional space of caste and class rigidities. Such concerns by early reformers were believed to be vested within India’s own pre-​colonial pasts and hence knowledge of the vernacular texts was detrimental in shaping the larger ideological negotiations over the private and public (Chatterjee 1993, 3–​12) in India. Meanwhile missionaries persisted that reform-​revivalist contestations remained conspicuous of the women’s voice. It was premised on patriarchal hypocrisy of both the intelligentsia and state. For example, a text (Fuller 1900, 33–​47) of 1891 records that among high-​caste Hindus, three-​ to four-​year-​old girls were eligible for contract of marriage (Fuller 1900, 33–​47). Marital life was complicated as complaints by women of the house were believed to bring calamity upon family honour. The author states: The word marriage is a misnomer. For marriages were never made for children. When the Khanderao Gaikowar, the Maharaja of Baroda married his two favourite pigeons with all pomp, all educated India was scandalised... it was no greater mockery than the marriage of a girl of eight to a grey headed old man of sixty. (Fuller 1900, 33) The custom was so deeply embedded in Hindu social life she says, On one occasion a Hindu friend called upon us and took our little girl on his knee. He wanted to say something suitable for a child. He looked at her face and asked in a laughing way, “Well when are you going to get married?” (Fuller 1900, 34) Despite attempts to secure women’s lives through the Widow Remarriage Act, 1956 and Brahmo Marriage Act 1860, the social stigma attached to widow remarriage remained deeply entrenched to notions of community respectability. Pandita Ramabai exclaims, Hundreds of our Indian reformers are ignorant about the real condition of women ... Even those who have suffered the greatest wrongs are reluctant to tell the truth to the world ... for fear that they may lower themselves and their nation in the eyes of other nations. (Fuller 1900, 11)

The Politics of Spectatorship  15 An Englishmen observes, The sentiment at the root of all domestic life is that women neither have sufficient knowledge nor moral strength nor sense of honour to protect themselves and need therefore to be guarded from themselves as from others. (Storrow nd, 43) Alan Hunt’s work (1999, 140–​144) on gender in Britain analyses a similar exercise of disciplining women’s sexuality to sanitise public morality. It was undertaken by enlightened intelligentsia to educate, protect and rehabilitate women from social vices of gambling and dissuasion of public gatherings at betting dens, music clubs and cinema houses. Such sanitisation was enforced through organisations such as the London Society for Protection of Young Females 1834 and Girls Friendly Society 1874, which argued that maternalism was necessary to reform the low orders and make them respectable to ethics of bourgeoisie domesticity and working-​class women (Hunt 1999, 140–​144). It indicates how morality was addressed by dictating women’s role in public spaces in England. Similarly, the woman’s question in India in the nineteenth century, as Partha Chatterjee’s and Ashis Nandy’s (Vinay Lal and Nandy 2006, xxxi) works argue, was entangled to patriarchal preconceptions about gender and ways in which popular cinema rearticulated cultural autonomy. Assam in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: Education, Novel Writing and Cinema The colonial government as early as 1857 had established three universities in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay through the Universities Act. In Assam, modern education was absent prior to arrival of the British in 1826. In medieval times, Vaishnavism dominated both instructional and recreational literature much before evolution of the modern short story or play (Barua 1966, 12), For example Prahlad Charita by Hem Saraswati (reign of king Durlabhnarayan thirteenth century), the Ramayana (Barua 1966, 12), translated by Madhav Kandali into Assamese verse in the fourteenth century and the Mahabharata (translated by Ram Saraswati) (Barua 1966, 12), Sankardeva’s Guru Charita (biographies) and Kaviraj Chakravartee’s Gita-​Govinda, Shakuntala and D. Goswami’s Kavya Shastra (fables of Hitapodesha) are some of the texts that served purposes of recording historical traditions (Barua 1966, 20–​40). Until the colonial intervention, record keeping in the Buranjis remained elite in nature and purpose until the first printing press got established

16  Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan at Sibsagar in 1846 by Nathan Brown and O.T. Cutter of the American Baptist mission. Initiation to western education by the natives of Assam was so poor that the British were compelled to bring literate men from Bengal to handle daily governance in Assam (Danforth 1833, 21). Subsequently Bengali was used as medium of instruction in the province from 1836 to 1873. No college also existed until 1901. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan’s report to A.J. Moffat Mills in 1853 asserting Assamese as a distinct language and not a broken offshoot of Bengali as many believed was strengthened by missionary insistence on modernising the region through instruction in the vernacular. Middle-​class sensibilities were voiced through publication of the first bilingual journal (in Assamese and English) Orunodoi on subjects concerning science, literature, news and general knowledge. By 1884, Nathan Brown published his Grammatical Notes on the Assamese Language and by 1868 Mr. Bronson had published his Assamese English Dictionary. Consequently in 1853, a missionary observed: We might as well think of creating a love of knowledge in the mind of a stupid English boy by attempting to teach him French before he knew anything of the rudiments of English. To my mind, the educational policy pursued in Assam is not only absurd but destructive of the highest motives of education. (Danforth 1833, 21) The new interest in the vernacular spilled over onto novel writing by early playwrights. The nature of literature gradually transitions from religious to the social. The change was perceptible as Meenakshi Mukherjee’s work (1985, 3–​5) on novels reiterates, owing to the growth of bourgeoisie society and capitalism in England. The rise of individualism and social mobility of the individual aided by industrialisation characterises how histories of human agency was textualised in novel genres. The consolidation of community self-​assertions as a response to colonial appropriation of India’s cultural and political autonomy aided production of narratives on colonisation of the Indian political space. Beginning with Assam Bhaxa Unnati Sadhini Sabha on 25 August 1888 (Kalita 2011, 80–​81) (development of the Assamese language and society) by the Assamese college students at Calcutta in the late 1870s, the period witnesses a flurry of re-​production of old and new texts in the vernacular. By the end of Second World War, the novel is one of the most widely circulated genres of literature. Exposure to English novels by the educated intelligentsia had by now exposed them to the difficulties inherent in adapting the one-​act play structure to social realities in India. To address this, an inclination to locate self-​histories in pre-​novel texts was seen desirable to rearticulate religious sensibilities with the new social genre.

The Politics of Spectatorship  17 Recovery of historical semi-​historical narratives from community histories preserved in the Buranjis indicates such gradual inclination by native litterateurs to imagine home and nationhood within one’s familial past. Some of the texts of the period that speak of such a transformation are Gunabhiram Barua’s’ Ram Nabami Natak, 1856 (on widow remarriage in prose) and Assam Bandhu (1885–​1886); Chandrakumar Agarwala’s Ban Kuwari (Sylvan Nymph; first Assamese romantic poem), Lakhinath Baezbarua’s Amalaloi Nepahariba (Don’t Forget Us; first Assamese short story), Hemchandra Goswami’s Priyotomar Cithi (Letter to Beloved; first Assamese sonnet), Kania Kirtan (a farcical play on opium); Bahire Rang Song Bhitore Khawabhatoor (All that Glitters Is Not Gold, 1876) and Padmanath Gohain Barua’s Joymoti, 1900 (Bhuyan 1995, 133, 217). Such selective reclamation and re-​articulation (Barua 1966, 50–​57) of community past from semi-​historical texts was also aided by the practice of oral retelling and class location of the early intelligentsia in north-​east India. Padmanath Gohain Barua belonged to an illustrious Ahom family at the Lakhimpur district 1871. He had his primary schooling in Bengali and later in English. His novels Bhanumati (on Maomaria rebellion, 1890) and Lahori (on Burmese invasion) are also both based on history. L. Bezbaruah similarly was born into an aristocratic family at Sibsagar. His father was a munsif in British government. Bezbaruah’s novels Chakradhwaj (1915), Belimar (Sunset 1915) and Joymoti (1915) are all based on historical figures. Both playwrights were young students at Calcutta during the height of the Indian renaissance and the newly evolving self-​ consciousness was disseminated through print in advocating nationalism in the nineteenth century (Rajkhowa 2015, 112). Naturally, mythology and history influenced both the young authors at locating identity assertions vis-​à-​ vis traditional recollection (Barua 1966, 50–​57). Rajkhowa’s work on Joymati has addressed how development of vernacular literature was crucial for the adoption of a standardised sarbojonin style of writing by the Assamese intelligentsia towards the twentieth century (Rajkhowa 2015, 112). In Jonaki, the first journal by the Assamese students at Calcutta, Bezbaruah asserts, For the new Assam that has come up, we shall use all our strength, we have to fight darkness. To uplift and develop our language for country is our goal (translation mine). (D. Bezbaruah 2003, 20) Textual appropriation was also necessitated by the inconsistencies of the ‘western novel’ borne out of industrialisation and working-​class ethos as opposed to India’s pre-​colonial romanticised pasts. The absence of education in the local vernacular, reminiscence of the loss, displacement and

18  Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan impoverishment of kings, artisans, craftsmen and labour dislocated by the decline of the Ahom system of government after Treaty of Yandaboo 1824–​1826 precipitated a crisis. Hence the ‘new English educated middle-​ class was compelled to acquire a synthetic culture evolving out of conflict between the old and new social order’ (Bhuyan 1995, 153). As Thomas Metcalf has argued about the Raj, colonialism needed negotiation through differentiation of colonial and native cultural affinities. The ideological appropriation of the colony resulted in a counterappropriation of such spaces through a reordering of class, caste and community ethos powered through language politics. Historian Birinchi K. Barua reaffirms how millennialism and individuals shaped national assertions. He says: Impact of western culture brought into our (emphasis mine) literature a profound and far reaching change ... among those who introduced new subjects and metrical forms Bezbaruah stands unrivalled.... He has evinced keen patriotism by composing stirring poems on historic greatness and the lost glory of Assam. (Barua 1966, 50–​51) Mukherjee’s work (1985, 5–​ 6) argues that three particular processes shaped the essentials of novel writing. Firstly, pre-​novel narratives being cyclic accommodated smaller stories within larger ones. It was loosely tied to one another as opposed to the new novel where the narrative structure was linear in which time where past or present was eliminated or reversed in the Panchatantra and Arabian Nights. Secondly, the novel made time and space fluid that didn’t allow superimposition over another narrative as done in medieval novels. For example, the Jataka stories. The third is the treatment of characters. In the plays, Rukmini Haran (Kidnap of Rukmini) and Ram Bijaya (Victory of Ram) ‘central characters were religious and invested with divinity in Indian novel writing which drew inspiration’ (Barua 1966, 19–​23) from realism to imitate the cosmopolitan nature of the English novel. The choice of female protagonist over a male one signifies how self-​reclamation in such ways seemed inevitable as religious indoctrination helped secure more followers than primary schools. A text of 1912 states in eastern Bengal and Assam: There are 4501 schools in the whole province, establishment of a sound system of primary schools is naturally the chief aim, but it depends on development of a thoroughly efficient staff of teachers. The attempts at Itinerant sub inspectors at teaching the venerable pandit how to teach have fallen on unscathed shoulders. (Cowen 1912, 86–​87)

The Politics of Spectatorship  19 Cinematograph in British India Priya Jaikumar has established how debates over cinema in the Imperial conference 1926 and Cinematograph Films Act 1927 extending state patronage, concessions not only to British films but ‘Empire films’ in response to Hollywood’s dominance in film business fuelled concerns of empire keeping vis-​à-​vis cinema in Britain (Jaikumar 2006, 4–​12). A similar project of visual spectatorship was envisioned in the Indian empire in the early twentieth century. In April 1921, the India Office at London writes to India: We have accepted in general terms the principle that cinema propaganda may be made of great utility to government...we know film possibilities in India are considerable; that likelihood of their misuse by outsiders particularly Americans both private and political purposes cannot be overlooked; and unless government turns it to its advantage this great power will pass out of its control. (1/​147/​I, 1922, 7) In addition, the Advisory Publicity Committee in India reiterated, Practically few films are at present produced in India. No protectionist tariff was suggested for encouraging indigenous film industry in the resolution...though stress on controlling class of film exhibited in India and rigorous censorship of imported films was stressed. (1/​147/​I, 1922, 12) The debate on policy legislation for cinema spectatorship in India accompanied the ethical dilemma of maintaining prestige of the British Empire in India. A certain moral panic on account of European films especially American cinema and its exhibition of sexually suggestive content that was believed to be harming the prestige of western civilisation in the twentieth century. Subsequently the Cinematograph Act 1918 empowered setting up Censor Boards at Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Rangoon and later for Punjab for addressing the vexed issue of censoring ‘unsuitable films’ and approval for public exhibition. Problems of censorship continued to confuse the officials. The Secretary to the Viceroy states: There is some difference of opinion as to standard of censorship to be imposed, local governments are generally satisfied existing censorship is effective in stopping worst or worst portion of films...Govt. of India agrees a stricter censorship of films as most of them are censored at

20  Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan Bombay and Calcutta ... Matter has been brought to notice of Madras, Punjab, Burma ... dated 4th Oct 1924 would help effect producers regarding quality of film produced by them. (Home Political 2/​16/​36, 1936, 30) Joymoti released in the year the Government of India Act of 1935 was proclaimed, which sought to determine responsible government for India five years after the Non-​Cooperation movement and eight years after the Simon Commission 1927. Notwithstanding stringent colonial suspicions and strict surveillance over any anti-​national or seditious activity on behalf of the nationalists, On 5th March 1935, the Bengal Censor Board certifies Joymoti for exhibition. Lakhinath Bezbaruah will inaugurate the film at Rownac Hall, Calcutta coming Sunday. It will be exhibited in the 2nd week of March at Guwahati. (Assamiya, 9 March 1935, 4) This is the most vital aspect that been overlooked by scholars on the theme. Joymoti with its nationalist overtone is passed by the Censor Board. The certification to the film paradoxically meant colonial inability to comprehend nationalist assertions on cinematograph while unconscious approval of the same ideology via the same piece of law. After watching the film, Gopinath Bordoloi exclaimed: How would humanity specially the Assamiya people today go uninspired by Joymoti’s idealism renowned since the days of Gadadhar Singha? Thanks to Agarwala and Chitralekha Movietone, my exposure to visuals of the erstwhile Ahom courts reminded me of Roman monarchy exhibited by film companies in Europe...it is as good as those produced elsewhere. (Assamiya, 23 March 1935, 5) This episode stands as a unique signpost emerging out of historical recovery of indigenous tradition vis-​à-​vis education, missionaries, novel writing and native conscious participation to cinematograph exhibitions in British India. Conclusion The film Joymoti therefore serves as a site of legitimisation of native autonomy attempted through cultural appropriation of community identity lost by colonial subjugation. The desire of the colonised to reclaim political autonomy vis-​à-​vis cinematograph production and spectatorship

The Politics of Spectatorship  21 indicates how reminiscence of community pasts although selective was reconfigured in the discursive space of cinema. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy has emphasised the role of Hindi cinema that continues to portray Indian post-​ colonial experience through narratives focused on the conflicting demands of tradition–​modernity, urbanisation, marriage, status of women and the domestic family (Banaji 2006, 3). The historical film genre re-​ signifies how education, novel writing and cinematograph legislations interacted in gradual stages in aiding native self-​assertions that were otherwise constricted by a highly vigilant colonial censorship for regulating native behaviour in the British Indian Empire. In the choice of the subject, Joymoti establishes why gender contests were re-​appropriated by nationalist intelligentsia in resisting colonial modernisation of the self in India. This was not only confined to the colonial metropolis but was an all-​India phenomena because print could not escape colonial censorship beyond a certain point and hence re-​inscribing the troupe of ‘women for nation’ became the ‘easiest’ recourse. Also, transition of the self from Indian literary canons onto visual aesthetics was the most feasible option realised but not availed to full potential until coming of the cinematograph legislation. While Indian textual and social traditions re-​legitimised women’s suffering into the new rhetoric of nationhood and sacrifice in cinema exhibition, it is the implementation of the cinematograph legislation that re-​ignites the colonial and native contest over the best means possible to modernise the British Indian Empire. Identity crisis of Indian intelligentsia was therefore crucial in determining a transition from textual to visual production wherein nation and region provided the context and the Cinematograph Act served the medium to address the issue. The politics of cinema spectatorship by collective native effort henceforth constitutes a major highlight in presenting how the public–​private ‘dilemma’ of Indian nationalism played out in multiple contours in regions located at the peripheries of the metropolis. It is interesting to note that focus on the subject in the existing scholarship on Assam in the post-​independent period comes largely from people’s familiarity with the film, not the texts, a fact that has been forgotten in elitist historiography. Thus, the film Joymoti as Ravi Vasudevan argues on cinema, a historical ‘vehicle of addressing cultural citizenship’ (Vasudevan 2000, 7). Most importantly, it is not just a product of resistance to colonialism but a deliberate, gradual historical episode of transition from pre-​colonial print politics to colonial visual aesthetics in Assam in the British Indian Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Note 1 Since it is a folk narrative embedded in the oral histories across Assam, the number of days varies in different accounts (10/12/15). So Bobeeta Sharma’s text has been taken as reference in my chapter apart from other texts.

22  Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan References Assamiya. (1935, March). Joymoti Filmor Aramanbho (Beginning of the Film Joymati), NMML, New Delhi. Banaji, Shakuntala. (2006). Reading Bollywood: The Young Audience and Hindi films. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barua, Birinchi Kumar. (1966). Assamese Literature. Bombay: International Book House. Bezbarua, Dilip. (2003). Sahitya Darshan. Bezbaruah, Lakhinath. (1937). Banhi, 6th edition. Bhuyan, Prafulla Chandra. (1995). Lakhinath Bezbaruah: Influence of Tradition on His Writings. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications. Chatterjee, Partha. (1993). Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cowen, Minna G. (1912). The Education of Women in India. Edinburg: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier. Danforth, A. H. (1833). Missionary Notes. Guwahati: Mission Press. Fuller, Marcus B. (1900). Wrongs of Womanhood. New York: H. Revell. Goswami, Priyam. (2012). The History of Assam: From Yandaboo to Partition. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Home Political. (1936). Prohibition, 2/16/36, National Library, Kolkata. Home Political. (1922). Publicity Films, NAI, New Delhi, 1/147/I. Hunt, Alan. (1999). Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaikumar, Priya. (2006). Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kalita, Ramesh Chandra. (2011). Situating Assamese Middleclass: The Colonial Period. Guwahati: Bhabani Books. Lal, Vinay and Asish Nandy (eds.). (2006). Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and Iconic in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: OUP. Mahanta, Ratneswar. (1982). Jaymoti, in Hem Buragohain (ed.), Jaymoti Kuwori. Calcutta: Navjiban Press. Mukherji, Meenakshi. (1985). Reality and Realism: The Novel and Society in India. Bombay: OUP. Rajkhowa, Gaurav. (2015, July). “Coming Back to Life: Jyotiprasad’s Joymoti and Nationalist Politics in Assam (1890s–1940s)”. Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, 6 (2), 107–125. Sharma, Bobeeta. (2012). The Moving Image and Assamese Culture, Joymoti, Jyotiprasad Agarwala, and Assamese Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford Publications. Storrow, Edward R. (nd). Our Indian Sisters. London: Religious Tract Society. Vasudevan, Ravi. (2000). Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: OUP.

2 Then and Now Nation and Transnational Identity in Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s Joymati (1935) and Jahnu Barua’s Ajeyo (2014) Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri The riot of diverse points of colour is such that no clear pattern can be discerned in any detail, though the picture as a whole does have one. A great diversity and plurality and complexity characterises all distinct parts of the whole…1

The idea for this chapter was upto a point shaped by the theme of the 2019 conference on “Region /​Nation /​Trans-​Nation: Literature-​Cinema Interface” (31 January to 2 February 2019) at BITS, Pilani, Goa, and the work I had already done on the narrative of Joymati2 in Assam. Then the citizenship bill was passed in 2019 and the trajectory began to alter in order to bring in resonances that surrounded me in the Assam of 2019, where we began to see the repeat of the mass agitations of the 1980s when polarisations of linguistic, religious and ethnic identities began to simmer and come to a boil, with the same dreadful noises. Stretching across a span of nearly 80-​odd years, I will flag 1935 (the making of Jyoti Prasad’s Joymati), 1947 (India becomes a sovereign republic), 1971 (the birth of Bangladesh and the cut-​off date demanded by the Assam Movement3), 1982 (the Assam Accord), 2013–​2019 (the National Register of Citizens in Assam4) 2018–​2019 (Tabling of the Citizenship (Amendment)Bill5) as specific moments that shape the current debate on citizenship, identity and the nation-​state as it evolves through two film texts that sketch the contours of what the notion of ‘transnation’ might connote in the context of Assam, and broadly, the Northeast. But first I will need to define the contours of my usage of the notion of transnation, which, in its very broad contemporary currency implies various conceptualisations of border-​crossings, globalisation and cosmopolitanism. I explore the possibility of reading back the notion to a time when the idea of India is still in its nebulous epoch–​when various sub-​ national categories, peoples, tribes and religious groups are moving towards a nation-​state as the newly independent India was emerging. DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-4

24  Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri Both centripetal and centrifugal forces seem to be at work here, especially if we consider the representations of this historical space in two specific Assamese films. How does one locate the term’s relationship with the nation-​state? While transnationalism studies draw from cosmopolitanism, diplomacy, international studies, globalisation and so on, it markedly concerns itself with the question of boundaries and borders, the coming into being of nation as a critical category. And it follows that nation and transnation can be mutually interdependent categories, whereby it is possible to analyse the fluidity of borders that can be drawn and re-​drawn. Transnationalism then would not entail the condemnation of nationalist concerns per se. In tracing the etymology of ‘transnationalism’, a term that was thrown up in the discussions on migration and identity in the United States in 1919, the honeycomb is the standout analogy offered by Patricia Clavin: a structure that sustains and gives shapes to the identities of nation-​ states…and geographic spaces. A honeycomb binds, but it also contains hollowed-​out spaces where organizations, individuals and ideas can wither away to be replaced by new groups. (438–​439) Encounters of transnationalism are frequently marked by the phenomenon of ‘border crossings’6 between people, cultures and institutions. ‘Border crossings’ might allow us to understand the complex encounters between people and social institutions that may be analysed. The idea is potentially lyrical, suggesting “how a particular phenomenon passed over the nation as a whole, how it passed across the nation, seeing how it bumped over natural and manmade features, or how it passed through” (Thelan cited in Clavin 423) –​and that this changes, and is changed. It will be useful to define my understanding of these categories through Jyoti Prasad’s Joymati, set in the seventeenth century in an important epoch of the Tungkhungia Ahoms and filmed around the time of the Indian freedom movement, and Jahnu Barua’s Ajeyo, also set around the Indian freedom movement, but filmed in 2014. My approach to reading these two film texts is different. For the first film, I attempt to read the historical moment and its specific narrative contexts that lead to the building up the idea of a nation and the appropriation of a seventeenth-​century figure as a nationalistic martyr, much like the notion of the honeycomb mentioned by Clavin. In this sense, I read around the film as the many layers of historical (or otherwise) narratives come together as Joymati comes into being rather than directly analyse the mise en scène,7 which I do for the second film text. Multiple resonant contextual voices can be heard in differently nuanced waves as the category of nation develops in

Then and Now  25 the making of Joymati. Decades later, Ajeyo definitively deploys several semiotic devices that place it historically in 1947 but responds to entirely different discourses through layers of shifting and altered spatial and temporal circumstance. In the context of nation, transnation, migration, identity and border crossings, where do we place the ‘foreigner’? Ajeyo revisits 1947 and the sudden creation of borders –​between both countries and peoples –​the translocation of populations across demarcated geographies and thereafter, the one word that has resounded across decades in Assam: foreigner. The word comes from the Latin forās, meaning ‘outside.’ Marciniak and Bennett speak about foreignness as a critically aporetic term –​ The foreign is a sticky term –​it sticks to a body of a human, or to a particular image –​and it marks it as something else, something as not me, something other, alien, some form of alterity… . undecidable, impassable, and thus always quivering… (1–​2) The foreign figure is thus always in limbo –​between the place of origin and the host nation, never ‘at home’, always stuck in the interstitial spaces that deny subjecthood, always in the fringes, always precarious; always looking for legitimacy. The ‘quivering’ foreigner is a striking term and aptly (even literally) fits the cinematic rendering of representative characters in Barua’s film. In this precise juncture of Assam’s troubled history –​2019 –​‘foreignness’ is once again an operative word that packs within itself ethnic/​religious anxiety and is both a warning and a worry. And as envisaged by the current legislation, the Citizenship Amendment Act by the government of India, some people are to be labelled more foreign than others: foreignness may be marked through the filters of nation, race, religion and ethnicity. Joymati (Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, 1935) Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s Joymati (1935) film was made on a subject that is the stuff of mythology in Assam. Filmed ambitiously, this is also an important landmark for Assamese pride, its first speaking film or chalchitra. An accomplished dramatist, Agarwala designed the film based not merely on the Bombay model, he had also learned film making in Germany. Joymati was dynamically structured to resonate with the discourses of the time, making imaginative use of song and dance sequences, mostly of his own creation; his most popular numbers. That the Ahom Queen Joymati Kunwari, consort of the Tungkhungia Ahom Prince Gadapani –​sati, martyr, patriot and national heroine –​emerges at this crucial phase of the movement towards India’s freedom and partakes of all the given narratives

26  Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri of the time is significant. And most of these (historical/​mythological/​literary) narratives about this woman choose to construct the required hagiography to feed the needs of that specific historical moment. It is important to understand that the historical imperatives behind the construction of the mythification and iconography of the legend of Joymati begin to evolve around the end of the nineteenth century and spills over into the twentieth. This is the period when India is in the throes of a political churning that will alter its status as a sovereign nation-​state. Western modernity is now becoming entrenched, while at the same time its traditional beliefs and ethos remain essentially unchanged, alongside the sweeping discourses of nationalism. Various thinkers have considered these processes of modernity in Assam to be a kind of reverberation of the epicentre –​Bengal –​although this is often the stuff of polemics. However, it is true that most of the great Assamese ‘moderns’ were educated in Calcutta and might have imbibed the fervour of what we know as the Bengal renaissance. This in itself could be read as one of the many transnational encounters between the yet undivided Assam and the political and cultural ‘centre’, Bengal8. There has been much speculation on the matter of the historical veracity of the figure and narratives surrounding Joymati.Was she a real person who played a defining part in the shaping the most glorious phase of Ahom rule in Assam, or merely a myth? One of the important British chroniclers of Assam’s history, E. A. Gait, in his History of Assam, first published in 1906 and revised in 1926, describes in detail the reigns of the Ahom kings Gadadhar Singha (Joymati’s husband) and Rudra Singha (her son) but does not make any reference to Joymati. Gait’s narrative is sourced from his extensive exploration of hand-​written manuscripts: the Ahom historical records, better known as the buranjis.9 These archives integrated several chronicles that documented “… the earliest times to the end of Ahom rule” (Gait vi). The absence (erasure?) of Joymati from Gait’s history then, problematises the very idea of Joymati’s existence. However, modern twentieth-​century historians like Surya Kumar Bhuyan, Padmanath Gohain-​ Baruah and Hiteswar Borboruah have provided ample space in their historical narratives to the figure of Joymati. All of these historigraphic inconsistencies make it doubly important to understand why Joymati was constructed into a cult figure in Assam towards the end of the nineteenth century; why, indeed this swift valorisation, this flurry of interest and writing on Joymati? In 1891–​1892, Ratneswar Mahanta began to inscribe the legend of this Queen-​martyr who sacrificed her life to save her husband, the future Ahom king in the popular Assam Bandhu and Jonaki. Joymati first appears in his articles “Moamaria Bidroh” and “Joymati Kunwari” and the myth of ‘Sati’ Joymati –​the ideal Hindu woman –​is established, strategically flanking

Then and Now  27 the ‘pan-​Indian’ stories of Savitri and Damayanti. Ratneswar Mahanta’s Joymati is the ‘pativratta’ who gives up her life for her husband while not in point of fact participating in the politics of state. An Ahom (and hence tribal) princess, she is the idealised ‘Indian’ sati whose self-​sacrifice and other womanly virtues straightaway connect her to the ‘greater India’, a paradigm for the womenfolk of his time. Here, Mahanta notably achieves two significant associations: he makes available for Assam its very own imaginary of the ‘mainstream’ heroine, one of the self-​sacrificing female icons that litter the annals of Indian myth and legend. Next, he clearly throws up the important connection that integrated the husband and the king and thence the nation –​note the larger symbolism –​and we are landed unswervingly in the heart of the national freedom movement. Moving beyond this conservative paradigm, Padmanath Gohain-​ Baruah and Lakshminath Bezbaroa produced literary and dramatic pieces where they ‘nationalised’ the figure of Joymati so that it fit in squarely with the political agendas of the period. The ‘sati’ was now the ‘mother’ and nationalist martyr. Taking cue from Ratneswar Mahanta, Padmanath Gohain-​ Baruah’s play Joymati (1900) brought forth the “incomparable Mahasati”(Gohain-​Baruah 44)who exhorts her sons to patriotism and bravery in war through her tales of heroism. Lakshminath Bezbaroa’s Joymati Kunwari (1915) tried to pool in all of the above characteristics while also infusing into the character a kind of Vaishnavite sanctity through her singing of the naams. She is the heart of her family, a reliable counsel to Gadapani, often giving him forceful advice, but all the while remaining the obedient wife. This is in essence the genesis of the literary mythification and valorisation of Joymati –​ ideal woman, wife, mother, sati and national heroine who was able to straddle the twin spaces of tradition and modernity; tribe and region within an obvious trajectory that validates and valorises its connection with the Indian nation. The story of this evolution is important when we focus on Jyoti Prasad’s film and consider his representation. This Joymati required for its subject matter a narrative that would sit well in history: an icon who was both human and heroine, a story that could fire the nationalistic imagination along with Axomiya pride, which showcased not merely heroism but a magnificent national past steeped in time-​honoured traditions and heritage, along with its multi-​ethnic demography. Jyoti Prasad was an active participant in the freedom movement and well understood the need to arouse his audiences. Aparna Mahanta has pointed out in a 2008 essay that …It is hardly surprising that Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, a fervent nationalist who was to play a leading role in the 1942 movement, chose the

28  Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri subject of Joymati to showcase Assam’s identity, its grand historical past, its unique culture and the glory of its women to the world. (83–​84) Jyoti Prasad made use of all the preceding representations, but more particularly, the Bezbaroa text. Bezbaroa is said to have visited the sets of Joymati and is reported to have told Jyoti Prasad that he had felt transported into the Ahom era for the duration of his visit (Agarwala 538). That the Ahoms were a distinctly ‘different’ nation and an explicitly distinct ethnicity, connected to the land of Siam is glossed over; transnational processes have taken over the discourse and with Joymati it seems to consolidate its legitimacy. The Ahom princess is soon to become a full-​blown icon of Indian nationalism through the efforts of Jyoti Prasad along with the superimposition of the conceptualisation of the idea of the woman as the repository of tradition and culture. Even as the idea of Bharatmata was taking root elsewhere in India, with temples dedicated to her, Assam too would shortly commence the celebration of Joymati Utsav to mark the martyrdom of this icon. The interpolation of the Dalimi narrative within the Joymati saga that takes up much space in all the earlier texts is extremely significant and ironic. To this day, there is an existing binary between the people of the plains and those from the hills, and between Ujani (upper) Assam and Namoni (lower) Assam; the differences are deeply entrenched and the faultlines marked in terms of language, lifestyle, food habits and culture. All of these boundaries needed to be breached if the nationalist agenda was to embed itself. Very pertinently, therefore, Jyoti Prasad’s Gadapani, the prince in exile laments the lack of the light-​hearted freedom of the hills, even as he frolics with Dalimi, a tribal girl. It is Dalimi who sings the now iconic “Luitore Paani” after acquiescing that all the smaller rivers must necessarily flow into the Luit as tributaries. For Jyoti Prasad, she becomes the mouthpiece for nationalist unity and alliances among the various tribal groups of the region to build an idea of a composite Assam. Note how slyly the tag of the ‘tribal’10 is removed from the Ahom queen and re-​ inserted into the ethnicity of Dalimi. While Jyoti Prasad was unequivocally participating in the discourses of nationalism, is it even plausible to accommodate the idea that there was a politically motivated ‘sub-​ nationalist’ agenda working through the film’s narrative? After all, the intermittent years have seen Assam passing through several complex political changes among which the most remarkable is the Assam Movement against the ‘illegal’ migrants from Bangladesh that threatened to change the demography of this region. This mass movement led to a resurgence of Assamese ‘nationalism’ and several new questions of identity were thrown up. By this time, Assam had

Then and Now  29 already been carved up into seven different states, in accordance with linguistic and ethnic identities, and multitudinous groups and sub-​groups even within Assam were trying to reclaim and reassert their own distinctive ethnicities. All of these are interestingly made use of by the next cinematic representation of Joymati by Manju Bora (about which I speak in another paper).11 She erects an opulent tribal courtroom and proceeds with the narrative, deliberately choosing a tribal female actor to play the queen who fits in with the settings and traditional Ahom iconography. This is of course a far cry from Jyoti’s Joymati, the sati who sits stoically with her head covered. In the decades that divide the two films, clearly, many of the national narratives have undergone radical shifts; redefined boundaries and borders have surfaced and solidified. From 1935 to 2006 (the date of Bora’s film) the nation has shifted from the centripetal narrative to the centrifugal. Ajeyo (Jahnu Barua, 2014) While one film made in 1935 marked out various ‘trans’ spaces in terms of the shifting paradigm in the manner in which the story of Joymati is told and how this collates with the formation of national and sub-​national imaginaries, another, made around eighty years later, has to confront the same time frame around which the earlier film was made through the politics of another. Representational narratives of historical periods such as the Partition of India must inevitably engage with this space of ‘othering’ in order to legitimise oneself –​this creation of the foreign, because of the drawing and demarcation of borders. And spectators must learn to think through the interstices of intricate configurations of nativity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or economic privilege pitted against the not-​so-​far-​ off memories of being together. This is the encounter that dims further and further until newer generations of spectators will have shed every iota of this nostalgic memory of a shared history. A film like Ajeyo prods the consciousness of the spectators through images of alterity that are articulated both by the social and historical context as well as through cinematic apparatus. Made 67 years after the event,12 this is truly a transnational encounter in film involving figurations of conflict, aspiration, appropriation and transgression. Later, in 1971, when East Pakistan has transmuted into Bangladesh, and thousands of refugees/​ immigrants crossed over into Assam, there begins a similar encounter. In a significantly titled piece, “The Partition’s Long Shadow: The Ambiguities of Citizenship in Assam, India”, Sanjib Baruah recalls, The date is important because, according to a bilateral agreement signed with India in 1972, Bangladesh took responsibility for those who moved

30  Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri to India after that date, and agreed to take them back. ... In effect, every migrant from East Pakistan –​whether Hindu or Muslim –​who entered Assam before 1966, were to be deemed an Indian citizen by default, since Bangladesh as the successor state did not take responsibility for him or her. The same applied to those who came between 1966 and 1971, except that their names were going to be temporarily deleted from the electoral rolls for 10 years. Thus the two laws legitimized the status of all Hindus and Muslims who migrated from East Pakistan during the quarter century following the Partition, without an explicit public declaration of conferral of citizenship as such. (Baruah 600) The ‘alterity’ and ‘foreignness’ of the images in Ajeyo in 2014 emphasise the viewer’s distance from the characters and events portrayed and points at the limits of what can be conveyed by narrative cinema, and how historical distancing might interpolate meanings into the original event represented in the film. The film, based on Arun Sarma’s novel Aaxirbaador Rong, opens in 2014, where Gajen, once a freedom fighter, now a well-​known writer is plagued with misgivings about the condition of the nation-​state that he has helped to construct. The protagonist of Barua’s film is a familiar figure in the post-​Assam Movement scenario –​a student leader sometimes prone to violence but with his heart in the right place; he is both respected and feared by those who would profit through the exploitation of given political situations. Moving into a flashback to 1947, we are thrown into a typical Assamese village. There is palpable excitement among the village folk about the imminent ‘freedom’; the mouzadar’s stock figure is busy deploying his strong-​arm men into the land-​grabbing mode –​this is the perfect opportunity to acquire all the lands occupied by the poorest of the poor –​the Bengali Muslims who are to be forced to vacate Assam and move to the newly created East Pakistan. New borders are suddenly in place, huts and homes are razed to the ground and a lone Muslim girl is left stranded with nowhere to go. Hiren Gohain recalls in a recent popular essay, written in the aftermath of the National Register for Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Bill, Bengali Muslim peasants remained largely outside the process of the development of Bengali national consciousness and, from the 1920s to the 1940s, got drawn into the mass assertion of a separate Muslim identity and demanded the merger of Assam with the proposed state of Pakistan. While driven by desperately poor landless peasants’ desire for land, this call for Pakistan greatly alarmed the natives of different communities. Suspicions against immigrant Muslims lingered long

Then and Now  31 afterwards, even triggering sporadic violence against them in Kamrup district in the early 1950s. (Gohain 2019) The film examines how the familiar is suddenly rendered foreign and how people find themselves wedged somewhere in between. Many will die in the crossfire, but for some, there is salvation in entering into a trans-​space. Her father killed, her hutment set on fire, a bedraggled Muslim girl swims across the river that turns into a very real analogy for border crossings. Wet and shivering –​quite literally the ‘quivering’ foreigner13–​Hasina seeks refuge in the young man’s home. His kindly Ai (grandmother) does not turn her away, merely handing her a set of clothes –​a mekhela saador to change into. This is an important semiotic device deployed by Barua; the Bengali Muslim is generally marked by his/​her sartorial choice to this day in Assam: the (usually) blue lungi for men and the cotton staple printed saree for the women. Initially, Ai stiffly resists any question of intermarriage between the communities through conversion or otherwise, but ironically, it is she who initiates the first transgressive shift; the change of clothes that will induct the Muslim-​Bengali woman into the Hindu-​Assamese household. But she is not allowed to enter into the house and must stay put in the outhouse until she has to attend to the seriously injured Gajen. Now there is no choice but for her to enter into the kitchen, the heart of the Hindu home that an outsider may never enter. She uses the sil-​bata14 to grind the herbal medication that will save Gajen, another deftly used semiotic device, and then spends hours watching over him. Finally, Ai relents: she takes a pinch of sindoor and converts her into a Hindu, and a bride for her grandson. Both are then sent packing into the anonymity of the city where they can finally live and raise a family. The old woman robustly does what the mullah seeks to do to Gajen, and what the Hindu Brahmin refuses to do for Hasina –​convert. This is hardly the kind of conversion that carries the agenda of the Ghar-​Wapsi15 brigade; this is transnational cinema of 2014 that squarely addresses notions of conceived foreignness whereby national and regional borders become increasingly impenetrable in the ‘native’ mind, especially so in the case of Assam, after the massive movement that began in 1979. How does Barua negotiate with the audiences of 2014 in Assam, who have, since 1979, continuously struggled to assert their identity through various tools? Ajeyo cannot perhaps be reduced to some kind of simplistic understanding of the partition conundrum where a mere act of conversion might erase the simmering and contentious issues that continue to persist and cause serious unrest in the state of Assam. In the aftermath of the movement, the repeated assertions of the foreignness of the illegal immigrants and calls for their detection and deportation, as also the ghastly

32  Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri bouts of violence such as the Nellie massacre of 198316 and more recently the massive NRC exercise that began in 2013 will immediately be evoked, intertwined with the images set in 1947. It will continue to resonate with even more complexity in 2019 when Assam witnessed spontaneous and massive protests at the tabling of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, … .the seeds of the present tensions and conflicts –​recently exploding into a tumultuous, region-​wide movement against the Citizenship Act Amendment Bill –​had been sown in colonial times deliberately, and aggravated by other, later factors; they are becoming almost intractable. (Gohain 2019) At the present time, Assam has thousands of immigrants still living in the char-​chapori17 areas, their futures hinged on the NRC and the CAA. In another relevant semiotic use of the river and its shifting sandbanks –​ the Chars18 –​where many of the Bengali Muslims make their home, Jahnu Barua tries to parley with a terrain that is in a constant state of flux –​lands that are formed, unformed and re-​formed by the river, throwing up questions about the instability of borders, homes, identity and nation. Notes 1 The epigraph is the oft-​quoted passage from Ernest Gellner’s comparison of the work of Oskar Kokoschka to that of Amadeo Modigliani as metaphors of ethnographic mapmaking before and after the rise of nations. It ends thus –​“… the minute social groups, which are the atoms of which the picture is composed, have complex and ambiguous and multiple relations to many cultures; some through speech, others through their dominant faith, another still through a variant faith or a set of practices, a fourth through administrative loyalty, and so forth” (Gellner 139–​140). 2 See Chaudhuri, Asha Kuthari. 2014. “Revisiting Women’s Narratives in Film: Adayja and Joymati” in Margins: a journal of literature and culture Vol. IV. Print. 3 The Assam Movement was an intense protest against “the entry and enfranchisement of ‘foreigners’–​mostly immigrants from East Pakistan/​Bangladesh” (Baruah 1986) that went on for more than six years (1979–​1985), ending with the Assam Accord. 4 The updation of NRC in Assam began in 2013 in accordance with the order of the Supreme Court of India. It was continuously monitored by the Supreme Court Bench consisting of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Rohinton Fali Nariman. It was finally published on 31 August 2019, with 31 million names out of a population of 33 million, leaving out about 1.9 million applicants, composed of roughly an equal number of Bengali Hindus, Bengali Muslims and others from various parts of India.

Then and Now  33 5 The Citizenship Amendment Bill was passed by the Indian Parliament on 11 December 2019 and became an Act whereby the Citizenship Act of 1955 stood amended. It made possible the attainment of Indian citizenship for the illegal migrants of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian religious minorities who had entered India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before December 2014 to avoid persecution. For the first time in Indian history, religion was made the criterion for citizenship. Muslims were not eligible for the same. 6 David Thelan’s idea of border crossings cited by Clavin. 7 Joymati is available to us only in a restored version, re-​edited by Altaf Majid. I examine the film in detail in my 2014 article. 8 It must be remembered that Assam and its neighbouring states were among the last independent Indian states to be annexed to British India; they were governed through the Bengal Presidency. This was in some sense a ‘double’ colonization –​Assam has always prided itself on its centuries old legacy of language, letters and the arts –​all of which were now to become addenda to that of Bengal. 9 The Ahom Buranjis record the 600-​year period of Ahom Rule in Assam; these were officially recorded and maintained by court historians, and in this sense is unique and peerless in the context of the historiographies of contemporary kingdoms in the sub-​continent. 10 The Ahoms were a distinctive ethnic group who migrated from Siam, who later began to identify themselves as Hindus. Currently, they are categorised as OBC, but there is also the demand for Scheduled Tribe Status. 11 See Chaudhuri, Asha Kuthari. 2014. “Revisiting Women’s Narratives in Film: Adayja and Joymati” in Margins: a journal of literature and culture Vol. IV. Print. 12 1947 –​Indian independence. 13 As referred to above, from Marciniak. 14 The grinding stone that is found across homesin rural India, especially in eastern India. 15 Ghar Wapsi (Hindi: Returning Home) was a re-​conversion exercise facilitated by Hindu organizations like VHP(Vishva Hindu Parishad) and RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) to ‘bring back’ Christians and Muslims to Hinduism and Sikhism. It is significant that it was around 2014 that the matter became a subject of heated public discussion. 16 The Nellie massacre of 1983 occurred on 18 February 1983, claiming the lives of 2,191 people (unofficially estimated to be more than 10,000) from 14 villages in central Assam. All of these were Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh; the perpetrators were mostly rural Assamese peasants. It was understood to be fallout of the granting of voting rights to nearly four million such immigrants on the eve of the state elections of 1983. The massacre was actually witnessed by journalists. 17 “The riverine areas (island) of the river Brahmaputra, locally known as ‘Char/​Chapori’ cover about 3.60 lakh hectares of land and population of approximately 24.90 lakh (as per Socio Economic Survey 2002–​2003). The chars follow a peculiar pattern of migration. They are subjected to erosion on

34  Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri their upstream and deposition on the downstream, due to which they migrate downstream. This affects the geometry and location of the chars during floods almost every year.”(http://​dir​cad.assam.gov.in/​. Accessed: 24 July 2020). 18 In Moddhikhane Char (Savangi) Bhaskar Sarkar examines this notion of the foreign and how the shifting borders affect violence; Moddhikhane Char is located also in a topography which is always in flux –​by the river Ganga.

References Agarwala, Jyoti Prasad. (1935). Joymati. (Restored and re-​edited: Altaf Mazid, 2004). Film. Barua, Jahnu. Ajeyo. (2014). Film. Baruah, Sanjib. (2009) “The Partition’s Long Shadow: The Ambiguities of Citizenship in Assam, India”.Citizenship Studies, 13:6, 593–​606, DOI: 10.1080/​ 13621020903309581. Bezbaroa, Lakshminath. (1970). Joymoti Konwari. In Asam SahityaSabha (Ed.), Bezbaroa Granthavali (Vol. II), 137–​174. Guwahati: Sahitya Prakash. Bhuyan, Suryya Kumar (Ed.). (1933/​1990). Thungkhungia Buranji. Guwahati: Srimati Laksheswari Bhuyan. Clavin, Patricia. (2005). “Defining Transnationalism”.Contemporary European History, 14:4, Theme Issue: Transnational Communities in European History, 1920–​1970, 421–​439. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​20081​278 Accessed: December 6, 2018. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gohain, Hiren. (2019). “Ignoring Assam’s Colonial Past While Discussing NRC Is Academic Escapism”. The Wire. Accessed: July 23, 2020. https://​thew​ire.in/​ rig​hts/​deb​ate-​ignor​ing-​ass​ams-​colon​ial-​past-​while-​dis​cuss​ing-​nrc-​is-​acade​mic-​ escap​ism. Gohain-​Baruah, Padmanath. (1971) “Joymoti”. In Chandraprasad Saikia (Ed.), Gohain-​Baruah Racanawali (39–​77). Guwahati: Publication Board Assam. Mahanta, Aparna. (2008). Journey of Assamese Women. Guwahati: Publication Board. Mahanta, Ratneswar. (1891/​ 2001). “Joymoti Konwari aru Langi-​ Gadapani”. Jonaki, 3, 11–​12. Marciniak, Katarzyna and Bennett, Bruce. (2018). “Aporias of Foreignness: Transnational Encounters in Cinema”.Transnational Cinemas, 9:1, 1–​ 12. DOI: 10.1080/​20403526.2018.1478371. Price, Gareth. (1998). The Assam Movement and the Construction of Assamese Identity. Doctoral thesis. University of Bristol. Sarkar, Bhaskar. “On No Man’s (Is)land: Futurities at the Border”. Transnational Cinemas, 9:1, 47–​67, DOI: 10.1080/​20403526.2018.1472828 Savangi, S. (2013). Moddhikhane Char (No Man’s Island). Documentary Film. Thelan, David. (1999). “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History”. Journal of American History, 86:3, 968.

3 Humour and Cinema A Study of Language Politics in Assam Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi

Introduction The existence of several heterogeneous social groups in North-​East India has made identity politics a part and parcel of this region of the country. Understanding the diverse facets of marginalisation through such identity politics, therefore, becomes important. This chapter attempts to unravel the linguistic identity politics that functions through the medium of humour in regional cinema of Assam. We will explore how the spoken language of “upper Assam” (i.e. Eastern Assam) has been constructed as the “pure” Assamese while that of “lower Assam” (Western Assam) as the “Other”.1 With respect to the politics of representation and exclusion, Anjali Pandey has argued that “Othering” describes the manner in which social group dichotomies are represented via language. This fact is perhaps most succinctly captured in the words of Berlin (1992), who states that “language is a pluralistic and complex system of signifying practices that construct realities rather than simply presenting or representing them” (Pandey 2004, 155). Speculating on the nature of this categorising principle, philosopher Sartre (1965) writes, “The Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me” for as he concludes “I need the Other in order to realize fully all the structures of my being” (as cited in Pandey 2004, 155). It is no wonder then that social reality is often represented in dichotomous terms, a juxtaposition of Us versus Them (ibid. 155). We will strive to locate the current continuities or shifts in linguistic hierarchies through the medium of cinema. “Othering” of the language spoken in “lower Assam” (prominent through the demeaning address Dhekeri) has happened through several mechanisms. One such tool is associating this dialect only with the scenes of comedy. As noted by film-​maker and critic, Utpal Borpujari, “Assamese cinema has rarely used the dialects of Assamese … There have been examples of using these dialects to impart a feeling of comedy, but in minor ways” (Samrat 2017). DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-5

36  Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi Our study is based on the textual analysis of Assamese films. Given the apparent normalisation of hierarchies that happen through the medium of film, we chose to do a textual analysis to unearth the various ways hierarchies are maintained and reproduced. We have taken up three films for our in-​depth study. They are Ningni Kai (2016), 100 Goru Marile Baghoru Moron (2013) and Bhole Babar Lotaari (2018).2 The selection of these films has been based on the presence of popular comedians of the Assamese film industry, namely Hiranya Deka, Setona Das and Jayanta Das. Also, in all of the films, the “upper Assam” language has been used to showcase diverse scenes and settings while the “lower Assam” dialect has been especially used in comic scenes. Our analysis has taken into account the film content, characterisations (where particular attention has been paid to the way the characters are developed and their language use), songs and background scores accompanying the scenes, dialogue delivery, etc. Hence, through a textual analysis of Assamese regional cinema, the chapter will look at the representation of comic language and how that feeds into the linguistic identity politics of the state. It will also analyse how a certain form of language gets associated with or cuts through the binaries of urban and rural spaces. Critical analysis of comedy will also involve looking into the gendered role of the comic persona. Humour and Cinema A comic scene in a film amuses the audience and usually generates laughter. But when humour/​comedy gets intertwined with language politics, pitting one group against another, it perpetuates a form of marginalisation. It is worth mentioning that philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle have brought to notice the disparaging element that may be present in humour (Parrott 2016). Several social scientists, including Zillmann and Bryant (1991), have argued how comedy is often used in plots where some persons or groups triumph over others, and where these others are “debased, demeaned, disparaged, ridiculed, humiliated, or otherwise subjected to undesirable experiences” (ibid. 50). As an entry point to the comedy discourse in Assamese cinema, this section will delve into how disparagement humour operates and then produces socio-​cultural hierarchies in the society. Within the framework of disparagement humour, the “looking down upon” blurs any distinction between humour and humiliation. The inequalities that are prevalent in the society get communicated via language while language in turn reinforces these inequalities. Further, these jokes strengthen certain prejudices against particular groups or community giving rise to categorisations like “in-​group” and “out-​group”. Using the lens of social identity theory to understand disparagement humour,

Humour and Cinema  37 Ferguson and Ford (2008) state that social groups compete for social recognition leading to “positive distinctiveness”. Within the scope of our chapter, the variable to study intergroup relations is based on their spoken language, where the social groups belonging to Eastern Assam came to be constituted as the “in-​group”. Through this process, their language began to be deemed superior in terms of its cultural capital. Moreover, Ferguson and Ford (2008) argue that: Whether through communicating cultural knowledge through stereotypes (e.g., Devine: 1989), contributing to an outlet for subtle expressions of prejudice (e.g., Crandall & Eshleman: 2003), or facilitating hostile and discriminatory environments for others (e.g., Ford 2000; Fitzgerald et al: 2005), disparagement humour can have important social consequences. (as cited in Ferguson and Ford 2008, 305) They draw from a vast body of literature to highlight the purpose and function of disparagement humour. They note that it serves as a “cultural tool for bolstering or maintaining positive distinctiveness” (ibid. 298). To explore the nuances of comic performances, one could also draw an understanding from the Greek tradition in Aristotle’s Poetics (335 BC ) and the Indian classical tradition of Rasa theory in Bharatamuni’s Natya Shastra (first compilation estimated between 200 BC E to 200 C E ). In Poetics, according to Aristotle, the distinction between comedy and tragedy lies where “comedy represents people as worse than they actually are, whereas tragedy represents people as better than they actually are” (as cited in Ferguson & Ford 2008, 288). Although these traditions originate in different cultural contexts, they provide an interesting lens to study comedy per se. Both the Aristotelian comedy and the Rasa theory (haasya rasa) postulate that comedy deals with an ordinary person or one belonging to the lower strata of society. By locating humour in the regional context of the cinema culture of Assam, it becomes imperative to put forth the question of representation and how it manifests itself in the usage of language. The stereotypical portrayal exposes the cultural prejudices inherent in the Assamese society which comes across during comic scenes. Further, it reinforces the hierarchy in the spoken languages of the people on both sides of the Brahmaputra valley, which will be illustrated in a later section. Assamese Cinema: A Brief History The Assamese film industry has seen several ups and downs since the beginning. The first Assamese film, released in 1935, was Joymoti.3

38  Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi In spite of the low-​key character of Assamese film industry, it is noteworthy that Joymoti was also the fourth film in the whole of India. It was produced and directed by Jyotiprasad Agarwala, the icon of Assamese performative traditions (Dutta and Dutta 2011). However, the film did not have any commercial success. After the moderate success of his second film Indramalati (1939), he clearly knew that a durable film culture in Assamese is far from possible due to the high production costs and lack of infrastructure and personnel (Rajkhowa 2015). Although film-​making tradition in Assam continued to flourish in later years, the commercial Bollywood-​ized movies became more popular. However, this is not to deny the existence of “parallel” cinema by several stalwarts of Assamese film tradition like Bhabendra Nath Saikia, Padum Baruah and Jahnu Baruah (Dutta & Dutta 2011). Era Bator Xur, released in 1956, was the directorial debut of Bhupen Hazarika, the cultural icon of Assamese music. This movie was about the tea labourers of Assam, showcasing the class divide and exploitations they face. Padum Baruah’s first film Gonga Silonir Pakhi (1976) is considered a breakthrough in Assamese innovative films (ibid. 216). Similarly, the films of Bhabendra Nath Saikia throughout the 1970s to 1990s like Sarothi (1992), Abartan (1994) and Sandhyarag (1977) have been extremely socially relevant dealing with the themes of women’s oppression, middle-​class aspirations and rural–​urban dichotomy. With time, however, the film industry began experiencing several losses. Even the critically acclaimed films of Jahnu Baruah and the likes rarely reached their financial success because of a lack of proper distribution and the diversity in audiences. Given that Assam is home to several ethnic groups speaking diverse languages, Assamese language films have a confined audience. Apart from that, the ban on Hindi cinema imposed by ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam)4 in 2002–​03, because of Bollywood’s influence on Assam’s movie culture, led to closure of several theatres. Because of this dearth of screening spaces, the filmmakers resorted to video CDs to release their movies (Dutta 2013). Therefore, in the early 2000s, VCDs became a popular medium of film distribution. Now decades later, in the last five years, one can see a re-​emergence of commercial blockbusters in Assamese cinematic culture. This trend is also a result of popular Assamese figures in the cultural field like Jatin Bora (one of the most prominent Assamese actors) and Zubeen Garg (popular singer-​songwriter turned producer and actor) producing these big budget movies like Ratnakar (2019) and Mission China (2017), respectively. With the onset of digital culture, several of the VCD movies have been uploaded onto digital platforms like YouTube. The current transition from VCD to digital space for instance has made the films more publicly accessible.

Humour and Cinema  39 This has also prompted us to choose films on the basis of their presence in digital platforms. Linguistic Identity Politics in Assam Before understanding the relation between humour and language in Assamese cinema, it is essential to write briefly about the linguistic identity politics in Assam that goes back to the thirteenth century. Assam is home to several tribes and ethnicities whose culture and language differ in significant ways. The state accounts for 45 languages and 23 tribes that make up 12.5% of the total population. Assamese speaking population account for 48.8% of the total (Dutta 2013). Apart from this, Assamese spoken in Assam also differs according to region. In spite of this linguistic diversity, there are certain sections of the population, speaking a particular kind of Assamese, who wield greater power and respect in general. Throughout history, the Assamese spoken in Eastern Assam, which is generally called the language of “upper Assam”, is very different in terms of “phonology, morphology, and glossary” from the dialects in Western Assam, especially Kamrupiya and Goalpariya (largely called as the language of “lower Assam”) (Sengupta 2018). The former has witnessed a distinct form of domination over the latter. This upper/​lower terminology, however (although used in a mundane way) literally creates a relation of domination and subordination. This relation of power emerged due to several political and socio-​cultural complexities within the state. It goes back to the reign of Ahoms in Assam (from the thirteenth to nineteenth century) and the Christian proselytising mission during the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Ahoms, who ruled Assam for nearly 600 years, were largely dominant in Eastern Assam and had their headquarters in Garhgaon (in present day Sibasagar). Due to their habit of recording the day-​to-​day events of the royal court, the use of the Eastern/​ upper Assamese language in formal terms began to increase. The influence of the Ahom kings, therefore, led to homogeneity of the spoken language of Eastern and Middle Assam over the rest of the state. Also, this language became the language of the administration5 in the Ahom kingdom from 1616. Apart from this, the inhabitants of “lower Assam” (Namoni Assam) were not ordinarily allowed to enter the Ahom capital and were stigmatised as the Dhekeri or the contemptible “other” to the culturally privileged and “superior” Ujoni or “upper Assam” (Sengupta 2018). As mentioned by the linguist Grierson (1903), this name was given to this portion of Assamese by the Ahoms to denote that it had been conquered, such that the term began to mean an “outsider” or the “deplorable” one (ibid.). The term began to have such strong connotations that today it is often used in a sarcastic way to demean people in day-​to-​day conversations.

40  Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi With the coming of the British, the American Baptist Mission began to invoke their evangelical projects from 1836 onwards. As part of this Christian proselytising mission, the printing presses began to be set up in Sibasagar itself. In 1846, they brought out the first newspaper in the state called Orunudoi (which used the language spoken in Sibasagar for literary purposes). Thus, traditions of Ahom court supported by the mission press established the language spoken in Eastern Assam as the literary language of the state (Hazarika 2009). It is nonetheless fundamental to note that the development of print culture in the colonial era can also be invariably tied to the emergence of Assamese nationalism along with several other administrative projects. The imagining of a “Greater Assam” required the hegemony of one particular language, which would feed into the idea of an “imagined linguistic community”. This automatically led to the construction of a linguistic hierarchy. It primarily had to do with the fact that the Assamese identity was often constituted by distancing itself from the Bengalis, who then represented the “other”. Such distancing emerged out of the threat that the Assamese intelligentsia felt because of the preference given to Bengali people in matters of employment by the colonial administration. Many of the administrators also promoted the Bengali language for official use, while Assamese was represented as a mere dialect of Bengali. Therefore, the middle-​class, educated Assamese elite tried to establish Assamese as a sub-​nation at par, rather than as inferior to Bengal (Goswami 2014, 50). The resolution passed in 1873 introducing Assamese as the official vernacular of the people (Misra 2006, 202) further solidified this Assamese language hegemony. The construction of such a “national language” makes us recognise that, as Sanjib Baruah has suggested, “the idea of being a speaker (and, increasingly, a reader and writer) of one language exclusively and associating that language with national or ethnic identity is a modern phenomenon” (Baruah 1995, 2783), which invariably leaves out several dialects which are particularly numerous in Assam. As Sanjib Baruah (1995) has argued, the relationship between language and dialect has always been a problematic one. Languages are usually understood as having scripts and literatures while the dialects do not. In North-​East India, however, there are a number of examples of dialects acquiring scripts and literatures during the last century. Hence, Baruah argued that the shift from language to dialects is a social and political process. Several factors like the advent of print culture, mass literacy, the growth of modern state etc. as mentioned above led to some dialects becoming literary speech or language and inhabitants of a large area started adopting one of the dialects that they speak. Thus, it is interesting to note that what appears to be a language at one time may have been a dialect at an earlier time (Baruah 1995, 2783).

Humour and Cinema  41 Hence, such efforts of linguistic nationalism explain the peripheral status of a dialect like Kamrupiya. As Madhumita Sengupta has mentioned, Kamrupi has now been reduced to the status of a rustic speech form, practised almost entirely by the less privileged sections of the society and, definitely within the inner domains of the home ... Kamrupi’s precarious position is reinforced by the overwhelming presence of standard Assamese as the exclusive medium of sophisticated conversation in Assam as also the language of education, cinema, literature, and journalistic writing. (Sengupta 2018) Hence, it has been observed that in several Assamese soaps and films, Kamrupiya dialect has often been used to impart a sense of comedy. Such usages of the dialect as opposed to a “civilised” “pure” Assamese (often used to depict serious conversations) result in the linguistic hierarchy to sustain. Constructing Hierarchies On-​Screen: A Critical Analysis This section will precisely discuss the above-​mentioned dilemma and analyse how the linguistic hierarchy is constructed through Assamese cinema. In Ningni Kai,6 the story is set in a village located in Western Assam. The plot revolves around a village trickster, named Ningni, played by comedian Hiranya Deka, whose humour comes through his deceiving acts on other villagers in order to collect materials for a meal. His “morally corrupt” character is the subject of this satirical comedy where the other characters are shown to be gullible and hence eventually succumb to his tricks. In one of the comic scenes, Ningni goes on to invite elderly villagers for a community feast, which turns into another deceit. The scenes which follow are replete with scatological/​toilet humour, with the villagers planning to take revenge. One of the characters, addressed as Hakim, is shown conversing in anglicised Assamese (which also tends towards Eastern Assam language) with the villagers and acts as their “rescuer”. In the film called 100 Goru Marile Baghoru Moron,7 the story is about a young man, with several liaisons in the past, finally getting married. In a particular comic sequence, where the friends and relatives of the groom are on a bus journey to the bride’s place, the film-​maker has brought together people from diverse communities/​cultures of Assam highlighting their stereotypical characteristics. For instance, one posing as a Nepali person is being addressed as Kancha8 and is shown as a milkman while the Muslim character is shown to have polygamous relationships. During the

42  Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi scene, a heated argument takes place between two characters hailing from Ujoni and Namoni Assam. The argument revolves around how one community has been sidelined by the other in terms of cultural and political representation. The person portraying the Namoni character specifically indulges in how Kaziranga and Bihu (rather than Goalpariya folk dance, which is specific to Western Assam) have come to symbolise Assam in its entirety as both are situated in Eastern Assam. He further points out that the leaders from Western Assam are largely missing in the political field too. Interestingly, even in the scene itself, he gets outnumbered by the presence of people from Ujoni Assam who treat him as a yokel and silence him leading him to apologise at the end. There is a clear construction of high/​low culture binary throughout the scene, which ultimately reinforces the inter-​community linguistic conflict. Thus, humour does not always elicit amusement and it could also lead to “negative emotional responses” (embarrassment, anger, frustration etc.) among the so-​called subordinate group (Ferguson and Ford 2008, 303). It is important to note here that in the film above, the comic roles are played by characters speaking both the Namoni (Western Assam) and the Ujoni (Eastern Assam) language/​dialect. However, the performance of comedy by both (especially in terms of dialogic tone and texture) is evidently different. While the one speaking the former has a loud coarse voice, enunciating the words with a heavy texture, the latter is soft spoken and has a melodious tone to his dialogue delivery. The background scores accompanying the two comic scenes are also distinct. Visually too, the former is dressed in a simple vest with a gamusa (a traditional Assamese towel) on his shoulder while the comedian playing the Ujoni character is attired in a modern suit presumably giving an urban outlook. These sartorial differences also essentially connect the Ujoni and Namoni characters to urban and rural settings, respectively. The urban/​ rural binary is also portrayed in the film Bhole Babar Lotaari,9 where the yokel character (speaking Kamrupiya), named Ganesh, migrates from his village to the city in search of a job. In the city, he stays with another family (whom he believes to be his relatives while the latter do not acknowledge that) and they exploit him by overburdening him with various chores and errands. The family in the city is shown to converse in Ujoni Axamiya (Assamese). Interestingly, the comedian Setona Das, who portrays the character of wife in that family, is seen to be influenced by Hindi serials and films in the way she carries herself. She is constantly seen to be decked up in lavish clothing and expensive jewellery signifying a particular status symbol associated with the urban. Ganesh being the sympathetic comic hero finally goes through a rise in fortune when he wins the lottery. In spite of the disadvantaged background, he ultimately proves his “natural nobility” by undergoing multiple tests of character

Humour and Cinema  43 throughout the film, which is another defining characteristic of comedy (Simpson 1998). Language and Music

In Ningni Kai and Bhole Babar Lotaari, it was observed that while the dialogues of the comic characters were in Kamrupiya dialect, the songs within the films were sung in the standardised Assamese language. This is interesting as the same characters were conversing in two modes of Ujoni and Namoni, in songs and daily routine talk, respectively, within the same film. One of the songs in Ningni Kai is in the form of a conversation where both the male and the female characters are seen disputing over their marital decisions. While the male character played by comedian Hiranya Deka sings in both Ujoni and Namoni Assamese, the female character shifts completely from her Kamrupiya dialect to sing in Ujoni Assamese only. It is as if the Kamrupiya dialect does not find representation in the “imagined reality” of the characters, considering songs as symbolic of the romantic, fantastical realm. Gendered Reading of Humorous Language

In the films discussed above, a gendered reading can also be done with regard to the comic scenes. For instance, in Ningni Kai, another young couple (both speaking the Namoni dialect) is shown courting each other while also arguing about their feelings. In the scene, the woman is questioning the man’s love for her, which prompts her to threaten him by contemplating different ways to end her life. To this, the man responds in a comic manner by disputing each of her tactics, taking undue advantage of her “naivety”. Similar confrontations recur throughout the film and each time her opinions get flustered by the man’s cunning remarks, thereby silencing her. Such instances of sexist disparagement humour highlights that there is a “substantial evidence suggesting that, regardless of sex, people enjoy sexist humour insofar as they have negative (sexist) attitudes toward women (e.g., Butland and Ivy: 1990; Ford: 2000; Ford et al: 1999; Henkin and Fish: 1986; LaFrance and Woodzicka: 1998; Moore et al: 1987)” (Ferguson and Ford 2008, 295). We also note that the male gaze is glorified to an extreme level in 100 Goru Marile Baghoru Moron as well. However, one of the women characters, played by Setona Das, takes a strong stand and voices out her disapproval towards such lecherous behaviour. Nonetheless, it is important to note that her character is shown to belong from Eastern Assam. This illustrates that the question of women’s agency is also linked to their linguistic identity.

44  Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi Throughout our analysis of the films as discussed above, the plot starts with a conflict that ultimately gets resolved and ends on a celebratory note. The comic characters (speaking in Dhekeri) that are shown as either engaging in satirical, scatological and sexist humour are not problematised, which brings to the fore how the issue of language representation through humour needs to be critically analysed and connected to the larger political scenario. Additionally, the comic persona bears the burden of their social location leading to layers of oppression that needs to be debunked. Contemporary Connections As Assam is embroiled in language politics, which invariably leads to linguistic hierarchies, we have considered the diverse mechanisms through which such hierarchies are reproduced. And one such method is by representing humour in Assamese cinema especially through the Kamrupiya dialect. Although there are instances of “upper Assam” language being used to represent comedy at times, the absence of “lower Assam” dialects in portraying anything other than comedy is what is significant, as already illustrated. Further, we would also want to draw attention to the function of the comic persona: does it provide a social critique or is it only used for comic relief? This distinction is seen in the Indian and Western traditions of comedy as well, where haasya in former, usually tends to generate more of free and merry laughter while in the latter, comedy is also used to mask unpleasant feeling, hence being sarcastic (Raval 2010, 29). Through our analysis, we found that it does attempt to deliver both, yet falls short. Given our limited access for this study, what came across is that in the past, the comic persona’s function was restricted to generating laughter rather than being a critical tool. In the contemporary times however, there has been a noticeable shift in the representation of the Kamrupiya dialect in Assamese popular culture. Representing Kamrupiya dialect in its colloquial form, rather than to elicit laughter essentially de-​stabilises its marginality. In this light, one can re-​imagine the dichotomy between high and low culture in terms of language use in the Assamese context. The decade beginning in 2010 can be seen as an important turning point in the context of Assamese cinema. In 2015, hundreds of actors, directors, technicians and producers from the Assamese film fraternity even observed a “Day of Solidarity” for the “revival of Assamese cinema” in Guwahati’s Dighalipukhuri area highlighting the apathy of the state government towards the industry. (Agarwala 2018)

Humour and Cinema  45 About this new breed of filmmakers in Assam, Agarwala notes, “These new faces –​both men and women –​are between the ages of 30 and 40, hail from various parts of Assam, and shoot on shoestring, and often crowdsourced, budgets” (ibid.). Some of these contemporary filmmakers are namely, Rima Das, Kenny Basumatary, Bhaskar Hazarika, Rajni Basumatary and Himjyoti Talukdar who have made concerted efforts that have led towards a new dawn in cinema of Assam. Given the diversity of their social and linguistic locations, there is better representation of numerous voices on screen. Merging skilful martial arts with comic timing, Kenny Basumatary’s Local Kunfu (2013) has generated good laughs along with an action-​packed performance. Having released its sequel in 2017, this movie franchise has a fan base of its own. It is important to note that most members of the cast belong to the Bodo community. With such significant changes, comedy is then not restricted to using Kamrupiya dialect to generate laughter. This could be considered as a shift. On the other hand, the use of toilet humour does come to fore as a continuous trope to tickle the audiences’ funny bone. In 2018, Rima Das’ Village Rockstars traversed various film festivals globally and it marked an important juncture for cinema in Assam. This film follows the story of a young girl in the rural backdrop of Chaygaon along with her group of friends. Throughout the film, Kamrupiya language is used to showcase everyday realities (rather than using it as a comic trope) of a young adolescent girl who dreams of owning a guitar of her own and to form a band with her friends in the village. Similarly, Rima Das’ film titled Bulbul Can Sing, also using Kamrupiya language, portrays a certain linguistic sensibility, which was otherwise missing from Assamese cinema so far. Depicting the life of three teenagers in rural Assam, it follows their journeys of exploring their sexual identities. Das who herself is a native of Chaygaon brings this language to life on screen and it can be seen as an assertion of linguistic identity through which the local culture and social attitudes are put forward. Asserting a linguistic identity which is otherwise pushed to the margins makes a case for the “subaltern” subject to speak. There is a subversion in the linguistic domain in a non-​comedy film, whereby the Kamrupiya dialect is used to depict everyday-​ness. By creating art that is rooted in one’s lived realities, the subaltern gains a voice and asserts their subjectivity. The voices which are otherwise marginalised empower themselves through this rhetoric. To answer Gayatri Spivak’s fundamental question: can the subaltern speak (1988)? Yes, the subaltern can speak and with optimum force. The dichotomy between Ujoni and Namoni comes into question with the emergence of this new cinematic representation of language. Thus, it destabilises the top-​down approaches of the “outside” voices.

46  Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi As we step into the second decade of the twenty-​ first century, the Assamese film industry marks its 85th year of existence. With the wide popularity of OTT (Over The Top) platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, Assamese films are also getting recognition among a global audience. Bhaskar Hazarika’s Kothanodi (The River of Fables) is the first film from Northeast India to be available on Netflix (Borpujari 2017). One can also see an emergence of a number of YouTube channels –​Heavy Budget being one of the popular ones –​which produce original content in the form of short films. Hence, there have been certain shifts in the last few decades in terms of the representation of Assamese culture through cinema. One important aspect would be the diverse social locations of the filmmakers themselves who bring various stories to life on screen. With new and diverse voices showcasing and producing more cinema in and of the region, this leads to cultural formation of new narrative(s). Notes 1 Edward Said in his ground-​breaking book Orientalism (1978) gave the concept of the “Other” as part of his postcolonial theory. In Orientalism, he questions the foundations of Western representational practices that tend to construct the “Orient” as the ultimate “Other” in history, art, music, literature, popular culture etc. 2 The years mentioned beside the films are as per the online videos we referred to on YouTube. 3 It is a film about the Ahom princess Joymoti who sacrificed herself to save the life of her husband against the enemies of the Ahom kingdom in the seventeenth century. The film was released amidst the growing nationalistic sentiments that were brewing in the country during that period. 4 ULFA, an insurgent group in Assam formed in 1979, demanded the secession of Assam from the rest of India. They saw the seat of power in New Delhi as a form of colonial governance. Their understanding of “Golden Assam” was to get rid of “Hindi speakers” who were seen as representing “Colonial New Delhi”. 5 Persian was also introduced later. Surya Kumar Bhuyan states that the Buranjis (historical chronicles from the Ahom period) compiled by Paramananda Bairagi of Gokhulpur during the regime of the Assamese king, Udayaditya Singha, who ruled from AD 1670 to 1673, is in Assamese but with a large admixture of Perso-​ Arabic diction like zobah, gor, takht, farman or imam (Bhuyan 1956, 41). 6 www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​U5Ma​Lbnq​wLg 7 www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​xEya​Gceq​7xg 8 Kancha, which literally means the young one in Assamese, is used as a generalised term to address Nepali men, which in turn becomes a racial slur. 9 Unfortunately, the YouTube video we referred to, is no longer in circulation online.

Humour and Cinema  47 Bibliography Agarwala, T. (2018). “Express Rewind: Assamese cinema and the murmurs of a comeback.” Indian Express, 30 December. Baruah, S. (1995). “Western Cultural Boundary of Assam.” Economic and Political Weekly 30 (44): 2783–​2784. Bhuyan, S. K. (1956). Studies in the Literature of Assam. Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall. Borpujari, U. (2017). “Cinema of the Northeast: From Early Assamese Films to Star Manipuri Directors, All You Need to Know.” Firstpost, 21 October. Dutta, D. (2013). “The Rise and Fall of Assamese Film.” Himal Southasian, 15 September. Dutta, P., and Dutta, M. (2011). “The Assamese Films of Bhabendra Nath Saikia: Another Parallel Stream of Indian Cinema.” Journal of Creative Communication 6 (1 and 2): 215–​224. Ferguson, M. A., and Ford, T. E. (2008). “Disparagement Humor: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Psychoanalytic, Superiority, and Social Identity Theory.” Humor –​International Journal of Humor Research 21 (3): 283–​312. Goswami, U. (2014). Conflict and Reconciliation: The Politics of Ethnicity in Assam. New Delhi: Routledge. Hazarika, B. (2009). “Assamese Language.” In Assam: Land & People, by Hitesh Deka, 213–​215. New Delhi: Thomson Press (India Limited). Misra, S. (2006). “Redrawing Frontiers: Language, Resistance and the Imagining of a Goalpariya People.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 43 (2): 199–​225. Pandey, A. (2004). “Constructing Otherness: A Linguistic Analysis of the Politics of Representation and Exclusion in Freshmen Writing.” Issues in Applied Linguistics 14 (2): 153–​184. Parrott, S. (2016). “When Everyone is Laughing: The Presence, Characteristics, and Enjoyment of Disparagement Humor in Online TV.” Mass Communication and Society 19 (1): 49–​73. Rajkhowa, G. (2015). “Coming Back to Life: Jyotiprasad’s Joymoti and Nationalist Politics in Assam, 1890s–​1940s.” BioScope 6 (2): 107–​125. Raval, R. J. (2010). “Shakespeare and Bhasa as the Writers of the Comedy: A Comparative Study.” PhD Thesis, Krantiguru Shyamji Krishna Verma Kachchh University. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Samrat. (2017). “Kamrupi: A Language with No Army.” Livemint, 23 October. Sartre, J. P. (1965). The Philosophy of Jean-​Paul Sartre (Robert Cummings, Ed.). New York: Random House. Sengupta, M. (2018). “Representing Kamrupi: Ideologies of Grammar and the Question of Linguistic Boundary.” In A Multilingual Nation: Translation and Language Dynamics in India, edited by Rita Kothari. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

48  Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi Simpson, D. L. (1998). Comedy and Tragedy. Accessed 10 August 2020. https://​ con​dor.dep​aul.edu/​dsimp​son/​tlove/​comic-​tra​gic.html. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan. Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (1991). Responding to Comedy: The Sense and Nonsense in Humor. In Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction Processes edited by J. Bryant & D. Zillmann, 261–​279. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

4 The Transnational City of Pondicherry Elite Indian Identity Crisis and Cortes’ Receding French Image Andrea Rodrigues Pondicherry conceals an abyss of identity crisis experienced by the Indian elite caused by the severed ties with the French colonial state. The city dwellers exhibit the burgeoning effects of this concealment through structural and pictorial forms through which some repressed notions distill into artistic structures. Sebastian Cortes’ photography and essay compilation probes into this crisis with a perspective reveals the precarious state of being of the city that runs three centuries deep into the past. The series of Cortes’ photographs have become cinematic in the depiction of Pondicherry’s history. The book has three essays in which the gaze of the transnational essayist depicts the transition of institutions like the Sri Aurobindo Ashram into the space of the trans-​nation, the receding French culture, the social psyche’s recurrent outcry for the French city, and the longing for French governance. The transnational identity was organized, and it eventually replaced the uncertain national one. In the area of regional studies, the positive influence of the initiator of a transnational culture is often undermined in the post-​colonial approach. However, this chapter maps Pondicherry’s cultural un-​coloring with the receding trans-​nation and looks at the literary depiction of the Colonial French as a pluri-​cultural negotiator thereby establishing the argument first made. In the early eighteenth century, the merchants of Pondicherry had developed an acquaintance with the French settlers, which later manifested into a personal and professional relationship. The Europeans were dependent on the Indian mercantile class to establish trade connections as the merchants were mediators between the colonizers and the sellers at the local markets. This local mercantile class found an opportunity to acquire a new social identity –​‘the new social elite’ as they were patrons of culture, art and local institutions (Mukund 2005, 136). The elite individuals had to be proficient in the local language and converse about the political situation, the ruling classes and local economic transactions. They had a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-6

50  Andrea Rodrigues certain social responsibility in the functioning of the colonial city and their cooperation or non-​cooperation would directly impact their identity and the future of the French in Pondicherry. The colonial French state became a source of identity for the merchant class. The colonizer wasn’t perceived as an oppressor but as an entity that facilitated the creation of an identity that would have monetary implications and social approval. This transaction was the initial process of formulation of a transnational identity, where certain traits of the French were consumed and reproduced by the Indian elite, thereby forming a French elitism coupled with the existing Indian identity. The Indian elite viewed them as not hegemonic but as cultural facilitators of the culture and spaces of the elite class. In 1761, the British took over Pondicherry from the French, which resulted in a sudden change in social roles of the merchants. A state of identity crisis was created as they realized their inability to find a responsible social role after the connection with the French began to taper off. The social gatherings came to a halt and their personal relationship with the French rulers was greatly altered. In the twentieth century, Pondicherry was occupied by third and fourth generations of Indian elites whose successors had relations with the French, and who themselves identified with Pondicherry. The French rule enabled the elite in French Pondicherry to gather and socialize in social groups in spaces like the Aurobindo Ashram and elite French hotels. The elite identity is driven by spaces where their class enjoys certain privileges, where they are differentiated from the other local residents. These spaces turned into transnational spaces and opened the scope for multicultural interactions. This again reinforced a perception of them as negotiators of space and culture. With history coming full circle, the situation of the French departing from Pondicherry was repeated, this time not partially, and in 1954, the French retreated from Pondicherry. The situation that followed was the destruction of heritage buildings, almost 200 have been lost since, and the modern Indianization of the city with regards to the building of urban Indian metropolitan buildings and commercial touristic ventures. This led to a receding French identity in the established transnational French-​Indian identity, which caused a distorted idea of the present. This chapter looks at the transnational identity formation of merchants like Ananda Ranga Pillai, Kanakaraya Mudaliar and Sunku Muthurama Chetty and the consequent identity crisis due to their disassociation with the French ruling power. It then ventures into Sebastain Cortes’ modern perception of identity crisis in the contemporary situation where the essays of Akash Kapur, Amin Jafir and Pascal Bruckner reveal underlying anxieties in relation to their identification with Pondicherry, while Cortes’

The Transnational City of Pondicherry  51 photographs reveal the receding French influence in Pondicherry. The chapter ends with assessment of the French as pluri-​cultural negotiators in the gaze of the elite, which greatly influenced their transnational identity formation through the years. Transnational Identity Formation in the Eighteenth Century The Mudaliars, Chettis and Pillais were the merchant communities that were most associated with the French. They had held positions as the dubash or chief courtier, which was the highest post under the French organization of trade in Pondicherry. Ananda Ranga Pillai was a dubash who served the French East India Company. His diary is an essential account of the early to mid-​1700s and it reveals his personal relationships with the European elites. He also presents an occasional commentary on the French power as a ruling entity and their interaction with the Indian society. The elite identity formation for Ananda Ranga Pillai was induced in his childhood due to his regular accompaniment with his father Thiruvengadam Pillai’s work, first as a native agent, and then, as the Dewan to the French East India Company. His father along with the family migrated to Pondicherry in 1716. In his early years, Ananda Ranga Pillai had learned the dealings of the French in Pondicherry. Like his father, he too when he grew older became responsibly associated with the French. Initially he was made the chief head of a factory of French possession in Porto Novo and later, with Joseph François Dupleix in power as Governor, Pillai rose in status as a respected courtier who was loyal to the court. Pillai was in-​charge of minting French coins in Pondicherry, which meant that he was integral in promoting the French economic system in India, while also trading materials like yarn, cloth and indigo and areca nut with Mascareigne, Manila and Mocha. Ananda Ranga Pillai became the medium that made French colonial culture transnational. By aiding trade between the French and these other territories, a link was created facilitating migration to and fro from these spaces. The transnational is in this process created by reinforcement of intercultural transactions through economic systems such as trading (Penny 1908, 568–​574). The identity crisis for Ananda Ranga Pillai possibly began with Robert Clive’s arrival and the consequent decline of Dupleix’s fortune as the French had lost the war. Pillai’s role in the French colony gradually terminated and by 1756, due to poor health conditions, Pillai was removed from his position. One notices here that the colonial state as a whole doesn’t directly influence Indian elitism; it is the interaction and the ability of the Indian to contribute to the colonial state and in return facilitate his own identity. The crisis begins when this interaction terminates abruptly due to the

52  Andrea Rodrigues social situation and the Indian elite are found incapable to withhold their transnational identity. In his diary too, there’s an outcry for the French for he had emotionally connected with the French culture, the French social groups and had looked at the colonial state with the notion of a ‘nation’, where the elites were sharing a similar space where the people were united with the notion of them rooting for the victory of the French against the British. In a resourceful and poignant article in the New York Times, Kamm (1976), an eminent foreign reporter, stated very blatantly that Pondicherry was initially built for the local elites, the colonial administrators, soldiers, doctors, importers, teachers and dentists. The space that the French created was conducive to elitism and involved encouraging interactions between elite businessmen officials, local militia and philanthropists. Kamm (1976) states mainly that apart from the French elite, the followers of Sri Aurobindo had bought homes of the French and had been living as the elite. Certain selected individuals from these elites can be realized as the ideological state apparatus as mentioned by Althusser, wherein the ruling class disseminates cultural ideologies through an apparatus to establish a culture of dominance and conformity. In the colonial city of Pondicherry, there must then exist the ruling class, that is, the French governors and the dominant class, which is the ideological state apparatus, that is, the Indian elite officials. This state apparatus comprising merchants like Ananda Ranga Pillai in Pondicherry were part of the cultural negotiations. This was another cause for their identity crisis because after the French cut off ties, the dominant class lost the connection to the ruling class. In the case of Ananda Ranga Pillai, with the fall of Joseph François Dupleix as the head of the ruling class, his role in the society also came to a standstill. Kanakaraya Mudaliar, also known as Pedro, was the Chef de Courtier of the company from 1724 to 1746. He was the grandson of Thanappa Mudaliar who was the first native dubash in Pondicherry. His identity formation as a French Indian perhaps began after the trading episode with the French initially around 1716. He developed a large trading network. After his tenure as a courtier came to an end, he still continued to associate with the French. Cojande states that Mudaliar made sure to send goods produced for vessel trading to the Company while also maintaining personal relationships with the Frenchmen working with the Governor. A semblance of Mudaliar’s association with the French is evident here with a motivation to retain his affluence and identity. In 1739, Kanakaraya Mudaliar, as a financier gave 10,000 pagodas in the form of an interest free loan to the French Company. Thanappa and Pedro Mudaliar, both were high-​caste Hindus who converted to Christianity because of the societal pressures of the Hindu society (Velmurugan: 1999, 456–​459). They had

The Transnational City of Pondicherry  53 begun forming for themselves an elite transnational identity. Moreover, this transnational identity constituted one’s social role too and becomes hereditary in the case of merchant groups like the Mudaliars where the generations carry forward the family career and the surname becomes a signification. Sunku Muthurama Chetty was another elite merchant who traded extensively with the French from 1711 to 1730. The generation that succeeded him followed suit too. His trade relations reached as far as the English at Madras, the Dutch of Negappatinam and also the French at Pondicherry. He directed the customs of the Mint at San Thome and formulated land revenues. He became an integral part of the French Company when he began to supply goods to almost half of the annual demand received from Europe which formulated his elite social identity. In 1725, he began facing problems when a fraud was detected in accounting, which called for reproach from Paris, which led to withdrawal of his contracts by the Superior Council and it altered his relationship with the French. Following this incident, his role in the French economy deteriorated and he could no longer revive his position. Sunku Muthurama’s brother Seshachala along with few family members like Lakshmipati, Adiappa and Vengata re-​established his relationship with the French and they began a long series of investments in French overseas trade. The family migrated from Madras and settled in Pondicherry but couldn’t live up to Muthurama’s trading legacy. Eventually, the drought of 1930s led to extreme financial instability for this merchant community and led to their fall. Arasaratnam, a maritime historian, states that Indian merchants like Chetty that were overly committed to their commercial relationship with the colonial power were completely drained by Europeans and in that process they lost their independency. They relied entirely on the joint stock supplies and didn’t have common capital. In the case of the Chetty merchant class, we see the inability of the family to sustain their identity and associations with the French, resulting in a gradual deterioration of their transnational elite identity. The theory of Gramscian class and social power thesis states that the more the power associated with a profession, the more the people moving into that profession will be subjected to internalize the mannerisms and values of the ruling class, and higher the power, the more will be the identity dissonance (Costello 2005, 222). The Indian elite merchants realized the power dynamics associated with the profession and with the idea of being amiable to the French. They adopted the religion and standard of living of the French. They built their houses in that manner, merging French and Tamil architectural aesthetics as is evident in the house of Ananda Ranga Pillai. The Gramscian theory also states that higher power status would lead to higher identity dissonance, which is again is tied in with the sudden

54  Andrea Rodrigues loss in power at the end of the Indian elite that led to the state of identity dissonance for the Indian elite merchants. Identity Formation in Modern Colonial Pondicherry: Parker and Goubert The children of French and Indian national elites in Pondicherry that received education in French Pondicherry began learning the history and geography of France. They learned very little about India and thus their identity was formulated as though they were growing up in a French city with little interaction with the Indian culture. Their parents had excluded them from Indian influences and anything that would get them attached to the Indian land, making it difficult to leave when the time comes. The protagonist Orianne in A House in Pondicherry by Lee Langley too faces similar reproach from her mother when she insists on learning more about Sri Aurobindo or anything related to Indian culture. The case of Walter Hugh Parker is also considerable as he was born to Anglo-​Indian parents, Leonard Parker and Joan Perreira, and faced identity crisis in Pondicherry during the colonial rule. He uses the literary form of an autobiographical research paper where he speaks about his own experience and ties it in with the socio-​cultural scenario. He writes: I think my identity crisis was more in facing my alterity rather than not knowing who I really was … alterity is also the psychological process of beginning to think as the dominant subject would regard oneself as ‘other’, and enact this thought process in word and deed. I refused to admit to myself that I had started integrating some of the characteristics of being Indian into my Anglo-​Indianness. (2015, 31) The young generation with the transnational Anglo-​Indian identity saw themselves often as ‘the other’ because their transnational identity made them different from others with national identities. They begin to perceive themselves as not belonging to the mainstream and as standing out due to social disapproval. Walter’s father had kept him away from Indian cultural elements because the transnational is experienced as a threat to their homeland identity, which is English and French, respectively. They don’t want their children to be cornered by the ‘other’ identity, or they would lose the privilege and esteem of their elite identity. Political identity dissonance is evident in the life of Edouard Goubert who was born to a French father and a mother with a transnational Franco-​ Indian nationality in Pondicherry. Their elite background facilitated his education in French Indo-​China and France. Initially, he

The Transnational City of Pondicherry  55 supported the French and then shifted his support to the Indian National Congress after which he founded the French India Socialist Party (Surjit 2006, 248). Here, the identity dissonance is that we see Goubert identifying with his French cultural past but wanting to associate with India as his nation. He sees India as his place of opportunity and identity and thus his transnational identity recedes. This receding is an inevitable consequence of the decolonialization process, however what distinguished this process in Pondicherry is the familial and interpersonal ties with the colonial state. Sebastian Cortes’ Pondicherry: Through the Essays of Kapur, Jafir and Bruckner The essays in the collection have essentially interacted with the elite part of the union territory –​the White Town, that is the French Quarters, with their authors residing in elite spaces interacting with elite people. The authors themselves have a global identity, which formulates their worldly view of Pondicherry and makes them perceive it as city that is open and receptive to multicultural elements. Akash Kapur’s essay makes a very poignant statement to the character of Pondicherry as a city. He constitutes it as a city that was ‘far from the great drama of nation-​building … playing out in the rest of the country’. He makes a comparison of the rest of India and Pondicherry’s interaction with the West. He exhibits certain dislike for the Indian rejection of the West and characterizes it as ‘a suspicion of the West, bordered on xenophobia’. In contrast to this state of mind, the inhabitants of Pondicherry were ‘resolutely, yet naturally, unaffectedly multicultural’, he says. Here we see that Akash Kapur identified with the French colonial state more than the Indian nation. The essay also views the nation as encroaching over the view of the world, posing radical Indian nationalism as a threat to the transnational identity. After the French influence in Pondicherry began receding, he had to move out, away from his homeland and thus he formulates now a disoriented understanding of the present. In Cortes’s (2012) essay compilation, Kapur talks about the ‘Be Indian, Buy Indian’, as a government propaganda, as something not organic to Pondicherry. ‘All the commerce and prosperity are, inevitably, changing the town’s character … a lot of people worry that Pondicherry is being commodified turned into just another tourist center … (like an) ultimately unlivable Bali or Goa.’ Pondicherry has begun accumulating modernization with beach resorts, movie theaters and cemented sidewalks and Kapur’s comparison to two other tourist destinations also tugs at the desire to preserve culture and identity to almost depict possessiveness over a place.

56  Andrea Rodrigues Akash Kapur states that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram during the colonial rule housed the Japanese, Americans, French and English, while in the post-​colonial scenario, Auroville turned into this transnational space. In his book India Becoming (2012) he writes about the locals’ nostalgia for a slow-​paced life and the sense of belonging. It is evident that the typical Indian modernity in Pondicherry isn’t aiding the French culture. The malls are in stark contrast to the colonial culture. The past needs to get modernized or rather post-​modernized to be an integral part of the present. Some elements of one’s identity emerge from certain practices and habits of childhood and a historic knowledge of earlier generational practices. Patrick Colm Hogan, in Colonialism and Cultural Identity (2000), states that practical identity is how one does something culturally and automatically, while reflective identity is the opinion one has of themselves of their ‘constitution’ in relation. In the case of elite Indian identity crisis in the postcolonial situation, the childhood knowledge of the city, of how one must adhere to tradition, to a certain way of life remains invalid in the present. In the case of Akash Kapur, his childhood habits of ‘eating chayo and chicken noodle soup in the town’s many Vietnamese restaurants’, of visits to the beach and watching movies at the Ratna Talkies becomes integral to his identity formation. The Vietnamese culture in Pondicherry could have also influenced his openness to acceptance of new cultures, contributing to the formation of a global identity. Amin Jafir –​The Transnational Past as Heritage Amin Jafir’s essay is interesting because he has studied Indo-​French furniture and he associates the identity crisis he faces with this furniture. He says that he could never really identify with being Indian or European. He was neither and still both. His study on Indo-​European furniture bought him closer to his Indian ethnic roots and his books on this type of furniture has catered to an elite readership. He is someone who is elitist and pluri-​cultural in his overlook and thus he strived to bridge the gap between Europe and Asia. The space for his stay he recalls is the ‘Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-​Orient’, another French-​Indian elite space. His description of the Ananda Ranga Pillai house and his diary establishes a link to the past, and he portrays the transnational elements of the past is his essay as being historically elite and rich in pluri-​culturalism. He portrays this past as resourceful, as heritage; he looks at the interaction between the French and the Indian as conducive to the creation of this hybrid furniture. He uses French vocabulary occasionally in his essay; the ‘hotel particulier’, the ‘Compaignie des Indes’ the ‘ecole Francaise’ that serve to validate his stance as an essayist in the book.

The Transnational City of Pondicherry  57 Amir Jaffir has a transnational identity and it is this identity that formulates the transnational gaze that brings out a perspective that is inclined toward the meeting of two cultures. This notion formulates through an identity of privilege where one’s basic needs are met and thus they can look outside one’s physical environment. The transnational gaze is closely associated with the elite. In the Indian Foreign Review (1982), it is expressed that it wasn’t uncommon to spot the Indian elite in Pondicherry, who was an industrialist and owned two cars to be riding a cycle around the streets. It is the elite that has access and can afford the multicultural experience, the ease of life substantiated with the monetary resource collected in a lifetime. Amir Jafir, in the essay, says that he ‘fell into an idyllic existence for which I (he) still yearn(s)’. The city had garnered an interest in Amin Jafir because the city itself was a representation of the transnational identity, the French and the Indian, where his ‘raw’ nerves that pulsated before entering the city were soothed, he felt like he had passed ‘into a dream’. This state of being is essentially the crux of transnational spaces like Auroville and Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The reason why many elites find home in Pondicherry is because the city is made up of the elitism of the French society and the rich cultural identity dynamics of the Indian society. The rich color of Indian life and tradition has been molded into French forms, and thus it turns not only transnational, but opens up the possibility for creating a global identity, much like the possibility present for the Indian merchants that received the French in the eighteenth century. It is for this reason that the French Indian heritage of Pondicherry should be preserved or else it will cease to function as a global city. Pascal Bruckner –​Paradox of the Past in the Present Pascal Bruckner’s essay talks about the French elite identity crisis in Pondicherry. The essay begins with an absolute detest for the post-​ independence situation where the French elite in Pondicherry are trying to grasp the seams of the French culture that is slowly running threadbare. His gaze is shaped by the idea that the French colonial rule was conducive for Pondicherry to progress as a city. In the essay, Monsieur Magry wears a lungi and has an Indian mistress of 18 years of age. Bruckner is critical of his behavior because he still practices French customs that are outdated in Pondicherry. The Consul General, another French elite in the essay, is given the notion of ‘feeling lost in a large rundown mansion with patchy walls’. The inability of the French to keep their cultural roots in the post-​ colonial situation is the prime reason for their distorted sense of identity, where they observe the past as being present and their traditions as still holding relevance.

58  Andrea Rodrigues His essay is filled with paradoxes where on one hand he is emphasizing the washed-​out gray of Pondicherry as though it was approaching its doom and on the other hand, emphasizes the transnational state of Pondicherry, as a place ‘wafting between two continents, Europe and Asia’. The interiors of the house, he describes as ‘both empty and overloaded at the same time’. At one point, he seems to despise the city, with its ‘impalpable melancholy’, as a ‘sealed-​off town’, but he thinks of it as ‘home’, as ‘nothing important or grandiose’. This paradox is the anxiety to preserve the Pondicherry of the past as in his memory by finding glimpses of it in the present. Pascal Bruckner brings out the evident contrast in the city, the pale gray of the past as associated with the Ashram as a transnational space of the past contesting the newly painted walls of the revived heritage, again in contrast to the uniform of the soldiers who served in the army of the colonial French, which has also lost its color. He names this conflict as an ‘unresolved rivalry of colours’ as the past slowly un-​coloring, yet remaining present. Sebastian Cortes’ Pondicherry: Through a Critical Lens Sebastian Cortes has photographed both the sides of the canal, the French and Tamil Quarter. The text, Pondicherry, provides the Indian identity as a counter to the French identity and provides significations to reveal evidence of the receding French culture in Pondicherry. The French culture appears transfixed in time in certain elements like statues, architecture and people. These become significations to indicate the abyss of precariousness leading to identity crisis. The carved wooden pillars in Ananda Ranga Pillai’s mansion are of Tamil origin, while the terrace on the first floor along with the white masonry columns reflects the Gothic French design. While building the mansion in 1735, there was a lot of give and take forming its pluri-​cultural façade. It appears as if the wooden Tamilian foundation is holding the French architecture. However, Cortes’ pictures of the Ananda Ranga Pillai House have a perspective to it. He chooses to shoot both these floors separately. The picture with the French columns looks empty, gathering dust in the way that cement gathers, with its washed-​out white pillars and peeled-​off golden rims of the walls. The room looks empty as if not inhabited for centuries. On the other hand, the Tamil counterpart looks occupied with furniture as if it had held life and daily routine. By shooting them separately, Cortes presents them as being distinct, unaffected by the other and one can take account of the French room that is slowly withering. Kamm’s (1976) article also makes it very evident that the French culture was receding and slowly turning into a thing of the past. He brings the reader’s attention to a ‘a yellowing map of France’s railroad system’ and ‘creaking furniture.’

The Transnational City of Pondicherry  59 These elements, when compared to Cortes’ photographs paint a similar narrative of the city dwellers need to hold on to the past as a source of transnational identity. The image of the Chamber of Commerce is one of the most interesting of the collection because of the play of emptiness and structure. There’s a row of empty chairs on the ground running parallel to the portraits of French and Indian political elites. The empty chairs seem to be the present that is stolen by the individuals of the past, as if they exist in the present only to watch over the proceedings of the Chamber of Commerce. The names on their pictures are not focused on, as if their identity has slowly become irrelevant to the Pondicherry of the present. The picture of the Foyer du Soldat, a legion hall for veterans of the war, depicts the chairs of red white and blue arranged in the order of the French flag. The chairs lie empty as if the war was a distinct time in history, as though the people who once sat in those chairs have passed away. Picture 101 of Vysial Street is of a soldier with a faded uniform, which signifies the need to associate one’s social role of the past with the present scenario; it links the identity crisis faced by the merchant class with regards to their social role with the present condition of the veterans of war. Cortes’ photograph of Sri Aurobindo Society Guest House signifies how the doors to Aurobindho’s society were always open to ‘guests’ of different nationalities. The room looks well maintained as if it were progressing in time, along with the past. It doesn’t have the air of Indian modernity but of silence and timelessness with Sri Aurobindo at the center enclosed in a frame as if it were holding the energy in the room. This picture indicates an element of Pondicherry that has remained unchanged –​the belief in peace through multicultural harmony. After fleeing the British supervision, Sri Aurobindo had taken into hiding in a house on Chetty Street, which he states was the house of a prominent individual, Shankar Chetty (who could be linked to the elite Chetty merchants). The picture of Chetty Street depicts a woman in a blue saree who doesn’t look into the camera as to signify a sense of not belonging. The house depicts a toned-​down effect of elitism, which could imply the receding French elitist state of the Chettys. In the photograph, Academy House Maravadi Street, the spectator is placed into the house somehow trapped in the space with white arch windows surround him, bringing to effect the order and precision of French Architecture, its symmetry and absence of abstractness. There’s an appearance of it being dark inside the rim where the camera is kept, and the outside is lit with daylight. An unusually small lightbulb lies in the center of the window pane indicating the need to not put the light on even though it is dark inside. It seems to indicate the dark empty quarters of this French mansion, inhabited, but still standing the test of time.

60  Andrea Rodrigues The pictures of Vysial Street portray elite Tamil houses of merchants with flat ceilings called thinnai held up by wooden columns, a courtyard and a colonnaded roof called a mutram. A few bungalows on the street date back to 250 years. The mutram is visible in all three pictures; one house seems distinctly French, inhabited and gathering dust like the first floor of the Ananda Ranga Pillai house. The other two houses, which have the color palette of Tamilian architecture, an atmosphere of life that is slow paced, an old man lies suspended on a chair with the ease of knowing that his life has been spent. Picture 100 depicts two major components in Vysial Street, one where the French Flag lies bent on the car passively, while in contrast, local women are creating a kolam out of rice flour, an old tradition of the women of Pondicherry. It depicts again the activity of the Indian culture and the passiveness of the French. The photographs portraying French spaces in Cortes’ collection are often devoid of people, but the Tamilian spaces seem occupied with people. Pictures like the Masi Magam and pictures shot at Goubert Avenue and Goubert Market are populated with locals and carry the air of life. It is interesting to see how ‘Goubert’ is associated with the locals, since he was a French man who had fought for the independence of Pondicherry. Cortes’ use of significations such as these imply the cultural change in the nature of Pondicherry and stand as evidence to the receding transnational culture. The French as Pluri-​Cultural Negotiators The French Revolution that occurred in the late 1700s had molded the modus operandi of colonial France and it differentiated their ruling method from the British. The French maintained the division between church and state and saw to it that religion didn’t intervene in their governance. Unlike the British that governed their colonies in a decentralized manner, which led them to react to development opportunities quickly, the French made large decisions only on account of consent received by the center, which made the empire slow but nevertheless bureaucratic in comparison (De Leeuw 2015, 5). This slowness is what characterizes the atmosphere in Pondicherry and seems to be the answer to its steady essence. The interaction of the French with Aurobindo’s ideas and the Ashram had influenced its title as a cultural negotiator in the gaze of the elite. Stephen White distinguished Aurobindo as being a twentieth-​century Renaissance man, someone who was already transdiscursive in his approach toward philosophy, reconciling Western sciences with the Eastern metaphysics. He regarded him as someone who was ‘professionally committed to educating … where peaceful cooperation and planetary citizenship become dominate values’ and these begin to hold as much regard as nationalism

The Transnational City of Pondicherry  61 (White 2007, 115–​132). Here, identity is promoted as not to be linked to the nation but to something transnational edging toward the global. The French aided this kind of societal cooperation through its policies and this made the elite view them as being beneficial to Pondicherry. Auroville remains as a memoir of the successful transaction between the colonial and the colonized as it was an outcome of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Initially, as the Ashram came into being under colonial French, it increased its global validity, because rarely did colonial institutions promote spiritual development. Auroville also stemmed from a similar spiritual and cultural foundation. It is a transnational space because its structure itself was transnational in the first place as it was built with the assistance of a French architect named Roger who designed the hexagonal-​ cone-​shaped dome structure (Kapur 2018, 21–​23). Here, people of similar nationalities came together, in another national space to push Auroville beyond its physical boundaries, assailing it into the dimension of the transnation. When a space turns transnational, it not only moves beyond the boundaries of the nation that it originates in but turns itself into a space accessible to a variety of nations. Auroville became an Indian township with global value systems. With the French Revolution, attention was drawn on human rights and the local people in colonies did receive some very basic rights. There was some token representation in politics, limited freedom of speech and locals were allowed to enjoy better education and study in France. With these rights came awareness among the upper classes about what freedom and equality entailed (Raja and Keshari 2005, 105–​110). The schools set up by the British were private and non-​democratic; however, the French education policy was secular and education was open to all sectors of society. The fees for English and undergraduate studies were nominal. They also had scholarships to send abroad for underprivileged students that excelled in competitive examinations. Elites in Pondicherry also had scholastic privileges. The highest qualification in education in French was the Baccaulareate de l’Enseignement Secondaire open only to the elite educated youth (Rajendran 2008, 65–​76). There were also cross-​ cultural transactions like Indian teachers like Savarirayalu Nayakkar were teaching French governors and priests. The French also aided schools opened by missionaries. The Sisters of St. Josephine of Cluny opened a school in Pondicherry in 1827, which was open to both European and Indian children. Similarly, many more schools were opened by other French missionaries like Congregation of St. Louis de Gonzague who promoted girl education. The French Government provided regular subsidy to the girls who would pursue French learning. In this way, the French emerged as a cultural negotiator. Its negotiation was that it would provide assistance toward education of

62  Andrea Rodrigues the locals, provided they in return learn French and prove resourceful for the colonial state. Conclusion The transnational identity of the Indian elite merchants was a situation of inner conflict because on one hand, it was evident to them that India, their own homeland is being colonized by the French, while on the other hand, they were acquiring a newfound identity with the French. Ananda Ranga Pillai and other elite merchants that became the ideological state apparatus grew in status and rank, but they also faced higher identity dissonance because of their power in relation to the state. The identity of the merchants in comparison with the essayists brings out that there was no one-​worldliness in the transnational identity of the Indian elite merchants in the eighteenth century. The global identity arrives only in the post-​colonial situation where one is cognizant and accepting of other cultures. The merchant has no realization of this and it is mainly because their interaction with the French was profit-​centric and conducive to social mobility. In the case of local elites like Akash Kapur, their world view comes from the consciousness of the world beyond the boundaries of the nation, of transnationalism, of an understanding of global peace and global identity. The differential element in the situation of the elites in Pondicherry is that they had access to local institutions and multicultural spaces. For them, the transnational space becomes extremely liberating, while still being Indian in manner. The French were perceived by the Indian elites as pluri-​cultural negotiators, which aided the assimilation of the French identity with the Indian identity. Moreover, the French maintained the division between their religion and the state in Pondicherry to some extent, which made the administration process transparent and trustworthy. The analysis of Cortes’ photographs depicted the un-​ coloring of Pondicherry through the faint colors of the architecture, the faded uniforms of ex-​servicemen and the passivity of French individuals and objects. The pictures also retain the elitism of certain spaces in Pondicherry as being fixed in time. The essays in the book, on the other hand, look at the change of Pondicherry’s atmosphere as a metropolitan city, its receptiveness toward multiculturalism and the notion of a distorted view of the present that is further complicated by paradoxes. The elite identity crisis is a phenomenon of the post-​colonial city where the local elites who benefited greatly with the arrival of the colonizer have now lost their identity and find themselves as not belonging to their own country. They yearn for the colonial past and perceive it as a place of opportunity, elite culture, better standard of living and of quality social

The Transnational City of Pondicherry  63 interaction. They are caught in the abyss of identity crisis which is then projected onto the city’s cultural and artistic elements. References Colm Hogan, P. (2000). Colonialism and Cultural Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cortes, S. (2012). Pondicherry. New Delhi: Roli Books. De Leeuw, A. (2018). “Colonial Historic Geographic Heritage in Puducherry in Tourist Information.” Thesis. Utrecht, Netherlands: Department of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. Kamm, H. (1976). “Enclave in India, Once French, Genteelly Going to Seed.” New York Times. www.nyti​mes.com/​1976/​08/​03/​archi​ves/​encl​ave-​in-​india-​ once-​fre​nch-​gentee​lly-​going-​to-​seed.html Kapur, A. (2012). India Becoming. New York: Penguin Group. Kapur, A. (2018). Auroville: Dream and Reality: An Anthology of Writing. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House. Mukund, K. (2005). The View from Below: Indigenous Society, Temples, and the Early Colonial State in Tamilnadu, 1700–​1835. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Parker, W. (2015). “I am Anglo-​Indian –​A Story of Belonging and the Dilemma of Identity.” International Journal of Anglo-​Indian Studies 15 (2), 31–​39. www. intern​atio​nal-​jour​nal-​of-​anglo-​ind​ian studies.org/​index.php/​IJAIS/​article/​view/​ 51/​44 Penny, F. (1908). “The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 568–​574. www.jstor.org/​sta​ ble/​25210​610 Raja, P. and Keshari, R. N. (2005). Glimpses of Pondicherry. Pondicherry: VBX Publication. Rajendran, M. (2008). Education and Administration in French Pondicherry and Indian Puducherry. Chennai & Puducherry: Srihari Publications. Ramamurthi, K. S. (1982). Indian Foreign Review, Volume 20. New Delhi: Publications Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Surjit, M. (2006). Historical Dictionary of India. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Velmurugan, R. (1999). “The Upper Caste and The Lower Caste Christians in Pondicherry during the 18th Century A.D.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 60, 456–​459. White, S. R. (2007). “Aurobindo’s Thought and Holistic Global Education.” Journal of Thought 42(3–​4), 115–​132. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​jthou​ght.42.3-​4.115 Yang Costello, C. (2005). Professional Identity Crisis. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

5 Cartography of Goa Analysis of the Tangible Loci of Culture in the Sketches of Mario Miranda Amrita Biswas

This chapter studies the sketches of Mario de Miranda, which through the employment of comic lens, provide the opportunity to comprehend the disparate contours that configured the cultural landscape of Goa. This analysis focuses primarily on the different spatial registers that Miranda engaged with –​from ports to streets and clubs to bazaars. Configuration of the Bazaar Space The bazaars sketched by Miranda serve as a cue to understand the “seeming chaos, contradictions and dualities that coalesce in a landscape of incredible pluralism” (Mehrotra 2002, 95). The site is a concoction of varied smells and sounds, ranging from the pungent smell of the river fish to the aroma of the zaios flowers that adorn the buns of the local fisherwomen. By squeezing different elements that characterize the space of the bazaar into a limited space, Miranda conjures a sensory overload that induces an anesthesia of perceptions in the viewer. He keenly observes the bargaining customers, the garrulous fisherwomen, the flower-​selling hawkers and the moving vehicles –​all of which accrue vibrancy in his bazaar sketches, appealing to and eventually numbing the diverse perceptual regimes of the viewer. With multiple modes of life that converge into the same physical space, the bazaars become a mesh of sensory and physical contradictions. In the bazaar (Figure 5.1), Miranda suffuses the realm with optical markers that provide a sense of the cultural and political discourses of the time, like the poster of Teatr or the political campaigns that are pasted on pillars in the bazaar area. The bazaar is not populated by faceless crowd, rather Miranda invests into the gestures of each individual in the frame to build an impression of the bustling activities that mark the condensed economic micro-​space. Of crucial significance is also the intricate detail with which the costumes of the bazaar crowd have been sketched. From hippies to fashionable tourists with cameras in hand to people from different parts of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-7

Cartography of Goa  65

Figure 5.1 The Market by Mario de Miranda. Source: “Mario Gallery,” www.mar​iode​mira​nda.com.

India dressed in hats, dhotis, shirts or jackets –​the bazaar space becomes an all-​encompassing site, which, by the amalgamation “of different worlds into a singular but multifaceted entity” (2002, 96), serves as a microscopic rendition of Goa’s landscape. This conglomeration of disparate cultural tendencies into a single spatial coordinate is emblematic of the global cultural flows that have punctured Goa, besides providing an entry point to understand the resistances that have emerged in Goa due to the uneven development and biased resource allocation that the locals have been subjected to. Drawing upon the theorizations provided by Rahul Mehrotra, I read Goa as a “kinetic” space, that is “incomprehensible as a two-​dimensional entity, but perceivable as a (site) in motion –​a three-​dimensional construct of a fragmented ground reality” (97). The kinetic space is an organic unit that thrives not only on legal economic networks but also on quasi-​legal platforms and interfaces that derive their functionality from constant modification and reinvention, influencing the economic dynamics and social perceptions about the site. Miranda, by depicting people who are caught in the midst

66  Amrita Biswas of an incomplete action, imparts a sense of motion and urgency to his sketches of Goa’s bazaars. He thereby creates a physical space, the highly compact portrayal of which triggers the notion of kinetic vitality in the perceptions of the viewer. This dense compression of people, activities and myriad sensations into a finite site generates an “evocative and inspiring kaleidoscope of energy and physical expression”. This fosters the emergence of the bazaar as a “faceted organism” –​an entity where the interlinking of various activities propels the optimum achievement of economic efficiency (100). Miranda’s representation of the bazaar dwells on proximity, density and community –​notions that are central to comprehend the cultural landscape of Goa that celebrates heterogeneity in the form of carnivals and feasts of patron saints. The public space of the bazaar constructs a community that is founded upon the acceptance of cultural differences or upon embracing the uniqueness of the other. In other words, the bazaar, being an inclusive space that does not define rigid rules for accessing it, acts as a vortex, inducting people to experience otherness, which eventually propels the mutation of atomized individuals into holistic communities. The mobility of human figures, that bazaars or other public conglomerations, such as processions and carnivals, embody, comprises the spectacles of Goa. The spectacles can be located in the myriad attempts that Goa makes in establishing and celebrating communitarian impulses and sentiments, where identities adopt fluidity and synergize to facilitate the creation of pluralistic and interactive entities. But this overt compaction can also make the entity falter along its margins by inducing in it the susceptibility to destabilizing tendencies. This can be explained by the frequent protests that the state witnessed against the explosive onslaught of tourists that led to a diversion of Goa’s resources from the locals to the tourism-​oriented industries and service sectors. I do not merely analyze the physical fabric of the bazaar that is situated on a specific spatial plane but also read the entire region of Goa as a bazaar that is intersected by various networks along which state-​designated illegal and legal businesses function. The bazaar in Miranda’s work can be studied as an “interstitial” crevice that is pulsating with energy and working as the point of production of economic pursuits that sustain the populace (98). I use the term “interstitial” to throw light upon the fact that the bazaar, which is physically confined to a specific spot, is only a fractional element that can be read as a unitary aspect, kind of a superficial underside, to the formless and nebulous all-​encompassing bazaar that the entire state has mutated into. This amorphous bazaar is characterized by trade maneuvers and economic transactions that render the boundaries between legality and illegality indistinct. This is because the individuals involved in the illegal economies navigate intermittently between the legalized and the underground domains of financial negotiations. This bazaar imagery

Cartography of Goa  67 of Goa suggests that the underbelly of “irregular economies” (Ruggiero and South 1997, 62) has overpowered the surface to such an organic extent that it has become practically impossible to clearly demarcate the contours of informal economies, thus likening it to a potent force that has overwhelmed the entire state to emerge as the significant locus of economic production. The bazaar can be distinguished from the market by virtue of the informality, the multiplicity and the fluid dynamicity that characterize it. This makes it essential for the agents in the bazaar to negotiate between interconnected structures of economic linkages, to navigate within the formless realm. Theorizing the space of the bazaar, Vincenzo Ruggiero and Nigel South argue: The suggestive value of the idea of the bazaar is that it alludes to a variety of individuals interacting in a market where commodities and services are bought and sold irrespective of their being legal or illegal. The notion of the bazaar … entails the co-​existence of legality and illegality and the permanent shifting of boundaries between the two. (Ruggiero and South 1997, 63) State–​Corporate Nexus and Goa’s Tourism Industry The proliferation of illegal transactions that have subsumed the economic terrain of Goa is discursively attributed by the locals to the ever-​increasing tourist footfall in the state. Such contestations point to the fact that the region is entangled in a “web of internal complexity with many worlds, with disparate aspiration compressed together in a finite space” (Mehrotra 2002, 103). The state authorities have failed to engineer an efficient shock absorption technique against the massive induction of tourists. This can be illustrated by an article in Gomantak Times (dated 7 November 1996) that documented the grievances of the residents of Candolim and Calangute. The locals suggested that besides facing electricity shortage, they were also subjected to water crisis since the pipelines, which were originally meant for them, were being usurped by the hotel magnates who formed an alliance with the local politicians to receive undue advantages in accessing various amenities. Along similar lines, an article in Herald (dated 18 July 1997) recounted how Calangute had transformed into a “hell-​hole” for locals because of uneven development and rapid urbanization that had transformed the region from a tranquil beach to a cauldron of dense economic operations meant to serve the ever-​increasing swarm of tourists (qtd. in Noronha 1997, 3253). Herald, a mainstream daily, had often reflected upon the ambiguous attitude that the authorities had manifested toward tourists because they could ignore neither the growing benefits that tourism engendered nor the inconveniences that it generated.

68  Amrita Biswas Analyzing Goa’s model of intensive tourism development, Paul Routledge argues: Development of tourism, with increasing emphasis on the demand-​ centered model of international tourism, particularly luxury tourism, is an important component of India’s new economic policy. Besides contributing substantially to foreign exchange earnings, the government expects tourism to provide employment benefits which, through the multiplier effect, can generate myriad other industries, and enable percolation of economic benefits to less developed areas… .Yet, such intensive tourist development necessitates marginalization of the needs of the local population. Not only do the host communities lose control over their land and sea, which get increasingly exploited for tourist consumption, their share in the profits derived from tourist trade is minimal… In short, construction of tourist sites such as Goa is predicated upon a development ideology that defines local people’s space as dispensable to the needs of national and transnational capital. (2000, 2647) Within such circumstances, where global capital flows propelled the massive explosion of tourism, the state administration failed to cushion the repercussions that tourism was triggering in Goa’s natural ecosystem and cultural ecology. With skyrocketing land prices, evictions of locals by muscle men employed by realtors, diversion of basic resources, rise in crimes and erosion of the local cultural insignias by rapid commercialization, the local residents of Goa were relegated to indifference. They were pacified with false promises while the state–​corporate nexus leeched onto and drained the land of its resources, be that socio-​cultural or ecological. Despite making conscious attempts at distancing himself from political debates and concerns, Miranda’s sketches, nonetheless, grounded as they are in the social milieu, offer a glimpse into the dual attitude that the authorities developed toward tourists. Miranda was a social observer who keenly registered everything that was happening in the vicinity and this is evident in the sketch titled Ferry across the Zuari (Figure 5.2) where a person can be seen reading the newspaper, which clearly reads “Goa for Goans says MP” as the title of the anchor. This situates the sketch into a specific spatio-​temporal dimension, registering the socio-​political debates that Goa was grappling with in the last few decades of the twentieth century. This sketch illustrates how Miranda’s work cannot be solely confined within the boundaries of social trivia. With distinct socio-​political commentary, Miranda, even in his most detached, humorous and observant self, does anchor the burning debates of Goa within a definite temporal matrix.

Cartography of Goa  69

Figure 5.2 Ferry across the Zuari by Mario de Miranda. Courtesy Mario Gallery www.mar​iode​mira​nda.com. Source: Five classic drawings by Mario Miranda (scroll.in).

Miranda’s sketches, depicting the arrival of tourists at the port, offer a significant cue to comprehend the grievances that were germinating among the locals toward the ‘others’, the outsider tourists. I refer to the sketch titled Welcome to Goa (Figure 5.3) to elaborate upon this. The sketch attains a comic dimension by depicting hustling crowds that are rallying against each other and hurriedly pushing through to make way for themselves. It portrays people, with varied mannerisms, dressed in miscellaneous costumes and accessories while engaging in different activities. For example, there is a boy hanging down the ladder, a man almost dwarfed by his enormous luggage, a hat-​ donned person calmly taking photos, a person grumpily looking at the crowd, a ‘gentleman’ dressed finely strolling lightly with a cigar and a ship crewmember announcing over the loudspeaker, among others. Miranda has imbued each person with intricate details, lending a unique character dimension to them and not clubbing them together as the anonymous faceless crowd. He deliberately

70  Amrita Biswas

Figure 5.3 Welcome to Goa by Mario de Miranda. Source: “Mario Gallery,” www.mar​iode​mira​nda.com.

portrays the tourists as a massive and compact yet individuated unit, a technique that gives an impression of the swarming crowd that is almost spilling over the limited space of the ship. While relaying this sense of the exploding tourists that have just been ‘welcomed’ to Goa, Miranda carefully plants, into the composition of the frame, most of the significant attractions that pull the enormous crowd to Goa such as the beer bar signboards in the foreground or the palm beaches in the background. To look at this image as just a caricature that adopts a comical lens to look at the idiosyncrasies of the brimming tourists will sideline its significance as a potent cultural marker. The sketch foregrounds the local resistance to tourism that had organized itself in the form of protests, highway blockades and other events of disruptions that had scarred the physical fabric of the region. By compressing huge crowds (where people are almost toppling over each other) into a very limited space, Miranda creates a visual noise where every inch of the frame is jam-​packed with tourists. This visual noise is instrumental in building up a strenuous tension that, while signaling toward the possibility of an imminent stampede, provides a suitable vantage point to read the disputes that erupted

Cartography of Goa  71 in Goa to reclaim the physical spaces from the ever-​increasing band of tourists that kept thriving in Goa. Packaging Experiences: Selling an ‘Authentic’ Goa Tourism as an industry is premised on the selling of “experiences” (Kaushik qtd. in Routledge 2000, 2650). It feeds on the desires of people to attain a way of life and a fragment of nature that can be extracted from the environment and packaged into products such as lifestyles, experiences or cultural ecologies that exhaust the substrate, rendering it as a commoditized object of mass consumption that has to be seized from the residents. An example of this constitutes the concept of privatized beaches that are predicated on the notion of isolating an area, which should be accessible to commons, and barricading it to provide quality leisure to the tourists. Such organized luxury tourist packages derive their value from creating ‘myths’ about tropical exotic landscapes, eventually consuming the ecological equilibrium of the area (Menezes and Lobo qtd. in Routledge 2000, 2650). The establishment of Goa as a tourist destination has been achieved through the convergence of economic and cultural frameworks that represent the state, its people and environment in specific ways to allure tourists. These interlinked frames of reference conjure images of Goa that cannot be gauged against some original and authentic Goa culture that has been distorted through the tourist’s interpretation of the site. Rather, Goa forms the central node amidst intersecting global and local networks that prevent its reduction to a one-​dimensional and static arena. This is in consonance with Miranda’s representation of Goa –​a site that has been endowed with divergent significations so intense that it becomes redundant to categorically dissect and distinguish between fabricated myths and material realities –​notions that are mutually constitutive in a multi-​faceted and pulsating area. His illustrations are populated by tourists who can be traced to New York, Paris or Bombay. Hippies with headgears and fancy beads, Bomboicars with huge suitcases atop their heads, people with guitars, cigars, sunglasses or beer glasses in hand –​ Miranda ascribes animation to human forms that are otherwise stacked against each other like cardboards. This multi-​ culturalism constitutes the essence of Goa –​a land that cannot be restrained to attune itself to the colonialist ‘Golden Goa’ image that has been efficiently usurped and restructured by the state–​corporate alliance to market Goa as a tourist haven. To refer to this dimension of packaging that institutions take recourse to, Routledge notes that: Historically, official Goan culture has tended to be represented as that of the Catholic upper-​class elites, being symbolized by the state’s

72  Amrita Biswas Portuguese architecture … and leisured lifestyle of the elites. It is these symbols which the tourism industry uses to market Goa, and in so doing, reinforce a nostalgia for colonial times. (2000, 2651) To validate his argument, Routledge offers a comprehensive list of tourist brochures that deliberately harped on the colonial past of Goa to invoke an image that makes the site markedly different from the rest of India. For instance, a 1996 Cosmos tourist brochure referred to Goa as having been “carved out of the Indian sub-​continent by the Portuguese” (qtd. in Routledge 2000, 2651). In a similar vein, a tourist guide supplement of The Week (dated 27 March 1994) quoted the chairman of the Leela group of hotels who positioned Goa as “a small replica of Europe’s Latin culture on the Arabian coast” (qtd. in Routledge 2000, 2651). Besides, there have also been attempts at marketing the sossegado way of life that is characterized by an easy-​going, unhurried and indolent attitude that makes Goa an ideal spot for lazy vacations. This can be corroborated by referring to statements made by the Taj Group of hotels, which emphasized that tourists could indulge in the best pastime for people of Goa –​which was to “magnificently” do nothing (qtd. in Routledge 2000, 2651). This projection of the languid lifestyle of Goa demonstrates how capitalist flows indulge in myth-​making exercises to construct neatly packaged images of a landscape that appeal to the tourist’s sensibilities. Therefore, ironically, luxury hotels, which are built by demolishing sections of the local villages, often resort to recreating idealized rural settings for tourists to give them a taste of the authentic Goa lifestyle. An instance of this would be the manner in which Resort Paraiso de Praia (owned by Asiatic Holiday resorts in Calangute) decided on ‘Goan village scene’ as the theme for the 1998 season. They decided to set-​up 20 huts to offer the experience of being in a Goa village, which would include live demonstrations of fishermen, potters and folk dancers as well as statues of weavers, cobblers and farmers of Goa. The motive was to concoct a microscopic rendition of the authentic Goa life. This constant feeding on to the notion of local authenticity is problematic, especially in a context that punctures local lifestyles to serve as a nodal juncture in global economic and cultural flows. Analyzing these practices that dissect aspects of culture and reorganize fragmented realities into a schismatic whole, Routledge notes: Such portrayals take the notion of ‘staged authenticity’ to its farcical conclusion. Goan village life, been removed to make way for resorts such as the Paraiso de Praia ironically vies for ascendency with petrified culture: an ossified image of Goa appropriately set in stone. (2000, 2651)

Cartography of Goa  73 Mapping the various strategies that have been historically employed by hotel magnates in Goa to sell it as a tourist destination reveals the investments into retracing the experience of Goa to the exotic rural. Crucial interplays occur between the various corporate strategies that eventually reinforce a distinct image of Goa. This image is premised not only on representing the land as the cultural “other”, a “pleasure periphery” thriving on the commoditization of basic experiences but also on recreating the “hippy mystique” (2652). Although the hippies had proliferated in Goa during the 1960s and 1970s, the sub-​cultural conglomerate persists in cultural memory of the landscape because of the contemporary attempts at reinvoking the hippy experience. This is done by the appropriation of their clothing and lifestyle pattern and by the frequent organization of parties that are designed to evoke the experiences of the subculture. The hippy experience has thus been streamlined and crystallized to form a cultural signifier that can be advertised as an experience intrinsic to Goa. Goa, which has become synonymous with the beach in travel narratives and advertisements, is thus being redesigned by corporate brandings to constitute a neo-​hippy experience: one that sustains itself by capitalizing upon fragments from the past. This ritualized indulgence in reconstructions of the past embeds Goa into a temporal vortex that delineates the cultural thresholds of the region, selling both the notion of difference and familiarity to an ever-​expanding tourism industry. The explosive onslaught of tourists, who seem to spill over the frame in the sketches of Miranda’s Goa, point to the exploitative nature of tourism that has historically mushroomed in the area, affecting the local cultural and natural ecology and upsetting notions of equitable tourism development. As a consequence, localized attempts at resistance emerged that attuned their activities to similar global initiatives that employed local, national and international media creatively to address their concerns and to promote awareness for the development of a sustainable tourism model. These organized resistances deliberately positioned themselves against the state–​corporate alliance, to oppose the exploitation of natural resources that had been propelled by the juggernaut of service industry, thriving upon the creation and recycling of myths. The representation of Goa’s cultural economy not only witnessed manipulation by the tourism industry but also bore the historical baggage of colonial distortion since the colonial past of the state witnessed an all-​encompassing Portuguese perspective in official or artistic representations of the area. Mapping Goa’s Cultural Loci Miranda’s sketches provide a critical template, enabling an expansive view of the cultural ethos of the area. Miranda is not the distant observer, rather

74  Amrita Biswas he blends with the crowd that he creates and this is best exemplified by the manner in which he physically positions himself amidst the crowd and the hustle in Goa’s buses or cafes that he sketches. Miranda, therefore, depicts a space that has a history of colonial past and that has been frequently represented from the perspective of the other, with a familiarity and sense of belonging that lends much to the need for representing Goa in a vein that differs from the point of view of the colonizer. His sketches do not just evoke the erotic or exotic aspect of Goa but depict Goa in all its regular and mundane charms. Thus, we have representations of Goa’s Konkani theaters, the Kunbi and Hindu weddings, the tango sessions at the local clubs, the local taverns, the village feasts, the massive carnivals and the Mando dances at wedding receptions –​a wide and unrestrained range of cultural loci, pursuits and activities that converge to offer a glimpse of the cultural dimension of Goa. The significance of theaters has been deftly established by Miranda by intricately planting the theater posters in public spaces such as bazaars (Figure 5.1). In one of his illustrations, theater actors can be seen being cheered upon by a massive crowd that helps understand the popularity that the art form enjoyed. Tiatr, a performative art form, can be described as an amalgamation of different elements such as songs, music, parody, drama, comedy and narrative improvisation that was often accompanied by a band of instrumental players. The plays frequently depicted a strong sense of pride for Goanese identity and employed the Konkani language not just as a medium of communication but also as a tool to counter the dominant institutions of authority (post 1961). Although treated with scorn and ridicule by a section of the influential elite communities of Goa, Tiatr had been commercially successful because it incorporated a shared notion of cultural signifiers that appealed to people. Pramod Kale, writing on elements of Goa’s popular culture, takes up the Konkani theater as a case study and notes that: Among the numerous cultural performances of Goa partaking of both indigenous and European transplanted traditions the most popular and vibrantly alive is the Konkani language Tiatr. It is a form which is rooted in the working class and lower middle class Goan Catholic population living in Goa or outside, expressing their trials and tribulations, hopes and aspirations. (Kale 1986, 2054) Goa has experienced phases of direct confrontation between indigenous and European cultures and the Tiatr embodies these negotiations that resulted in processes of cultural assimilation and adaptation, leading to the germination of a multi-​faceted organic entity that cannot be constricted into a one-​dimensional flat image. Another performative tradition that

Cartography of Goa  75 Miranda elaborately sketches is the Mando that developed during the nineteenth century and was usually performed at wedding receptions or Tornaboda of rural elites and landed gentry in a bid to express the pre-​ occupations of the upper crust of the Goanese society. The traditional love songs or Mando were accompanied by slow and rhythmic cha–​cha and tango dances after raising a toast to the married couple. Donning Pano baju (a traditional costume of Goa), the woman in Miranda’s world adopts shy and coy expressions while dancing slowly to beats with a fan in hand and is accompanied by a man waving his handkerchief. The nostalgic love songs, performed in aristocratic halls to commemorate various social occasions, evoked an idealized Goanese rural life as imagined by the elite landed communities. This is where Mando differed from the Konkani Tiatr that had proliferated among the working-​class sections of the society, although a variant of Tiatr had emerged that catered to the tastes of the urban-​centered bourgeois (1986, 2058–​2061). Despite numerous forms of cultural appropriation, Tiatrs formed a significant constituent of the village feasts and festivals that were organized in the honor of the patron saints of the different village communities. The carnivals or the Easter celebrations offered opportunities for the natives to indulge in Kunbi/​ cunnbi dances that held a ritualistic significance for the community, being performed in open spaces as opposed to the restricted hall in which Mando was performed. Analyzing the significance of Goanese songs and music, Alfred F. Braganza argues that even though Mando had its roots in folk culture, it underwent processes of “stylization” and “sophistication” to eventually transform into more of a classical culture than folk culture, being accompanied not by Ghummotts but by violins and piano (Braganza 1983, 160). Miranda’s sketch on Kunbi wedding (Figure 5.4) presents women, clothed in short-​sleeved Cholis and checked Cappods with a folded palou across their shoulders that falls onto the bangles. Squatting under the shade of the tress adjacent to the mud houses can be seen men, clothed in Cashttis, playing on their Gummott and Madiim and contributing to the aural vibrancy of the moment that matches in spirit with the physical vivacity of the Kunbi dance. The Kunbi geet, “with the syncopated rhythm of the tabla and the drum and the clang of the cymbal” (Braganza 1983, 162), is a captivating variant of Goanese folk song that is performed by the laborers joyously and often takes the form of a duet. Miranda’s all-​ embracing and curious lens is not confined to folk traditions solely as he turns his ironic vision to caricature the social rituals of the elites at the local bars or the clubs. He depicts the mannerisms and gestures of men and women performing the tango together, while they are cautiously watched over by guardians. The high-​society weddings, too, are rendered stifling in Miranda’s sardonic vision. Beyond the superficial

76  Amrita Biswas

Figure 5.4 Kunbi Wedding II by Mario de Miranda. Source: Mario’s Goa.

aristocracy and festivity exists a sense of chaos where people nudge each other and pour Cliquot slyly over women in the clamped and crowded room. The notion of festivity also manifests itself in Miranda’s sketches of the church feasts where communities come together for sermons, processions, music, fair and fireworks. He shows the decorated church and village streets that exude a notion of communitarian bonhomie. He depicts people who have congregated to partake in the holy ceremony that is followed by joyous celebrations where senses indulge the taste of the Feni and the aroma of incense sticks. The congenial atmosphere is evoked by the amalgamation of diverse activities and conversations in a space that reeks of gaiety and harmony with children buying balloons and sweetmeats while priests and locals engage in friendly greetings and cordial exchanges. The celebrations in the village feasts and processions were augmented by bands of musicians and cheerful onlookers. In a similar vein, the carnival emerged to be a gala festive event in Miranda’s world radiating amiability and unifying disparate cultural threads into an organic and holistic mega-​event, which attracted locals and tourists alike.

Cartography of Goa  77 Miranda’s sketches on Goa’s carnivals recreate the sensory regime of the event by incorporating colorful masks, violin players, musicians, dancers, tourists, curious onlookers, flower-​sellers and performers into the compact frame. The sketches accrue kinetic dynamism by the juxtaposition of contradictory elements that have been squeezed into the frame. They open themselves up to a plethora of sensations where the tactile, the auditory, the visual, the oral and the olfactory attain a saturated harmony. Miranda, thus, displays an engagement with Goa’s cultural signifiers that goes beyond the binaries of the erotic or the exotic to offer a critical insight into urban and rural lifestyle. He dismantles the superficial aristocracy in the former and depicts the mundane and regular concerns of the latter. Miranda’s rural scenes stand at odds with the ones invoked by Paraiso de Praia because Miranda does not fossilize idealized rural fantasies onto lifeless and inanimate figurines. Rather, he displays a sense of familiarity as he keenly documents the local bar of the village or the villagers going about their daily tasks such as pottery and fishing. Miranda’s world is an organic microcosm of Goa where rubbles of a romanticized rustic life are not calcified to nourish the mythical dimensions of the landscape. Instead, the cadences of the humdrum affairs of daily life form the pivotal axis along which the cultural economy of the space can be experienced and understood. Goa as a Synergistic Cultural Interface The multiculturalism of Goa manifests itself in the series of sketches that have been grouped together under the category, ‘Sailing to Goa’ in the book Miranda’s Goa. Miranda portrays people with diverse cultural backgrounds and has an eye for detail for Goa’s hippies. He does not adopt an atomistic view of the hippies, disbanding them as a sub-​cultural ethos that is at odds with the Goanese cultural space but depicts them as a coherent and meaningful holistic entity. Moving against the normative discourse, which “presents subcultures as lawless forms”, Miranda’s sketches help to reflect upon the orderliness of the “internal structure” that hippies exemplified (Hebdige 1979, 113). Starting off as an oppositional stance, the hippies eventually underwent a process of diffusion that resulted in an integration with the mainstream cultural realm of Goa, a phenomenon that can be explained by the nostalgic replaying of the hippy culture manifested by appropriation of their costume, accessories and music. The hippies, dressed in and accessorized by chaotic ensembles that they adopted, generated “noise in the calmly orchestrated crisis of everyday life” in the 1960s and 1970s by visually asserting themselves as a deviance from the conventional surrounding culture. Their cultural signifiers –​such as “dress, appearance, language, ritual occasions, styles of interaction,

78  Amrita Biswas music” –​echoed their pivotal attitude to life and were categorized as marginal that was often considered to be puncturing the mainstream culture (1979, 114). This othering of the hippies mutated into an inter-​constitutive dynamic association between the conventionally created categories of mainstream and peripheral cultures where cultural ruptures formed the definitive core of a kinetic cultural arena, expressing unity through the notion of difference. Thus, the experiences of breaks, discontinuities, mergers, extrapolations and cultural re-​appropriations form nodal points along the amorphous trajectory that the hippy culture witnessed in Goa. It is also imperative, in the context of Miranda’s sketches, to question the validity of the term subculture that sets off categories of dominant and marginal cultural tendencies in a kinetic realm, the essence of which lies in the negotiations or interactions between and the co-​existence of diverse cultural facets. Miranda’s illustrations of the hippies reflect the porous boundaries of the community that facilitated later generations to indulge in performing the hippie culture by incorporating their stylized ensembles. The compositions demonstrate that moving beyond the categories of dominant and marginal, it is crucial to think of diverse cultural threads as competing, interactive and dependent, rather than mutually exclusive. This explains that even though the hippies “developed as a relatively isolated and sectarian response” to cultural structures and underwent “numerous fads and stages, explosions of popularity” and periods of decline, their influence has been significant on the music, art and fashion of Goa’s cultural ecosystem (Clarke 1974, 440). From the hippies to the Kunbis, the Mando to the Tiatr, the tourists to the locals, the bazaars to the ports, Miranda charts an extensive cartography of the multicultural essence of Goa that dismantles the binaries of the erotic and the exotic, conjured by the state–​corporate nexus. This constructs an organic and heterogeneous cultural fabric of the space that is anchored into the schismatic kinetic dynamism of Goa. Positing the artworks of Miranda as crucial lens to interpret the cultural ethos of Goa, this chapter therefore analyzes the indigenous as well as global influences that have acted as catalytic forces in constructing Goa as a synergistic cultural interface. References Angle, Prabhakar. (1994). Goa: Concepts and Misconcepts. Bombay: Dahanukar. Anon. (2006). “People’s Protests.” Economic and Political Weekly 41.51, 5205. Beattie, Martin. (2008). “Hybrid Bazaar Space: Colonialization, Globalization, and Traditional Space in Barabazaar, Calcutta, India.” Journal of Architectural Education 61.3, 45–​55. Braganza, Alfred F. (1983). “Goan Songs And Music.” Journal of South Asian Literature 18.1, 159–​164.

Cartography of Goa  79 Clarke, Michael. (1974) “On the concept of ‘Sub-​Culture’.” The British Journal of Sociology 25.4, 428–​441. Cunha, Gerard da. (2010). Mario’s Goa. Goa: Architecture Autonomous and Gerard da Cunha. Fernandes, Wilson. (1983) “Hippies in Goa.” Journal of South Asian Literature 18.1, 253. Hebdige, Dick. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Kale, Pramod. (1986). “Essentialist and Epochalist Elements in Goan Popular Culture: A Case Study of “Tiatr”.” Economic and Political Weekly 21.47, 2054–​2063. Mehrotra, Rahul. (2002). “Bazaar City: A Metaphor for South Asian Urbanism.” Kapital & Karma: Recent Positions in Indian Art. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 95–​108. Noronha, Frederick. (1997) “Goa: Fighting the Bane of Tourism.” Economic and Political Weekly 32.51, 3253–​3256. —​—​—​. (2005). “Twisting the Tale: Goa’s Anti-​Colonial Stir Retold.” Economic and Political Weekly 40.11, 1017–​1018. Rodrigues, Manuel C. (1983) “Dances of Goa.” Journal of South Asian Literature 18.1, 165–​167. Routledge, Paul. (2000). “Consuming Goa: Tourist Site as Dispensable Space.” Economic and Political Weekly 35.30, 2647–​2656. Ruggiero, Vincenzo and Nigel South. (1997) “The Late-​ Modern City as a Bazaar: Drug Markets, Illegal Enterprise and the ‘Barricades’.” The British Journal of Sociology 48.1, 54–​70. Tomlin, Liz. (1999). “Transgressing Boundaries: Postmodern Performance and the Tourist Trap.” TDR 43.2, 136–​149.

Part II

Nation, Cultural Histories, Trans-​Nation The Cinematic Imagi-​Nation

6 That Which Flows Moinak Biswas

1 I would like to revisit two films, and the novels they have adapted, to make some observations. I believe this line of inquiry can be extended to a larger body of cinematic and literary works. I have in mind novels in my own language, Bengali, which build their world around rivers. I will focus here on Padma nadir majhi (‘Boatman of Padma’, Manik Bandyopadhyay, 1936) and Titas ekti nadir nam (‘A River Named Titas’, Advaita Mallabarman, 1951, 56) because they are remarkable examples of the genre, and also because they have passed memorably into films: in Jago hua savera (‘Day Shall Dawn’, A. J. Kardar, 1959) and Titas ekti nadir nam (‘A River Named Titas’, Ritwik Ghatak, 1973).1 I was wondering if we can think about these novels and films in terms not confined to those of adaptation, not, for example, by asking what happens to an element as it passes from one medium to another. The Pakistani film Jago hua savera takes obvious liberties with the novel. The poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz virtually rewrote the story. Ritwik Ghatak’s Titas, on the other hand, stays very close to its source (even though it does away with the boy Ananta’s education and his journey to the city). But we are not concerned with that aspect of transaction in this chapter. There are other connections to remember. The writers Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–​ 1956) and Advaita Mallabarman (1914–​ 1951) were contemporaries, and they shared the formative experience of the 1930s and 1940s, when a new, post-​Rabindranath modernism was taking hold in literature, and leftist progressive culture produced its first major practitioners and institutions. Manik and Faiz, and indeed many members of the team on Jago hua (for instance, Tripti Mitra, the actor, Altaf Mahmud, the singer) were involved in the Progressive Writers’ movement and the Indian People’s Theatre Association in the 1940s. So was Ritwik Ghatak. Manik Bandyopadhyay and Ghatak shared profound affinities in DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-9

84  Moinak Biswas both life and art. But I would like to remark on something more basic that brings all these works together and consider the question of enunciation. One could begin with water. Padma and Titas are ‘wet’ novels (not all river novels have that quality). They begin with monsoon. Everything is soaked to the core. The fishermen, the community at the centre of the two novels, live too close to the river without the safety of distance that the respectable castes enjoy in the village. The river is both a moving shelter –​these people spend days on end on it –​and a horizon of annihilation where lives are often erased without mercy. The rains render indistinct the thin border that separates the river from the courtyard, or the sky from the interior of their mud houses. Manik, true to his temperament, does not make the grand, formidable river Padma too intimate. Mallabarman, who grew up as a Malo, a member of the fishing community of his novel, draws a distinction between Padma and Meghna on one hand and the more affective Titas on the other. But their very proximity to and identification with the river means that the people in both the novels are vulnerable in more than one sense. Mallabarman writes: Who are they? They are the Malo boys. They are the Malo girls. Not those whose houses have bordering walls, pond in front, well on the side, courtyards leading to the road. The roads lead to the town, sometimes with a lane branching off into the village on the side. Horse carriages run along that road. (2017, 16; my translation) The nourishing water can also take away the precious little they possess. At the outset, Padma nadir majhi and Titas ekti nadir nam give us pictures of the cycle of life that draws from the river at every stage from birth to death. But it is also water that in inclement times creeps up along the feet, drops into the bed, floods the kitchen. If one thinks of immersion, one must remember it is not only the enveloping presence of water, what Mallabarman calls a mother-​like embrace, but also the possibility of dissolution of the flesh into pure matter that is at stake. I borrow this metaphor from the novels themselves. The fishermen stand between the land meant for the peasants, and the river. This land and water contrast gives rise to the drama that captures historical movement in the novels. The river destroys the village not only by flooding, but also by withdrawing, changing course, creating the sandbar, the ‘char’. A whole civilization can be wiped out in such an event. The river, we are told by the novels, as a flowing principle overrides the distinction between habitats and pathways, and borders between countries

That Which Flows  85 and territories. It would be interesting to see what this means in terms of enunciation. One can sense that Manik and Mallabarman have both attempted a speech, a mode of telling, that proceeds from internalizing the great flow of the river. The flow is not only used as a metaphor, as a matrix of possibilities of life, but the very unfolding of narrative threads around multiple lives bespeaks an assimilated movement. I think this principle constitutes a major affinity between these two works. This is not a statement on the merit of representation, neither on the similarities between the novels and the films. I am trying to point out a shared sense of flow and liquidity. Before we go further into the question of enunciation, let us remember how the novels turn the flow into destiny at the point where borders are breached –​borders between regions and countries. Hossain Mian is the messenger of doom in Padma nadir majhi. But he is also the engine of change. He lends money to the poor fishermen, lends them implements, helps them rebuild their huts when they are razed by the merciless seasons. But he also traps them. He takes them away to a faraway island where he is building up a colony, a fierce and hostile terrain where he turns these hapless people into primitive cultivators. He is innovator, criminal, sailor, smuggler, poet and visionary.2 Kuber, one of the central characters, joins his trips as a boat-​hand to the estuary of Padma, going to Chandpur and beyond. As he discovers the mysterious traffic in contraband goods and people in which Hossain Mian is involved, he finds himself in a region that is no longer familiar to the fishermen. He does not recognize the waters; their dimension and nature are beyond his comprehension. So are the map, the compass and telescopic device that Hossain uses. Hossain himself appears more and more fluid, undefined. Soon after this, Kuber will submit to Hossain’s blackmail and leave for his island colony, Moinadwip, perhaps never to return. Before that, he witnesses the threatening metamorphosis that the river undergoes once it reaches the meeting point with the sea. Manik develops this theme further in Majhir chhele (Boatman’s Son), a novel for young adults he wrote eight years after Padma nadir majhi. The teenage boatman boy Naga in that novel joins his master Jadabbabu on his trips to the estuary of Padma ferrying contraband goods. Jadabbabu is the counterpart to Hossain Mian in Majhir chhele, adventurer, dreamer, smuggler. As they move close to the outer waters, Naga is seized by an intense desire to experience the ocean. The water changes its shape, turns into a dangerously fascinating display of mist, wind and waves. Foreign faces appear –​a man called Denis enters the picture, then a Japanese man. Then comes the storm. As their ship sinks, Naga goes under the water. The last words of the novel report his thoughts: “Has he started seafaring at last, by fully dissolving into the sea?”

86  Moinak Biswas One should not be surprised that Padma nadir majhi itself travelled across the border. A director from West Pakistan made a film on it with British technicians, artists from West Bengal and East Pakistan, and shot it on the banks of Meghna. They employ a style borrowed from Italian neorealism, a style that was internationalizing itself at the time. Walter Lassally’s beautiful camerawork closely follows Luchino Visconti’s portrayal of Sicilian fishermen’s life in La terra trema (1948) (Figures 6.1 and 6.2).

Figure 6.1 Jago hua savera.

Figure 6.2 Jago hua savera.

That Which Flows  87

Figure 6.3 Titas: Ananta’s mother, ‘Rajar jhi’, washed ashore.

Titas has no historical glory to speak of, no battle was fought on its banks, no empire built –​Advaita Mallabarman tells us. It did not have a great mountain to be born of, or an ocean to meet. It comes out of the Meghna, and, after running its course through the interiors of Cumilla (Comilla) and Brahmanbaria,3 it falls into Meghna again, forming a shape that looks like the bracelets worn by village women. But the traumatic event that changes the lives of Kishore and his wife (referred to as ‘Ananta’s mother’ in the novel), two characters at the centre of narration, takes place at a meeting point with ‘different’ waters, not at all nourishing and intimate. It is where Titas veers close to Meghna and is joined by the ‘Naya Gang’ with its ferocious, wide, ocean-​like waters. Ananta’s mother was abducted by pirates at that point, and Kishore lost his sanity forever from the shock (Figures 6.3 and 6.4). The images above contain some abiding motifs in Ghatak’s film, all deeply grounded in Titas’ own ‘civilization’ as Mallabarman would call it. And they have resonance that travels across territories. One remembers what Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1942 book Water and Dreams: Water always flows, always falls, always ends in horizontal death. In innumerable examples, we shall see that for the materializing imagination, death associated with water is more dream-​ like than death associated with earth: the pain of water is infinite. (1983, 6)

88  Moinak Biswas

Figure 6.4 Titas: Her death in the river.

2 We pass on to the next fragment with the help of something else that Bachelard says in that book: “The true eye of the earth is water” (1983, 31) (Figure 6.5). I think it is possible to see a different set of connections between the book and the film as we reflect on this statement. It also allows us to speak about enunciation. Bachelard writes: “Between contemplated nature and contemplative nature, there are close and reciprocal relations” (Bachelard 1983, 27) [emphasis in the original]. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in his first cinema book, defines the ‘perception-​image’ in terms that are intuitively close to Bachelard’s. The way he saw it, it is eminently possible for the water or the earth to cast a look, to turn into a contemplating instance. But unlike Bachelard, he was not thinking about matter. He was thinking of the image, a certain cinematic potential, the perception-​image as one kind of movement-​image. Movement-​ image allows us to experience movement as distinct from the space covered by movement. Perception-​image allows us to experience perception itself –​ not characters perceiving, but the perceiving process. Deleuze writes: If the cinematographic perception-​image constantly passes from the subjective to the objective, and vice versa, should we not ascribe to it a specific, diffuse, supple status, which may remain imperceptible, but which sometimes reveals itself in certain striking cases? (1986, 72)

That Which Flows  89

Figure 6.5 Titas drying up.

The ‘French School’ (Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Jean Epstein, Jean Gremillion and Marcel L’Herbier, whose most prominent work was done in the 1920s and 1930s) provides good examples for Deleuze since water and floating motion were recurrent elements in their work. One remembers Renoir’s Boudou Saved from Drowning (1932), and A Day in the Country (1946) or Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934). Jean Renoir’s predilection for running water has often been discussed. But this predilection was common to all the members of the French school (although Renoir gave it a very special dimension). In the French school, it is sometimes the river and its course, sometimes the canal, its locks and its barges, sometimes the sea, its frontier with the land, the port, the lighthouse as luminous quality. (Deleuze 1986, 77) Deleuze expands on Jean Mitry’s idea of the ‘semi-​subjective image’ where the camera is neither fully objectively watching something, nor fully identified with a character watching. It moves about with the character, with more than one character sometimes, blurring the subjective–​ objective boundary. Great possibilities follow from this, one of which is that of creating a cinematic equivalent of the situation that we observe in the novels under discussion. As we read them, we are moved to ask: are these stories narrated through the characters, or through the river as a character? This is the reason why there is no single central character in them, but an ensemble.

90  Moinak Biswas Deleuze also expands on the remarkable insight of Pasolini (2005) that the crucial discourse of cinema is neither the direct nor the indirect discourse, but the free indirect discourse where one enunciation is embedded in another, leading to a spilt in the enunciating voice/​source. One is no longer certain about the inside/​outside, consciousness/​world separation. Regarding the French school, Deleuze writes: What can be more subjective than a delirium, a dream, a hallucination? But what can be closer to a materiality made up of luminous wave and molecular interaction? The French school and German Expressionism discovered the subjective image, but at the same time they took it to the limits of the universe. (1986, 76–​77) Let me cite another passage from the same chapter: (W)hat the French school found in water was the promise or implication of another state of perception: a more than human perception, a perception not tailored to solids, which no longer had the solid as object, as condition, as milieu. A more delicate and vaster perception, a molecular perception, peculiar to a ‘cine-​eye’. (1986, 80) Deleuze uses the word “reume” in this connection, which for him means an “image in the process of becoming liquid”. 3 Before ending, let me go back to Titas, to Basanti’s death, as the river dries up, and starvation claims the lives of a whole community (Figure 6.6). The film does not exactly end like the novel where we see the ‘char’ (sandbar) that surfaced after Titas dried up. Monsoon inundates it. But this is useless water for the Malos. Here are the last lines of the novel: This does not remind you that once there was a char here. It’s all water, water as far as one can see. From the faraway South, waves now come and break on the Malo neighbourhood. … But that neighbourhood is no longer there. The abandoned houses have wild plants growing over them. As the wind hits the plants, they make a wheezing sound. Those who have perished there must be breathing with that sound. (2017, 232; my translation)

That Which Flows  91

Figure 6.6 Titas: Basanti’s death.

Figure 6.7 Titas.

But the film did ‘adapt’ this in a scene appearing a little before the end: Basanti points at the dried-​up Titas. We hear her sigh on the soundtrack, off voice, three times (Figure 6.7). The breath of the dead that Mallabarman writes about has been adapted in the film. Breath, like water, is an element that flows between the novels and the films.

92  Moinak Biswas Notes 1 A comparable adaptation of a major ‘river novel’ is Ganga, written by Samaresh Bose in 1957, and filmed by Rajen Tarafdar in 1960. 2 For an illuminating study of the character of Hossain Mian see Ahmed Sofa, “Manik Bandyopadhyayer ekti charitra”, in Bangali musalmaner mon (Dhaka: Bnadhan Publications, 2018). 3 Now districts in Bangladesh.

References Bachelard, G. (1983). Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Trans. Edith R. Farrell. Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundation. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: the Movement-​Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mallabarman, A. (2017). Titas Ekti Nadir Nam. Kolkata: Karuna Prakashani. Pasolini, P. P. (2005). “The Cinema of Poetry.” Heretical Empiricism. Trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing.

7 Ray at Large Cinema In and Out of Literature in Region, Nation, Transnation Kaushik Bhaumik

My chapter here tries to open up Indian cinema in the region, nation, transregion through a very preliminary and loose set of speculations around the work of Satyajit Ray in the 1960s. The speculations are cast at the widest and most ambiguous borders of the issue and are therefore more of a laying out of the outermost frames for thinking about the subject at hand in greater detail in the future. Simply put, I would like to take up Ray’s Nayak, a film for which he wrote an original script, a script not adapted from any literary work, as a case study of what it might tell us about Indian cinema–​literature interface in region, nation and transregion at a particular moment in history. I shall also be peripherally referring to other Ray ‘originals’ –​Kanchenjungha and the Feluda novels and films of the 1970s as I go along to nuance my argument. Thus the question that I seek to tease out here is if the films where Ray’s cinema departed from the literary might have something to do with the issue of region, nation, transnation, the divergence between cinema and literature itself a filter for discursifying a certain historical juncture for the region in the nation and transnation.1 1 Of course writing an original script does not obviate the literary at all and cinema is literary in ways far beyond direct referencing of literary works. Indeed, the film script itself is a literary work and one can imagine the films in question here being written up as novels of sorts. What I wish to speculate on is whether Ray’s ambitions to make a particular kind of cinema could not be accommodated within a Bengali literary ecumene at a particular moment in time and whether these exceptions have a set of common preoccupations running through them. These preoccupations, in turn, when identified might give us an indication of the limits or the skin of the Bengali literary, the point at which a literary culture fails to articulate

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-10

94  Kaushik Bhaumik certain dimensions of historical experience due to all kinds of internal cultural restraints, but which the intellectuals and artists of the region might be interested in articulating. Needless to say, such a field of enquiry for Ray’s cinema would open up a plethora of questions for region, nation, transnation: the cinema–​literature interface in wider historical contexts. Such wider contexts are of course beyond the scope of this chapter. At the very outset, I would like to clarify that I am at no point here calling into question the quality of Bengali literature. Indeed, this literary culture has encompassed waves of the transnational and international modernisms until a limit was reached. That limit was both an internal one as well as one that was specifically related to the crisis of literature the world over posed by the spectacular powers of cinematic modernities from the 1960s onwards, the ones Ray’s Nayak seeks to grapple with very directly. To come straight to the point, both Kanchenjungha and Nayak, both films for which Ray wrote an original screenplay, turn out to be within Ray’s oeuvre in the 1960s, the films that maximally flirt with an abstract experimental style of cinema that was being put into place in World Cinema at that moment predominantly through the impact of a new kind of European cinema that was turning away from narrative cinema towards the avant-​garde. Kanchenjungha has distinct overtones of avant-​ garde spatiotemporal abstractions that we begin to see in cinema such as Antonioni’s and Nayak can very profitably be compared to Fellini’s 81/​ 2, again a film marked strongly by the ascent of abstract hypermodernist space above narrative.2 My speculations begin at this point –​the misfit between Ray’s ambitions to make a certain kind of avant-​garde cinema, an ambition understandable given his meteoric rise to the front ranks of World Cinema in this period, and the ecumene of Bengali literature in the 1960s. Moreover, there remained an expectation of the times for Ray to emulate the best of World Cinema of his time to take Indian cinema to the cutting edge of radical cinema, a pressure that would wreak havoc in Ray’s life from this point onwards. Ironically, having reached the pinnacle of adapting literature to cinema as well in some ways attained crowning glory in his oeuvre with Charulata, a piece of work prestigious and thumpingly successful precisely because it was a fluent and felicitous translation of Tagore, Ray would be criticized in the years to come precisely for being bourgeois and middle class realist in his aesthetics when the need of the hour seemed to have been to align with the radical political and psychic upsurges in the world, with cinema spearheading this revolution culturally over literature (the French Nouveau Roman movement, for example, would explicitly turn towards cinematic abstractions both as a way to keep literature going at the high stakes of perceptual abstractions that avant-​garde cinema poses as well as radicalize literature itself to meet the radical political demands of the time). The criticism of Ray was not

Ray at Large  95 very unlike the manner in which the Cahiers du Cinema critics who went on to found the Nouvelle Vague attacked a certain literary French cinema du papa.3 Nayak might in many senses be seen as a response to this brewing crisis in Ray’s artistic career. The period between 1964, the year Ray emphatically arrives on the World Cinema scene as frontline auteur alongside the likes of Bergman and Kurosawa, with the triumph of Charulata and, 1969, when he would return to pre-​eminence through the critical acclaim for Aranyer Din Ratri were uncertain times for the master. Films such as Kapurush/​Mahapurush and two Uttam Kumar films –​Nayak and Chiriyakhana –​fared unevenly in commercial and critical circles, especially the latter (indeed, till date Nayak, the focus of this chapter, is considered to be one of Ray’s lesser films). It was with his 1968 ‘children’s’ film Goopy Gyne, Bagha Byne, the one of the biggest hits in the history of Bengali cinema, that Ray returned to some kind of command over his career’s public fortunes. The next year, in 1969, Ray would find some kind of reconciliation between his desires to respond to the revolution in World Cinema occasioned by the unceasing emergence of New Wave cinemas internationally and his need to keep his cinema within the sensorial limits of Bengali bhadralok literary cinematic culture that he would make Aranyer Din Ratri after a novel of the same name by one of the stormy petrels of post-​Tagorean Bengali literary modernity, Sunil Gangopadhyay. And yet as I have noted, a certain move away from the literary, the regional Bengali, was already noticeable in his original script married to hypermodernist abstractions of Kanchenjungha made in 1962. I guess because the film was so rarely seen for many years it has not come much into reckoning in subsequent considerations of Ray’s cinema. I shall come back to the Kanchejungha a moment later as marking, nestled within the most intense period of Ray’s engagement with Tagore, the beginning of a new line of enquiry into a demotic urban middle class modernity. Some translation happens via Chhobi Biswas’s personality as a feudal patriarch between colonial zamindari India in Jalsaghar and postcolonial feudal bourgeois India in Kanchenjungha that allows Ray to posit the rebellion of the daughter of the feudal family in favour of a jobless middle class young man as a point of entry into thinking about the evolution of social classes across historical divides. Nayak, however, as I shall seek to demonstrate, takes Ray way beyond the realms of the demotic urban middle class into a hypermodernity that is done once only in his career and never again. Nayak on reconsideration is turning out to be a cinematic text of staggering subtextual and historical contextual complexity. Made the same year as that other famous hypermodernist train film, Alain Robbe-​Grillet’s Trans-​Europ-​Express, it remains the closest Indian cinema ever got to the European supermodern. Recounting the career of an actor who makes the

96  Kaushik Bhaumik journey from a period of Bengali cinema that had more in common with the popular Bengali stage of nineteenth century vintage and silent cinema to the heights of glamorous superstardom with an added twist of Ray casting, Uttam Kumar, that very superstar in real life in a hypermodernist cinematic fiction rivalling the persona of a Marcello Mastroianni, the film is a breathtaking roller-​coaster ride conveying to the viewer the speed at which cinema takes the modern from the feudal bourgeois to the demotic middle class and onwards to a hypermodernist abstract. Critically, the film’s abstract imagery, from the sleekness of the train to that of the persona of the leading protagonists, would push towards pure cinema, a more image-​based cinema than Ray’s trademark literary realism. The very train journey that the superstar takes between Calcutta and the capital of independent India, Delhi, becomes a metaphor for a series of complex meditations on Ray’s part on the relationship region, nation, transnation and between cinema and literature mediating the former. The train’s length is utilized to harbour, as if in a line of prison cells, all forms of Hindu middle class moderns –​from the wheezing cultural critic witheringly disapproving of film star excess, the traditional middle class family with an ailing daughter, the modernizing feminist snobbish of popular cinema, an array of feckless bourgeois characters from corporate company heads to commercial conmen and finally the educated middle class man turned godman. The actor, Arindam Mukherjee played by Uttam Kumar, who is on his way to Delhi to collect an award, encounters these characters in various contexts (except, significantly, the godman) revealing some aspect of 1960s Bengali society’s relationship with Bengali popular cinema, above all, the one marked by the superstardom of Uttam Kumar. The central leitmotif of the film is the biography of the actor retold in flashbacks occasioned mostly by his encounters with Aparna, a modern educated upper middle class girl, who is interviewing him over multiple conversations in the dining car of the train for a feminist magazine she runs. An interesting cameo in all this is the guard of the train (if for no other reason but as the avatar of the modernism of the bhadralok modern bureaucratic clerical class that has remained central to both Bengali secular modernist cultures; Sankar, the writer whom Ray would adapt in the 1970s, was a clerk at the law courts) as well as neo-​Vedantic religious and political modernities of the Ananda Margis, the Brahmakumaris or the cult of Lokenath Baba and so on, the kind that the godman in Nayak represents.4 Beyond the proportions of the train itself, the length of the train journey seems to give the film time to present a synoptic snapshot of the socio-​ economic and cultural tensions besetting the urban modern Bengali middle class in multiple registers. What becomes clear by the end of the film is that the star is alienated from all ordinary or even extraordinary reality and

Ray at Large  97 it is only the second-​wave feminist on the verge of postmodernity played by Sharmila Tagore who, despite her visceral dislike of Bengali popular cinema, understands the hypermodernist abstractions of the superstar’s life. Indeed, one way of unravelling the cultural tensions undergirding the film is to query the contradiction between Aparna’s dislike for Arindam’s screen roles and her growing empathy and even sexual attraction for the ubercool superstar in the flesh. These are new personalities emerging in Bengali history –​self-​made, self-​taught, secular and modern, dynamically active in very edgy fashionable ways and hugely alienated from mainstream history and society but in a post-​existential manner. Even as I put the issue this way it becomes clear how far Nayak is from the even the cutting edge of the Bengali literature of the time that the film was made in. Central to the narrative is a dead end that the star has reached in terms of his career and fame, an aporia that becomes the pretext for all repressed difficult memories, mostly guilty ones of betraying mentors, friends and lovers, to come hurtling back into his life at once. The dead end is, like in the case of the protagonist of 81/​2, irrational, akin to a writer’s block, and the very context for the hypermodernist spatial abstractions of cinema to happen. Empty time translates into pointless empty space. And extreme empty time translates into hyper-​empty space –​to the point of white light (Arindam’s sporting sunglasses at various points in the film denotes both the uber-​cool of the superstar as well as the intensity of the white light of abstraction in his life). The star has nowhere to go, he is a victim of his own unreal success. Films are flopping and he is spiralling down towards pedestrian worries of successive flops finishing off his career like an ordinary actor would. Even the national award that he is going to receive is treated by him at the beginning of the film with an air of boredom and resignation. He has seen it all, done it all. And yet he has all the charisma and the restless energy of a superstar aspiring to reach greater heights. Indeed, here, Ray is bringing film history in directly –​the 1960s mark the beginnings of the long decline of the Bengali film industry that continues unabated as we speak. But more obliquely, one is tempted to read into this impasse in the superstar’s life an echo of the dilemma that Ray was facing in the middle of the 1960s, a self-​confessedly difficult period for him. Scale of success can be a problem when a cultural system cannot handle the energies of growth within its semiotic. In this vein, one can imagine the European style abstract hero that Ray creates for the film as a double of Ray himself. And indeed, beyond the literalism of the film star as Ray stand-​in there was the other literal fact of Uttam Kumar himself gradually moving away from his fame as matinee idol defined by his persona as the romantic hero of Bengali cinema towards more ‘thoughtful’ cinema (he would through the 1960s, produce complex dystopic popular films such as Saptapadi, Jotugriha and

98  Kaushik Bhaumik Uttar Falguni, all adaptations of literary works). In the intersection of the crises in both Ray’s and Kumar’s careers and both of them seeking to find new challenging directions for their respective superstardoms, there is this tantalizing possibility that Nayak could have, if it had garnered international awards, sent Kumar into stratospheric international stardom of a cool modernist kind. Instead, Kumar in his effort to encash on his Bengal stardom via Bombay cinema would fall flat on his face with the bombing of Ek Chhoti si Mulaqat the very next year after Nayak, 1967. Crises of star careers everywhere, beyond the regional cinematic-​literary! 2 As Sharmishtha Gooptu has argued, Bengali cinema set itself up from the onset of the talkies onwards as a literary cinema in an attempt to mark itself off from the commercial excesses of Bombay cinema, as a marker of another vision of the free Indian nation, one defined by high culture. The evidence from the cinema in the period she examines is borne out at least partially in the case of Bengali cinema that had acclaim in critical as well as statist circles in matters such as national awards for cinematic excellence. Ray himself seems to have followed the trend and upped the ante hugely in terms of aesthetic and inscriptional clarifications of this literary cinema. Nayak, however, poses a problem for such a literary cinematic tradition. But it also points out towards the tides of change circulating, inevitable in some ways, way beyond the impasse in star careers in Bengal straining at the leash of regional cultural constraints. The journey of Bengal from Calcutta to Delhi in a train that is uncannily prescient of the supermodern Rajdhani Express that would be launched only in 1969, three years after Nayak, is also the inevitable drift of the region into the nation/​transnation. Within a year of Nayak, Indira Gandhi would smash the power of the regional satraps of the Congress party and by 1969 nationalize banks formalizing an unprecedented centralization of political power in Delhi. And of course we know that this decade marks the beginning of the intensification of the flight of the Bengali educated or the culturally ambitious from Bengal to all over the nation–​transnation spectrum. If the earlier avatars of the modernist the transregion/​international could be done within the Bengali regional by quietly absorbing the supra-​ regional into the demotic of the regional, from now on, increasingly, the supra-​regional aspirations of Bengali culture would have to be done outside the region. What is out of joint in all this? Of course, it is a question of a tension between the skin of a Bengali regional modernity defined by literature of a certain kind and the forces of cinema in particular and the dynamism

Ray at Large  99 of modernization in general. I had in my doctoral work argued that the coming of the talkies had entailed a shift from a bazaar cinema defined by a worldly material dynamic in global trade an creativity by a cinema of the upper caste Hindu bourgeoisie who used sound and talk to establish a hegemony of the social problem film, the genre that dominated Indian modern literature as well cinema until the 1960s. A cinema based on the break-​up of princely state feudalism in the dynamism of a cosmopolitan material modern of the bazaar was replaced by refeudalization of a cinema that on the whole mourned the passage of feudal and brahmanical mores in the challenge of the modern. At the heart of this ‘reform’ of cinema was a regression to a conservative sexuality, which directly brings us to Ray’s cry for help in this period, when challenged for not making ‘radical’ cinema, in which he said that sometimes he felt he could just give up all cultural restraints and make a radical modernist cinema, in line with the sexual revolutions of his time. I had in my dissertation also argued how the brahmanization of the Indian cultural ecumene had disastrous consequences for modern Indian historiography where there is till date an incredible paucity in the study of material modernity, of a secular material urbanity. The urban was shunned by Gandhian and vulgar Marxist class analytical socialist dogmatism either as a space of decadence or of corrupting capitalism. A sort of Kala Pani, the brahmanical untouchability of mleccha modernity, was thus practised by all schools of Indian cultural and academic thinking and continues to be so. In the Inter-​Cultural Asia workshop last year at Jadavpur University, Sukanta Chaudhuri had pointed out the avoidance of Calcutta in Bengali modern literature of the nineteenth century, something that changes over time but remains restricted nevertheless as I shall demonstrate in the last part of my chapter (Chaudhuri 2018). What the avoidance of the urban modern also led to was a total disregard for the technological base for modernization and urbanization of which cinema formed an important infrastructure for the sensory experience of the adventure of the modern. The reason no novel in Bengal in 1966 could have dealt with the life of a cinematic superstar like the protagonist of Nayak, or the stratospheric level of hypermodernist spatial abstractions that mark the delineation of his personality or his sensorium in the film, is precisely this disregard by the literary for the machinic recalibration of the senses in the dizzy logics of technological modernization, something that cinema could effortlessly follow because it was hardwired into this very process itself. Arindam Mukherjee, the nayak of the film, jettisons the stage theatrical, the literary therefore, and creates his career emulating cinema –​the art of Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni. And indeed it may be argued that the hero’s flashbacks of past incidents

100  Kaushik Bhaumik in his life are the literary cinemas that he has transcended to reach the abstractions of Ray’s film.5 Here, literature fails to deliver a character the speeds of whose rise to stardom match the real material histories of the speed of a Rajdhani Express or cinematic modernity of a certain abstraction in the smooth speeds of the times. Only cinema based on an original script written by Ray for the cinema could have done the job. Increasingly through the twentieth century, cinema came to lie in the intersection of city, technology and a modernist cosompolitanism of material culture, all of which were anathema to modern Indian literature for a very long period of time. Nayak’s spatial abstractions wouldn’t have been possible without a certain machinic urban global modernity, a media-​driven individuation, that of course was censored ruthlessly in brahmanical Kala Pani avoidance of some very key aspects of the modern.6 The heart of the matter was/​is brahmanical upper caste ritual defined as civilizational, a ritual order still rooted in a culture that peculiarly mixed tribal ideology framed absolutely by local nature and feudal ideologies of the land, leaving no room for abstractions, the incursion of pure space, hallmark of modernity’s abstractions rung in by something such as Robbe-​ Grillet’s nouveau roman and the New Wave cinemas of the period.7 I have elsewhere argued that it is this busy ritualism, almost tribal in its frequencies and intensities, that provides fertile ground for the manic adoption of New Media technologies by Indians today, the digital itself being ritualistic at heart. And even if this ritualistic core modernizes on the face of it, the region keeps the core intact to the point of its becoming invisible, only to be auscultated in the spectral affective reverberations to be only felt but not put down in words (Bhaumik 2013). But beyond this, what I am trying to get at is a methodological issue for the cinema–​literature interface in the region, nation, transregion spectrum. That the issue of translation of global cultures into local experience is a difficult one has been pointed out many times, especially by Franco Moretti, in his magisterial surveys of world literature.8 What I am trying to point out is that the troubles of ‘translation’ might begin in a political unconscious that defines the skins of a culture. This skin was not just about the usage of brahmanical lexicon and idioms, but the articulation in an internal synaesthesia of the regional linguistic a whole range of affect experiences, hard to track down in logocentric discourse, that became exclusionary of vast swathes of modern experience that were nevertheless crucial to the modernization experience of the region (and in Nayak the brahmanical patriarchal force of Bengali literary culture is denoted by the old cultural critic who wants to extirpate cinema as a source of moral corruption and has seen only one film in his life –​John Ford’s How

Ray at Large  101 Green Was My Valley, both a literary adaptation and a film made by a Republican American filmmaker). Why this was so is still to be discovered but my hunch is that the conservatism of the literary regional has its roots in a defence of the leisurely time of feudal agrarian societies against the dynamism of the machinic modern city. Ray himself would make the same point in Shatranj ke Khilari about Awadhi Urdu literary culture at least. Renato Poggioli famously wrote about the pastoral longing as “but a wishful dream of a happiness to be gained without effort, of an erotic bliss made absolute by its own irresponsibility”. Ray commences the 1960s with the crisis of Apu’s pastoral longing smashed to smithereens by the modernity of city and disease in Apur Sansar, passes through Nayak mid-​ decade and ends the decade by producing a remarkable critique of Bengali youth modernist radicalism by showing such radicalism as marked nonetheless by the pastoral longing for “happiness to be gained without effort” in Aranyer Din Ratri (Poggioli 1975). 3 In what remains of the chapter, I would like to nuance the above picture of the limits of Indian literature defined by the regional brahmanical through certain interesting moves Ray makes in his cinematic and literary careers. If Nayak stands out as an extreme case of the cinematic transcending the regional literary towards the transregional/​ national/​ international, then what I had indicated at the beginning of my chapter with respect to Kanchenjungha provides us with a series of cinematic meditations on Ray’s part as regards the limits of the regional literary that can to some extent encompass the avant-​garde secular modernist, the secular here defined by me as a de-​brahmanized/​de-​ritualized modern matterscape in cultural texts, while also including elements of ‘traditional’ Bengali literary culture –​the zamindar-​bourgeois gent for example. Or in Nayak itself, we are able to believe, following the cue of a line spoken by a protagonist, Arindam Mukherjee as a modernist Krishna, something probably made explicit in the very last scene of the film where we see Arindam, all super-​cool in his sunglasses wreathed in a garland traditionally offered to deities, especially Krishna, speaking to his fans. In Mahanagar we find a contrasting of ritualized brahmanical middle class household’s material textures with the de-​brahmanized abstract modernity of corporate offices or secular bourgeois households. With Kapurush we find Ray begin a radical thinking of a body unmoored from tradition in a secular demotic of modernist urbanity in the figure of Soumitro Chatterjee.

102  Kaushik Bhaumik Again the modernist existential moral cowardice and cynicism of Soumitro’s personality running from Kapurush to Abhijan to Aranyer Din Ratri passes through a more classical register in Charulata just as the patriarchal Chhobi Biswas transmogrifies from feudalism to modernity between Jalsaghar and Devi and Kanchenjungha. A similar line could be drawn for the personas Sharmila Tagore assumed in her work with Ray but in an interesting pas a deux with the personas played by Madhabi Mukherjee in Ray films. The fake Vaishnava bhakta of Mahapurush reappears as the globalizing bhakta of Nayak (and who can today resist a chuckle at WWWW (World Wide Will Workers), the organization to which the bhakta belongs?) and then becomes a modern thug in Sonar Kella and finally cedes space to an astoundingly presciently Ramdev-​ish Machhli Baba in Joi Baba Felunath, gender ambiguity, a larval sexuality et al. all intact in place. The train in Nayak therefore seems to be carrying an entire menagerie of Bengali regional modernity circumscribed earlier by older (literary) histories towards new destinies, into new horizons in region/​transregion and beyond. What is important for my purpose here is that much of this Ray oeuvre post-​ 1966 is adapted from Bengali literature, the turning point being Aranyer Din Ratri where Ray moves into adapting the work of radical modern texts by a new generation of writers some of whom are actually opposed to the Tagorean classical literary idiom of Bengali literature, the very idiom with which he had got identified and was harangued and castigated for. But even here, at the cutting edge of Bengali radical modern prose, Ray would never attempt the hypermodernist aesthetic of a Nayak. Thus, Ray, far from being a literary adapter, seems to have used Bengali literature across the Tagore–​post-​Tagore divide as some kind of a cognitive modern tool to investigate the tension lines of the modern in Bengali culture by tracing a genealogy of social types from the feudal bourgeois modern down to the demotic middle class of his times, with the failure of literature to become cinematic hypermodernist being attributed to faulty inheritances of the present from the past.9 This very failure of the Bengali modern is also the ‘failure’ of Nayak as a one-​off in Ray’s career. And if the cutting edge of Bengali literature fails to deliver on Ray’s cinematic ambitions, then Ray’s ‘originals’ too assume an ambiguous critical stance towards the Bengali literary regional, not the valorized position literature has in writings about his cinema. Another interesting register of Ray’s work with trying to find contemporaneity in his work ‘adequate to the times’ begins with the inauguration of his Feluda series of detective novels in 1965, a year before Nayak, a time when Ray was finding Calcutta to be a nightmare as evinced from a letter he wrote to his biographer Marie Seton during that period. Indeed, one of the pivotal motifs of the Feluda stories is the relentless travels of Feluda

Ray at Large  103 and his nephew-​sidekick Topshe to outside Bengal for their investigations culminating in the final set of novels travels abroad. This transregional modernity of Bengal framing the literary Feluda only intensifies and deepens in the filmic adaptations by Ray –​Sonar Kella (1974) and Joi Baba Felunath (1979) set in Rajasthan and Benaras, respectively. Modernity it seems would work for Ray best outside Calcutta, in the exotic travels of the Feluda character all over India and the world, an Indic peopled by all kinds non-​Bengalis, Indian and non-​Indian, and in Soumitro’s modern persona in Ray films always away from a ‘Bengali’ setting from Kapurush right down to the two Feluda films he would star in in the 1970s (with the exception of Ashani Sanket). Or was this modernist Bengal/​hero abroad inaugurated as far back as Apur Sansar? Again, the limits of the Bengali brahmanical modern have to be literally territorially transcended for a free play of the modern, echoing in many ways the fleeing of modern populations from Bengal to other metropolises within India but more significantly abroad in the period in which all this is happening. Time and again Ray plays the Règle du jeu trick of getting the protagonists of his films out of their comfort zone of urban life, the ‘Bengali’ in literary circumscription, to a distant setting where their lives/​ senses unravel under the pressure of empty time and space, approaching high modernist abstractions. Pratidwandi ends in a flight from Calcutta and in Seemabadhwa, the voice of reason arrives from outside Bengal, in the form of Sharmila Tagore, as if the heroine of Nayak had left Calcutta and now returns to find it moribund and corrupt. I had been very surprised when in a conversation with Mani Kaul about Ray’s film style Kaul confirmed my hunch that the problem with Ray’s Calcutta Trilogy lies in a deep unease with the Ray images in an urban setting –​the films look stilted, hamstrung in terms of shot angles, acting styles and edit flows. Kaul had on that occasion told me that Ray had himself once told him about his deep unease at shooting bodies in Westernized clothing in urban settings –​in this case Calcutta. And indeed one can surmise the double problems Ray would have faced in first, trying to ‘match’ the derelict colonial and traditional architecture of the city to a hypermodernist abstract cinema that he might have wanted to make and secondly, the problems he would have faced ‘matching’ modernist abstraction with Bengali bodies wearing clothes in traditional ways –​dhoti, punjabi, sari etc. all worn in traditional brahmanical style. Thus Nayak with its compartmentalization of various genres of the Bengali bhadralok modern in discrete compartments allows Ray a unique sleight of hand to have his cake and eat it too –​shoot the film to supermodern speeds and the cool abstraction of airconditioned interiors while also managing to do his own Rear Window of sorts in providing a synoptic totalizing view across otherwise irreconcilable textures of Bengali bhadralok society.

104  Kaushik Bhaumik 4 Thus nestled within Ray’s literature–​cinema traffic is a very graded consideration of the skin of the Bengali literary interfacing with his cinematic political agendas. There is a limit within which the literary can accommodate a modicum of a secular modern materiality and failing which either Ray writes Nayak or he actually starts producing his own literature that in some senses become ‘original’ screenplays for films to follow. He will move into juvenile fiction if needed to articulate his vision of the modern. This experiment is framed by two destinies of modernity –​hypermodernist abstraction and spectacular action of the feudal ritual-​free modern body, destinies that will, for Bengal, fail spectacularly through the 1970s. Modernism will cease as a reference for Bengali cinema and culture and action will be resolved by the import of Amitabh Bachchan films into Bengal. And in some ways Bachchan, who intoned the introduction to Ray’s Shatranj ke Khilari in 1977, would supervise, via the formalization of a ‘lumpen’ aesthetic in Bengali cinema, the breakdown of the hegemony of Bengali brahmanical-​bourgeois literary in films. Ironically, the period of the decline of Bengali cinema is co-​terminous with the decline of Bengali literature as well. Today, Bengali cinematic forces are strongest in Bombay, while Bengali literary forces have moved into a transnational English of the era of globalization, horizons that Ray was already exploring from the 1960s onwards. One wonders what his Mahabharata would have been like as envisioned by him, in English and played by Hollywood actors! In what does get done of all this, the meteor of Alien produced in Hollywood rose briefly from the lotus ponds of famine-​ridden Bengal of 1943 only to fall back on to the rather drab realist lotus ponds of Ashani Sanket.10 What’s left behind is the stump of a certain modern that endlessly valorizes Feluda precisely because the character becomes a nostalgic memory of a nascent freewheeling Bengali cosmopolitan secular modernity that could have gone places but never went. What we get are nostalgic recursions of the spectres of Ray’s own cinema as part of a Bengali nostalgia industry of a Bengali modernism that could have been. Among these artefacts of nostalgia is Srijit Mukherjee’s debut film Autograph, which is a partial ‘remake’ of Nayak! But part of my chapter’s aim has also been, beyond the remit of the conference topic, to reconstitute, away from the usual registers in which it is analysed, Ray’s cultural work as a sustained politics of querying the limits of the Bengali cultural scene in a ceaseless battle against the skins of that culture bestowed upon him and Bengal as a problematic legacy. There is in this work a magical imagination about histories, genealogies and destinies of the Bengali people, things that pass through the imagination of an itinerant storyteller who has seen the world

Ray at Large  105 and knows how the secret streams of history work through the passages in an extremely vast adventurous universe of cultural genetics that always problematize the quest for any restricted regional identity. There is inside Ray, an Apu, a Phatikchand, a Mukul and a Captain Spark, all boys who want to run away from home into the magic of the cosmopolitan secularity of the modern world, a certain attitude that allows history to be seen in nomadic open ways. It is in the boom and bust of these larger histories of Bengal, in the vast cultural worlds that Ray knows, that Bengali literature and the region slip in and out of Ray’s cinema. Finally, that literature and region become frozen as a museum artefact while the boys have all run away –​literally. Maybe we need to take away the significance of the absolute non-​ encounter between Arindam Mukherjee and the godman in the film that has been the subject of my chapter all this while (absolute in the sense that far from encountering Arindam, he never even refers to him once throughout the film). It is as if two parallel autonomous Bengali/​Indian modernities oblivious to one another are taking shape in the midst of the train of supermodern speeds –​one that of abstract hypermodernism and another that of modernizing brahmanical religiosity signalled most wonderfully subtly in typical Ray-​ese when the godman hands over a business card to the commercial conman and hints at possible business partnerships in the future. What I have tried to show above is that the region –​Bengal/​India today forces exiles on the former while internalizing the latter into ever-​proliferating circles of ritual action in a world filled with a never-​ending flow of consumer goods that ritual could play with and with the manic ritualism of digital acts that belie (ac) countability. It is truly peculiar the ways in which the Indian regional has flown into the global over the past few decades while ensuring that the two paths rarely cross substantially, each having its own mechanisms of networks of power to sustain itself quite independently of one another. The skin of the Hindu semiosphere, to borrow a term from Tartu semiotician Yuri Lotman, lies precisely in the godman’s absolute opacity to Arindam Mukherjee, signifying the absolute non-​ translatability of certain modernities into the many regionals that constitute India at home and in the world (Lotman 2000). Of course, this opacity/​silence is precisely the powering motor of the war machine the arrogant ritual/​ethno-​superior can launch genocidally at the Other not acknowledged.11 Notes 1 For a lucid discussion of Ray’s relationship with Bengali literary culture see, Moinak Biswas, ‘Early Films: The Novel and Other Horizons’ (2006, 37–​79).

106  Kaushik Bhaumik 2 I use the term hypermodernist in the sense associated with Paul Virilio’s work on speed and modernity, a very high degree of abstraction of sensory experience being both a method and a consequence of modernist speeds. See Paul Armitage. Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond. London: Sage, 2000. For the rise in the 1960s of abstract spatial imagery of everyday life connected to speed, see Kristin Ross. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. 3 For a succinct summary of the criticism of Ray during these years see, ‘Introduction: Critical Returns’ in Biswas (2006): 1–​18. 4 For the political radicalism of the clerical class of the colonial and postcolonial bureaucracy see, Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury. Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c.1830–​ 1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 5 For a similar argument about Ray’s films filled with flashbacks denoting the protagonists of his cinema transcending difficult pasts on their way to modernizing see, Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism in Indian Cinema: The Double Take of Modernism in Ray’ in Biswas (2006): 80–​115. 6 For the link between hypermodern speeds and abstraction of sensory experiences, especially in high-​ speed travel, see Marc Augé. Non-​ Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. 7 For a complex discussion of abstraction and modernity in Robbe-​Grillet’s novels and films through the trope of Gilles Deleuze’s ‘any-​space-​whatever’ see, José Luis Romanillos. “Outside, it is snowing”: Experience and finitude on the nonrepresentational landscapes of Alain Robbe-​Grillet’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, October 2008, 26 (5): 795–​822. 8 For Moretti’s critical approaches to flows of texts across world literature, see Franco Moretti. Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. 9 Here I am of course referring to Fredric Jameson’s famous essay ‘Cognitive Mapping’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana-​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 347–​60. Jameson argues, given a postmodern reality vast and unrepresentable, the individual works through such experience through cognitive ‘mental maps’ around perceived pivot points considered historically and existentially significant. 10 For a riveting account of Ray’s project to make The Alien in Hollywood see, Satyajit Ray. Travails with the Alien: The Film That Was Never Made and Other Adventures with Science Fiction. New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2018. 11 For the tension between absolute silence and coded reference to cultural ‘Others’ in the brahmanical tradition, see B.D. Chattopadhyaya. Representing the Other: Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (Eighth to Fourteenth Century). New Delhi: Manohar Books, 1998.

Ray at Large  107 References Bhaumik, K. (2013). Bazaar/​Market. Berlin: Arsenal. Biswas, M. (2006). Apu and After: Re-​visiting Ray’s Cinema. Kolkata: Seagull Books. Chaudhuri, S. (2018). Open Session: “Where is Kolkata?” Inter-​Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 18–​29 June. Lotman, Y. (2000). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic of Culture. Trans. Ann Shukman. London: Tauris. Poggioli, R. (1975). The Oaten Flue: Essays on Pastoral Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

8 Beckett and Avikunthak Lineages of the Avant-​Garde Brinda Bose

The avant-​garde is distinguished for having an intimate and intricate relationship with death –​most of all its own –​which makes questions of its lineages irresolvable at base, and complex at best. In shorthand, the most outré of modernist and contemporary aesthetics, many of those identified with or by the label deny or seek to elude it –​there is something about the avant-​garde that makes everyone uncomfortable, clearly, including its (perhaps reluctant) practitioners –​which may be, ironically enough, the best effect the avant-​garde could hope for. Paul Mann’s significant work, The Theory-​Death of the Avant-​Garde (1991), was revisited by himself in Masocriticism (1999) a few years later. In its first chapter titled ‘The Afterlife of the Avant-​Garde’, the following fragmented lines trace an essence of his argument to resurrect it as a search for silence and death, after having declared it dead. The avant-​garde died of exposure. It died by revealing itself to its enemies … It buried itself alive in the very manifestoes, events, collages, poems and assemblages in which it proposed to live a disruptive and utopian existence. It died of discourse. It talked, wrote and painted itself to death … the death of the avant-​ garde is not its end but its repetition, indeed its compulsive repetition. …The afterlife of the avant-​garde will be the first confrontation with the silence of death and will produce precisely nothing. It is here that one begins to imagine another monstrous order … That will make writing the practice of a certain disappearance. A certain silence. That will make writing a strange shadow whose sole purpose is to mark the destruction of the body that once stood between its light and its earth. (Mann 1999, 3–​6)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-11

Beckett and Avikunthak  109 Samuel Beckett may be read as a writer of silence and death, who marks not only the destruction of the body that stood between its light and its earth but also its resilience and its secrets. I shall look at two plays of Beckett’s –​the acclaimed Waiting for Godot (published in French in 1952, and in English translation in 1954) and a short “dramaticule” Come and Go (1965) –​along with his only film titled, unsurprisingly for Beckett, Film (also 1965), in conjunction with two films made by Ashish Avikunthak in response to the two Beckett plays. Avikunthak’s is a prominent name in contemporary Indian parallel cinema, whose work has been called avant-​ garde, a description Avikunthak himself has expressed reservations about. I wish to investigate and interrogate some of the questions of silence, secrecy, deaths and afterlives of the idea of the avant-​garde posed by Mann, particularly in two contexts, the material and the temporal: how they live, migrate and transform across territories and borders and also across material forms of art; and how they mutate through time and generations. If the avant-​garde is premised upon silence and death, an aesthetic carved of failure and impermanence, can it travel across time and space and artistic forms and recreate itself in transnational, trans-​historic avant-​garde moments? Would such refashioning be a failing, predicated on a death of a text or a territory or an age, or in Beckettian terms, a deliberate ‘failing better’? If predicated on a death, what kind of lineage is it, rising like a phoenix, and often discarding any blood-​ties? Samuel Beckett’s ‘dramaticule’ Come and Go (1965), a fraught poetic fragment, starts with three young women, Flo, Vi and Ru, sitting in a row on a bench, almost immobile, not speaking. The first exchange ensues thus: Vi: Ru. Ru: Yes. Vi: Flo. Flo: Yes. Vi: When did we three last meet? Ru: Let us not speak. [Silence. Exit Vi right. Silence.]

(Beckett 1973)

The stage direction, “Silence”, occurs four times in the first twelve speaking lines of the play, of which most lines are monosyllabic –​“Flo.” “Ru.” “Yes.” –​and then Ru exhorts that they should not speak. The short play consists of the ritual coming and going of each of the three friends to and from the bench in turn, with very little said between them except an

110  Brinda Bose ominous secret conveyed into the ear of one by the second, about the third when she is away. Each time, before the whispered secret, the one who will hear it is asked how she thinks the third friend looks at this time of meeting after a long interval. And each time, the whisper elicits a low exclamation from the hearer, “Oh!”, after which she is admonished not to let on to the absent friend that she knows anything is amiss. Beckett’s directions for all three women’s reactions to the secret they hear is: “Ohs/​Three very different sounds” (Beckett 1973). There is both pathos and ambiguity in this directive, hinting at depths lurking in whispered secrets. Though never specifically indicated, an unhappy sense that the whisper is connected to mortality pervades the air surrounding their strange, mechanical comings and goings and their staccato, mournfully nostalgic utterances. Death is hovering over the three women, they can sense it even if they must not speak it aloud: and they are searching to see its shadow in each one’s face as they rotate places on the bench. Ashish Avikunthak made a short film based on Beckett’s Come and Go, titled Antaral (Endnote) in 2005. This is a sequence that reproduces the essence of Beckett’s dramaticule closely, enacting the women revolving their seats on a bench, one sharing an unknown ominous secret with a second as the third moves away. A maker of experimental cinema for over two decades now, Avikunthak is considered an artist in the Indian avant-​gardist tradition of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, a lineage and inspiration of filmmakers he has claimed for himself though he is unhappy with being called an avant-​garde outside of this cinematic kinship. His claims on someone like Beckett appear straightforward insofar as he seems to pick up and transport the literary into the cinematic, then complicated by way of cultural difference. Perhaps the avant-​gardists draw upon a certain Modernist predilection for cross-​cultural circulation, as Jahan Ramazani has suggested in A Transnational Poetics, though with specific reference to poetry: Literary transnationalism … may suggest a different disciplinary model of “citizenship”: instead of replicating the centripetal vortex of the nation-​state or its dilated counterpart in unitary migrant communities, cross-​cultural writing and reading can, if taken seriously in criticism and the classroom, evoke noncoercive and nonatavistic forms of transnational imaginative belonging … when the intercultural tropes, allusions, and vocabularies of poetry outstrip single-​state or single-​ identity affiliations, they can exemplify the potential for generative intercultural exploration. (Ramazani 2009, 31) Simultaneously, waves of a distinct, if transnational, imagination of belonging pit potentially ‘global’ or ‘world’ citizens against their

Beckett and Avikunthak  111 inheritances and influences, creating endless moments and cycles of conjunction and disjunction. These encounters –​of and between form and content –​are provocative in never allowing for still-​points by which legacies can be mapped, pointing instead, to a series of deaths and afterlives that remain shifting, ephemeral, discomfiting. The ‘itinerant’ could be an apt metaphor to look at drifting lineages, for not providing a precise roadmap but retrieving the sense of the wandering, the peripatetic, and the wayfaring, as a theoretical tool as much as a way to wander between them, stopping at sites of contact and recognition that are impermanent. It is no less pertinent that both Beckett and Avikunthak, in similar and different ways, can claim for their work a poetic aesthetic that allows them to flow naturally with the idea of the transnational. Beckett, an Irishman who lived most of his life in Paris, moved seamlessly between French and English, translating his own work and facilitating performances of his plays across continents; his only attempt at writing for cinema is an avant-​gardist transnational exemplar with an American director, Alan Schneider, and star actor Buster Keaton as the single protagonist of his 18-​minute Film. Avikunthak is from north India who grew up in Calcutta in the east, and lives between India (where he shoots his films, usually two or three simultaneously) and Rhode Island, where he teaches Film Studies. His films are in two languages, Hindi and Bengali (Antaral, his short film, uses both), which are subtitled for his international audiences. Avikunthak, in his aesthetic encounter with Beckett’s dramatic writings, brings about a transcultural transformation of both form and content while holding closely the basic tenets of the plays so that the conjunctions and disjunctions are both apparent, making for the politics of his aesthetics. In Antaral, while the echoes of Beckett’s Come and Go are deliberate and obvious, Avikunthak adds not merely the visible local ‘difference’ of the Hindu religious/​superstitious ritual of ‘dandi-​kata’ –​a trail by which young women prostrate themselves full length on the road and move forward marking distance covered each time by their bodies laid lengthwise flat on the ground, an anticipatory penance for wish-​fulfilment –​but also adds memories through palimpsestic connections between the filmmaker and his fictitious women protagonists in a salute to nostalgia. In contrast to Beckett’s directions for Come and Go, which indicate that there should be no specificities of location, and that even the bench on which the three women sit should hardly be seen, Avikunthak’s Antaral is shot in his ancestral house and his three protagonists, Aditi, Ashwini and Kuheli, are played by close members of his family. Their Beckettian sequences of mournfully sitting on a bench together suspended in time and space, whispering terrible secrets and invoking their lost childhoods almost wordlessly, are

112  Brinda Bose interpellated by the film’s location in Avikunthak’s home and family, as well as by interludes of games the girls played together as children against the familiar chants of Bengali limericks, rhyming songs and nonsense verse. In correspondence with Arka Chattopadhyay, Avikunthak has said of his film: I did not want to make a film that simply mimicked the structure that Beckett had constructed. I wanted to experiment with the narrative. I wanted to fragment it; to rupture it; to produce an ambiguous emotion. I wanted to push the polysemic narrative intrinsic to the play to further its disenchantment. (Chattopadhyay 2017, 403) There are both ruptures and linear progression in the conversation that Avikunthak’s film sets up with Beckett’s written text. Beckett’s play even has a diagram to demonstrate the way in which the three women link hands while sitting on the bench. Between this literary text for dramatic performance and a short film, between the three women in each ‘text’ who enact the same dialogues and silences in different languages and forms, and then between the starkness and bareness of one dramaticule and its echoes in the other challenged and subverted by interpolations of colour, noise, ritual, game, chant, song and play, falls the shadow: the shadow of lineage as well as the shadow of its subversion. In walking the treacherous line between these two, Avikunthak, I suggest, stays true to the spirit of the avant-​gardists he pits himself against, who were pledged to fragment and rupture narratives and to produce what he well describes as “an ambiguous emotion”. Samuel Beckett’s literary work also sits on various margins that nebulously separate prose from poetry, meaning from non-​meaning, silence from speech –​they are not either or both, they are neither. It is this third space of expression that the avant-​garde continually reaches out to, this extra-​terrestrial, extra-​terrible space of moving beyond by moving ahead, a vanguardism as outrageous and dangerous as it is promising. Beckett’s literary fragment ‘neither’ captures this liminal beauty and horror: TO AND FRO in shadow from inner to outershadow from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again beckoned back and forth and turned away heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other unheard footfalls only sound till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other

Beckett and Avikunthak  113 then no sound then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither unspeakable home.

(1997, 509)

The publication history of ‘neither’ tells a tale that serves well as an appendix to this moment of trembling outside of two worlds: it had regularly been published as a poem with line breaks, but when British publisher John Calder was going to add it to his Collected Poems, Beckett objected because he considered it a short story. In the work of these two artists belonging to different times and locations, I think through their connections and disconnections via this engagement with the ‘neither’ of form, content, thought, intention and imagination. Beckett’s obsessive formulation “imagination dead imagine” holds the three markers that may be indicative of this engagement, the noun and verb forms, imagine and imagination, and the connector, “dead”, which sits like a dead-​weight and a death-​wish between the passive and active forms of imagining. Each of the texts of literature and film that I am touching upon today is signified by time, passed and passing. In each there is a waiting –​for death or for a new life, sometimes a transformation from a wait for death into a release that identifies another beginning. But hope is minimal, just as the aesthetic is minimalist. The mood that knots Beckett’s two plays, the well-​ known Waiting for Godot (1949) and the little-​known ‘dramaticule’, Come and Go, to Avikunthak’s two films based on these, Kalkimanthankatha (The Churning of Kalki, 2015) and Antaral (Endnote, 2005), is strangely elegiac, though worked out through shifting and changing registers, advancing through disjunctions and miscommunications. In the case of these texts, the knotting is transnational in its basic parameters. The tonal quality that undergirds Avikunthak’s recreations of Beckett’s intense jousting with the imagination of death –​and the death of imagination –​recreates a similar sense of the elegiac even when it embraces a set of different ritualistic and affective modes that seem to lift it upwards and away from the more obvious darkness of Beckett’s texts. Beckett’s only film, titled Film (1965), directed by Alan Schneider and starring Buster Keaton, is a visualization of the same mood that he offers in much of his written work, the plays as well as his short prose. In that, Film evokes in us both a sense of déjà vu and a perception of revelation: we are struck by wonder at the tingling sensation of having known all this before, and yet astonished that Beckett’s own visualization did indeed play out in such an exemplary twinning with his literary imagination.1 Beckett begins his film with a nod to the avant-​garde master-​film, if we will: in his close-​up of the eye, he acknowledges Luis Bunuel and Salvador

114  Brinda Bose Dali’s first collaboration, En Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) –​ more specifically, its famous sequence of an eye being slit by a razor. With this horrifying reverberation, Beckett sets the focus for his 18-​ minute short film, during which our attention is continually drawn to the middle-​ aged dark-​clothed male protagonist’s refusal, or inability, to look eye to eye –​with the camera, with other passing characters, out of a window, at a sketch of a face with humongous eyes, or at himself in the mirror –​ until the final moments of the film, which become apocalyptic when he does finally stare into the director’s camera, and stares it down. I am proposing that Film, made in 1965 in transnational mode using American director and actor, can be deployed as a meta-​text to track the connections and disconnections, communications and their failures that reverberate between the transnational, trans-​generational literary and cinematic interface we are reading here. In Film, this is signified by the eye: that watches and is watched, that hides and is eluded, until the coming of the apocalyptic moment when a confrontation between the human eye and the camera eye destroys the dilemma, one swallowing up the other. In the Beckett and Avikunthak texts, literary and cinematic, there are continuous motions of seeing, gazing, not seeing, waiting to see and not wanting to see. The avant-​gardes are obsessed by the impossibility of seeing; to see and to know signifies annihilation. It is crucial that all the texts continue to wait to see, where humans engage and disengage with each other in an endless game, continually flagging the failure to communicate, or to act upon communication because of a fear, both of success and failure. In both Come and Go and Antaral, despite their diverse cultural markers, when the whispered secrets rotate between the three women and ends to rest on their interlocking hands, the gesture –​which could have implied resolution in the bond of friendship –​conveys instead the futility of attempted communication. Whispers convey inimitable truths of living and dying. After which, they can’t go on. They will go on. Beckett’s work also signifies an enthralment with art and its experimental forms, beyond any coercive relationship with the social and the moral. Nietzsche, in his revised preface to The Birth of Tragedy in 1886, had written, “For all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error” (Nietzsche 1999, 9). This ‘Dionysian’ formula, as he named it, spoke of the comic and the tragic, and by which he advised his youthful critics not to look for redemption in a higher Christian existence: “You should for the time being learn the art of consolation in this life: you should learn to laugh, my young friends, even if you wish to remain thoroughly pessimistic…” This was the spirit that Beckett responded to, this Nietzschean ‘pessimism of strength’ that perhaps gave modern literature its tragi-​comedies.

Beckett and Avikunthak  115 In his prose text Watt, Beckett writes of laughter: Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us, I mean the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless … The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh … is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs –​silence please –​at that which is unhappy. (Beckett 1953, 48) This is the laugh that we encounter often in Beckett, the one that laughs at that which is unhappy, demonstrating, over and over, I would say, a Nietzchean ‘pessimism of strength’, continually looking to art for ways to overcome the horror of a living death that is modern existence. Gilles Deleuze, when he discusses Nietzsche’s Ubermensch/​‘Overman’ of Thus Spake Zarathustra in his study titled Difference and Repetition, says: Theatre is real movement, and it extracts real movement from all the arts it employs. This is what we are told: this movement, the essence and the interiority of movement, is not opposition, not mediation, but repetition. (1995, 10) He goes on to clarify, we are not speaking of the effort of the actor who “repeats” because he has not yet learned the part. We have in mind the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the signs and masks through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles; we think of how repetition is woven from one distinctive point to another, including the differences within itself. (1995, 10) So many of Beckett’s dramatic (or non-​dramatic, if we prefer) sequences enact this repetition with differences within, in which the actors play roles which play other roles: we see this repeatedly in Waiting for Godot, and we also see this in Buster Keaton’s magnificently subdued, shuffling performance in Film. It is astonishing that through the length of the film till the very last couple of minutes, all we see is Keaton from the back in a shapeless black coat and hat; in fact, he was directed never to look at the camera. His two tasks were to cover up or get rid of all seeing eyes,

116  Brinda Bose and not see or be seen. All his movements are repetitive; this constitutes both the comic and the tragic atmosphere of the film, moving dialogically between these two senses in a pendulum swing, the repetition marking the differences within. The sign of the eye is everywhere, taking different shapes and forms, signalling other texts and picking up their fears and horrors, as in the razored eye of Bunuel and Dali’s Andalusian Dog. This is the world that the last Modernist and the first contemporary bequeathed to his successors at the turn of the century. He straddled late modernism and the early contemporary so easily that his work and his influence passed seamlessly, noiselessly on to a whole new generation of writers who carried forward the wrestle with silence and the word. Beckett had made it possible to think about the word in subtraction; it was he who had thrown at those around him and behind him that impossible maxim of a treacherous modern existence, “You must go on. I can’t go on. We must go on” (Beckett 2012, 103). He found his métier in subtracted, minimalist language. The celebrated first set of stage directions of Waiting for Godot, which is perhaps his best-​known work, published first in French in 1952, reads: A country road. A tree. Evening.

(Beckett 1956, 2)

A world of possible associations are opened up with these words for Vladimir and Estragon who will soon be spied on stage, surely as Beckett intended it with these directions –​if we see opening up as maximalist and universal, closing as minimal and specific. ‘A country road’ –​We can imagine it as a Bildungsroman/​picaresque that has been displaced; the road is an emblem of movement, towards the future and progress, but a country road may indicate a rural landscape, with no necessary sign of mobility towards development. A tree –​shows the possibility of an appointment, by providing a spatial particularity, while the indefinite article ‘A’ before tree provides less clarity. Evening –​gives us a temporal mapping, and indicates nature of light, which may be fading or gone. These are very specific stage directions, representing Beckett’s minimalism, but we are not sure what the stage might look like, following these directions. All we know is that it will be empty, but for a tree: a minimalist set, to signal the minimalist exchange that are to follow.

Beckett and Avikunthak  117 Some of the signs that we pick up from these directions point us towards markers of modern life. A country road is, first, not a living-​room –​non-​ domestic/​non-​family/​non-​private. The road itself is still, on a stage: what it signifies is a waiting. The road waits for people to walk on it or for transport vehicles to move along it. The road by itself is blankness. What is actually being viewed on the stage is a tree, by which something might happen in the evening. If there is a meeting or an encounter by the tree (as opposed to one in a living-​room for example) it may be accidental, perhaps of strangers. The title of the play, Waiting for Godot, is significant, because the stress is on the action, and here the action is a passive one, that which takes place while waiting (for Godot). This is borne out by the play, in which Godot is not sighted or met. It is also significant that the first words of the play are “Nothing to be done”. Through everything that is done, or said, on stage through the two acts of the play, this is what we are reduced to, in life and death and the time between, this recognition that finally there is really nothing to be done. And yet we wait and have encounters with friends and enemies and a whole crowd of indifferent people, and wait again. Are the encounters meaningless? Do we wish to encounter people or hide from them? We are not sure. We sit on the fence between choices that we apparently have, knowing somewhere perhaps that we really have very little choice, or none. Avikunthak’s Kalkimanthankatha transports this universally known and hailed Beckett text to India. In facile ways, this could either mean that there is an echo of sense and sentiment across geopolitical realities, and that Avikunthak is demonstrating the aesthetic and psychological relevance of Godot in India across space and time; or that he is looking to show how dissimilar apparently similar human predicaments are, by setting a Beckettian minimalist aesthetic –​of two men in the middle of nowhere waiting for everything and nothing –​against the lights and sounds of a fervid Hindu pilgrimage, the Kumbh Mela, the very epitome of communitarian excess. And that he is doing this by first mimicking and then undercutting Beckett’s legacy, showing alterity in similarity, echoes of experiences connecting people in all parts of the world even as each region and culture diverges into bewildering difference. But that would be obvious and too simple. Avikunthak is invested in experiments with form, and it is this quicksilver curiosity that leads him to take a literary text and twist and meld it into another shape in another medium, pitting various forms and experiences and histories and geographies in conflicted conversations with each other. In reply to questions I put to him in discussing his film, Avikunthak said succinctly: Theoretically, Becket emerges as a product of my Heideggerian Geworfenheit –​a sense of being thrown into the world, where

118  Brinda Bose I encountered Beckett’s text. It was a product of a cultural and political milieu of my life in Bombay and Pune during those years. Therefore the ‘anxiety of influence’, as you correctly say, is facile. For me, west and east are both zones of afflictions, as a product of my being in world. The important question for me is how I weave those zones of afflictions in creating my work… Antaral and Kalkimanthankatha are not re-​telling or adaptations or even over-​writing of literary texts, through which I am articulating an Indian epistemology… In these films I am not translating Beckett, but rather transmuting the text to construct a narrative configuration in which the original is abandoned or even exorcized. In that vacancy, a narrative formulation is injected that placidly resonates of the original as a lost fragment, but is ensconced with my universe, which is culturally, linguistically and politically peripatetic. In the process, a disjunctive work is produced that is in a constant dissonance with the original. The new that is seen is the frictions caused by this dissonance.2 In this meditation on the river and the womb –​the Holy River in which Hindu believers immerse themselves ritualistically for purification of their sins, and so, the river as womb –​the two protagonists are debating the idea of the self, and whether one is seeking to immerse oneself completely in the water, the womb, the void or searching for something in the void that will stop them from self-​destructing. It is, as they say, the eternal question. The void, the water, lies within the self, and not outside it. What is it that one is searching for, is it a reason to plunge into the void, or a reason to stall it? Avikunthak’s emphasis on dissonance, abandonment, loss, seeing the west and east as equal “zones of affliction” and his own universe as “peripatetic”, is significant in the context of ‘Prayoga’ cinema in India, which to a great extent pits itself against the ‘western’ idea of the avant-​garde, as delineated by film historian and critic Amrit Gangar. Avikunthak’s work is placed here. In offering and finding wide acceptance for the word ‘Prayoga’ in place of ‘experimental’ for a group of Indian filmmakers beginning with Ritwik Ghatak, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, Gangar says: “Unlike avant-​garde, prayōga is a non-​military word; it is, in fact, artistic and meditative”, and lays stress on aspects of Prayoga cinema that include “deep and abstract meditation, concentration of mind, contemplation of the Supreme Spirit”.3 Avikunthak, Gangar says in a caveat, prefers to see this cinema as “a theory of practice”, understanding prayoga as “a practice of experiment”. My own reading of Avikunthak’s Beckett films would place him distant from any cinema of contemplation of the Supreme Spirit or deep and abstract meditation: indeed they are abstract and meditate

Beckett and Avikunthak  119 deeply, but my understanding is that the meditation is material and existential rather than the spiritual. As Avikunthak says repeatedly, he is deliberately engaged in rupturing a form that “remains as a shell which is filled with the yolk I create …”, averring “So my practice is both a continuation and the rupturing of the form.” In reply to another question about what he does with Beckett’s texts, Avikunthak writes: Here I am taking a text that I am affectively attracted to then I transmute it within my commentarial positionality. Rather than a dialogue or a conversation, it is probably a friction. I don’t think this is a friction between a western text and an eastern intervention, but rather an expository incongruity with two individual subjectivities located in separate ontologies. My practice is not an erasure of Beckett, but as I said it is abandonment. (email to Bose 2019) This is where I would locate the avant-​garde lineage from Beckett to Avikunthak most sharply, setting aside –​or abandoning for my purposes, if you like –​the quietist tendencies of Prayoga. That it is not an erasure of Beckett but an abandonment still provides this cinematic experiment with a certain violence, and it is a violence of form, not of spirit. Avikunthak also uses a word I have offered for his work earlier, the palimpsest, a layering of artistic forms, executed with intensity, creating and revelling in the friction that the encounter generates. If there are deaths, there are afterlives of forms of writing and filmmaking that went before. Lineages are not seamless but wrought of blood and thought, in inspiration and friction both. In Kalkimanthankatha the two young men shed their clothes at the end of the film and launch pieces of cloth to float in the river and walk away naked. They have encountered not just religious madness all around them but also the Red Book and revolutionary dreams. The two young men appear to discard both and embrace a certain moment of sublime consciousness about the insignificance, and yet immense significance, of their naked bodies. They walk into the far distance, without any answers. Can we watch with equanimity their stark naked bodies as they cavort on the river bank in slow motion? Avikunthak dares us to shrink in embarrassment from this secular assertion of the material self. And yet we are also aware that at the Kumbh Mela where they almost are, saints and sadhus also wear the bare minimum of cloth, aspiring to walk naked. It is a thin line between that we walk, perhaps. The Red Book hovers in the consciousness. This may be the final disruption brought about by an aesthetic of friction, in which the naked body confronts the naked eye.

120  Brinda Bose Notes 1 www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​Pm6f​f DuE​LsE 2 Ashish Avikunthak, email to the author, 29 January 2019. 3 Amrit Gangar, “The Cinemā of Prayōga.” www.avi​kunt​hak.com/​Pray​oga%20 Webs​ite/​Ima​ges/​Cin​ema%20of%20Pray​oga.pdf

References Beckett, S. (2012). The Unnamable. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​. (1997). “Neither.” The Complete Short Prose, 1929—​1989. iBooks. New York: Grove Press. —​—​—​. (1973). Come and Go: A Dramaticule. London: Calder and Boyars. —​—​—​. (1956). Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​. (1953). Watt. New York: Grove Press. Chattopadhyay, A. (2017). “Exhausting the inexhaustible: reading the structure of Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go through Ashish Avikunthak’s Endnote.” Textual Practice 31:2, 399–​415. Deleuze, G. (1995). Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Gangar, A. “The Cinemā of Prayōga.” www.avi​kunt​hak.com/​Pray​oga%20Webs​ ite/​Ima​ges/​Cin​ema%20of%20Pray​oga.pdf Mann, Paul. (1999). ‘The Afterlife of the Avant-​ Garde’. Masocriticism. State University of New York Press. Nietzsche, F. (1999). The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramazani, J. (2009). A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

9 The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity Formation in Tanvir Mokammel’s Films Fakrul Alam

Introduction: Rethinking the Consequences of Partition from a Bangladesh Perspective Tanvir Mokammel, a Bangladeshi filmmaker, has for long been striving to induce in his viewer’s feelings that would make them revalue some of the consequences of the partition of India in 1947. He would have all concerned rethink the way religious, linguistic, and nationalistic predilections have led not only to the splitting of the subcontinent, but also to persistent human problems and widening diasporic divides. Mokammel is deeply concerned about traumas scarring whole generations, and endless human misery proliferating in a manner that seeps through the borders that created them. He agonizes in his films over fissured relationships, unsettled men and women, and seemingly moribund, or in some cases, ghettoized ways of life. A novelist as well as a filmmaker, he focuses in his works on ordinary men and women finding themselves hemmed in by arbitrarily imposed boundaries; he depicts too middle-​class people driven across such frontiers having to restart their lives with little or nothing. Mokammel is a filmmaker and writer who deserves to be much better known. My intent also is to contribute to contemporary filmic and literary attempts to bridge divides created by nation-​making, and where necessary, focus on transnational issues that should be (if it is not already!) our shared concern. In particular, I hope to explore issues arising from Mokammel’s films and his fiction that relate to national identity formation in our region in the light of key moments in its history such as the decisive partition of Bengal in 1947 and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 after a bloody liberation war. Mokammel’s films, as well as his published work, mostly represent traumas associated with these divisive, decisive movements in Bangladesh’s history, and the diasporas and marginalization of minorities that consequently ensued. With sympathy as well as insight, and alluding to classics not only of Bangladeshi literature, but also in a few cases to masterpieces of the western tradition, he traces the impact on DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-12

122  Fakrul Alam individual lives of events in the region that have unsettled seemingly moribund ways of existence, and in many cases cramped lives. In particular, my chapter will highlight Mokammel’s sympathy for subalterns, minorities, and doubly colonized or cornered sections of people in Bangladesh and India, and his filmic depictions of their travails. However, I will also be emphasizing how we in our part of the world tend to occlude memories and even shut out thoughts that would prove too much of a burden on our collective conscience as we move forward in nation-​making. Mokammel was born in 1955 in Khulna, a city bordering West Bengal that had a Hindu majority in 1947, but that fell to Pakistan’s lot due to Lord Radcliffe’s arbitrary scissor work undertaken to fulfill Lord Mountbatten’s imperious dictates. In that year, Mokammel’s father, then a magistrate in West Bengal, opted for Pakistan. His mother was a teacher in a college who believed all her life in the confluence of people, but who now saw neighborhoods repeatedly riven by politically induced partitions. She would react to their consequences by doing what she could for the afflicted. What appeared to affect Mokammel most in his childhood are memories of riots such as the one that took place in the subcontinent in 1964 after the alleged theft of the prophet’s hair from Srinagar’s Hazrat Bal Mosque, as well as the sight of Hindu families, among whom were school and neighborhood friends, leaving Khulna one after the other. These unhappy memories exacerbated Mokammel’s concern at the slowly diminishing space for secularist thinking in independent Bangladesh, although in the pristine state of its constitution, the country had made secularism one of the four pillars of its constitution. He was bothered too that our commercial films and mainstream media narratives tended to ignore people drastically affected because of their religious or linguistic identities by the events of 1947 and 1971. Mokammel’s father had at one time been posted in the sub-​divisional town of Narail in the southern part of what was then East Pakistan. Once he had met a Hindu lawyer, who had vowed to him never to leave his house on a bank of the River Chitra, although so many of his co-​ religionists were then leaving the province because of wave after riot-​ induced panic wave. These memories of displaced lives, as well as festering or intensifying psychic wounds and unending suffering of minorities subsequent to partition, were seemingly occluded by most people in these parts later on. This was because after Bangladesh’s birth, people of Mokammel’s generation had to contend with incidences of mass genocide and rape of women during its liberation war of 1971; such traumas overcast earlier ones. Partly, too, the increasingly majoritarian mentality of Bangladeshis induced them to overlook narratives of people who had to leave and made them forget or marginalize their predicaments after a while. There were too men and women who had sought refuge from riots

The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity  123 in partitioning India in the 1940s, casting their lot with the Pakistanis in East Pakistan in 1971, and now leading constricted lives in camps, seemingly forever. They had opted out of Bangladesh and did not seem to matter to Bangladeshis anymore. Politically sensitized by such events and deeply influenced by Marxist thought, Mokammel joined the Communist Party of Bangladesh. He had graduated from the English department of the University of Dhaka in the late 1970s but had decided to work in rural areas for his party. He was eventually disillusioned by communism as he found it in practice but would remain forever influenced by his contact with the conditions of deprived, cornered and displaced minorities forced to eke out an existence in rural or remote areas. In addition, his father’s posting in a border area at one period of the decade had exposed him to the misery of refugees who had settled in such areas subsequent to partition. In particular, he witnessed then the difficult conditions of Hindus who had settled on either side of Jessore Road and the rail line connecting these areas to Kolkata. Mokammel had become part of the film society movement in Bangladesh by the 1980s, but at the turn of the century he opted to become an independent filmmaker. He first directed some documentaries, treating subjects highlighting his progressive and secular interests, and underscoring his belief in drawing attention to the condition of minorities in a nation supposedly based on secular principles. In particular, he felt that he had to show to his Bangladeshi viewers something that they would not normally pay attention to –​the misery of many Bangladeshi Hindus forced out of Pakistan into India, and the dismal living conditions quite a few of them were experiencing in their new habitations. How could Bangladeshi identities be formed optimally by ignoring them and the consequences of 1947 and 1971 taken in their entirety? Mokammel’s first feature film, Nodir Nam Modhumoti, was made in 1995 and was devoted to the Bangladesh war of liberation. His second filmic effort, Chitra Nodir Paare, saw him focus on partition and depict the story of the Hindu lawyer refusing to leave his home on the banks of the beautiful Chitra River despite the 1964 riots’ fall out. Arguably his best feature film, this 1999 venture merited all the major awards at the National Film Festival held that year, including that of Best Director. He was similarly successful in his next filmic venture in 2001 with Lal Shalu, a film based on a famous novel about religious charlatanism by the very secular writer Syed Waliullah. Other feature films by Mokammel revealed his continued interest in the liberation war of 1971, and in minorities and their ways of life. Among his many documentaries, let me mention only the major ones relevant to my chapter. In the 1993 documentary Ekti Golir Atyakahini he depicted the denizens of a lane in old Dhaka housing Hindu families

124  Fakrul Alam of a community who specialized in making shakhas or bangles out of shells who had survived religious and caste prejudice and communal violence for generations and appeared indomitable in spirit. In 2005 he directed Karnuphalir Kanna, a documentary on indigenous hilly people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of southeast Bangladesh displaced by the big Karnaphuli Dam and having to contend daily with Bengali settlements imposed on them, first by the Pakistani government and then by lowland Bangladeshis. In 2011, he directed yet another documentary on the Bangladesh War of Liberation based on his research about that year’s horrific happenings. In the rest of my chapter, however, I will concentrate on only three films by Mokammel because I feel they represent his works and concerns regarding partitions best: the 1999 feature film, Chitra Nadir Pare and two documentaries. The first of these is the 2007 film Swapnabhumi or the Promised Land on the continuing predicament of people from Bihar confined to camps in Bangladesh for two generations now. The second is the 2017 mega documentary, Shimantorekha or “the Borderland” that traces the fate of Bengali Hindus in various parts of India consequent to partition and their thoughts about the country and people they had left behind. Framing Mokammel’s Films on Partition and 1971 Theoretically Influenced by Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel, The Shadow Lines, I believe that it is the task of the critics of partition literatures to trace and make others reflect about the “shadow lines” that unite as well as divide people after arbitrary lines are imposed on them, such as ones that were drawn posthaste on the Indian subcontinent map in 1947. Without much consideration for the people affected afterwards and accentuating gender, class and caste divisions, they further complicated the turbulent situation in India created by the anti-​British movement. Awareness of such problems shapes Mokammel’s works as well as those of other post-​partition writers and film makers. One remembers here Ritwick Ghatak’s partition trilogy, novels and memoirs where Partition figures quite prominently in works such as Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Purba Paschim (2000) or Hasan Azizul Huq’s Agun Pankhi (2006), or poems such as those by the West Bengal poets Sankho Ghosh, who muses in verse over having left East Bengal. The concept of “shadow lines” is very relevant as well in understanding Mokammel’s treatment of the people of Bihar stranded and abandoned in Bangladesh after the cataclysmic break up of Pakistan in 1971 in his film Swapnobhumi. Avtar Brah’s lead piece in the 2018 collection of essays Beyond Borders and Boundaries titled “Borders, Boundaries and the Question

The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity  125 of Commonality and Connectivity” reminds us helpfully of the “inequities and inequalities” created by boundaries everywhere and of the politics of exclusion they reflect (4). She stresses in addition the importance of the “radicalized and ethicized ideologies that are likely to spill into bloodshed” when boundaries are imposed by one group of people over others (6). Quoting Etienne Balibar, she emphasizes how borders become “instruments of differentiation” and “enacted practices” and induce “belief in common ancestry, shared destinies, attachment to a ‘homeland’, and a sense of belonging on the basis of language, religion, or culture” (6) Brah sees borders as perpetrators of “global inequalities” that “have a long history embedded within practices of colonialism and imperialism,” but that have “assumed new forms in today’s ‘postcolonial’ world, marked by the emergence of contemporary neo-​imperialisms” (13). She believes that it is the task of conscientious postcolonialists to sensitize themselves and others to issues such as “the plight of migrants” and “interrogate historical and contemporary imaginations” to draw further attention to the subject and its ramifications (14). The “inequities and inequalities,” created directly or indirectly and in the short or long term by borders, the violence that flares up as a consequence, nationalist practices that promote feelings of “us” and “others,” prioritizing the former and cornering the latter, the yearning for a lost homeland, and the dismal condition in which politically pressurized migrants lead their lives, are dealt with thoughtfully and with sympathy by Mokammel in many of his films. A survey of his films makes it abundantly clear that it has been his intention throughout his career as a filmmaker to problematize our assumptions about the others in our midst and direct the spotlight on men and women majorities tend to overlook, whether willfully or unintentionally. In attempting to frame my discussion of Mokammel’s films, I find Natasha Master’s 2009 Carleton University dissertation’s introductory considerations on “collective trauma and the cinematic representations of history” very useful as well as Brah’s perspective. She points out in her work that in the subcontinent, mainstream media tended for a long time to churn out “narratives of unity and homogeneity.” She notes that while “Partition films do exist,” they are relatively few in number (Master 2009, 2). Master sees this as symptomatic of “post-​traumatic repression” (2). She believes that going against the tendency of “silencing, or erasure, of a multiplicity of private memories on a significant scale” (3) is crucial. She is drawn to recent partition films, literature and scholarly works instead because they focus on the scars created by partition and highlight the “complicity of the government, military, and law enforcement authorities.” Such films have for Master the laudable function of “giving voice to that which has been forced into silence, [and] of articulating collective

126  Fakrul Alam trauma and its memory, and of challenging the inherited memory and history of the India–​Pakistan conflict” (5). In discussing the three films chosen for close reading in what follows, I intend to benefit from Master’s introductory discussion of her theoretical assumptions to point out instances of Tanvir Mokammel’s filmic projections of lives of people affected permanently by traumatic periods of history in India or Bangladesh. I will consider his films as endeavors to bring to attention what Bangladeshis in particular prefer not to view or reflect upon. His films are designed to give voice to many of those people who are either forgotten, elided over, repressed or silenced. Mokammel, like many film makers who have eschewed popularity and prefer to shore up alternative versions of history in their representations, has striven to create public history out of lives lived pathetically by partition’s victims, often in border areas or camps situated in remote locations. Chitra Nodir Pare and Coming and Going

Tanvir Mokammel translates the title of his film, Chitra Nodir Pare, as “Quite Flows the River Chitra,” evoking intertextually Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokov’s late 1920s work, And Quiet Flows the Don. While Sholokov’s massive work is truly epic in conception and spread and Mokammel’s film is only a little less than two hours long, he is bent like the Russian novelist to depict the way individual lives and relationships are affected by internecine conflicts. In particular, Mokammel depicts in this film the closing years of the life of Shashikanta Sengupta, a small-​town Hindu lawyer in partitioned Bengal in the 1960s, who has decided to stay where he is by the banks of the river Chitra that flows past Narail town, even though increasing communal tension, riots and insecurity have been forcing people of his community to leave the beautiful rural setting. Mokammel begins his film by showing wild ducks in flight migrating freely, not bound to the concept of a home. Shashikanta is tied to Narail and determined never to leave the town, even though every now and then he keeps encountering Hindus leaving, who wonder if he too will be leaving like them. One after other, they opt to depart for India because of the uncertainty about their lot in post-​partition East Pakistan. The Hindu zemindar of his locality leaves; other professional Hindus such as physicians and lawyers had already begun to depart from the picturesque Chitra banks as well. The question that continually confronts the people of the Hindu community recurs in Tanvir’s film repeatedly because of the town’s madman who confronts everyone he meets manically with the question, “Are you going or coming”? Most Hindus of the locality eventually go away and Shashikanta is forced quite early in the course of the film to send his son away as well, but he resists till the end any thought

The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity  127 of departing himself. That one is in the longer view always already in a state of flux (like the river Chitra) or flight (like the swans) is a metaphysical proposition alluded to in the novel, but in the short term it is the animosity created by partition politics that Mokammel depicts as upsetting the communal harmony that had existed in the area for ages and was forcing Hindus to leave. Such politics, and those who were taking advantage of them to disturb lives and relationships, and unsettle minorities, are gestured at in the film. Then, too, Mokammel emphasizes the materialism and covetousness that guide at least a few of the Muslim inhabitants of Narail and make them prey on the increasingly defenseless Hindu population, though there are many Muslims who try to ally themselves with the likes of Shashibrata and respect him as well. However, while Shashibrata may have vowed never to leave his ancestral homeland, there were vulture-​eyed Muslim neighbors ready to prey even on a relatively secure man like him. Soon the more vulnerable Hindu homes get brick-​batted. There is even an incidence of the rape of a Hindu woman. Things get much worse when riots erupt in neighboring Khulna town subsequent to the ones that had taken place in both India and Pakistan in 1964 after the purported theft of the prophet’s hair from Srinagar’s Hazrat Bal mosque. In the absence of adequate protection and the disinclination of the state machinery to do anything much to protect its Hindu minorities, the film shows them leaving for Kolkata, first in a trickle when the relatively affluent, higher caste ones can depart because they are in a position to exchange their property with Muslims from West Bengal willing to swap with them. But the trickle soon becomes a stream, and then after 1964 a river of refugees traverses borders. Kolkata is referred to as swelling with refugees from East Pakistan. Soon middle and then scheduled caste Hindus flee across the border as well. Increasingly, it is clear that most Hindus got the feeling that they would not be able to stay in East Pakistan much longer. Clearly, the line imposed by Radcliffe’s commission had ensured that they would not be welcome in the country of their birth in the long term even if they were like Shashibrata in not wanting to leave. At the end, the broken Shashibrata collapses. After his death, his daughter and sister leave the ancestral home forever. The sad ending of Chitra Nodir Pare intertextually evokes Satyajit Ray’s Panther Panchali, for the melancholic theme music, the sight of a homestead being deserted and its inmates taking to the road connect Mokammel’s film with Ray’s one. The theme music is followed by a Tagore song whose lyrics wonder where the road that one finds oneself fated to enter in course of one’s life will lead to, and when the wanderings of homeless ones would end. But more tragic emotions are evoked in the concluding sequence of the film, albeit ironically, when the bus carrying

128  Fakrul Alam Shashibrata’s family members leaves for a quite unknown world to the voice of a child reciting a popular children’s rhyme about the world as a bioscope and the British Viceroy having sent an invitation that will result in travels and travails that will lead the voyagers to Kolkata to presumably see him in his opulence. Despite the sadness of the ending, however, Mokammel plays in his sound track, as the film credits are being exhibited in the last few minutes of the film, Tagore’s song “Banglar Mati, Banglar Mati,”1 as if to express a fervent prayer for the wrongs of partition to end and the borderlines separating the two Bengals revoked. In making Chitra Nodir Paare, Mokammel is thus bent on reminding his viewers in Bangladesh of the cost in human misery of partition and the wrong done to Hindu Bengalis of the region in the province. He underscores too the Islamization that had been spurred there because of aggressive policies adopted by successive Muslim League and/​or military governments, calculated to uproot Hindus so that land grabbers and the Muslim bourgeoisie could have a field day in East Pakistan. But it appears to be the case as well that Mokammel is reminding his contemporary Bangladeshi audience at the turn of millennium, who have had democracy restored to them a few years back in 1991, of the dangers to not only liberal values, but also to minorities that had been posed by military governments that took over Bangladesh after the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. These rulers had the country under their grip for almost two decades. In that period of time, they had taken a course that threatened the harmonious existence of Hindus and Muslims once again, although such an existence is a desideratum for Mokammel and many others. By focusing on such issues, Mokammel is clearly alerting his viewers so that they can learn from the past to avoid further tragedies such as the ones associated with the riots of the partitioning of the subcontinent, or the Hazrat Bal mosque incident in 1964. His quite lyrical film about a beautiful river bank town threatened and changed forever by partition-​ induced divisions thus appears designed to not only direct attention to his Bangladeshi audience to the wrongs that had been done to the minority population and were occluded in the collective memory of Bangladeshis, but also to alert them so that they could learn from past mistakes. Such knowledge, he indicates through his film, is necessary to avoid further injustice to these and other people in a nation’s midst, and to risk upsetting the traditional harmony that existed between peoples in such settings permanently. Shimantorekha –​Partition’s Hindu Bengali Victims

Though chronologically, Shimantorekha or “The Borderline” is the last of the three films I should discuss, I will now concentrate on this almost

The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity  129 two-​ and-​ a-​ half-​ hour-​ long documentary at this juncture, instead of the earlier Swapnobhumi or “The Promised Land,” since this recent work takes Tanvir back to the subject of Hindu Bengalis forced directly or indirectly to leave their homeland. Starting with pre-​partition riots refugees, moving on to refugees who left East Pakistan later because of fundamentalist provocateurs, and still later on to the ones part of the mass migration resulting from the genocide of 1971, and then the refugees leaving India afterwards because of economic or political reasons or other motives, in Shimantorekha Mokammel presents to his Bangladeshi audience what they have been occluding for generations –​the trauma of Hindu migrants forced out by religious ideological considerations, or because of well-​ orchestrated political ploys aimed at exclusion and encroachment on minority property. Mokammel also draws attention through Shimantorekha to the continuing plight of vulnerable groups of refugees living in India for decades by now. He depicts too their yearning for the homeland they had left behind and the dismal conditions they have had to negotiate after being uprooted from East Pakistan. Mokammel, in other words, wants his Muslim Bangladeshi viewers to sensitize themselves through the film to memories they would rather suppress. He is bent on going against the silencing of memory or the desensitization of conscience of the majority simply because they are so complacent about being majoritarian. Shimantorekha connects with the much earlier Chitra Nodir Pare too through Tagore’s song “Banglar Mati Banglar Jol,” whose instrumental version plays during the opening film credits. Mokammel chooses to translate the title itself as “barbed wire”; we are shown a particularly tangled wired fence at the outset. He clearly has in mind the vivid and disturbing image of Felani, a girl who was shot dead by Indian border forces while trying to cross a barbed wire fence, something featured toward the end of the film. The opening epigraphic lines project some dismal but pertinent statistics –​2 million Muslims had crossed to East Pakistan and 5.8 million Hindus to India in 1947 alone! The credits part of the documentary film ends with the question Tanveer intends to explore through a film timed with the 70th anniversary of the 1947 partition of Bengal –​who gained and who lost through it? Later, we hear him state how partition keeps “haunting” him. Mokammel feels it is his mission as a film maker to stir the consciences of his viewers yet again as well as his own memory to understand why such calamities were allowed to take place, and to trace their long-​term consequences such as the eviction of minorities and their consequent predicaments. Should this be the case if national identity formation is to proceed positively? He, for one, must answer the questions raised at the beginning of his film. Shimantorekha is clearly another instance of the obsessive nature of his

130  Fakrul Alam journey to answer them throughout his oeuvre –​whether through feature films, documentaries or novellas. To that end, in Shimantorekha Mokammel takes his viewers successively to a small district town in northern Bangladesh called Santahar and refugee camps set up in West Bengal after the partition such as Cooper’s, Dhubulia, Ashokenagar and Bhadrakali camps. Not content in documenting the lot of refugees in the state, he takes his viewers farther away –​to the Dhandakaranya Refugee Settlement in Madhya Pradesh and settlements in Chattisgarh and Uttarakhand. But Mokammel goes even further geographically, and beyond such barren or jungle territories, crossings the Bay of Bengal to depict Hindu East Bengali refugees in the lush green Andaman Islands. He takes us as well to Jadavpur, Kolkata, where many residents of what was once a refugee colony have now settled into comfortable middle-​class lives. He stages for his film the return of a few better off Hindu migrants to India to their villages in Bangladesh so that he could capture their emotions on the screen on their homecoming as they meet relatives they had left behind in addition to the Muslim neighbors they once had. But he interviews as well Bangladeshi Muslims who ruminate on relationships lost because of partition and one particular Bangladeshi Muslim who returns with the filmmaker to his village in Basirhat, West Bengal. He also interviews prominent intellectuals from both sides of the divide who had been forced to move and who articulate their anguish at the events of 1947 and its legacies. Throughout, Mokammel provides images of barbed wires, indicating that such fences go against nature. In the process, he reminds one of Frost’s narrator in his poem, “Mending Wall” who had noted famously that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (Frost, www.poetr​yfou​ ndat​ion.org/​poems/​44266/​mend​ing-​wall), although many a neighbor keep insisting on one! Build a wall and create perpetual suspicion and tension between neighbors is what Mokammel is suggesting through these interviews. Mokammel vividly documents in his film the mental, physical and financial sufferings of the partition’s refugees. He indicates that most were caught unaware in 1947 and delineates the labor and stress that migration entitled. He also names a few Hindu and Muslim politicians who had been complicit in the division of Bengal as well as ones who had tried to prevent it. The riots that preceded the creation of the border and its human price make him wonder, “Was an alternative to partition possible?” In the course of the film he tries to find an answer to the inevitable question, “Can the divide created by partition be bridged again somehow, or will it prove to be an ever-​widening one?” He also wonders out loud, “Did anyone of the perpetrators of partition bother to think about its human costs?”

The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity  131 As if by way of illustration, he reminds us of the inhuman conditions in which refugees have lived for generations, and of the plight of widows and women without families in camps, or in what are now called “permanent” settlements, and in shanties on either side of the rail track leading from Bongaon to Calcutta. However, in the Andamans he shows refugees from Bengal settled reasonably comfortably in their new island homes. There are others who tell him here and elsewhere that they have no time or need for nostalgia about the land they had left behind and found no point in ruminating on a lost homeland. Despite the successes of some settlers and their indifferent attitudes to the forsaken homeland, Tanvir Mokammel leaves audiences with the overwhelming impression that barbed wire fences are recipes for disaster; much better to let people move freely like the birds in flight that he shows at one point of his long documentary film on the partition of Bengal, and as he did at the opening sequence of Chita Nadir Pare. The human cost has been too high, as evidenced in the riots of 1947, 1950, 1964 and the genocide of 1971. The image of Felani, the Bangladeshi Muslim girl shot by an Indian Border Security Force while trying to cross a barbed wire boundary where she got stuck for a while even after death, reveals to Mokammel how humans could be deprived of the freedom migratory birds enjoy. At the end of Shimantorekha, one does not remember most the partition success stories in it –​they are few and far between is what he seems to suggest –​but is moved mainly by the pain and agony it has been causing for decades to not a few minorities on both sides of the fence. The purpose of Shimantorekha then seems to draw a connection between Radcliffe’s arrogant and ignorant border mappings, Mountbatten’s imperious and impatient dictates, and the conflicts and traumas created by them. The film shows that gender, class and caste would further add to the woes of refugees. Mokammel underscores what Bangladeshi nationalist discourses tend to minimize and what he feels is crucial to healthy national identity formation –​the commonalty of cultures. Recognition of this fact can lead to permanent healing of the wounds of partition and promote transnational movements that are natural like those of birds in flight. He would not like barbed wires set up that loudly signify that they are props of differentiation; he would like his viewers to listen to voices that are not heard and expose them to memories that are not recorded in official narratives. To forget or ignore is not to move toward healing is what Mokammel is bent on suggesting through this and other films. Articulating what has too often been unheard or repressed is the task he has taken on in post-​independence Bangladesh almost entirely on his own.

132  Fakrul Alam Swapnobhumi –​a Permanently Deferred Promised Land

Swapnobhumi, the last of Tanvir Mokammel’s films on partition and its aftereffects, seems to have been composed to shake Bangladeshis out of their complacency about being a country where the wounds of partition had been healed by the emergence of an independent country after the bloody war of liberation of 1971. What Mokammel focuses his lens on this time are refugee camps that have remained within Bangladesh after its birth and the lot of people –​mostly from Bihar –​who had migrated to East Pakistan after partition but had sided aggressively with the Pakistani occupation army in 1971. Pakistan was their promised land, but it is a dream that seemed to have been deferred permanently for most of them after the emergence of Bangladesh. It is Mokammel’s mission in Swapnobhumi to turn the spotlight on the people who have been left stranded; it is the narratives of their shattered lives that he presents in this documentary made 40 years after partition in 2007. Once again, he seems bent on interrogating the collective memory of Bangladeshis about the refugees. However, this time they are not across the border but in their midst, a large group of people who seemed to have reached a dead end in their lives. These are people who have been abandoned by the Pakistani state that they had believed in, and the state they felt they should have been taken to after it had been truncated permanently in the Bangladeshi war of independence. Unfortunately, they are treated with suspicion, resentment or indifference by most people of the country they feel stuck in. In other words, in Swapnobhumi, Mokammel once again continues to narrate the painful history of partition’s aftereffects by focusing on another of its festering collective wounds. It is in this film that he seemed to have had hit upon the filmmaking strategy he had adopted at much greater length in Shimantorekha ten years later, making use of camp visits and conversation with their inmates, weaving people and places and the past and the present to give us insights into the accumulated misery and hopelessness of two generations of refugees living after the birth of Bangladesh in ghetto-​like environments. The more than 160,000 men and women quartered in camps are to Mokammel another instance of the devastation partition left in its wake for so many people in all the three countries created by it. The interviews Mokammel presents are a record of excesses committed by both Bangladeshis and Urdu-​speaking refugees; initially by the non-​ Bengali migrants from India who follow the lead of the soldiers from West Pakistan during 1971, and after their independence by Bangladeshis. Feeling themselves stranded, the Urdu-​speaking allies of the Pakistanis have been dreaming and hoping of repatriation to their promised land. Almost

The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity  133 all had opted for Pakistan after Bangladesh had become independent, but by the time the film had been made in 2007, most had realized that history had abandoned them, and the pledges made by its government to take them would not be honored. The question now appeared to be a simple one: would the Urdu-​ speaking community of Bangladesh who had opted for Pakistan after partition and had sided with the Pakistani government in 1971, only to be stuck in abysmal conditions in Bangladesh, choose to stay that way, or opt to become regular citizens of the country? A 2003 Bangladeshi High Court ruling had made it easier for them to be Bangladeshi citizens. Some members of the community had then decided to cast their lot with the Bangladeshis, but others were in limbo still. Consequently, they are neither Indians, nor Pakistanis, and not even Bangladeshis in Bangladesh –​dependent first on United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) and now entirely on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), adrift, afraid of losing their language and culture. Mokammel uses the lyrics of an Urdu song to project their emotions –​“My boat is adrift/​Where will I find port?” He ends the film hopefully with a particularly moving interview of a father and a daughter. He had on him a scar that he displays and explains was a result of an assault on his body in 1971 –​emblem of the scar the year left behind permanently for so many. But his daughter is full of hope and appears destined to claim her place in Bangladesh –​a citizen by inclination as well as birth. Nevertheless, one leaves Mokammel’s films with a sense of shock –​how can we human beings treat each other so? Conclusion Swapnobhumi, then, is another instance of how as a filmmaker Tanvir Mokammel has opted to choose an alternative tradition of film making in Bangladesh to concentrate on cinematic representations of Bangladesh’s history that have do with reviewing the traumas of the past, focusing on the way they have been occluded in official narratives and ignored in mainstream movies that prefer to concentrate on depicting the path to national identity formation as full only of triumphant landmarks and not one that is rock-​strewn, wobbly for its travelers, and even perilous for some groups within the country. Lives left out of mainstream histories that have become subject to oblivion or marginalization are what preoccupies Mokammel in the films discussed. Directing such films to problematize dominant narratives of unity, homogeneity and triumphs that dominate mainstream partition stories, he is intent on making his audience look at the defeated or handicapped “others” that seemed to have been conveniently blotted out from their memory, or confined to dark corridors of their minds. His

134  Fakrul Alam is an endeavor to recover such memories by crossing borders and going to remote or confined places geographically or historically. He believes that we must come to terms with the past through healing festering sores in the present and looking beyond our mind-​forged manacles if we are going to move forward in national identity formation positively and come to terms with partition’s consequences permanently. We can place Mokammel, therefore, in the tradition of filmmaking of recent decades that have carried forward what a filmmaker like Ritwick Ghatak had begun: depict the disturbing episodes of partition’s history and represent their potential to disrupt mindscapes and wreck lives. This is the tradition of truth-​seeking guided by a belief in cultural pluralism, but also the road to the future in national identity formation. Remembering the past in a kind of cathartic gesture, and re-​visioning it for another phase of subcontinental history where inter-​community and transnational healing can take place, are the priorities of these alternative film makers. Let me conclude by underscoring the fact that Mokammel’s is a maverick stance in contemporary Bangladesh. He is only one of a handful of our writers and artists who have dedicated their lives and honed their craft to healing partition’s wounds across the nations of the subcontinent, to make us not forget and come to terms with what we have preferred to not remember, to make silent voices speak on screen and to offer us microhistories through the documentary tradition as well as through his feature films, novels and at least a few poems. He is one of the unacknowledged artistic legislators of our part of the subcontinent and deserves to be better known across it. Note 1 Banglar Mati Banglar Jol Let Bengal’s soil, waters, air, and its produce Be made holy; bless them, bless them all, O Lord! Let Bengal’s homes, fairs, forests and fields Be made holy; bless them, bless them all, O Lord! Let Bengali vows, hopes, and deeds all come true, And let the Bengali language blossom, O Lord! Let Bengali hearts and minds, and all Bengali siblings In Bengali homes become one, O Lord! (My translation)

References Brah, A. (2018). “Borders, Boundaries and the Question of Community and Connectivity.” Beyond Borders and Boundaries: Diasporic Images and

The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity  135 Re-​presentations in Literature and Cinema. Mumbai: Indian Diaspora Centre, University of Mumbai. 3–​18. Frost, R. (1914). “Mending Wall.” Poetry Foundation. www.poetr​yfou​ndat​ion. org/​poems/​44266/​mend​ing-​wall Master, N. (2009). “Representing the Unpresentable: Bollywood Partition Films.” [Unpublished dissertation]. Carleton University.

Part III

Nation, Cultural Histories, Trans-​Nation The Literary Imagi-​Nation

10 Region, Nation, Border Histories of Land and Water Supriya Chaudhuri

At the close of his great novel of rural life, Hāṇsulī Bāṇker Upakathā (The Tale of Hansuli Bend, published between 1946 and 1951), Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay employed a metaphor that appeared to reflect both upon the relation between aesthetic forms and upon those between region, nation, and trans-​nation. He likened the central feature of his novel’s topography, the slender, unpredictable Kopai river, to the tale itself, the upakathā, and saw it as joining up, through the sweep of momentous events, with history’s Ganges. And while the historic flood of 1943 (1350 in the Bengali calendar) that irrevocably changed the Kopai’s course, washed away the railway-​line, obliterated the ‘goose-​neck’ (hāṇsulī) Bend,1 and flattened the Kahar village on its banks might be thought of as an act of nature, Tarashankar leaves us in no doubt that human agents have also had a part to play in merging the tale with history, upakatha with itihāsa, the minor rural watercourse, the Kopai river, with the great stream that flows through the larger Indian landmass: The story of the flood is not a tale, it is history. This was the flood of 1350 –​1943 in the English calendar. The flood of 1350 in which the rail-​line was swept away –​that flood! That flood is recorded in history. The flooding of the Damodar, the Ajay, the Mayurakshi, the Kopai rivers didn’t just sweep the rail-​lines away, it swept away the settings for countless little tales, like Hansuli Bend: it changed them forever. History doesn’t recognize the Lord’s word, the sport of Kalarudra, Hari’s rule. It calls these events sudden, fortuitous. Let history say what it will: whatever the truth of the matter is, the Kahars hold these to be true. (Bandyopadhyay 2015, 283) This moment, we realize, is one when both landscape and demography of rural Bengal were fatally transformed by historic events. The greater

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-14

140  Supriya Chaudhuri catastrophe, not mentioned by Tarashankar but hanging like a dark shadow over the novel’s immediate future, is the famine of 1943, or paṇcāśer manvantar, which caused some four million deaths in the province of Bengal and left an unhealed trauma in the body of the future nation-​ state. But even before this, unaware of what the future held, the Kahars could never have returned to their old ways, since their lives and habits had changed. On the one hand, the cutting down of the bamboo grove by wartime profiteers has allowed the flood to sweep unchecked through their village; on the other, the Kahars themselves have exchanged work in the fields for paid labour in factory and railyard in the nearby town: Instead of earth, dust, mud, they are smeared with oil and soot; for the work of plough and scythe they have taken up hammer, crowbar, and pick-​axe. (Bandyopadhyay 2015, 284) And in the very last lines of the novel, their rebel leader Karali, pick-​axe in hand, searching for land to build a new settlement, is busy cutting a path, Tarashankar says, for the Kopai of the tale to merge with the Ganga of history. This is a complex, ambivalent close to a magnificently layered and ambitious novel, one that spans the entire period of India’s transition to nationhood, since it first appeared in 1946 and underwent numerous revisions right up to 1951. It straddles the critical phase of India’s accession to political independence in 1947, from the violence of its Partition to the adoption of its written Constitution: in a sense therefore, it addresses the time and process of nation formation. Dedicating the book to his friend and mentor, the poet Kalidas Ray, Tarashankar presented it as a tale of Rāḍh, a region of western Bengal containing the writer’s own district of Birbhum through which the Kopai river of the novel flows (Bandyopadhyay 2015, 3). The novel’s opening pages, vividly describing the Kopai and its twist, the Hansuli Bend of the title, promise something like the ‘river novel’ that constitutes a distinct subgenre of Bengali fiction, instanced in notable works by Manik Bandyopadhyay and Advaita Mallabarman. The river is a presence in the novel, a daily reality to the Kāhārs who live in a hamlet within the river’s fold and sow crops and cut bamboo on its banks; its periodic floods, like the one that washed away the British indigo plantation less than a century ago, have become part of communal memory. For even this small pocket of rural Bengal contains intricate histories of land, work and capital: within living memory the British-​owned indigo factory has yielded, first to the rent-​collecting landlords, the Chaudhuri zamindars, and after them to the small-​holding, prosperous middle castes, the Sadgop peasants of Jangal village who carry on trade and employ

Region, Nation, Border  141 the Kahars to till their land as māhindārs or kriṣāṇs. As Tarashankar tells us, the Kahars are not native to this region, though they have been settled in the crocodile, bear and wild pig-​infested hamlet of Bansbadi for generations. Brought to the indigo plantation by the British as palanquin bearers (Behārās) and bodyguards (Ātpoures), lineages that still determine their houses and marital customs (Bandyopadhyay 2015, 17–​19), they now toil in conditions of agrestic servitude, as cowherds in youth, and as bound agricultural servants in adulthood, only rarely achieving the status of bhāgjoṭedār (sharecropper) in fields owned by their Sadgop masters or by the predominantly Brahman gentry of Chandanpur (Bandyopadhyay 2015, 39, 55; Ray 1987, 713–​23). Not only has this oppressed, Dalit community (‘untouchable’ in the eyes of the local gentry as well as their own, and categorized by the socio-​legal labels of dacoity and prostitution) been dislocated from any presumed point of origin and learnt new habits as tillers of the soil, but its living rhythms, its language, music, and memory, are spelt out against the signs of a hybrid modernity: the railway train crossing the bridge, warplanes passing overhead, money changing hands. The novel tells the Kahars’ story through that of the Behara headman, Banowari Kahar (like his father Tarini, a bhagjotedar of the powerful Ghosh family of Jangal) and his struggle to contain dissensions in the village, curb the spirit of the rebellious, orphaned Karali, maintain customs such as the Charak rituals, and keep the community united against threats of outward migration to the town. Rajat Kanta Ray, reading the novel as a ‘Kahar chronicle’, notes that the Kahars in general toil at a level below the money economy (Bandyopadhyay 2015, 85–​86, 234–​35; Ray 1987, 724–​ 26), but Karali, the leader of the rebels, works for cash rather than kind at the Chandanpur railyard and draws other young Kahars to join him. Karali’s iconoclastic behaviour extends from his fearlessly entering the jungle to kill a huge snake, a Russell’s Viper that the old woman Suchand pronounces to be the village deity Kalarudra or Babathakur’s mount, to building a brick house in Bansbadi, which is razed on Banowari’s orders. By the novel’s close, the Second World War has broken out, a war that forcibly interrupts the slumber of Hansuli Bend and changes the course of the tale: ‘drawn by people’s life-​stories, it flowed into the great stream of history: it was beyond the tale’s imagining’ (Bandyopadhyay 2015, 274). Prices rise, young men leave the village to work on the railway, city folk take refuge from Japanese bombs in the countryside, traders begin to hoard grain, and we realize that this narrative looks ahead to a catastrophe more terrible even than the flood of 1943, a famine in which entire rural communities were displaced and around four million people died of hunger in the province of Bengal. I have chosen to begin with this text, not so much because of its literal articulation of the relations between region, nation, and trans-​nation

142  Supriya Chaudhuri in an Indian context, but because it seems to reflect, with surprising acuteness, on questions of ideology and form, placing a local idiom in the internationalizing frame of modernist aesthetics, allowing the lowly tale to merge into national and world literatures. Indeed, it is notable how fiction writers in this period deliberately employ humble, folk generic descriptors like upakathā, kathā, pāñcālī, carit-​mānas, and so on to frame radical modernist content. This interface, as we might describe it, between formal and material values has a further dimension in placing the task of representation at its core. Tarashankar’s self-​appointed task of capturing the life-​habits of a subaltern group is haunted by questions of language, custom, and memory. The speech of the Kahars, distinguished by phonetic and lexical features that are commented on by the novelist, can be reproduced only in part, often with an accompanying gloss. Historically, the dislocation of the Kahars from any originary community –​which might have been a language-​community –​is so far advanced that the representation of their speech is always-​already a translation. Internally, within Bengali, it appears to be a dialect, yet in conjunction with their life-​world of memory, ritual, and storytelling, it is a living reminder of their actual distance, both from their geographical roots, and from the educated Bengali gentry who were Tarashankar’s readers. Himself (at that point in his life) a socialist, a member not only of the Progressive Writers’ Association but its anti-​fascist successor, the Anti-​Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association, Tarashankar made important linguistic and ideological choices in this novel. Nevertheless, it is a work in which representation never fully succeeds in measuring up to the energy, passion, and drama of the Kahar life-​world, which we glimpse only in imagination. Yet we could not have known of it at all had the novel not mingled linguistic documentation with paraphrase, drawing the reader into a perpetually enacted struggle to reach what seems almost, but not quite, out of reach. This in linguistic terms is what Jean-​Jacques Lecercle has called the ‘remainder’, something that constantly stages ‘the return within language of the contradictions and struggles that make up the social’ (Lecercle 1990, 182). The linguistic choice is an ideological one: how does one focalize the subaltern, speak for Banowari Kahar, without becoming complicit either in his subordination, or in the instruments of colonial power that promise release to Karali? Translation, a process through which we transform and ‘naturalize’ the speech of the other, while granting its difference, is a political act. It threatens the autonomy of the other speaker, the plurality of the many-​voiced nation: yet, as the novel shows us, it is an instrument without which understanding, however imperfect, could not even commence. Many of the questions that Tarashankar raises here are central to linguistic and ethnic debates in eastern India today, while they also speak to the idea of the global modern and the aesthetic and social issues to which

Region, Nation, Border  143 it is inextricably linked: national literatures, the world literary system, the relation of centre and periphery, rural and urban, subaltern and bourgeois, migrant and native, region and nation. I will return to these issues later. The project of modernity had been a central concern of the Bengali novel from its inception, driving its search for subjects and representational techniques, most of all the social realism that sought to render the sufferings of the rural poor and the urban unemployed. Rural Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century was overtaken by a series of catastrophic events (on ‘catastrophic realism’, see Bhattacharya 2020), including the first ‘partition’ of the state and the redrawing of its boundaries in 1905, armed uprisings against British rule and brutal suppression of nationalist insurgencies, two world wars, the famine of 1943, and long drawn-​out peasant movements like the Tebhaga land agitation extending from 1946 to 1951. The second, national Partition of 1947, preceded by large-​scale communal riots, took an immense toll –​one that we are still paying –​in human displacement, migration, and homelessness. These events cast their shadow on the literature and art of this period, a shadow visible in realist and modernist fiction, and in the powerful expressionism of Ramkinkar Baij’s sculptural treatments of Santal peasants, and in Zainul Abedin, Somnath Hore, and Chittaprosad’s images of the famine. By contrast with the distinctively European conflation of modern with urban, Indian and South Asian aesthetic modernity, as reflected in literature, cinema, and art, involves renewed attention to the regional, the rural, and the subaltern. The village emerges in Bengali literature and art of the last century as the crucible of modernity, the site where the struggles and failures of a newly modernizing nation must be worked out. Arguably, this is the result of a Gandhian, anti-​colonial, ‘turn’ in the 1930s, away from the colonial–​ metropolitan–​urban to the rural and regional, identifying ‘a new space and a new theme’ (Das 2015, 296; Bhattacharya 2021, 289–​90). These local stories, as produced in the ‘regional’ literatures of our subcontinent, force themselves into the national narrative through their vigorous claims to both national and global attention, not only through extended readerships, but also by a direct critical, and political, engagement with global intellectual history. At a somewhat later point, cinema’s powerful employment of modernist literary texts also projects the regional into the global, making it ‘representative’, often disquietingly or subversively, of the national. The success of that representation may be accidental, depending upon the vagaries of global access and recognition, yet in aesthetic production generally, it is impossible to overlook the working out of ‘regional’ ideologies of the nation-​state in the period immediately following decolonization. It is important that we ask ourselves, then, what precisely we understand by the terms region and nation. The anthropologist Bernard Cohn, contributing to an early volume on regions and regionalism, defined four

144  Supriya Chaudhuri types of regions: historical, linguistic, cultural, and structural (Cohn 1971, 35–​37). Within the boundaries of the nation-​state, a region might appear a smaller unit, part of a state or province, and is identified by well-​marked linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic forms. But, in fact, regions tend to cross the political boundaries imposed during colonial rule or thereafter and are difficult to reduce to their mapped configurations. Surprisingly, there is little theorization of the term in its aesthetic registers, given its widespread use alongside approximations such as āñcalik and prādeśik in the Indian languages: which often, in the cultural or linguistic sense, indicate the subregional or provincial. An exception is Toral Jatin Gajarawala’s account of anchalik sahitya as ‘referring primarily to novels that circulate in peripheral spaces, demonstrating keen interest in the village, the marginal community, the scheduled tribe, the inaccessible locality’ (Gajarawala 2013, 101), a definition that seems to me inaccurate, since a local or regional focus does not imply a limited, regional circulation. In the larger sense, and in terms of its geographical features, geological underpinnings and climate, the whole of the Bengal delta is a single region (rather than dui Bangla), and its culture and patterns of habitation have been formed by the courses of its rivers and the indistinct relations between deltaic land and water, notoriously described as ‘new mud, old mud, and marsh’ (Spate, Learmonth, and Farmer 1971, 571). The Bengal region is thus a boundary-​crossing geopolitical formation or location of culture, demanding what Jahan Ramazani styles a transnational poetics. In his 2009 book of that title, Ramazani connected global modernity, as produced by the networks of colonial capital, to a variety of transnational templates (Ramazani 2009, 1–​21) illustrated through the translocal and border-​ crossing characteristics of modern and contemporary poetry in English. But despite the energy and range of his argument, Ramazani does not really consider the case for the regional as transnational, and the multiple intersections of the regional, the national, and the global –​as for example in modern Bengali, but also, for that matter, modern Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic literatures. For this reason, I want to read Tarashankar’s mid-​ century masterpiece –​a novel as conscious of its subregional identity as of its implicit claim to address the newly formed nation –​with a work written almost 50 years after it, where region speaks directly and explicitly to and for the nation: Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khoabnama (The Book of Dreams, first published in 1996). If Tarashankar’s novel was set in the Raḍh region containing his native Labhpur, a geographical area coinciding more or less with western Bengal and falling after Partition to India, Elias’s native town of Bogra (or Bogura) in the Rajshahi district of north Bengal, belongs to his chosen setting of Bārendra-​bhūmi, a region that fell after Partition to East Pakistan, and is anciently identified with the kingdom of

Region, Nation, Border  145 Pundrabardhana with its capital at Pundra or Mahāsthāngaḍ, the largest surviving archaeological site in modern Bangladesh. Five months before his untimely death, Elias wrote to Mahashveta Devi about his plans for a major historical novel set in Mahasthangaḍ: but Khoabnama, for which his research was if anything even more extensive, is set in an unmarked village near the district town of Pabna, and its characters speak in the Pabna dialect. The novel’s present interweaves past and future, memory and prophecy, beginning from the eighteenth-​century Fakir-​Sanyasi rebellion (1770–​1820) against the East India Company to the Tebhaga land movement (1946–​47) and pro-​Pakistan politics in the period immediately before and after Partition. It is a novel of subaltern experience, of history from below, fusing centuries of exploitation and betrayal into a single, poetic, sometimes hallucinatory narrative. If Tarashankar had used social realism within a modernist framework, Elias employs the tools of postmodernist magical realism, drawing on folk memory, dream, fantasy, and myth while recording the historical process of nation formation for his subaltern actors. But above all this is a novel that sustains, like Tarashankar’s, a perspective characteristic of the regional novel, and that I can only describe as ‘deep landscape’: a landscape that enfolds its own history and those of others who live and work on it. At its heart is a topographical formation, an expanse of marshland called Kātlāhār Bīl (not quite a lake), its shifting boundaries, quicksands, and mudflats typical of what Debjani Bhattacharyya calls the ‘soaking ecologies’ of the Gangetic delta, where land–​water relations are defined in terms of soaking (and draining) rather than separation (Bhattacharyya 2018, 4). To the north of the marsh, as we learn at the novel’s start, is the grove of pakur trees (ficus virens, grey fig) on one of which sits the ghost or spirit of Munshi Barkatullah Shah, a general of Majnu Shah’s Fakir army, brought down by a British soldier’s bullet as he raced towards the Karatoya river and the citadel of Mahasthangaḍ, more than two centuries ago: It is necessary to mark closely the spot where Tamiz’s father stands, rooting the soles of his feet firmly in the mud, stretching the veins in his neck to look as far up as he can into the sky, waving his two black arms to disperse the ashen clouds. Long ago, when, let alone Tamiz’s father, even his father had not been born, nor even his grandfather Baghar Majhi, nor even Baghar Majhi’s great-​ grandfather, no, perhaps his grandfather, had been born, or if he had, he was still crawling around on the new earth cleared for the homestead after the jungle had been cut down, in those days, one afternoon, Munshi Barkatullah Shah, racing towards the Karatoya river to join the innumerable fakirs of Majnu Shah’s army at Mahasthan Fort, was killed and thrown off his horse by

146  Supriya Chaudhuri a bullet from the gun of Taylor, commander of the British sepoys. The bullet hole in his neck never closed up. After dying, he took his ash-​ smeared body and the chains wound around his throat, and climbed up to the top of the pakur tree on the northern end of Katlahar marsh and sat there with a pair of fish-​engraved iron tongs. Since then, during the day, he is spread out all over the marsh as sunlight within sunlight, and at night he rules the marsh from the top of the pakur tree. If Tamiz’s father could only catch a glimpse of him! –​this hope drives him to chase away the clouds in the sky. (Elias 1999, 333) It is this spirit, as much a spirit of history as of land and water, with whom Tamiz’s father tries to communicate, standing with his feet planted in the mud of the marsh, straining his neck upwards to catch a glimpse of the Munshi in the noonday sun or the feeble moonlight. By the end of the novel, the pakur grove and the Munshi’s tree are gone, and the northern end of the marsh has been drained for a new road and Sharafat Mondal’s brick-​kiln (Elias 1999, 572–​75). But the ghosts remain: Tamiz’s father, who spoke to the Munshi during his nocturnal excursions to the swamp, and learnt how to interpret dreams from the khoabnama, or dream-​book, of his long-​dead mentor, the fakir Cherag Ali, lies dead in the swamp’s quicksands (Elias 1999, 598–​600), but continues to speak to his second wife, Cherag Ali’s granddaughter Kulsum. Perhaps he is reborn as Tamiz’s daughter, Sakhina; perhaps Tamiz himself, if he has been killed by the police, will climb into the moon with his bullet-​ridden face. Certainly, it is the child Sakhina, at the novel’s hypnotic close, who sees the partly dried up Katlahar Bil on fire, an event Tamiz’s father had prophesied, as a dense cloud of fireflies rises like kindling in some imagined kitchen, cooking rice under a blood-​streaked sallow moon. By this time Tamiz, accused of murder, has long fled the village, perhaps to be shot by police during the Tebhaga land agitation. Kulsum is dead, and the creation of the nation-​states of Pakistan and India has radically altered the demography of the village. The rich Hindu landlords and shopkeepers have left, poor labourers like Baikuntha are left; rumours of pre-​Partition riots in the distant cities of Dhaka and Calcutta have set Muslim against Hindu; refugees bring stories of horrific atrocities to the camp in Pabna town. Structures of exploitation and indebtedness bind, as before, the fisherfolk and sharecroppers at the forefront of Elias’s narrative. Sakhina’s hunger, the rice-​pot she sees on some glowing unearthly kitchen fire, feeds into the novel’s larger vision of generations of hungry peasantry –​ and particularly their womenfolk, like Kulsum and Phuljan. What has changed in the narrative’s course is the spirit-​haunted waterscape itself, its ecological balance threatened as the marsh is progressively drained, its

Region, Nation, Border  147 common provision of fish now claimed by a powerful few, accumulating its dead (the Munshi, Tamiz’s father, perhaps Kulsum and Tamiz as well) as unsilenced reminders of the past, prophets of an ominous future, and habitants who disrupt the present. Elias was a Marxist and Khoabnama is a political novel. Its unsparing analysis of the 1947 Partition, of myths of nationhood, of class, caste, and gender oppression, of superstition and hypocrisy, has drawn the epithet ‘insurrectionary’ for its radical ideology and aesthetics. It seems to me, however, that its politics is above all a politics of landscape, of the ‘soaking ecologies’ of the Bengal countryside: its narrative mode is that of a soaked or ‘saturated’ present where everything is steeped in a dense, numinous intelligibility, like the world of dreams inhabited by Tamiz’s father. For Elias even more than for Tarashankar, location in the rural, the regional, the linguistically localized (like the Pabna dialect spoken by the characters of Khoabnama) roots national politics within transnational ideology. The ‘thin stream’ (roga srot) of the Bangali river, repeatedly mentioned in his incantatory narrative, is threatened today by a shift in the course of the Jamuna that may submerge an area of almost a thousand square kilometres including Bogra and Sirajgunj (Saha et al. 2022). In his novel, it has already met the Jamuna of history. I want to turn now to a film text, one that draws on the ‘regional’ novel to produce a cinematic equivalent of its deep, saturated reading of soil and water, landscape and history. Ritwik Ghatak’s Titas Ekti Nadir Nam (A River called Titas, 1973: literally, ‘Titas is the name of a river’, both title and first line of the eponymous novel on which the film is based) was made three years before his untimely death, and two years after the bloody struggle that saw the birth of a new nation, Bangladesh, out of the traumatic aftermath of Partition in India’s fractured east. If Partition, as Moinak Biswas has observed, was the single historical event that represented for Ghatak ‘all that was alienating and destructive in the experience of his community’, Titas looked back at a different time of loss, showing that: the excavation of memory in his films is not so much a matter of a return to roots as it is sometimes thought, it is meant to bring back the moment of rupture to consciousness, a moment that the traumatised do not know how to remember. (Biswas 2004, 2–​3) The film was an Indo-​ Bangladesh production, marking Ghatak’s own return to narrative cinema after a long hiatus (Subarnarekha, made in 1962, was released in 1965, and was followed by several shorts, documentaries, and unfinished features). It was one of the relatively few films

148  Supriya Chaudhuri for which Ghatak used a literary source, Advaita Mallabarman’s semi-​ autobiographical account of the Malo fishing community in Gokarnaghat, on the banks of the Titas river near Brahmanbaria, now in Bangladesh. Published in 1956, five years after the author’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 37, this poetic, layered, ambitious novel consciously places its river-​story within the parameters of the ‘local’ and ‘regional’: that is, what might be described in Bengali as āñcalik sāhitya, regional literature. Writing on the deployment of the ‘folk’, the reliance upon emotion, and the relations between spatiality and subject-​formation in the Dalit novel, Drishadwati Bargi notes that the anchal, as opposed to the specificity of the rural or the heterogeneity or corruption of the urban, connotes homogeneity of culture and seclusion from the centre. It is larger than a village but often shares with it the character of rooted, knowing–​knowable communities. (Bargi 2016, 92) In her reading, however, Bargi emphasizes the dangers of seeing Malo culture as homogeneous, pointing out the conflicts and clashes that are generated partly by upper-​ caste interventions (like the jatra in Titas), partly by the forcible deracination and spatial dispossession of subaltern communities, and partly by the internal complexities of Dalit history and consciousness (Bargi 2016, 94). Mallabarman demonstrates an acute awareness of these factors, as of regional geographies, in placing his novel and its subjects within the shifting, unstable topology of a ‘minor’ river, the Titas. At inception, the novel contrasts the Titas on the one hand with the choked-​up stream of the Bijay, and on the other with the raging torrents of the Padma and Meghna: Titas is only an ordinary river. You will not find its name in any history book, any revolutionary chronicle, since no warring factions have tainted its waters with their blood. But does it for that reason have no history? (Mallabarman 1956, 26) In the course of a deliberately episodic, but ‘latticed’ or interlaced narrative, the book describes the gradual destruction of the Malo way of life, laying bare the processes of social, economic, and cultural disintegration that are symbolically but also physically represented by the drying out of the river Titas. At the novel’s close, the inexorable expansion of the sandbars (car/​char) that obstruct the river’s course has robbed the fishermen of their traditional occupation, and pitched battles are

Region, Nation, Border  149 fought over the right to grow crops on the newly deposited silt, a drifting river-​island that raises the mirage of property. Yet, as the author tells us, neither the dispossessed fisherfolk, like Ramprasad and his brothers, nor landless peasants like Karam Ali and Bande Ali, are able to claim an inch of the new soil: in the end, it is the powerful jotedars who take it all (Mallabarman 1956, 333). Household by household, the Malo village disappears, its members moving away in search of work or succumbing to illness and starvation. In her dying moments, as her whole life passes before her in a dream, the widow Basanti sees only the endless paddy-​ fields where the river used to be, and her pitcher of water scooped out from the sandbank falls from her hand (Mallabarman 1956, 348–​50). Her estranged foster-​child Ananta, surviving only through his ‘wilful act of spatial mobility’ (Bargi 2016, 99), demonstrates the insubstantiality of the myth of the returning native, the mirage of home, and of spatial identity for the Dalit subject. Ghatak’s handling of this material has been criticized for its lack of authentic historical temporality, and its failure to connect personal relationships, so strongly imbued with the melodramatic and mythical resonances characteristic of his art, with the unfolding of economic processes that Mallabarman indicates (Bhadra 2011). I agree with Parichay Patra that the film conveys Ghatak’s ‘obsession with the catastrophe that the capitalist-​industrial modernity is associated with’, and that even if the social and economic factors responsible for the decline of the Malo community remain relatively underworked, they are not absent (Patra 2017). Nevertheless, what seems to me to be at the heart of both novel and film is another interface crucial to the deep ecology of the Gangetic basin, that between soil and water, and it is this that lies behind its histories of settlement, occupation, labour, capital, and property. For the catastrophe that overtakes the Malos is not entirely a product of history: it is also a geographical event, the rising of a char or river-​island/​ sandbar from a river-​bed, caused by the enormous amounts of silt that rivers in the Ganga–​Brahmaputra–​Meghna delta –​the largest and most densely populated delta in the world, with a surface area of approximately 100,000 square kilometres (see www.delta-​allia​nce.org/​del​tas/​Ganga-​brah​ mapu​tra-​delta) –​carry down in the passage from their Himalayan sources. Kuntala Lahiri-​Dutt and Gopa Samanta treat these chars, defying colonial topographies, as ‘hybrid environments, not just a mixture of land and water, but a uniquely fluid environment where the demarcation between land and water is neither well defined nor permanent’ (Lahiri-​Dutt and Samanta 2013, 1). While for land-​based peasant cultivators like Karam Ali and Bande Ali the chars present a fertile opportunity, for the Malos the constriction or disappearance of the river spells death. But for both the event is itself beyond their physical control, though not beyond their

150  Supriya Chaudhuri imagining, as Radhacharan Malo’s dream shows (Mallabarman 1956, 327–​ 29). Ghatak, never averse to extracting the maximum symbolic weight from a narrative element, allows this catastrophe, speculated upon at the start of his film by Ramprasad, and realized at its close through a brilliant cinematographic sequence as the dying Basanti scrabbles for water in the sand, to remain what it is, a physical event, an act of nature, hollowing out, as such events do, the apparent ease and familiarity with which we treat our relationship with the natural world in which we are placed. I use the phrase ‘hollowing out’ advisedly, because the film’s cinematography produces a remarkable set of contrasts between plenitude and lack, plane and hollow, in optical terms. With the Titas in full flow, there are panoramic, light-​filled shots of flat, never-​ending expanses of water, land and sky, dotted by the sails of fishing-​vessels on the horizon. Closer up, we see the circles traced by the winnowing basket the child Basanti is using in the first scene, the dark curves of beached fishing boats, the coils of fishing nets, the hollow of the vessel in which Rajar Jhi is concealed, the gap of the banyan tree in which she appears to her son Ananta, the gleam of water in a hollow expanse of sand, like a huge eye, towards which Basanti points as she says that Titas has become just a name (one of the film’s most remarkable shots, at 2.19) and finally, the hollow scooped out in the sandbank by the dying Basanti, scrabbling for water. Even here, in a Subarnarekha-​like moment, Basanti has a vision of plenitude, the child blowing on his trumpet as he runs through the flat expanse of paddy-​ fields now taking up the Titas’s river-​bed. This sense of a waterscape or landscape that for all its rich promise remains shifting and impermanent, even illusory, is contrasted with the ‘sedentary metaphysics’ (Malkki 1992) of capitalist and colonial geographies, rooted in instruments of measurement and demarcation. Even the char, rising to swallow the river, is sometimes described as drifting on the water’s course, like the Malos themselves, who must go where the current takes them, or die where it leaves them behind. In that dazzling, mirage-​like shot of the receding river-​water gleaming in a sand-​hollow, like an enormous eye, the Titas seems to look back at us as Basanti points to its absence, staking its claim to centrality in a film that otherwise foregrounds the passion, violence, and melodrama of human relationships. The film proceeds, in the epic mode adopted by both Mallabarman and Ghatak, through a series of episodes linked paratactically (Auerbach 2003, 6–​ 7) –​that is, treated with equal emphasis, juxtaposed and linked to each other through narrative interlacing. This associative method seems now to be described as ‘hyperlink cinema’, using a term coined by the critic Alissa Quart. Ghatak’s

Region, Nation, Border  151 use of parataxis allows his characters a kind of space, within a deliberately loose, often inexplicit narrative network punctuated by moments of melodramatic, carefully choreographed, physical encounter. Framing this life-​world, a set of local stories resonant with myth and music, are the larger narratives of social decay and economic co-​optation, on the one hand, and the river’s geomorphology, on the other. The drying Titas, the dying Malos, have their place in the deep ecologies of the Bengal delta, an expanse of flat land, slow-​moving rivers, swamps and marshes, partly a ‘remnant oceanic basin’ (Bhattacharyya 2018, 3). Loss of home and livelihoods is a reminder of the insufficiency of ‘sedentary metaphysics’ to this interchangeability of soil and water. In a film made through bi-​ national co-​operation, by a director already assured of his place in world cinema despite his relative lack of indebtedness to it, the specifics of place and region do not simply work to exoticize the content for a Bengali middle-​class viewership, as Bhadra had feared. They leave us, rather, with the pain of physical dereliction, of being unhomed on the earth that is our home, a trauma that for Ghatak is ‘excavated’ through the memory of Partition, as Biswas notes (2004): but which is, we must remember, a recurrent reality for Dalit subjects, accustomed to the historical violence of spatial dispossession and translocation. This reality remains an uncomfortable, unyielding awareness within the deep ecologies of all the texts I have considered. I would like to close with some reflections on borders, a demarcation affecting both regions and nations, but subject to the boundary-​crossing propensities, not just of human populations, but of land-​masses as well. In an essay published in the journal Transnational Cinemas, Bhaskar Sarkar asks, ‘What happens when, instead of people traveling across borders, the border ‘crosses’ a population?’ (Sarkar 2018, 47). The focus of his essay is a documentary film made by Sourav Sarangi in 2012, Char… The No-​Man’s Island, about squatters on a char, or river-​island thrown up on the Ganga river where it marks the India–​Bangladesh border. I watched the film after reading Sarkar’s essay, alerted by his analysis to many features of documentation or style, and yet newly overwhelmed by its immediacy, its capacity to function as participant and witness, not just to record lives and behaviours. Co-​produced by backers from India, Japan, Italy, Norway, and England, Char looks at the anxieties and struggles of impoverished and precarious lives maintained almost entirely by cross-​border smuggling of contraband goods. While Sarangi treats his subjects –​especially the two young boys Sofikul and Rubel –​with compassion and sympathy, Sarkar notes the implicit, unstated contradictions in the form of the ‘humanitarian documentary’ (60; citing Pooja Rangan 2017), which brings global funding and liberal sympathies to bear,

152  Supriya Chaudhuri usually ineffectually, on the crimes of governments, corporations, and international capital: Running across distinct domains of crisis (crimes and scandals, wars and natural disasters, pandemics and famines) is the figure of the vulnerable, the precarious, the endangered: the famished child, the wasting AIDS patient, or the drowning refugee. (Sarkar 2018, 60) Sarkar offers a thoughtful, sharply analytic critique of this investment of global agencies for development, environment, or humanitarian aid in the representation of regional-​local disasters, ‘reaffirming our habitually dormant capacity for care’ in a multiplicity of distant contexts. The task of documentary cinema is then to bring the local crisis –​often the result of national conflicts or crimes –​to international attention through a universally intelligible film language (Sarkar 2018, 60–​62). But Sarangi’s film, once I had seen it, appeared more than a call to conscience. Immersive, non-​judgemental, sometimes laying bare a kind of awkwardness or rawness in the footage, the documentary allows us to follow the director and camerapersons into situations of close proximity with the characters, while at the same time, it reminded us of the zone of indistinction between land and water within which both char and border are situated. The India–​East Pakistan, later India–​Bangladesh borderlands offer an example of a ‘transnational’ region with common geomorphic, demographic, linguistic and cultural features divided by a political border that has sometimes followed, and sometimes deviated from, the apparently ‘natural’ boundary-​forming course of a major river, like the Ganga. But this is also a landscape whose rivers are constantly shifting their courses: over time, the Ganga has been pushing eastward, while the Brahmaputra’s shift is westward (Coleman 1969, 129; Kuehl et al. 2005). In the film, the precarity of land–​water relations are as apparent as the vulnerability of lives lived on the border, where livelihoods are sustained by an illegal economy of smuggling and trafficking, ironically confirming Mezzadra and Neilson’s idea of borders as facilitating, rather than obstructing, the flow of global capital (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, viii–​x). This point is also made in Malini Sur’s study of ‘animal corridors’ for the (illegal) entry of cattle into Bangladesh from India’s North-​East (Sur 2021, 83–​88), where she notes that ‘the border chars, with their interspersed rivers’ (72), uncertain land areas and shifting populations, play a vital part in this traffic. Sarangi’s film powerfully conveys the many risks and small rewards of the kind of smuggling (mainly rice, the intoxicant Phensedyl, and other goods) carried on by Rubel, Sofikul, and unnamed women, as well as the precarity of their squatters’ existence

Region, Nation, Border  153 mid-​river on the char, subject to the violence of monsoon storms and the probing searchlights of border patrols. At the same time, political borders in this region are prone to being erased by rivers changing course, the emergence of drifting land tracts like chars, and the submergence of riverbank hamlets like Palashgachhi, named in the film (see the discussion of this episode in Sarkar 2018, 56). While the film follows the practice of ‘humanitarian documentary’ in engaging with the lives of the most endangered –​paperless settlers or citizens who daily cross and recross the border –​it also reads these hybrid land–​water environments in terms of imbricated histories and livelihoods, focalizing the tension between an inherently unstable geophysical feature, the river that shifts and breaks its banks, and the land that it throws up and reclaims. Since the river here is the boundary between India and Bangladesh, it is a historic instrument of division, while disputes over its waters, its changing course and shifting relationship with banks and bars, unsettles the region as it poses a question to both nations. Here, as in Ghatak’s Titas, one is forced to ask whether geography, in the end, trumps history. Regions, although they can of course be historically defined, are best understood with reference to geomorphological coordinates: nations, although they protect their cartographical boundaries, are historically constituted. The interface of literature and cinema with regions and nations may end by making us more aware of those planetary, geophysical formations that escape human control and political will. Note 1 Tarashankar says (Bandyopadhyay 2015, 5) that the river-​bend resembles a ‘hāṇsulī’ or crescent-​shaped ornament, itself named after the slender curve of a swan’s or goose’s neck. Diacritical marks are used only for the first instance of a Bengali word, not subsequently. All translations from Bengali texts are mine.

References Auerbach, E. (2003). Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bandyopadhyay, T. (2015). Hansuli Banker Upakatha. Kolkata: Bengal Publishers. Bargi, D. (2016). “Understanding ‘dalit chetna’ in Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, A River Called Titash.” Contemporary Voice of Dalit, 8(1), 90–​104. Bhadra, G. (2011). “Titas Ekti Nadir Nam: Malor Chokhe; Titas Ekti Nadir Nam: Madhyabitter Chokhe.” Ritwik Ghatak. Ed. Rajat Ray. Kolkata: Pratibhas. 180–​190. Bhattacharya, S. (2020). Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism. London: Palgrave.

154  Supriya Chaudhuri —​ —​ —​ . (2021). “Regional Ecologies and Peripheral Aesthetics in Indian Literature: Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha.” South Asian Review, 42(4), 387–​ 402. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​02759​ 527.2021.1905​482 Bhattacharyya, D. (2018). Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: the Making of Calcutta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biswas, M. (2004). “Her Mother’s Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak.” Rouge. 1–​8. Accessed 18 June 2022 at www.rouge.com.au/​3/​gha​tak.html Cohn, B. S. (1971). “Regions Subjective and Objective: their Relation to the Study of Modern Indian History and Society.” Modern India: An Interpretive Anthology. Ed. Thomas Metcalf. London: Macmillan. 35–​37. Coleman, J.L. (1969). “Brahmaputra River: Channel Processes and Sedimentation.” Sedimentary Geology, 3(2–​3), 129–​239. Das, S.K. (2015). A History of Indian Literature, 1911–​ 1956: Struggle for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Elias, A. (1999). Khoabnama. Rachana-​samagra. Vol. 2. Dhaka: Maola Brothers. 331–​693. Gajarawala, T.J. (2013). Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste. New York: Fordham University Press. Ghatak, Ritwik (dir.) (1973). Titas Ekti Nadir Nam. (A River called Titas). (Indo-​ Bangladesh feature film, 159 minutes). Kuehl, S.A., Mead A. Allison, Steven L. Goodbred, H.K. (2005). “The Ganga-​ Brahmaputra Delta.” River Deltas—​Concepts, Models, and Examples. SEPM Special Publication No. 83. Lahiri-​Dutt, K and G. Samanta. (2013). Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lecercle, J. (1990). The Violence of Language. London: Routledge. Malkki, L. (1992). “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology, 7, 24–​43. Mallabarman, A. (1956). Titas Ekti Nadir Nam. Kolkata: Puthighar. Mezzadra, S. and B. Neilson. (2013). Border as Method: or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Patra, P. (2017). “In Defence of A River Called Titas.” Senses of Cinema, 82. Accessed 18 June 2022 at www.sen​seso​fcin​ema.com/​2017/​cteq/​a-​river-​cal​ led-​titas/​ Ramazani, J. (2009). A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rangan, P. (2017). Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ray, R.K. (1987). “The Kahar Chronicle.” Modern Asian Studies, 21(4), 711–​749. Saha, M, S.S. Sauda, H.R. Khan Real and M. Mahmud. (2022). “Estimation of Annual Rate and Spatial Distribution of Soil Erosion in the Jamuna Basin using RUSLE Model: a Geospatial Approach.” Environmental Challenges (Elsevier), 8, 1–​14. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.envc.2022.100​524.

Region, Nation, Border  155 Sarangi, S.(dir.) (2012). Char … The No-​man’s Island. (Documentary film, 97 minutes.) Sarkar, B. (2018). “On No Man’s (Is)land: Futurities at the Border.” Transnational Cinemas, 9(1), 47–​67. doi: 10.1080/​20403526.2018.1472828 Spate, O.H.K., A.T.A. Learmonth and B.H. Farmer. (1971). India, Pakistan and Ceylon: the Regions. London: Methuen. Sur, M. (2021). Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-​Bangladesh Border. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

11 Travelling On Bengali and English Literatures of Transnational Worlding Arka Chattopadhyay

In contemporary world literature studies, inaugurated by David Damrosch, there is a surprising lack of emphasis on vernacular literary traditions across the world. In this chapter, I will discuss Bengali Indian literature as a case in point for this lacuna. In the book, Teaching World Literature, edited by Damrosch, there is little or nothing on Indian literatures. In this volume, John Burst Foster Jr. fleetingly refers to Bengali literature while talking about his experience of teaching world literature as a one-​semester general education course. He mentions Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World while discussing transnational hybridity of students in a global classroom. The student in question with an Indian mother and Pakistani father can sense a Hindu–​Muslim religious tension towards the end of Tagore’s novel. The important point, however, is that the reference frame is limited by translation, circulation and canonization. The only Bengali writer to get a mention in the book is the 1913 Nobel laureate Tagore, introduced to the west by none other than giants like W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. In this chapter, we will pressurize this canonical bias by evoking not so well-​travelled Bengali writers who have been translated into English, such as Subimal Misra, untranslated texts of popular Bengali writers like Hemendra Kumar Ray and untranslated works of otherwise translated Bengali writers like Nabarun Bhattacharya, not to mention globally available works of Indian English writers like Amitav Ghosh. The point is to show how transnational intertextuality, cultural translation and planetarity function as dialectical tools of worlding in world literature and counterbalance linguistic translation as a necessary condition for texts to enter the pantheon of world literature. Travel will be our key connector among these diversely different literary works.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-15

Travelling On  157 11.1  Subimal Misra: World Enformed In his 2019 introduction to Subimal Mishra’s Two Anti-​Novels in English translation, Janam Mukherjee spends the first couple of pages in delineating the historico-​political context of the Indian partition and independence, talking about the refugee crisis, deaths and so on (vii–​viii). In the middle of all these doldrums, Subimal Misra is born in 1943. This socio-​historic contextualization creates a ‘world’ for the author’s work to be situated into. Contextualization has always been important but within the space of world literature, it acquires a particular value because we are talking about disseminating transnational and trans-​cultural texts in a global and diverse, if not culturally ‘distant’ (extending Franco Moretti’s idea of ‘distant reading’) scenario.1 We are not addressing the signifier ‘world’ in its noun form as a fixed entity but engaging with ‘worlding’ as verb –​a fluid, experiential process. It is a textual, literary and anthropological process by which these world literary texts generate their worlds. ‘Worlding’ is a complex spatio-​temporal process by which a text conjures up a world of its own with a certain degree of mimetic correspondence as well as degrees of autonomy vis-​à-​vis the real world outside. Pascale Casanova, one of the inaugurators of the world literary system, talks about this textual conjuring of a world (2005). I am using ‘worlding’ in a slightly different sense here, closer to the way the word is used in the work of another world literature scholar, Pheng Cheah (2016). Though Cheah highlights the temporal over the spatial in ‘worlding’, as an experience, I would see it as a conglomerate spatio-​temporal process, enabled by a text. I also want to make a claim for worlding as a pedagogic tool. Just as contextualization as worlding is one classroom technique, translation is another. We are often teaching translated texts in a world literature classroom in which the students and sometimes even the teachers are reading the text only in English translation, thanks to English, being the global lingua franca of world literature. Let us see how cultural and linguistic translation works for a writer like Subimal Misra. As an avowedly Marxist writer, Misra is imbued by the political idea of the Marxist international that makes his practice relevant to the field of world literature. He is a world litterateur in that, irrespective of whatever language he writes in. His texts speak to a large transnational audience in terms of the issues they address. Misra’s prefatory text in the recent aforementioned volume is titled ‘The Anti-​Novel: A Manifesto’ and it begins with a block-​ quote from Marx. Misra calls it ‘Karl Marx’s words, in my own way’ (xvii). My point is not just that Misra chooses a transnational Marxian reference to contextualize his manifesto but also that, to use someone else’s words from another national culture in his own way and voice, as

158  Arka Chattopadhyay he says, marks the principle of worlding here. Marx is appropriated and adapted for a particular vernacular context. This is contextualization as re-​contextualization and vernacularization. It happens through an act of translation, circulating among three languages –​German, Bengali and English. Misra reads Marx’s German in English and domesticates it into his Bengali. As he sketches out the politics of the ‘anti-​novel’ form, he refers to a range of texts and authors from different parts of the world, such as Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour and Apollinaire. He puts Bengali-​ Indian writers like Manik Bandyopadhyay, Kamalkumar Majumdar and Bangladeshi novelist Waliullah together with European writers like Joyce, Proust and Beckett (xx). He tracks a transnational novelistic tradition from Tolstoy’s War and Peace to Bibhutibhushan’s Pather Panchali and goes through the Soviet tradition of ‘socialist realism’ in literature to locate the form of the anti-​novel as a radical iteration of Marxist dialectical thinking. This is a quasi-​Maoist dialectic as an endless series of contradictions and negations, imprinted on the non-​linear and non-​ realistic, palimpsest-​like form of Misra’s texts. This authorial paratext is an obvious teaching aid and ideas like Marxist dialectics and a transnational evocation of world literary texts help us contextualize Misra’s literary practice. V. Ramaswamy, Misra’s translator, notes the deeply Bengali and yet world literary qualities of his texts. These are texts, rooted in Kolkata and the state of West Bengal in India and yet informed by transnational traditions (173). Some of these include literary forms that travel from European Modernism and its avant-​garde literary practices. Misra acknowledges the American Beatnik writer William Burroughs for the ‘cut-​up’ method that has its origins in the Surrealist collage. Misra’s narratives use the collage technique to juxtapose one narrative with another, in-​setting a previously written text as a textual frame and so on. The author evokes Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic form of ‘montage’ for his experiments into anti-​narrative. In the 2010 preface to his first book of stories in English translation, Misra writes about his early stories from the 1960s and 1970s: At that time, I had merely ventured to explore how to employ, and how far one could employ, chiefly, the montage technique of Sergei Eisenstein in a narrative. From two or three sentences arranged sequentially, one after another, a third sense would emerge; coming out like a spark, it would hit at the reader’s aesthetic sense, and haunt their cerebral entity, if they have any; some other meaning would thus be miraculously born. (Misra 2010, xi)

Travelling On  159 By way of travelling across the world, these literary forms become ‘world forms’. These forms carry aesthetic ideas that travel and inform multiple literary practices from different parts of the world. This world form could also be seen as a teaching aid when we discuss world literature in classrooms. If I am introducing Misra’s narrative experiments in a literature classroom in America for example, it will help to talk about Burroughs’s ‘cut up’ and Eisenstein’s ‘montage’, which students will perhaps know more than the Bengali-​Indian writer. Let us look at one example of what I will call a ‘voice-​montage’ from Misra’s anti-​novel, This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale. Towards the end of this text, there is a section, featuring a long series of voices that are emanating from common people, juxtaposed with those from famous public figures and personalities from different parts of the world. This is one brief instance:

Herbert Marcuse

‘Revolution does not mean merely a formal change in the social system, but a transformation of people’s thinking, outlook, their innate faculties, objectives and value system…’

Youth

‘Shivlal Yadav’s spin is going to work, isn’t it…’

Drunk officer, whose wife flirts with the boss

‘I swear on my mother, I don’t like anything…Believe me, I never wanted to be born’. (Misra 2019, 136; font size differences are part of the original text) The montage works with a hint of surplus meaning, generated by the juxtaposition of these voices. The three voices make us wonder about the relation that may exist among them. Does Marcuse’s remark on revolution as change in thinking connect with the patriarchal system, glimpsed in the third voice of the drunk officer? Does the socio-​political ‘change’ in voice one connect with the anonymous youth’s voice, commenting on the Indian spinner Shivlal Yadav’s spinning skill? ‘Spin’ is a ‘change’ in the ball’s direction in the air and another ‘change’ in the trajectory of the ball after it pitches. Moreover, as the youth speculates, Yadav’s spin may also ‘change’ the course of the match. To continue with the metaphor of spin as change as well as spin inducing change, is the boss and the wife in voice three taking the husband for a ‘spin’? We could open up many such networks of signification from this voice cut-​up or auditory

160  Arka Chattopadhyay montage. ‘Believe me, I never wanted to be born’ in voice three appears in English transliteration in Misra’s Bengali original. This calls into question the very status of translation. I will come back to this point later. At the level of its content, Misra assembles transnational figures, ranging from Rabindranath Tagore and Ramakrishna to Jean-​Paul Sartre and Marcuse. The voices communicate not just successively but across multiple pages in a sequence of associations. Misra has Sartre comment: ‘I saw the starving child die in front of my eyes. That’s why the dilemma in the novel, Nausea, is now extremely irrelevant’ (131). It is not difficult to see the connection between Sartre’s voice-​comment and the newspaper headline that comes six pages later: ‘Naxalite youth whose body would be found in the drain’ (137). This is immediately followed by a political statement that comes from a Naxalite revolutionary.2 This is how Misra places Sartre’s comment on his own political radicalization by experiencing the child’s death that renders literary subtleties null and void. The death of the starving child meets the Naxalite youth’s corpse in the drain. This is an imagistic and invocatory sequence of transnational worlding, realized through distant voice-​montage. What we have as a result is a ‘world form’ in the so-​called regional literature. The form of montage with a nod to Eisenstein and Burroughs is a literary-​cinematic world form that travels into Indian literature but Misra’s explicit politicization of the form as well as his culture-​specific content adds another experience of transnational worlding through the imported world form. Taking the world form argument one step forward, let me note that Misra’s collages and montages often import ‘world news’ in a journalistic register. He ‘informs’ his readers about current affairs around the world. Toward the end of his anti-​novel, When Colour Is a Warning Sign, Misra divides the page into two newspaper columns and offers a series of national and international news items. He begins with a 1983 news from Beijing, China, about the non-​publication of a satirical article on the Indian Congress party leaders, Indira Gandhi and her father Jawaharlal Nehru. From this we jump to Sanjay Gandhi’s accidental death in 1980 and his last comment on the importance of the Nehru clan in India’s future economic progress. From this we move into actress Vyjayanthimala’s decision to perform a dance in remembrance of Sanjay Gandhi. We also have a news item on India’s protest against the Chinese article and replacement of Sanjay Gandhi with Rajiv Gandhi as the All India Youth Congress leader. While these news items have a coherent anti-​establishment political thread, running through them, I want to highlight the globality of these themes. From the aforementioned series, we proceed to a report on the anti-​crime initiatives in China and another news article on Isabelle Allende’s story as the President of Chile from 1971. This article traces the ironic transformation of the leader from Left to Right, which is also representative of the corrupting influence of the

Travelling On  161 statist machination of power. Misra’s use of world forms is not just a variety of formalist avant-​gardism but its discursive political content creates a point of dialogue on global scale about socio-​political issues. These echoes of world news enable a textual mutation towards world literature. India finds its place in this journalistic constellation in terms of its relationality vis-​à-​vis transnational events. India is ‘worlded’ (enfolded in a larger world structure) by Misra’s world forms in the shape of montage. This is how his texts travel out, irrespective of linguistic translation. To open up the necessity for translation alongside the debate around untranslatability in world literature,3 let me make a final reference to Misra. In an interview collected in his second short story collection in English, Wild Animals Prohibited (2015), he tells Gaurav Jain how the montage quality of his works has suffered in translation for publishable market strategies. Misra is an anti-​establishment writer in the Bengali Little Magazine community who never wanted to get published in big presses and populist periodicals. He would often print, carry and sell his books himself in Kolkata Book Fair and College Street at variable and optional (he gave his books without charging any money to those who could not pay) costs. Ironically, a writer who rejected marketization of literature had to be tamed under the aegis of translation packaging for Harper Collins, a major pan-​Indian and global publishing house. In the interview mentioned above, Misra tells Jain: Where’s the montage? There was just one montage-​based title, Haran Majhir Bidhoba Bouer Mora Ba Shonar Gandhimurti (Haran Majhi’s Widow’s Corpse or the Golden Gandhi Statue). […] As a short-​cut, that was shortened, apparently because such a long and unconventional name could not be gulped by readers. (261) The titular story is indeed a montage of two different stories: one about ‘Haran Majhi’s Widow’s Corpse’ and the other about a ‘Golden Gandhi Statue’ to be imported from America. The story is renamed ‘Golden Gandhi Statue from America’ in the English collection. The politics of this choice has a global pitch at its core. ‘Golden Gandhi Statue from America’ adds ‘from America’. This was not part of the original title which simply said ‘Golden Gandhi Statue’ without declaring where it came from. The new title is tailored to hook global audiences by transnational signifiers like ‘Gandhi’ –​India’s major cultural export and ‘America’. These signifiers travel much better than ‘Haran Majhi’ –​two words that would befuddle a global reader. This is not a question of cultural untranslatability but that of selective translation and appropriation to fit the global market of world literature. These aesthetic compromises underwrite translation as the sole

162  Arka Chattopadhyay and often not so reliable tool in an Anglophone-​heavy, monolingual model of world literature. 11.2  Hemendra Kumar Ray: How Does the Untranslated Travel? From a critique of translation at the mercy of global literary market, let me now come to consider how untranslated translations travel. We are talking about popular Bengali-​ Indian fiction writer Hemendra Kumar Ray’s (1888–​1963) translations of Edgar Allan Poe stories into Bengali that have not been translated back into English. Such a translating back in this case could be a crucial exercise because Ray’s translations are not translations in an orthodox sense. As we shall see, they are trans-​cultural transcreations. In the process we will also make a move from linguistic to cultural translation as migration of stories from one nation to another. The dominant model of world literature is constrained by its dependence on the translation of any text into English. Through Ray’s stories, I would like to question this Anglophone monolingualism by discussing cultural translations that move away from English language, rather than moving towards it. Ray’s translations may not travel beyond the Bengali vernacular in India, but they borrow a good part of their narratives from not just America but (especially in ‘The Premature Burial’) from an extended transnational context within Poe’s story. Hemendra Kumar Ray’s twentieth century Bengali horror stories ‘Jibanta Mrityu’ (‘Death Alive’) and ‘Bandi Atmar Kahini’ (‘Story of trapped soul’) take the cue from Edgar Allan Poe’s nineteenth-​century American gothic stories, ‘The Premature Burial’ and ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, respectively. I want to talk about a transnational travel of narratives from America to India that leads to speculations whether intertextuality could work as a literary principle of worlding. This transnational travel echoes the etymological meaning of translation as spatial change. ‘Jibanta Mrityu’ (‘Death Alive’) picks up the idea of people buried alive by mistake from Poe’s 1844 story ‘The Premature Burial’. Let us see how the story is re-​worlded from English to Bengali in the form of cultural translation. It is curious that Poe’s story mentions the black hole tragedy of colonial Calcutta at the beginning as one of the global examples of horrific collective deaths (Poe 1946, Volume 1, 532). We are not sure if this reference to Bengal in Poe’s text captured Ray’s imagination. Poe’s story is first and foremost about the narrator who suffers from cataleptic seizures and fears being buried alive. It is about his journey from the grips of premature burial fear to an overcoming of the symptom through a particular experience. The character engages in an elaborate discourse on the idea of premature burial by bringing in multiple real-​life examples of people mistakenly buried alive. He talks about the wife of

Travelling On  163 a Baltimore lawyer whose family vault revealed hints of her revival and struggle to get out when it was opened after three years for the reception of a sarcophagus. Poe himself charts a transnational context as the narrator’s second example goes to France in 1810 where Victorine, a young girl from a wealthy family had a failed marriage and died a sad death. When her lover broke open her grave soon thereafter, he found her alive. The narrator also relates stories of an officer of artillery whose subterranean struggles were heard and he could be revived. There is one Edward Stapleton in 1831 whose corpse was exhumed by body-​snatchers to make a test with the galvanic battery. During this test, he suddenly came back to consciousness. After this case, the narrator goes into his own experience of falsely thinking that he has been prematurely buried. And all this after he re-​designs his family vault to save himself in case of such grave errors. In actuality, he was spending the night in a boat and had a dream of being buried alive in his small and uncomfortable bed. After he understands the falsity of this experience, which was more of a nocturnal vision than reality, he can transcend not just his fear but the cataleptic disorder as well. Coming to Ray’s use of this narrative, there is no personal story of the narrator in ‘Jibanta Mrityu’. Ray begins with the Indian context. The narrator describes the case of a woman in a Bengal village who rose up on her pyre when she was about to be cremated. The people present there thought, she was a ghost and started beating her with logs and sticks. She was recovered by police but could not survive her injuries. This case brings in the component of ghosts and superstition, which has a particular meaning in the Indian ecosystem of tantra and cultures of death. The narrator comments that this reality has a specific geo-​political import in a densely populated, not so evenly educated and unequivocally poor country like India. Here we see an aspect of cultural translation as worlding. The narrator reflects: ‘in this country, we burn or bury a body soon after death and hence the possibility of such events’ (Ray 2005, 246; translation mine). It is to add substance to this reality and widen his reference frame as well as credibility that Ray’s narrator then goes into the ‘Western’ examples of such cases. He gathers these cases from ‘The Premature Burial’. We notice a strategic movement of widening the region and the nation into a world by becoming transnational in narrative framing. Ray’s narrator mentions Poe as the source of these international examples but more than Poe’s story about the narrator’s life-​shifting experience of auto-​curing catalepsy, he is interested in the historical narratives of premature burial within Poe’s text. Like Misra, Ray ‘informs’ the text with these transnational news items to substantiate the narrator’s discourse. For Ray’s narrator, these are transnational histories of the same phenomenon and he cites them as global stories that have travelled into India. After the stories of Victorine,

164  Arka Chattopadhyay the artillery officer, and Stapleton, Ray’s narrator ends the story in the following way: If life comes back to the buried body in a few days’ time, all the innumerable people who have been cremated or buried immediately after death in India till date must have had so many unfortunates who were burnt alive! Who could count them? Thinking about this gives us the shivers! (Ray 2005, 249; translation mine) Ray contextualizes the phenomenon of being burnt and buried alive in India and adds a new cultural dimension of supernaturalism to it. He uses the inset stories from Poe for their transnational cultural capital to make his narrative discourse more credible, thus promoting the region into a world. He dispenses with the individual narrative in Poe’s story. This selective appropriation tells us something about worlding. Worlding as an amplification of the regional and even the national, creates belief for fictional truth. When fiction writers vouch for the truth of their narratives, they have to back their belief in the veracity of the story. While Poe uses transnational examples in his story to historically establish the phobia of premature burial, Ray uses Poe’s built-​in transnational reference frame to bolster the credibility of his own fiction, situated in another country, in another culture. In Poe’s 1845 story, ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, the narrator who practices hypnosis, is able to freeze his dying friend Valdemar at the borderline of life and death in the body. Valdemar writes to him and asks the narrator to pay him a visit on his deathbed. Valdemar permits him and he hypnotizes him on the verge of death, thereby stalling the natural post-​mortal decay of the body. In the shocking final moment, when the ethically troubled narrator withdraws the hypnotic spell, Valdemar’s body becomes a pool of unnamable liquid in a second. Ray uses this central idea of a man’s soul trapped in his hypnotized body but gives it an Indian sociality, missing in Poe’s story about two secluded men of letters: the narrator and his learned writer and translator friend, M. Valdemar. The Ray story has an urban, middle-​class social narrative. As the narrator and his friends gather in the house of Ananta-​babu (‘babu’ is a Bengali honorific here), a famous ‘spiritualist’ and mesmerist, an accident occurs in the neighbourhood. Suren-​babu falls from his terrace and lapses into coma. The doctor is certain of his impending death, but all his family is in Hardwar. In the pre-​mobile phone era, they are unreachable for an unforeseeable future. To make Suren survive the interim, Ananta hypnotizes him and like Valdemar, he eventually utters the impossible sentence, ‘I am dead’ in an inexplicably deep and monstrous voice. When Suren’s wife Hoimoboti

Travelling On  165 reaches home with the kids, she does not allow Ananta to release the mesmeric spell. She wants to see her husband alive. She keeps making requests to Ananta, saying that she would rather keep Suren like this and not be called a widow. Ray translates and trans-​situates the story in the Indian social fabric with particular cultural values associated with widowhood. Widowhood in early twentieth century India is as good as the end of the world for the woman with ensuing social stigmas. Ray invokes Indian knowledge-​system by using the word ‘yoganidra’ (yoga-​induced sleep) for hypnosis (Ray 2005, 237). Though Ananta yields temporarily, he himself has a believer’s moral disposition. He says, ‘death is god’s wish; if I try to block that, it would invite disaster for me and I won’t survive’ (235; translation mine). These details are all Indian re-​contextualizations in the mode of cultural translation. Two months pass by and Suren’s body remains undecayed on the floor of the drawing room. The incident slowly becomes a public spectacle, attracting popular attention. People pour in from different parts of the world, including other countries, to watch this miracle. This aspect of public spectacle is missing in Poe’s text. It does not mean that there is no moral problematic in Poe’s story. It is an individual ethical dilemma in Poe and not a social and familial dilemma, as in Ray. This shift of emphasis from individual to collective morality is used as a strategy of re-​ worlding. It is somewhat similar to the previous Ray story, in which Poe’s focus on the individual was displaced by the collective historical examples in Ray. Ananta calls in the medical doctor on the day of breaking the spell. He says that he has broken the ‘law of nature’ and feels like a criminal (236). He also comments that what is happening to Suren must be a torture to not just his body but his soul as well. Hoimoboti is forced to consent and the spell is withdrawn after some suspense, as the result of a delayed response to the hypnotic passes and commands in Suren’s body. When it gets withdrawn, all that remains of his body is a skeleton on the floor. Ray thus tailors the final moment for his young-​adult audience. He waters down Poe’s grotesque emphasis on carrion and the unnamable biological waste of the body [‘nearly liquid mass of loathsome –​of detestable putridity’ (Poe 1946, Volume 2, 663)] by replacing it with a mere skeleton. While ‘Jibanta Mrityu’ translates Poe into Bengali in a selective and appropriative way, ‘Bandi Atmar Kahini’ alters the context but does not change the generic narrative arc. Through the socio-​moral implications of a more collective social formation, Ray re-​worlds the American gothic story that emphasized the solitary individual over the community. The textual world is also a cultural world. Its specificities have to be altered for any intercultural transplantation. In these cultural translations we spot intertextuality as a process of worlding and re-​worlding. It is through the western narratives that ‘Jibanta Mrityu’ attempts to make a

166  Arka Chattopadhyay world from the regional. This is why it does not change the cultural details of the three transnational examples taken from ‘The Premature Burial’. The translation works more at a formal and narratological level when Ray selects the inset narratives and not the narrator’s frame-​narrative for his own story. In ‘Bandi Atmar Kahini’ we see a different variety of cultural translation in which it is not the form but the content of moral dilemma that finds a modulation in the intercultural transfer. There is a cultural grafting of the American world into the urban Calcutta in the first half of twentieth century. Cultural translation is a tool for re-​worlding. But the more important point is that these translations from Poe to Ray demonstrate a world literary travel that does not depend on translation into English language. 11.3  Travelling Further into the Planet with Lubdhak and Gun Island There are diverse strategies when it comes to making a world of a region in literature. I did not say ‘world from a region’ but ‘world of a region’. How are the ‘of’ and the ‘from’ different? How does a region become a world? When we say ‘world from a region’, we silently assume that a region can only become a world in a relational sense by being co-​invoked with a larger ‘world’, be it a national or a transnational space, beyond itself. But there could be a transformation of the region itself into the world wherein the world is not an expansive reference frame or a second entity to enlarge the region. We see a complex intermeshing of these two strategies in the Bengali-​ Indian writer Nabarun Bhattacharya’s thus-​ far untranslated, twenty-​first century dog-​novella, Lubdhak (Sirius 2006). In this text, the canine community faces eviction and liquidation by the human sanitation and beautification projects in Kolkata (capital city of West Bengal, a state in India). They fight back through a utopian dog revolution when a meteorite conspires to destroy not just the city or the country but the entire planet. Nabarun imports this astral dimension of planetarity to signal a worlding of the particular city. This is a positioning of the city in relation to notions of region, nation and the world in its widest possible grasping –​as the planetary. This adds a spatial species-​dimension in the novel that deals with the inter-​species relation of the human and the dog. While this holds, it is also true that Kolkata, the particular region and the city, through the planetary mediation, becomes a world on its own. The planetary is dialectically used as a third term to make the region into a world and yet at the same time, it makes a world out of Kolkata because we can differentiate between the scales of the world and the planet. Kolkata becomes a world because earth as the planet is activated as a third. Bhattacharya’s narrator foregrounds the discursive and charts a history of the planet. He spends the entire first chapter, talking about all the big

Travelling On  167 earthquakes that have taken place from 1737 or further back in 525 AD . The apocalyptic tone finds expression in a quantitative notion of scale-​ shifting in the very opening of the novel: ‘Seven hours, only seven hours left. Seven hours, meaning four twenty minutes. It is not something of an unimaginable scale. Just twenty-​five thousand two hundred seconds’ (9; translation mine). This numeric trope of scale-​shifting where the more we subdivide and lower the unit of measure, the more negligible it seems, is homologous to the scale-​shifting that happens between the city and the world through the dialectical third of the planet. Ironically enough, when Kolkata becomes a world by being situated in relation to the planet, it goes to show how vacuous the ego of this tiny city is, vis-​à-​vis the planetary vistas. This insight into Kolkata’s insignificance in the planetary scheme offers a critique of anthropocentrism in the novel. The irony is that Kolkata is made into a world only for its puniness to be highlighted. The historically minded narrator notes that Charles F. Richter had made his scale in 1935, but there were many unmeasured and immeasurable earthquakes before that point in planetary history. From the list of major earthquakes between 525 and 1995, the narrator zooms in on the Kolkata disaster that led to the death of three hundred thousand people. This earthquake happened on 11 October 1737. The small number of deaths in that makes the narrator wonder about the then population of the city. From this he comes to the point that there is no figure for animal deaths back then and things have not changed much in the present. As the narrator wonders about life as zoe and not only bios (Bhattacharya’s word in the preface is ‘pranmandal’ or ‘life-​world’ beyond the human), he gets anxious about the absence of dog-​sounds from the city as it awaits the astral clash, down to its last seven hours. The narrator engages in a planetary speculation whether the dogs have been set forth like rockets: ‘we are watching the flight of those star-​shaped sparklers up into the sky, the sparklers, falling down on earth from the dogs’ burnt tails over a whole era, many many light years’ (10; translation mine). This evocation of trans-​human macro-​time is significant as a literary strategy of worlding through the planetary. The dog trope meets the astral motif as the narrator references the famous Soviet-​dog Laika who was first to be sent into outer space in 1957. Transnational reference, as seen above, becomes a tool for worlding. The novel does not just begin but also ends with this planetarity. The narrator mentions the attack of an asteroid on earth, 65 million years ago. He archives the missed encounters between planetary bodies and earth in 1989 by six hours and in 1996 by four hours. It is here that the narrator interprets planetary apocalypse as a punishment for human injustice on dogs as he compares the clashing meteorite with a cosmic dog, out to take revenge for all the dog deaths across the world (62). In Lubdhak, we get a sense that everything which happens in the novel happens all

168  Arka Chattopadhyay over the planet and what we see is a worlded region, Kolkata, as a tiny urban fragment from a planetary narrative of nemesis. It is through this planetarity that Kolkata paradoxically becomes a narrow world. A recent Indian English novel that shares Bhattacharya’s concerns about the non-​human animal and climate crisis is Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). It uses a spatio-​temporal logic of repetition across centuries to create an experience of worlding. Not only does the novel’s story travel from Kolkata and Sunderbans in West Bengal to Los Angeles and Venice, but it also follows the cryptographic code of the legendary gun merchant (‘Bonduki Sadagar’) of Sunderbans that connects with the story of Chand Sadagar’s tryst with the snake goddess Manasa Devi. The literary and cultural legend of the snake goddess’s possessive love for the merchant, leading to a series of catastrophes for Chand, has a snake-​like slithering narrative trajectory, reminding us of the meandering rivers in Sunderbans. The travel of this narrative echoes the transnational travel of characters in the novel. As they seek to solve the mystery of Sunderbans’s famously enigmatic gun merchant, the quest takes them across different countries. Ghosh uses a repetition in historical macro-​time to make a commentary about climate-​crisis-​induced illegal migration. Literature has a role in the circulation of Chand’s mythological narrative as it gets narrated in the 600-​ page poem, Manasamangal Kavya. When Dinu, the narrator-​protagonist becomes obsessed with the gun island in Sunderbans and the snake-​shrine, he starts having visions of snakes. The snake’s winding way stands for a non-​linear temporal travel through which history repeats itself with differences. Dinu is the new Chand, haunted by the cryptic mystery of the gun island and the ultimate fate of the gun merchant. Like Lubdhak, I am not attempting a full reading of Gun Island. I simply want to show how the transnational experience of worlding encounters a planetary dimension in Ghosh as well. The entropic environmental concern with anthropogenic climate change is more central to Ghosh’s novel than Bhattacharya’s, but they both exploit the planetary to inscribe the world. We notice the signifier ‘world’ in the oral non-​sense verse, supposedly composed by the gun-​merchant, but never written down: Calcutta had neither people nor houses then Bengal’s great port was a city-​of-​the-​world. (16) This is a snake-​like migration of the region into the world. Kolkata thus connects to Venice through its maritime link and becomes open to a process of worlding (‘nagar-​e-​jahan’). Following an allusion to William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Cinta, Dinu’s Italian friend, connects the etymology of ‘bonduk’

Travelling On  169 (gun) to ‘Venedig’ and finally to Venice. This indicates that the so-​called gun merchant is no gun merchant and the expression actually refers to a ‘merchant who went to Venice’ (137). In a similar way, the Bengali expression ‘Taal-​ misrir-​ desh’ (a country of sweets) is etymologically linked through the Arabic roots of ‘misri’ to Egypt. The merchant would have had to cross Egypt on his way to Venice. It takes an Italian character to unpack these nuances from the Bengali expressions. Cinta is able to notice other languages in Bengali. She translates Bengali into European languages via the Arabic. This move towards embedded multilingualism within what looks like a monolingual rubric implies a linguistic trans-​ culturalism. The transnational and trans-​cultural travel of the same signifier generates a sense of worlding here. We stare at multiple languages and cultures with words as go-​betweens. This is how a local folktale becomes ‘worlded’. This is another way in which a regional language (Bengali in India is a regional language but in Bangladesh it is the national language) internally becomes a world language through words that cross linguistic borders. Here we have a fresh insight into worlding as multilingualism inscribed within monolingualism, waiting, as it were, for a trans-​cultural translation. Like the ancient merchant, the novel travels to Venice and we peak into the illegal migrants there, coming from Bangladesh. The human migration induced by climate crisis finds a parallel in migration of the non-​human as we witness a rare event of whales, dolphins and millions of birds in the sky, migrating north, in search of a better environment. Dinu, Piya, the marine biologist and Cinta approach the refugee boat that connects Tipu and Rafi, boys from Sunderbans who hold a clue to the gun island mystery. We will not go into that narrative strand. It suffices to say that the migration of human and non-​human makes for another analogy with the migration of the gun merchant narrative. The sea, the storm, the migration of human and non-​human species, unite to make Gun Island a novel about our world. The differential repetition of transnational history performs itself as Dinu follows the so-​called gun merchant’s footsteps, from India to Italy. This transnational movement of history that repeats itself after centuries meets the larger history of animal species in the astral and cosmic event of ‘bioluminescence’ to lift its spatiality into a planetary dimension. Piya, in her marine biologist’s language, calls this cosmic event of environmental sublimity, ‘bioluminescence’. Dinu describes it thus: […] a halo of birds spinning above her, while down in the water a chakra of dolphins and whales whirled around the boat. And then an even stranger thing happened: the colour of the water around the refugee boat began to change. In a few moments it was filled with a glow, of an unearthly green colour, bright enough that we could see the

170  Arka Chattopadhyay outlines of the dolphins and whales that were undulating through the water. (282) The prose here registers the strangeness of this event as Dinu is enamoured by what he sees. The co-​invocation of natural elements (sky, air and water), chromatic variations, aquatic undulations and isomorphism of the circling birds in the sky and the whales, going round and round in the water, limned by the spirit-​signifier ‘halo’ and the tantric word ‘chakra’–​all these aspects make the description mystical. This is a cosmic convergence of multiple species, migrating in harmony. Dinu is ‘transfixed by this miraculous spectacle’ (282) and his subsequent description only intensifies the sublimity of this moment of nature’s exaltation: ‘the storm of birds circling above, like a whirling funnel, and the graceful shadows of the leviathans in the glowing green water below’ (282). The image of the mythical leviathan climaxes the metaphor of funnelling birds in the sky. This is a momentary but momentous moment of harmonic nature. We must remember that this is not the order of things in the world of nature depicted in Ghosh’s novel. It is only an exceptional aesthetic moment that interrupts the entropic conundrum of anthropogenic climate change. It is here that Gun Island speaks back to Lubdhak in the cosmic language of planetarity. Though Lubdhak’s planetary thread is laced with a dark apocalyptic note, Gun Island evokes the planet as a sublime moment of nature’s majestic intensity. Despite this apparent difference, the two texts share the same deeper spirit. In Bhattacharya, the planetary trope arrives with a prospective end-​of-​the-​world scenario. The planet is therefore like a limit to think worlding as an experience. The experience of the planet in Ghosh, albeit more exhilarating, is another kind of limit to worlding. It offers nothing but a flash that disappears as soon as it appears. There is no formation of the world here but only a fleeting subjective glimpsing of the planet as a world that evaporates with the passing instant. The cosmic event of bioluminescence does not cement a stable world of permanence. It is a short-​lived spark that cannot overturn the entropic order even though it ruptures that order through its rapturous appeal. In both novels, we move beyond region and nation to reach outward into the planet as a negative as well as an affirmative limit of the worlding experience. To conclude, in this chapter we examined various Indian literary texts in both Bengali and English in tandem with the experience of worlding through intertextuality, cultural translation and planetarity. With Subimal Misra, we concentrated on a bricoleur ‘world form’ of news and voice-​ montage and explored the problematic of translation for global market as a counter-​pull to experimental rigour. In Hemendra Kumar Ray’s Poe translations, we underlined the strategies of cultural worlding in translation. The emphasis was on transnational movement of stories as a way of

Travelling On  171 generating narrative credulity and a cultural transition from individual to collective experiences. In Bhattacharya’s and Ghosh’s novels, we zoomed in on the cosmic thread of planetarity in the dialectic of worlding and demonstrated how the alterity of the planet installs a limit to the experience of worlding. These differently vectored analyses foreground the need to widen the landscape of world literary travels beyond the compulsive monolingualism of English. To end with a Homi Bhabha echo, the transnational is so much more than the translational! Notes 1 For Moretti, ‘distant reading’ is a reading that makes the text disappear between macro and micro units of analysis outside and inside the text respectively (see Moretti, 48–​49). 2 Naxalite political movement was the result of an armed peasant revolution of 1963 in the tea gardens of Darjeeling in India. 3 For more on this see Emily Apter’s book, Against World Literature.

References Apter, E. (2013). Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso. Bhattacharya, N. (2006). Lubdhak [Sirius]. Kolkata: Abhijan. Casanova, P. (2005). “Literature as a World.” New Left Review 31 (Jan–​Feb, 2005), 71–​90. Cheah, P. (2016). What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke, NC: Duke University Press. Foster Jr, J. B. (2009). “Cultural Encounters in Global Contexts: World Literature as a One-​Semester General Education Course.” In: Damrosch D. (ed) Teaching World Literature. New York: MLA, 155–​164. Ghosh, A. (2019) Gun Island. Gurgaon: Penguin India. Misra, S. (2010). The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories. Trans. V. Ramaswamy. Noida: Harper Collins India. Misra, S. (2015). Wild Animals Prohibited: Anti-​Stories. Trans. V. Ramaswamy. Noida: Harper Collins India. Misra, S. (2019). Two Anti-​Novels. Trans. V. Ramaswamy. Noida: Harper Collins India. Moretti, F. (2013). Distant Reading. London: Verso. Mukherjee, J. (2019). “Introduction.” In: Two Anti Novels. Trans. V. Ramaswamy. Noida: Harper Collins India, vii–​ viii.Poe, E. A. (1946). “The Premature Burial.” In: The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: Volume 1. New York: Knopf, 532–​542. Poe, E. A. (1946). “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” In: The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: Volume 2. New York: Knopf, 656–​663. Ray, H. K. (2005). Kishor Bhoutik Shamagra 1 [Young Adult Horror Collection 1]. Kolkata: Patra Bharati.

12 Capitalist World-​Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve Sourit Bhattacharya India’s liberation from the colonial rule was marked by a widespread food crisis. Critics have argued that this crisis was conditioned by the colonial modernising of India from mid-​nineteenth century onward through technologising the agricultural and industrial sectors and hence dismantling long-​term sustainable food production systems (Arnold 1989; Siegel 2018). A tragic consequence of this phenomenon was the outbreak of numerous famines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These famines had also called for intellectual and social-​political mobilisation around them. As Benjamin Siegel writes in a book on hunger, food, and the making of modern India, “Hunger had begun to emerge as a site of political contestation in the decades before independence” (Siegel 2018, 5). The 1943 Bengal famine, the Tebhaga uprising, and food movements in the postcolonial periods frequently reminded that food was a key social and political issue for the newly independent nation. Much of the political energy on the issue, however, derived from the representations and debates on food and related issues in literary and cultural works. For instance, the 1943 Bengal famine galvanised the birth of India’s modern political theatre (Indian People’s Theatre Association) through Bijan Bhattacharya’s famine-​based play Nabanna or Harvest (1944). Some of the most popular Hindi films in the period engaged focally with the issues of landlessness, hunger, sustainable food production, and nationalising food and agricultural sectors (Mehboob Khan’s Roti [1942] or Mother India [1957] or Bimal Kar’s Do Bigha Zamin [1953]). Apart from noted vernacular novelistic contributions to the issue (such as Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Bengali Ashani Sanket or Amritlal Nagar’s Hindi Bhookh), in “Indian English literature,” Bhabani Bhattacharya’s most celebrated English novel, So Many Hungers! about the 1943 Bengal famine was published in the wake of the Indian independence (1947). His next novel, Music for Mohini (1952) had extended discussions on food and poverty, and his third novel,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-16

Capitalist World-Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics  173 He Who Rides a Tiger (1954) narrativised the suffering and tribulations of a lower-​caste rural protagonist, Kalo, during the famine. From R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958) to Mulk Raj Anand’s The Road (1961), notable writers and artists of the time could hardly ignore the most challenging issues of food, hunger, and starvation in a vast and deeply uneven and recently politically independent country like India. Since independence brought in no substantial change for the lower classes and castes or was unable to guarantee even the most fundamental right in a postcolonial democracy –​the right to food –​there was an abundance of disillusionment, anguish, and dejection in these narratives. Literature and art became the means through which to represent the historical or contemporary socio-​ecological and food crisis, to fight the everyday impacts of capitalism, class, gender, and caste, and to emotionally connect with a vast and impoverished population suffering the injunctions of starvation.1 In this chapter, I will show through a close reading of Kamala Markandaya’s novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954; citation from 1956 edition used) how postcolonial authors felt, imagined, and rendered the immediate cases of hunger and death under “capitalist world-​ecology” in late-​colonial and postcolonial India and forewarned the young independent nation of its massive but fundamental duty of feeding the subject population. Nectar in a Sieve is Markandaya’s first and most popular novel.2 It is about a peasant woman Rukmani, who recounts in first-​person narrative her post-​marital life under changing socio-​economic conditions of landless agriculture, industrialisation, and drought, her forced migration to the city, and the perennial desire of a peasant to get back to her village and family. The novel is shaped by food discourses throughout –​every chapter of the novel refers to aspects of cultivation, vegetable-​growing, rice, irrigation, healthy bodies, eating, etc. The focal point changes to starvation, skeletal figures, and philosophical thoughts on hunger as drought and inflation ravage the unnamed village. Markandaya very clearly indicates that there are two socio-​ecological forces responsible for the plight of the peasant family –​landless farming and industrialisation. Nathan, her husband, is a landless farmer who pays rent via a contractor to an unknown landlord and lives off the land’s produce. But a flood, followed by a long drought, destroys his crops for successive years and prevents him from paying his rent, resulting finally in the loss of his land. Early in the novel, Rukmani tells readers that her husband, like her father too, does not own any land, but they save sufficiently from the harvests: “From each harvest we saved, and had gunny-​sacks full of the husked rice stored away in our small stone-​lined granary. There was food plenty” (Markandaya 1956, 7). But this comfortable situation soon disappears due to successive “natural calamities.” A land that Nathan has tilled for generations is gone in a moment making him professionally crippled. Forced to migrate to

174  Sourit Bhattacharya an unnamed city, he mourns the tragic loss of his “ancestral” land and worries he is not skilled to do any job in the city: “This city is no place for me, I am lost in it. And I am too old to learn to like it” (177). He eventually dies there, and Rukmani will somehow manage to go back to her ancestral village in the end. Although Markandaya does not specify the time-​period for her novel, her references to a British doctor Kenny and the building of a tannery in a village allude to the social context in late-​colonial India. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar famously noted in his study of the birth of industrial capitalism in Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the transformation of Bombay from a fishing hamlet to an industrial metropolis was a product of imperial connection. It grew out of labour and resources collected from the hinterlands: Its commodity markets were linked to wider relations of production and exchange in the hinterland. Its mills depended increasingly upon the penetration of the domestic market. Labour for the city’s commercial enterprises not only migrated from distant regions, but retained close ties with the village and through the remittance of cash earnings contributed to the reproduction of the rural economy. (Chandavarkar 1994, 29) Migrant labour was key to the birth of industrial capitalism, which also shaped, what Ramachandra Guha calls, the production of “ecological refugees,” in which capitalism and neo-​ colonialism have turned landless labourers into eternal refugees and migrants (2006, 234). Historical sociologist, Jason W Moore has further argued how capitalism actively produces nature and society. For Moore, capital accumulation is inherently socio-​ecological in that it turns land productivity into labour productivity. Moore shows that capitalism in North America and Europe was activated by “human flows” through successive waves of labour at a world-​scale, from African slavery to Asian indentured labour (2011, 106). In so doing, capitalism has not only reorganised society but also actively produced new markets, commodities, new state making and accumulative capacities, and new geographies and cultures –​an entire ecosystem what Moore calls “capitalist world-​ecology” (109). To come back to the novel, while Markandaya’s example of a rural hinterland facing the injunction of capitalist pressure may seem isolated at first, the socio-​ecological transformation of Rukmani’s rural society for a drought and then for the building of a tannery is not an isolated condition. Nathan’s landlessness, his losing of the livelihood for a drought, and his forced migration to a city where he is unable to contribute to a stone quarry are specific yet

Capitalist World-Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics  175 generalisable examples of how capitalist ecology produced humans (into exposable migrants), nature, and society at a world-​scale and specifically during the interwar, late-​colonial years –​best evidenced in the group of work known as “regional novels” by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, A. Bapiraju, Gojananda T. Madkholkar, Nanak Singh, and others that captured this phenomenon widely adapting to the post-​Depression era social realist style.3 The novel further shows that it is the nonhuman animals, women, lower class, and lower castes who bear the brunt of capitalist world-​ecology. Markandaya depicts industrialisation mainly through the building of a tannery in the village precincts. Rukmani expresses her displeasure at the tannery from the beginning. She is aware of the better income she earns from the vegetables in her backyard, for the tannery and the demands of its city-​bred people have doubled the prices of vegetables and everyday commodities in the village; yet she is saddened that her relationship with the flattering and loving client, Old Granny, is over now (Markandaya 1956, 47–​48). Ironically, inflation helps the villagers in the beginning, but as the drought continues the prices of rice and other essential foodstuffs soar high due to hoarding and black-​marketing practices, preventing them from buying food. Along with the tannery comes the urban lifestyle –​the rowdy street life, the shops and money culture, the din and bustle of the factory, the rise of crime –​which for Rukmani spoils the traditional rural culture and ecosystem. Rukmani reflects at one point that she cannot hear a bird singing these days, At one time there had been kingfishers here, flashing between the young shoots for our fish; and paddy birds and sometimes, in the shallower reaches of the river, flamingos, treading with ungainly precision among the water reeds, with plumage of a glory not of this earth. Now birds came no more, for the tannery lay close. (69) One can note in this stark observation of nature how capitalism exhausts natural resources, reorganises social needs, and produces nature. To return to Moore: “Nature is no longer a passive substance upon which humanity leaves its footprint. Rather it becomes an inclusive and active bundle of relations formed and re-​formed with the historically-​and geographically-​ specific movements of humans with the rest of nature” (Moore 2011, 117). In a prescient reading of the novel, Sharae Deckard draws from Ramachandra Guha’s distinction of “omnivores” and “ecosystem people” to argue that ecosystem people like Rukmani rely on seasonal rain cycles and their “necessary adaptability”:

176  Sourit Bhattacharya She is careful to rotate crops so as not to exceed the land’s carrying capacity, practicing cultivation within the biophysical limits of the ecosystem, and is adept at “reading” flora and fauna and signs of eco-​ systemic change in the paddy fields, as when she detects the loss of biodiversity catalysed by the village’s new leather-​processing factory. (Deckard 2019, 174) But all of this is destroyed for the tannery and the reorganisation of society and human relations with nature under capitalist world-​ecology, catalysing widespread migrations and a possible extinction of animal species. Although Rukmani, an educated village woman, is concerned about the alimentary, environmental, and economic issues, her peers, Kunthi, Janaki, Kali, and others find these concerns “queer,” and “stupid” (29, 46). Indeed, some of them support the decisions by the village’s youth to join the factory to save money and enjoy the new lifestyle. Through Kunthi, Markandaya also shows how women are seduced by the tannery men for money and ornaments or are forced into sex trade in exchange for food during the drought (Rukmini’s daughter Ira faces this tragic experience; 98–​100). The tannery also brings a rising culture of crime, such as Rukmani’s younger son is killed for allegedly stealing from the factory during the drought. What is suggested through these quick examples of crime and starvation is that the tannery is not only a “disturbance” to the rural life system as was assumed, but one that actively reshapes the villagers’ lives by making them dependent on its socio-​ecological mode of production. While the drought is understood as a “natural calamity,” the tannery by dismantling the traditional modes of food production and sustainability does not allow an easy recuperation from the food crisis, causing further death and distress. One of the most significant takeaways from Markandaya’s novel is that the end of colonialism has not necessarily ended “death by starvation.” As long as postcolonial nations are forced to continue to depend on world-​capitalism and to inexhaustively “produce” humans and natures around it, the artificial creation of death by hunger will follow.4 While Markandaya’s novel points to the material production of hunger and food crisis, readers will also note a deep personalisation and metaphorical embodiment of hunger here.5 Deckard argues that Markandaya conjures up an embodied, libidinal relationship with land and food in the early part of the novel, especially in her description of seeds, in which “the land is more than landscape, not something to be beheld or valued solely for its aesthetic qualities, but rather, the material ground of her life and symbolic basis of her subjectivity” (Deckard 2019, 174). In these instances, Markandaya uses a mode of narration where memoir writing and discursive thinking on hunger converge –​an aesthetic innovation within, what

Capitalist World-Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics  177 can be seen as, social realist writing. The novel begins with Rukmani’s thoughts that she can still distinctly remember the days of her marriage 40 years earlier. But then, it turns to take up the past tense predominantly to record her life-​story, until resorting again to the present tense to put closure to the narrative (recalling the narrative technique in Narayan’s The Guide, although Narayan’s is third-​person narration). Since Rukmani can write in English (she will use this skill in the city and write letters for people to earn money so that Nathan and herself can go back to their village; 1956, 167–​168), this first-​person narrative creates the sense that she is writing her own memoir. In this short memoir, she decides to highlight certain events and skip certain others. Sometimes, years have passed within the gap of two sentences or two chapters (Chapter One ends as Rukmani, a bride, arrives at Nathan’s house, while Chapter Two begins with the birth of her first child. Between Chapters Two and Six, 14 years have passed.). This structuring has caused critics to doubt Markandaya’s skill in narrative construction.6 It seems to me, though, that through such construction, which purposefully relates hunger to temporality, Markandaya offers to demonstrate how starvation is artificially manufactured in rural societies and how a human body adjusts to the conditions of hunger. These thematic desires and treatments compel a discursive engagement with hunger, which is executed through the mode of personalised memoir. For example, consider this passage: For hunger is a curious thing: at first it is with you all the time, waking and sleeping and in your dreams, and your belly cries out insistently, and there is a gnawing and a pain as if your very vitals were being devoured, and you must stop it at any cost, and you buy a moment’s respite even while you know and fear the sequel. Then the pain is no longer sharp but dull, and this too is with you always, so that you think of food many times a day and each time a terrible sickness assails you, and became (sic) you know this you try to avoid the thought, but you cannot, it is with you. Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire, only a great emptiness is left, like the sky, like a well in drought, and it is now that the strength from your limbs, and you try to rise and find you cannot, or to swallow water and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost. (87–​88) This passage immediately brings to mind Knut Hamsun’s descriptions of the physical suffering of an unnamed and hungry artist in his novel Hunger (1890, 1998 edition used for reference),7 or more recently a passage from Aki Ollikainen’s novel of the 1866–​68 Finnish famine, White Hunger (2015) where the narrator, through the child Mataleena’s consciousness,

178  Sourit Bhattacharya compares hunger to a struggling kitten trapped in a sack about to be thrown in an icy lake.8 In a perceptive study of the “Aesthetics of Hunger” in Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger, Timothy Wientzen (2015) shows how the macroeconomic conditions of Norway’s entry into the world-​market accelerated similar uneven conditions, not only displacing populations and cultures but also forcing them to “embody” these conditions. He notes, Rather than map the systems that produce hunger, Hamsun filters the experience of starvation through a single, first-​person narrator whose experience takes place within a social context that hunger renders him incapable of interpreting. The experience of hunger becomes a total one, swamping his cognitive faculties in favor of bodily extremity. (214–​15) The unnamed narrator’s embodiment of hunger, his refusal to take aid and suffer consequences make it clear that hunger in Hamsun’s novel is neither a metaphor for a universal experience of modern anomie nor a proto-​existential investigation into human nature, as critics tend to see it. Rather, in foregrounding the bodily experience of hunger, Hamsun situated the formal and thematic concerns of his novel within a developmental history of a nation’s integration into the economic world system. (216) I would argue that Markandaya offers a similar rendering in which a deeply personalised, embodied aesthetic appears mediated by capitalist world-​ecology in the important time of India’s historical entrance into postcolonial modernity. But Markandaya adds to it what Hamsun does not, at least in Wientzen’s reading: she does map the system that produces hunger and thus in a Lukácsian manner reveals the contradictory, paradoxical, and disparate forces of history shaping human and social life. Lukács further argued in The Theory of the Novel that the realist novel achieves totality through repeatedly bringing and cancelling the organicity of these paradoxical and disparate elements in its use of the devices of irony and narrative perspective, as well as the other features of reflection, mood, and chorus/​minor characters (Lukács 1971, 92). The description of hunger through self-​reflexive and ontological utterances, ironic moods, and embodied metaphors is integral to Markandaya’s hunger aesthetic. To go back to Markandaya’s quote above, hunger is understood as an existent being, an actively working part of the body –​something that we carry with us every day, but something that also devours us as it grows out. In this, it is given a parasitic dimension, eating not only the internal

Capitalist World-Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics  179 organs of the body, but also what is left of the body itself destroying the entire organic system. The only remedy is food, but food does not help regain strength for the body. It just makes the body duller, until the body gradually empties out of strength and hunger becomes a phenomenon of the mind creating illusions of strength, food, and resources. The narration is full of everyday, empathised reading, as if the narrator were ironically aware of hunger and its stages and their everyday presence among peasant lives. Indeed, irony appears to be a potent device for hunger depiction. Nicole Simek writes in the context of French Caribbean postcolonial literature that irony attends to the multiple aspects of hunger as biological need, as figure for desire, and as a concept or aesthetic structure: “To approach hunger with an eye for irony is to a certain extent to insist on the discursive lives of hunger, and to scrutinize the biopolitics of ‘bare life’ that relies on an (over)investment in physical survival” (Simek 2016, 2). This bare, discursive, ironising aesthetic of hunger appears in the use of the syntax and style in Markandaya’s narrative. The above passage, for instance, has a motional state, a speedy syntax –​long sentences divided into smaller parts joined by commas or colons. This indicates the different states and processes that the body must undergo when sieged by hunger. Also note the constant use of second-​person narration, where the reader is included in the narrator’s discourse as one who fully and assertively participates in the discussion. The reader is supposed to know these stages because everyone suffers from hunger, either for small or prolonged periods, especially if the reader is from the previously colonised societies where hunger, drought, and malnutrition predominate. There is also the use of sharp and evocative imagery. Again, in a deeply ironic gesture, the dried nature of the body in hunger, the emptying out of strength, is compared with the sky or a dry well in drought. While the sky is a standard metaphor for suggesting emptiness, a dry well is a poignant one, for it most painfully suggests that there is no water anywhere: the rivers and ponds have dried up, and there is no rain; even the well which is dug very deep inside the earth to store water artificially has succumbed to it. Without water, the body realises that it is dying in parts, and that even a temporary availability of water, ironically, only worsens the condition. These are some philosophical realisations regarding hunger, presented using an improvised structure and ironic imagery, which Rob Nixon has influentially called in his book an aesthetic of “slow violence” (2011). This rendering is comparable with Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novel, He Who Rides a Tiger, which was published in the same year as Nectar and has sections where Kalo speculates on the relations between hunger, law, and caste.9 Markandaya through this depiction seems to not only speak of hunger and its everyday manifestation in Indian villages, but also comment on the links between production systems, economic and social

180  Sourit Bhattacharya stratification, and the inevitability of the situation under capitalist world-​ ecology. Post-​independence, India saw huge investments in heavy industrialisation by the state and in the concepts of progress and modernisation of villages. By setting the novel in a late-​colonial period and by publishing it in the immediate postcolonial times, Markandaya admonishes the terrible socio-​economic future awaiting the subject populations for rural India. If the birth of the postcolonial period is tragically marked by hunger and food crises, state policies have only worsened the conditions by not taking due care of the hierarchised nature of agriculture in India and of the large body of landless agriculturalists, and by shifting the focus onto heavy industrialisation, which has further stripped agriculturalists of jobs and forced them to migrate to cities. Markandaya channels these astute perceptions and social commentaries through a personalised, fast-​ skipping, memoir in the model of social realist narration, which allows discourses of an intimate and strategic engagement with body and its adjustments to hunger, indicating the irony and pathos of the situation. In the essay “Socio-​literature,” Markandaya observes that two centuries of colonialism, imperialism, and racism have shaken to the core the values of mutual love and peaceful co-​existence. Indian literature at the crucial postcolonial juncture does not have the luxury to avoid these issues of historical subjection. She emphasises the need to write a “socio-​literature” or the “literature of concern,” which is not propaganda/​didacticism but “a representation of what is like to be there and feel it happening to you” (Markandaya qtd. in Joseph, 216). What is poignant about this assertion is the issue of the immediacy and the transparency of writing, as if a writer were to embody the conditions they noticed and wrote about. The compelling discursive strategies of the narrative above tell us that writers improvised widely to capture the specificity and the ubiquity of socio-​ ecological and food crisis conditions in India and gave them a personalised, mediated, and intimate form. Through these aesthetic developments, they offered possibilities of both critiquing the existing socio-​ecological conditions enabling scarcity and food crisis and their impact on human and nonhuman body and life-​cycle. They actively reminded that that the postcolonial beginnings of India were marked by utterly devastating food shortage conditions and that we needed a committed aesthetic of starvation to be cognisant of the issues of slow violence and human-made scarcities. Notes 1 For a study of theme and structure in post-​independence novels, see Mukherjee (1971). For postcolonial environments in Indian English fiction, see Pablo Mukherjee (2010).

Capitalist World-Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics  181 2 She was also accused of orientalist tendencies and pandering to the West in her rendering of poverty and hunger. As Rosemary M. George writes, “In India by the mid-​1970s, Markandaya’s reputation became fixed as a rootless and reclusive writer who had catered to the West in a series of novels that were deemed overly poverty fixated, sexually explicit, exotic recreations of India or of foreigners in Europe” (George, 400–​09 (406)). 3 For a discussion on this, see Das (2005, 296). For the rise of social realism in literature and art, see Tucker (2011). 4 This phenomenon is most tragically present in the rise of deaths in contemporary India due to farmer suicides, caste discrimination, or even not having Aadhaar card linked to a beneficiary’s ration card. See, for instance, Aarefa Johari’s reporting on deaths due to Aadhaar card issues (2018); also see Archana Kaushik’s work on the link between hunger and starvation and the social welfare worker’s practising of untouchability (2018). There have been literary and cultural works on the issue but not as widely as in the years immediately after independence. See the novels by Kota Neelima and such films as Peepli Live. 5 Markandaya returns to this motif in A Handful of Rice (1967; 1985), where hunger is manufactured by the hoarding of rice and essential commodities by corrupt traders like Damodar, Markandaya shows the endlessness of food crisis and hunger conditions for a peasant even in the city precincts: “Bad Harvest […] Ravi felt very tired. He thought he had cut clear of all that, very simply by walking out; now here was the slimy tentacle reaching out from the sodden paddy-​fields of endless abject villages to clutch at him in the middle of a town” (emphasis in original; 205). 6 For instance, M. K. Bhatnagar thinks Markandaya’s novels are riddled with “superficialities and inauthenticities,” while Mohan Jha suggests that her works deserve only a “hasty reading.” There are also critics such as Margaret P. Joseph who engage sympathetically with Markandaya and thinks that the challenges in her structures and the openness in her conclusions are “uncompromisingly realistic” in her rendering of reality. See, M. K. Bhatnagar, 3; Mohan Jha, 36–​44 (39); M. K. Naik who speaks about the “superficialities” in A Handful of Rice, 237; and Margaret P. Joseph, 65. 7 Compare the protagonist’s thoughts here, “During this fruitless effort my thoughts began to get confused again –​I felt my brain literally snap, my head was emptying and emptying, and in the end it sat light and void on my shoulders. I perceived this gaping emptiness in my head with my whole body” (p. 28); or, “I seemed to have become too feeble to steer or guide myself where I wanted to go; a swarm of tiny vermin had forced its way inside me and hollowed me out” (Hamsun, 17). 8 Here is the passage from Ollikainen: “Hunger is the kitten Willow-​Lauri put in a sack, which scratches away with its small claws, causing searing pain; then more scratching, then more, until the kitten is exhausted and falls to the bottom of the sack, weighing heavily there, before gathering its strength and starting a fresh struggle. You want to lift the animal out, but it scratches so hard you dare not reach inside. You have no option but to carry the bundle to the lake and throw it into the hole in the ice” (46–​47).

182  Sourit Bhattacharya 9 For instance, when Kalo is arrested for looking “suspiciously” at the modern luxury buildings in Calcutta, is taken to the magistrate, and pleads his innocence, the magistrate asks: “Why did you have to live?” Kalo is shocked and can only answer, “I’m a worm, sir, it is nothing that I live or die.” He is shocked because he had a different and a favourable notion of colonial law in his village. During the famine times, space, caste and administrative/​ legal judgements appear linked (Bhattacharya, 36).

References Anand, M. R. (1961). The Road. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers. Arnold, D. (1989). Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Bhatnagar, M. K. (2002). Kamala Markandaya. New Delhi: Atlantic. Bhattacharya, B. (1952). Music for Mohini. London: Crown Publishers. Bhattacharya, B. (1954). He Who Rides a Tiger. London: Arnold Heinemann. Chandavarkar, R. (1994). The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–​1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Das, S.K. (2005). History of Indian Literature, 1911–​1956: Struggle for Freedom. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Deckard, S. (2019). “Land, Water, Waste: Environment and Ecology in South Asian Fiction” in Alex Tickell ed., The Novel in South and South-​East Asia since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 172–​86. George, R.M. (2009). “Where in the World did Kamala Markandaya Go?” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42(3), 400–​09. Guha, R. (2006). How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hamsun, K. (1998). Hunger, trans. by Sverre Lyngstad. New York: Penguin. Jha, M. (2013). “Indian Novels in English: Notes and Suggestion.” The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium, ed. by Prabhat K. Singh. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 36–​44 (p. 39). Johari, A. “A Year after Jharkhand Girl Died of Starvation, Aadhaar Tragedies Are on the Rise.” Scroll.in, 28 September 2018. Web. Accessed 8 October 2021. Joseph, M.P (1980). Kamala Markandaya. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann. Kaushik, A. (2018). “From Hunger Deaths to Healthy Living: A Case Study of Dalits in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India.” Contemporary Voice of Dalit 10(2), 1–​9. Lukács, G. (1971). The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-​philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press. Markandaya, K. (1954). Nectar in a Sieve. Bombay: Jaico. Markandaya, K. (1967). A Handful of Rice. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks. Moore, J.W. (2011). “Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times: Accumulation & Crisis in the Capitalist World-​Ecology.” Journal of World-​Systems Research 17(1), 107–​146. Mukherjee, M. (1971). The Twice-​Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques in the Indian Novel in English. Delhi: Arnold Heinemann.

Capitalist World-Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics  183 Mukherjee, U.P. (2010). Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Naik, M. K. (1989). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Narayan, R. K. (1958). The Guide. London: Methuen. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neelima, K. (2013). Shoes of the Dead. Delhi: Rupa Publications. Ollikainen, A. (2015). White Hunger, trans. by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah. London: Peirene Press. Siegel, B.R. (2018) Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simek, N. (2016). Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life. New York: Palgrave. Tucker, D. ed. (2011). British Social Realism in the Arts Since 1940. London: Palgrave. Wientzen, T. (2015). “The Aesthetics of Hunger: Knut Hamsun, Modernism, and Starvation’s Global Frame.” Novel: A Forum for Fiction 48(2), 208–​223.

13 Modernity on Wheels Reading Trains as Sites of Encounter and Disaster Anuparna Mukherjee

In the summer of 2020 when the nation, grappling with the first wave of COVID-​19 came to a halt under the preventive lockdowns, the trains were regularly hitting the headlines. At first, it had to do with the interruption and the partial resumption of the railway services with the desperate migrant workers, walking back to the villages following the railway lines. When special trains started ferrying passengers to their homes, things became deplorably macabre with the news of trains being held up, delayed, rerouted or even losing their way. Passengers, comprising children, pregnant women, complained of falling ill due to the lack of food and medical assistance or the prolonged exposure to the crowd in packed trains. Simultaneously, there were disturbing reports of people dying on the railway tracks after being run over by the carriage in their sleep1. The ensuing chaos that led to several of these unfortunate incidents replicated the experience of the past in the present, creating a sense of profound horror and uncanny. The debacle brought back the transborder memories of Partition carriages and the endless stream of humans –​fatigued, exhausted and brow-​beaten –​gathered in railway stations, tracks and lines in post-​independence India and Pakistan. Around the same time, Indian Railway got embroiled in another debate around the question of privatising its services. The plethora of events generated an amalgam of mixed responses tending towards a sense of disaffection at the current state of affairs to sentiments about the railways being a national asset with the associative discourses around national integration and pride. At the same time, it evoked the darker and murkier memories of colonial exploitation, previous epidemics and the Partition. Issuing from the current moment of crisis, these disparate yet strangely interconnected circumstances recalibrate the chapter’s meditation on the trappings of the “modern” and its contested understandings in South Asia through the evolution of the Indian railways as the conduit that tap the pulse of the nation. Drawing on the manifold intersections

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-17

Modernity on Wheels  185 between cultures and regions primarily through a body of literature, I engage with railway spaces –​trains, platforms and junctions –​as sites of encounters that disturb the bulwarks of modernity unevenly experienced and articulated across the subcontinent. Through an array of subversive imaginaries in the tales of supernatural-​haunting, crimes, rumours of contagion in mobile carriages, to catastrophic communal, I attempt an alternative way of retelling the railway memories that connect the nation. The introduction of railways was, indeed, an epochal event in imagining the world anew. It anchored an understanding of time and space –​a new railscape –​seen through the box windows of the carriages and time strictly corresponding to fixtures, timetables, signals and schedules. The station clocks synchronised time across the country. The new space–​time consciousness firmly aligned itself with the “temporal imperialism” of the West and the corresponding nexus of commercial capitalism entrenched in the colonial matrix of power, which inextricably linked movement with modernity through the emergent railway infrastructure that cut across remote landscapes. Commenting on the shaping-​influence of this new-​fangled technology of mobility, Giordano Nanni observes how: As the circulation of information and commodities through the railway, telegraph and faster mail services accelerated, a uniform definition of time soon became indispensable if passengers and goods were to depart from one locality and arrive at another safely and on time … During the process of this shift, the rhythms of society were gradually reoriented around a new source of temporal authority, driven by the exigencies of major business and mercantile interests –​a new Chronos, of which the train was an apt symbol: fast, linear, unidirectional, and confident of its destination. (Nanni 2012, 51) The persistence of railway-​ time associated with speed and concomitant productivity, thwarted or delegitimised the other expressions of premodern-​time in favour of a “single”, “standardised” temporality, unifying the differences across the colonies in the imperial chain. Likewise, the railway created new spatial intimacies by “collapsing” vast distances that “helped make the colony appear more proximate” (Aguiar 2011, xiii). Sifting through the literary texts, the following sections will thus, explore how this coerced model of uniformity wrought by the railways in radically different and far-​flung places further problematises the troubled legacy of modernity in South Asia.

186  Anuparna Mukherjee The Beginning In Britain, the railroads were laid in 1830, and in another 20 years’ time, a passenger locomotive ran between Bombay to Thane in India in 1853, covering a distance of 34 km approximately. Going back to its early days, Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days contains a vivid record of the colonial railways and how it stitched the breadth of new India that was “daily changing” its “manners” and “distinctions” under the aegis of technological modernism: The general route of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway is as follows: Leaving Bombay, it passes through Salcette, crossing to the continent opposite Tannah, goes over the chain of the Western Ghauts, runs thence northeast as far as Burhampoor, skirts the nearly independent territory of Bundelcund, ascends to Allahabad, turns thence eastwardly, meeting the Ganges at Benares, then departs from the river a little, and, descending south-​eastward by Burdivan and the French town of Chandernagor, has its terminus at Calcutta. (Verne 1994, 4) It is perhaps equally noteworthy how this project of “travelling modernity” contributed to the imperialist ambition of expanding the contours of their Empire in India, which the narrator in Verne notes, was barely “seven hundred thousand square miles” (Verne 1994, 3), with a domiciled “population of from one hundred to one hundred and ten million of inhabitants. A considerable portion of India is still free from British authority” (Verne 1994, 3–​4). In the colonial nexus of power and governance, the insalubrious ties between the railways and British expansionism, then, went hand in hand since its inception under the Company’s rule. Jules Verne’s account of Great Indian Peninsula Railways, was, of course, significant for reasons more than one. The technological transformation that backed the introduction of railways heralded a new sense of time where the distance between places is both compressed and meticulously calculated. The editor of the Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories succinctly points out how Verne’s excerpt beacons this era of precision, characterised by the great momentum in speed and space–​time synchrony: Phileas Fogg bet his entire fortune that he could cross the 19th century world –​with no schedule, no special arrangements, and no air travel –​in exactly eighty days. Any delay, any breakdown, and Fogg would lose everything. (Verne 1994, 3)

Modernity on Wheels  187 Interestingly, Verne’s passage, invokes a new genre of railway stories within a larger framework of travel narratives, drawing on all the excitements and perils of the new technology. As the railways went on to revolutionise the way the world understood travel, trade, and commerce shirking the distances in time and space, it expectedly had a huge impact on contemporary literature and culture. With the coming of new railway stations across Europe and subsequently in the colonies, “wheelers” were introduced in the platforms that would sell popular romances and potboilers, with an occasional stock of low-​priced “railway editions” of classics to the travelling populace. Travel, as Robert Burden purports, has “always generated stories; and narratives are structured like journeys, with beginnings and departures, incidents and arrivals, endings and homecomings” (Burden 2015, 8). With the arrival of the railways, the print industry reaped definitive commercial benefits and profited both materially and culturally from the heady experience of enhanced mobility. The incorporation of “other” topographies and culturescapes were generative of new sensorial realities and aesthetics. The railway age witnessed an equally significant expansion of the reading base. Yet, all along literature shared a vexed relationship with trains, which stood for the goods and evils of industrial modernity. The “jolts and shocks produced by the continuous introduction of new energy” (Morrison 5–​ 6) stroked multifarious doubts in the minds of people that were associated with the intrusion of machines in our affective lives and the ways in which it altered the workaday environment. The aggressive acceleration of the railway responding to the new economic, vis-​à-​vis commercial forces and imperatives were putatively linked with anthropogenic environmental catastrophes and the irrevocable erasure of rural, premodern communities with a “startling suddenness” (Marx 2000, 15), Likewise, railway accidents were often integrated and amplified for dramatic effects as essential plot devises, causing serendipitous meanings and equally rampant instances of disfigurement, death and disunion in the nineteenth-​century novels where families were often united or separated in train journeys within a web of changing circumstances. Nicholas Daly posits in “Sensation Fiction and the Modernisation of the Senses” that “this vehicle of modernisation also brought with it a new potential for harm; the early encounters between the human body and the discipline of the railway were not always happy ones” (Daly 1999, 463). So, the scepticism about the new dispensation continued unabated for quite some time, drawing on the sensational reportage of disasters on railway tracks, which heightened many of the speculations and apprehensions of the time about the new technologised culture. Literature was quick to reflect these anxieties and excitements about an imperfectly understood marvel of modern technology. Train travels, in the crime fictions of Victorian and subsequent

188  Anuparna Mukherjee times, were chosen to thicken the tension in the plot, by confining the characters in a mobile carriage from which they have no escape. By juxtaposing precision with unpredictability and randomness, they equally reflected the precariousness of human life even when it is couched within the mechanical routine of touted train schedules, deceptive and yet neatly organised spaces and compartments, which create an overall impression of order, if not monotony. The explosion of interest in the railways, vacillating between deep-​ seated concern and the incipient feeling of thrill that this mode of transport generated spilled over to the genre of children’s literature. The suspense and tensions in the plot-​line were woven around the train, stations and platforms as new nodes of network, reimagined as ambivalent sites of accidents and dramatic encounters. Edith Nesbit’s novel The Railway Children, serialised in The London Magazine during 1905, before being published as a book, flirts with the possibilities opened up by this novel iteration of “travelling modernity”, which engendered new codes and conventions of adventure through somatic experiences the made “new demands” on our “sensorium” (Daly 1999, 463). In Nesbit’s novel, the railway brings together the major action of the play, when a family of three precocious young children and their mother relocates from London to a modest country dwelling in a sleepy suburb “The Three Chimneys”, after the father is imprisoned with false charges of espionage. When they start living near the railway tracts, the trains unexpectedly alter the events of their lives: This was the first train the children saw on that railway which was in time to become so very dear to them. They did not guess then how they would grow to love the railway, and how soon it would become the centre of their new life, nor what wonders and changes it would bring to them. (Nesbit 1905, 19) The childhood world of nursery tales rife with fairies, genies or fire-​ breathing monsters now becomes coloured with railway almanacs, signal boxes, telegraph wires, coaches and carriages, so much so, that they even start naming the trains: “The 9.15 up was called the Green Dragon. The 10.7 down was the Worm of Wantley” (Nesbit 1905, 51) They become like those mythical beings who populate their imaginative universe. When Roberta sees a passing train spouting volumes of steam from its mouth, she imagines: “It was like a great dragon tearing by. Did you feel it fan us with its hot wings?” (Nesbit 1905, 34). Indeed, in the diegetic world of the novel, the things that the characters do for living or leisure is structured around railway schedules. The trains create strange convergences between

Modernity on Wheels  189 the individual and the collective, connecting the static, somnolent hamlet of Three Chimneys with the whirlwinds of the bigger world: “Here in the deep silence of the sleeping country the only things that went by were the trains. They seemed to be all that was left to link the children to the old life that had once been theirs” (Nesbit 1905, 50). The children, for instance, believe that the 9.15 train that travels to London is the link between them and their absent father: “London’s where father is”. So, they wave at the carriage every day as a way of expressing their love to the father: “Take our love to Father!” cried Bobbie. And the others, too, shouted: –​“Take our love to Father!” (Nesbit 1905, 300). Towards the end, the spectacular sight of hands from the carriage windows vigorously waving back at the children gives the train a human dimension with the news of their father’s release (still unknown to the children): Then, when the train, passed the fence where the three children were, newspapers and hands and handkerchiefs were waved madly, till all that side of the train was fluttery with white like the pictures of the King’s Coronation in the biography at Maskelyne and Cook’s. To the children it almost seemed as though the train itself was alive, and was at last responding to the love that they had given it so freely and so long. (Nesbit 1905, 301) The affective bridge between the human and the engine attempts to address and accommodate the ideological debates about the disjuncture between man and machine at the heart of the discourses and critical formations around industrial modernity. The Railway in Indian Literature Like its British counterpart, the literature of the Indian empire, and the subsequent postcolonial nation, shared a chequered relationship with the railways, which was reflective of the scepticism and awe that the colonies harboured about the new regime of infrastructural modernity imported through the fraught encounter with the west. In Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay’s early twentieth-​century novel, Pather Panchali (The Song of the Road) when the two young siblings of an impoverished household, Apu and Durga, encountered the train passing through their hamlet for the first time through the tall grasses in the field, the episode was instantly associated with wonder and the opening up of a new world of experience. This scene was immortalised on screen by Satyajit Ray in the 1955 film adaptation of the same novel. However, there is an equal number of representations that invariably associate railways with sudden change,

190  Anuparna Mukherjee annihilation and destruction. Against the backdrop of the World War, the fabled world in Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s 1941 novel The Tale of Hansuli Turn (Hansuli Baker Upakatha) (2011) embeds this complexity in the narrative as a “double-​bind”. While the railway line “runs past the village, and the rhythmic to-​and-​fro of the train is used as a timepiece by the Kahars (a marginal, untouchable community in rural Bengal) to measure out the workday” (Bandyopadhyay 2011, xii), its presence in the life of the Kahars, irrevocably changes the community with all its modernising impulses. Ben Conisbee Baer, in the introduction to his translation of Bandyopadhyay’s novel, precisely locates this dilemma where colonial modernity can in some sense be understood as emancipatory for India’s most marginal people. It is complicity with the very structural violations of war and “modernization” that paradoxically enables Karali to break with the feudal violence that prevails over the Kahars. (Bandyopadhyay 2011, xiii) In this tension between local premodern lifeworld and the new perception of time brought forth by the global forces from outside, trains were simultaneously viewed as a boon and a bane. Yet, in spite of the scepticism about the railways’ problematic relationship with imperial modernity, the interest in the trains as a new and fast mode of transport, covering great distances remained unabated since the early days of its inception when the imminent threat of erosion of caste and class distinction in crammed railway carriages attracted severe criticism from the conservative religious quarters. In fact, there went a popular Bengali aphorism which enumerated the three main causes –​or the three “Sens”, curiously similar to “sins” behind the degradation of Hinduism: “Jat marlo tin-​Sen-​ey/​ Kesab Sen-​ey, Will-​Sen-​ey, Isti-​Sen-​ ey” (“Our religion is doomed by three Sens/​Kesab Sen, Isti-​sen and Wil-​ Sen”). The first “Sen” is the Brahmo reformer Kesab Sen and the third “isti-​seney” is a hobson-​jobson of the English word “station”, a place where segregation of caste and religion could not be followed rigorously as people from diverse backgrounds were compelled to commute as co-​ passengers. Finally, Wil-​Sen is the allusion to the Great Eastern Hotel that served beef and other food proscribed by Hindu religion, also known as the Wilson’s Hotel after its founder David Wilson. Yet, the trains not only attracted hordes of people from different walks of life, it altogether changed the face of the cities as administrative and trade capitals of the burgeoning Empire. With the expansion of rail lines, the trains connected the suburbs (mofussils) to the industrial conurbations, allowing the passage of daily commuters who regularly came to the city in sizeable numbers for work and study, breeding a class of people called “daily passengers”

Modernity on Wheels  191 who supplied steady workforce for central business districts. The stations became one of the most crowded places on the urban map bustling with commercial activities. Likewise, trains journeys, especially in “third-​class” compartments that become notoriously packed with “native” commuters, were on occasions, recounted in contemporary literature with boisterous humour. In Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hootum Pyancha’s Naksha (1861) or Sketches by Hootum, the Owl, comprising a set of satirical vignettes on the mores of the nineteenth-​century Calcutta, the succulent description of the jostle and the traffic while boarding the railway carriage generates much amusement, though not without noting how infrastructural reforms and the practices of modernity were fractured by difference in the colonies: Tununang tang, Tununang tang… . the bells sounded again. Passengers raised merry hell as they started climbing in. People were shoved inside third-​class compartments with help from a guard and two musketeers. Passengers inside the train were heard screaming: “Now where do you think you are going?” “Sahib, there’s no room here”. “Where’s my bundle? My bundle, please!” “That’s my child! Hay you, don’t sit on his neck”. But the railway staff, bound as they were by regulations, did not pay heed to these. Although each of the third-​class compartments had taken the shape of a crab’s womb, a couple of stationmasters and guards kept peeping in at a regular interval, to see if there was any breathing space left so that they might push in some more passengers. If only the hapless English who survived the Black Hole had seen these third class compartments, perhaps one day they would gather the courage to tell the Company’s agents and locomotive superintendents that the pain suffered by third-​class passengers was no less than that experienced by the English soldiers trapped in the Black Hole. (Sinha 2012, 259–​260) The scathing humour apart, as Ritika Prasad pointed out in Tracks of Change, the “structural discomforts” and “routine indignities” in the third-​class compartments, that the colonised population accepted as a part of their everyday and could even laugh at them, also “created a shared body of knowledge, not only about the details of railway travel but also of the extent to which their practical experience of technological change was mediated through an ideology of colonial difference” (26). On the practical side, such overcrowding and commotion led to unwarranted disasters and accidents on the tracks and railway stations. In fact, in 1855, Akshaykumar Dutta (1820–​ 1886), one of the progenitors of modern Bengali prose, wrote a 20-​page manual Baspiyo Ratharohi-​diger Proti Upodhesh (Instructions for Those Travelling in Stream Locomotives) in 1855, eulogising the modern marvel, but at the same time instructing

192  Anuparna Mukherjee its readers about the appropriate behaviour and conduct to be followed during the train travel. The trains, thus, elicited an equal amount of interest and apprehensions about technological modernity in the vernacular literature of/​on the colonial period. The railways, with all the news of accidents, suicides and deaths on the tracks, bred new vulnerabilities, mirrored in the genre of ghost stories, for instance, dealing with the spirits whose activities were primarily confined to railway properties whose remit stretched from empty carriages, deserted stations and waiting rooms, station master’s bungalows to railway colonies. The stories often brought back the repressed memories of fatal injury, self-​annihilation or disaster on the tracks. The new spatial configurations fostered by colonial modernity had transformed the whereabouts of the indigenous ghosts. The spirits of the marshes, wetlands, fields and forests had not only acquired new character traits from their colonial counterparts, their happy haunting grounds also expanded to embrace new infrastructural forms and contours. The ghosts straddling the borders between the past and the future showed remarkable adaptability to the new technological innovations. One such ghost story about a crime inside a railway carriage occurs in Hememdra Kumar Roy’s Kamra ar Amra (We and the Compartment). This first-​person narrative recalls a journey of two friends in an empty train compartment haunted by spectral boarders who were killed by a railway robbery. Again, in Bimal Kar’s A Ghostly Wagon and a Guard Sahib (Ek Bhoutik Malgari o Ek Guard Saheb) a crime of the colonial period, albeit of a different nature is brought forth by the narrator, where the erstwhile station master of a god-​forsaken locality in Bihar recalls a macabre experience during World War II. While serving his duty, the station master would receive wagons filled with goods and occasionally, encounter passenger trains whose windows were covered with slated glass, obstructing any views of the interior from the outside. One day a goods engine arrives at his station at an odd hour with an ominously mysterious guard. In his conversation with the guard, the station master understands that these trains transfer the prisoners of war to the camps in hidden or unknown locations. Sometimes, these carriages are packed with the contingent of wounded soldiers who are brought here for medical treatment. And when they die, their bodies are disposed-​off or cremated in this region. The story climaxes with the haunting vision of the wagon being shrouded by a swarm of locusts like a pall of death. Indeed, the foundation of the railways, which was hailed as the cornerstone of modernity in the empire and was invoked with much pride by the British administration, was also connected to the multifarious crimes by the imperial government. It was inseparable from the capitalist explorations and profiteering that worked in collusion with colonial coercion and violence. Thus, the disruption and

Modernity on Wheels  193 blockade of railway services became a major form of protest during the anti-​colonial struggle. That apart, it was also believed that the project of the railways, linking the hinterlands with the cities, also had a corrupting influence on the villages by transporting pollutants and dangerous malady from the overcrowded, urban conurbation. The fear was exacerbated by the trains’ own unsanitary conditions of the congested and swarming carriages that Hootum’s narrator previously indicated. Looking roughly at the first 50 years between 1854 and 1900 in the Statistical Abstracts from 1840 to 1865, 1894−95 to 1903, Ritika Prasad contends that the “decades in which India’s railway network began carrying unprecedented numbers of people further, faster, and more frequently were the same ones in which cholera and plague effected substantial ravages among India’s population” (Prasad 2015, 165). We see in Sharadindu Bandopadhyay’s, short story The Visitor of the Night, the initiation of the railways in a small rural settlement carries portentous threats of disaster that becomes manifest in the unknown hooded figure of the stranger who comes from elsewhere, and then suddenly disappears after burning down the village. He declares himself to be the very embodiment of death and the cholera epidemic, ravaging the country. He purportedly travels from place to place with the insidious intent of ruining the rural lives everywhere. During the recent outbreak of the coronavirus, it is this same threat to public health, contagion and the fear of rapid transmission through contact that led to the precautionary shut down of railway services connecting the distant corners of the country as a countermeasure to curb the spread of COVID-​19. Railways after India’s Independence Along with the departure of the colonial government in 1947 came the Partition of the subcontinent into two postcolonial nation-​ states –​India and Pakistan. The experience of the geopolitical division and the vicissitudes of bewildered migrants is narrativised in the Partition chronicles of overcrowded trains carrying hordes of passengers across the borders. The writings often complement the stark and disturbing visual images of densely packed compartments with people sitting on the roofs of the train with their cattle, pots and pans. In the haunted soundscape of migrant memoirs, the cluttering wheels and the whistle of the train piercing through the darkness become distinctly associated with the arrival of more homeless, “unaccommodated” refugees, reviving the memory of one’s own traumatic journey. On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of India’s independence, artists from India and Britain collaborated to recapture the event around 1947 through audio-​visual narratives, evocatively titled Different Trains 1947.2

194  Anuparna Mukherjee In this rendition, musical pieces are juxtaposed with haunting visuals of trains and platforms among others. In the compositions, occasional jarring sounds are interspersed with the names of places undergoing Partition and the voices of those who lived through the mayhem to recount their experiences. They were drawn from the rare archives of the time from the British Film Institute. The entire performance, first carried out live across two locations –​Barbican Hall London and in the Magnetic Fields Festival in the deserts of Rajasthan in northwestern India –​is recorded by Boiler Room and now digitised by the British Council. The literary outputs working with similar material bring forth horrific instances of trains carrying corpses and mutilated, mangled bodies passengers to the other side of the border during the communal riots, as one finds in Kushwant Singh’s 1956, novel, Train to Pakistan and Bapsi Sidwa’s 1980 novel, Ice Candy Man. In the Partition memory, trains are associated with aborted journeys, interceptions, deferment and the inability of people to reach a destination. Sadaat Hasan Manto, in his short sketch, “Modesty” that forms a part of the collection The Black Margin, recounts one such journey with the darkest cynicism: The rioters brought the train to a stop. Those who belonged to the other religion were methodically picked out and slaughtered. After it was all over, those who remained were treated to a feast of milk, custard pies and fresh fruit. Before the train moved off, the leader of the hosts addressed the passengers: “Brothers and sisters, since we were informed late of your train’s arrival time, we were not able to offer you the kind of hospitality we would have wished”. (Manto 2008, 407) Like the trains, the railway stations, too, became sites of violence and disorder with the platforms suddenly transforming into temporary shelters for millions of refugees ridden with hunger and disease, seeking rehabilitation. Manik Bandopadhyay’s The Final Solution describes the woeful condition of the homeless mass gathered in these places through the plight of its female protagonist: “Mallika’s family had a place, the length of a one spread mattress. Everyone was squeezed there –​Mallika, her husband Bhusan, their two and half-​year-​old son Khokon, and a widowed sister-​in-​law Asha, tin suitcases, beddings and bundles, pots and pans” (Sengupta 2003, 23). The destitute in these filthy platforms and railway stations were not only subjected to unliveable conditions but encountered criminals from petty thieves to pimps and lecherous men camouflaging as volunteers and relief workers. Many were involved in the flesh trade and they often took away young women either forcibly or by luring them

Modernity on Wheels  195 with money and financial security for their indignant family. Nights were particularly harsh when reprobate, predatory men attempted molesting the women and young girls in their sleep. In Pratibha Basu’s short story, Flotsam and Jetsam, one such incident comes to fore: Bilu’s mother sat up anxiously wrapping the sari around herself. She felt for Milu, the other girl who seemed to have rolled away somewhere in sleep. Shaking in fear, she held the child tightly to her bosom as she realised that the child was being drawn away. Her hands had come suddenly in tough with strong male paws which soon melted into the night. (Sengupta 2003, 46) The evocation of railway in the corpus of Partition literature is couched in deep and often transgenerational trauma associated with dispossession, death and dishonour that have become a part of our cultural legacy transmitted, consumed and internalised across several generations. Therefore, it is no surprise that these memories of Partition were rekindled in recent times when long caravans of people were seen walking for miles and dying on the way consumed by hunger and fatigue during the country’s sudden lockdown. Many who took to the roads without any map or the knowledge of the route, as the previous migrants of the Partition followed the railway tracts to connect the dots between the origin and the destination, with all the uncertainties about their future. Relating this catastrophic migration of labourers with their families and their meagre belongings after being thrown out of their jobs and homes in the cities to the 1947 exodus, Indian poet and lyrist Gulzar responded to the looming crisis through a poem, bringing into sharp focus the systemic inequalities through time: The pandemic raged The workers and labourers fled to their homes All the machines ground to a halt in the cities Only their hands and feet moved Their lives they had planted back in the villages… (Translated by Rakshanda Jalil) The ghostly incursions of the past through the portal of the present, both marked a sense of continuity with historical images and contexts and a disjuncture in the teleological time as a persistent surge “forward” through the circular and recursive movement of trauma across generations in South Asia. These evocations of railways reminded us that India’s encounter with modernity through technology and infrastructures of mobility is at a best a fraught project. And, with the Partition, the trains emerged as sites of anarchy and mayhem across the subcontinent, offering the most

196  Anuparna Mukherjee unflattering vision of modernity’s failure to sustain its emancipatory framework of secular, egalitarian citizenship. Further, since its inception, the railway project was tied-​up to the abusive nexus of colonialism, which undercut the emancipatory narratives of the Enlightenment. Thus, along with a new sense of freedom and movement of individuals, ideas and information, the transformative potential of the railways engendered a sense of perplexity that was variously associated with the acceleration and mechanisation of modern life, which irrevocably changed the affective dynamics of the quotidian. It was equally arbitrary the way it championed the Western science of horology in the colonial societies with the railway’s absolute reliance on the clock and the new language of hours and minutes tied to timetables, eclipsing all other perceptions of time or temporal practices. Engaging with this dichotomy, the essay, therefore, interrogated the purported function of the railways in forging a national identity through shared remembrances that do not necessarily fall within the celebratory frameworks of memorialisation. Here trains “connect” the nation but often as ambivalent and complex sites of trauma and anxiety. By tracing the spectral precipitates of the past in the discussion on the early ghost stories to the evocation of contemporary migrant crisis through the mediated memories of the Partition riots on wheels, the arguments led back to the problematic templates of modernity and its troubled manifestations in the literature of the erstwhile colonised spaces. Notes 1 “Maharashtra Train Accident: How 16 Migrant Labourers Were Killed”. www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/maharashtra-train-accident-how-16migrant-labourers-were-killed/story-kdJHMdZU3T2ubxXNdnUKYL.html 2 www.differenttrains1947.com

Bibliography Aguiar, Marian. (2011). Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bandopadhyay, Manik. (2003). “The Final Solution”. Mapmaking: Partition Stories. Edited by Debjani Sengupta. New Delhi: Srishti, pp. 23–​38. Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar. (2011). The Tale of Hansuli Turn. Translated by Ben Conisbee Baer. New York: Columbia University Press. Basu, Pratibha. (2003). “Flotsam and Jetsam”. Mapmaking: Partition Stories. Edited by Debjani Sengupta. New Delhi: Shristi, pp. 39–​58. Burden, Robert. (2015). Travel, Modernism and Modernity. London: Routledge. Daly, Nicholas. (1999). “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernisation of the Senses”. ELH, 66(2), pp. 461–​ 87. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​30032​080.

Modernity on Wheels  197 Elting, E. Morison. (2016). Men, Machines, and Modern Times. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kar, Bimal. (2017). Ek Bhoutik Malgari o Ek Guard Saheb (A Ghostly Wagon and the Guard). Suktara-​r 101 Bhuter Golpo (101 Ghost Stories in Suktara, A Children’s Magazine). Kolkata: Deb Sahitya Kutir. Manto, Saadat Hasan. (2008). “Modesty”. Bitter Fruit. Translated by Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin, pp. 407. Marx, Leo. (2000). The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. United New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Nanni, Giordano. (2012). The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire. London: Manchester University Press. Nesbit, Edith. (1905). The Railway Children. London: Macmillan. Prasad, Ritika. (2015). Tracks of Change Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Roy, Hemendra Kumar. (2014). “Kamra ar Amra” (We and the Compartment). Kishore Bhoutik Samagra, Vol. 1. Kolkata: Patra Bharati, pp. 191–​196. Sinha, Kaliprasanna. (2012). Sketches by Hootum the Owl: A Satirist’s View of Colonial Calcutta. Translated by Chitralekha Bose. Kolkata: Samya. Verne, Jules. (1994). “Around the World in 80 Days”. Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories. Edited by Ruskin Bond. New Delhi: Penguin, pp. 3–​14.

14 “The lights cut out quickly” Nation, Nationalism and City-​lit during 1980s–​1990s Dibyakusum Ray

In an attempt to briefly signal at Indian urbanism during the two decades (1980s and 1990s) and the resultant city-​based literary practice, this chapter considers four texts as an autotelic critical zone –​a bridge between the national politics of the 1970s and the post-​liberalized 2000s. As a very brief introduction of this age to an uninitiated reader, I posit the 1980s and 1990s as a rite of passage between two distinctive phases of the Indian national existence: the Nehruvian socialist strain and the neoliberal capitalist strain. The 1980s witnessed the very literal fall of the Indira Gandhi-​led “old Congress” culminating in her assassination by her own bodyguards (1984), initiating a long and nationwide ethnic feud. Policy-​wise, the prime minister’s mantle was shifted to Rajiv Gandhi, who took the Congress party and the nation in an unprecedented direction by inviting foreign capital and making the economy more hospitable to “free trade in goods and services, free circulation of capital, freedom of investment” (George 1999). I want to look at this extremely volatile transitional phase as a germane field for regionalism and urban literature. From a welfare nation with an ideatic focus on “the interests of the downtrodden, minorities and the other weaker sections of society” (Ram 2012, 222) (notwithstanding its inherent problems and striations) to a “dismantling” of the welfarist state and “minimising state interference in the market” (Joseph 2007, 3213) –​this abrupt and radical mutation exerted a perplexing effect on the Indian urban sociology and its representative artistic expressions, especially literature. The clash of national consciousness and internationalism, along with the ruminating urban bourgeois society caught in its ideological dilemma, forms the very backbone of urbanity and urban literature of this era of consumerism, open market economy, and ethnic divide. We will touch upon all of these issues in the following argument, both as a data-​centric sociological perspective and its abstraction through a literary format, and how it signals further changes later on. To properly explain the socio-​political background that germinated this very

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-18

“The lights cut out quickly”  199 particular literary canon, I have divided the following argument in two parts: the first providing a brief history of the Indian urbanism preceding the 1980s and 1990s and the contemporaneous tradition of city-​lit (our moniker for literature with urban themes heretofore); the second on the neoliberal Indian society and literature. Together, this chapter attempts to reconstruct a complicated and volatile historical chapter before the reader, while commenting on how with their widely variant rhetoric, thematic and experiential practice, literature can represent the questions of regional, national and trans-​national aporia in a cogent yet exhaustive manner. Yet before everything else, one is faced with a methodological quandary –​what is city-​lit? More precisely, does it signify a specific canon, or a tensile category that freely borrows from a mélange of literary genres, without any tangible thematics? Although the Indian city-​lit –​with its immense complexity, representational politics and frequent evolution –​is unique from the global and Western literary canon, I still resort to Richard Lehan for a canonical perspective. The city-​lit is, according to Lehan, “superimposing urban upon literary modes and vice-​versa” (Lehan 1998, 3). Lehan’s idea of superimposition does include a sense of immersion as he overwhelmingly focuses on the literary-​ philosophical manifestation of the city and seems less interested in the data-​driven, politically aware, ‘public’ urban existence in general.1 I, however, would like to state that in an Indian postcolonial scenario, such omissions render the whole project untenable chiefly because postcolonial urban academia (‘urbanism’) is methodologically bound to the “concepts and questions for urban space, urban research and urban theory. The analysis of power, representation, and identity is transmuted for a spatial analysis of urbanization, urban development, and urban life” (Ren 2020). In other words, the ‘urban’ of the postcolony is perennially in its formative stage, being made and unmade through a myriad of social, political and cultural experimentations, and any cultural corpus can hardly afford to bypass this laborious, archival, data-​centric evocation of the time and region while representing an era. Hence, according to my claim, any postcolonial Indian literary expression can be called city-​lit as long as it is aware of the grating, transmuting, laborious, checkered and progressively complicated nature of the Indian city-​life. A sense of history that augments the psychosomatic condition of the characters must be a mainstay in this literature, capable of making profound commentary on the innate nature of the ethos of urbanity that completes factuality. Such narratives do not have to be operating from within the literal socio-​economic zone commonly known as the “urban” and can freely be non-​ canonical and cross-​ generic: romance, history, crime-​thriller, tragedy, even pastoral accounts. Allow me to provide a few cross-​temporal examples. The very inception of Indian urbanity in the backdrop of the last few decades of colonial

200  Dibyakusum Ray rule can be found in Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Aparajito [The Unvanquished]. One must remember this time as a transition for India which, chiefly agrarian from its pre-​modern inception as a bordered nation state, displayed a massive rise in the city population growth rate in 1921–​51 (Bhagat & Mohanty 2008, 5), with an even more impressive mean growth (0.8→2.6) as compared to the previous four decades (1881–​1921), precipitated by rural migration in search of a more lucrative profession in the interwar urban industrial sectors. This swirling, heterogeneous, opaque and chaotic flow of humanity propelled the authors like Bandyopadhyay towards a lost innocence, a collective keening for a moral void that urbanity has rendered the generation bereft of. Aparajito describes his protagonist as a bucolic youth gradually shifting base from the village to the city, all the while encountering the mass of suffering humanity in a colonized country, tasting the urban life in its bittersweet complexities, and finally going back to the sylvan, deeming it the ultimate refuge. Thus, Bandyopadhyay’s narrative, which is complex and often ambiguous, is finally anti-​urban. It considers, much in the puritan fashion of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and Oswald Spengler, the Indian cities to be ontologically inferior to the countryside: [t]‌hese high-​pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-​as-​world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture. (Spengler et al. 1991, 246) Bandyopadhyay’s anxiety against the city as a deadening assault on spiritual concord is carried forward in the following decades by novels like Twilight in Delhi (1940) by Ahmed Ali and Voices in the City (1965) by Anita Desai –​both depicting the urbanite’s psychosomatic spasms at the city chaos. The misery stemmed in the sylvan rootlessness often drives the sensitive protagonist to the edge of insanity and suicide: “his natural anarchism, his imbalance and inconsistencies, his dark and demoniac dreams that grovelled mostly in the grossness of the city, its shapeless, colourless and grim old houses and slums, then heaved up, like the radio aerials and pigeon-​roots that collected the fuzz of smog on the roofs…” (Desai 2019, 23–​ 24). Ali’s novel is the dying Muslim nobility’s final elegy in the backdrop of a fast-​modernized “new” Delhi, Desai’s novel is about a trio of bourgeois siblings suffering in a merciless Calcutta. Both, in languages ranging from heavily metaphorical to veridical, describe a city-​space that was reeling under the “sheer load of empirical inputs besieging the national consciousness –​the freshly concluded partition and riots, refugee crisis, dissolving of the dominion status, ultra-​leftism, the

“The lights cut out quickly”  201 first general election of 1951–​52 etc.,” demanding “a vast literary tapestry dotted with excitement, heartbreak, trepidation and cynicism, all within and without the city-​limits” (Ray 2022, 46). This strain of city-​lit –​metaphorical, yet sternly cognizant of its historical backdrop –​has continued to influence the multi-​genre literary practice of independent India, perhaps even more intensely in the backdrop of Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial regime and the resultant urban violence of the 1970s. I invite my readers again to visualize the Indian urban scenario of this time: “ballooning slums, unemployment among the literate, industrial recession, and stark economic disparity with the high-​income sector.”2 Although statistically the 1970s (more than half of the decade was governed by Gandhi) does show a steady rate of overall growth in the urban sectors (the city population grew by a static 3.8%, faster than the national growth rate, signalling steady urbanization with the rural to urban migration picking up pace as well), the land distribution system was archaic with a clear bias towards the elite class and there were vast slum areas replete within the cities. The government’s further plans of to reduce urban class-​striations –​like repossessing the urban surplus land and distributing it among the lower income groups –​yielded minimal impact because of corruption, convoluted bureaucracy and class bias.3 Such crises, intensified by the war for Bangladesh in 1971 and a fresh refugee crisis into the state of Bengal led to a shortage of food and living-​expense inflation. Sunil Gangypadhyay’s Pratidwandi [The Adversary] perfectly captures the citizen’s grating encounter by describing the unemployed youth Siddhartha venting his repressed anger on an uncaring metropolis and its heartless people, a violent scene with strong ironic undertone as the whole action is ultimately an emasculated fantasy because Siddhartha cannot do any of these in reality, and he knows it: Of course, I’ll go back. I’m in exile now. I’ll go back not only to Keya but also to have my revenge. All these fellows at the interview who spoke so rudely –​I’m going to crush them all and smash that building to bits. Then I’ll take care of Badal and his two friends who beat me up –​I’ll rub their faces in dirt –​. As for Ananta Sanyal –​I’ll gouge out his eyes. That police officer, even Keya’s father if he takes bribes –​I’ll line them up against a wall and with my rifle I’ll –​Oh yes, I’m going back. (Gangopadhyay 2005, 103) As we move closer to the 1980s, resonances of this acerbic cynicism can be increasingly discerned in other contemporaneous city-​lit as well, like in U.R. Ananthamurthy’s (2016) perspective on satellite towns (Bara or The Drought) or Jagadish Mohanty’s (2019) collection on modern Indian urbanity in general (South-​Facing House and Other Stories). We now have

202  Dibyakusum Ray more vivid descriptions of the urban life as depicted by empirical evidence, from the (“[n]‌arrow streets without gutters, shapeless houses huddled together, a memorial at every street turn… Dust lingered everywhere” (Ananthamurthy 2016, 182)) to frustration and nihilistic anger, tinged by the 1970s Leftist worldview: “Bhubaneswar, I shall be killing you within a few days… .your 999 temples and 99,999 clerks, you unaccountable prostitutes, unrecognizable housewives, unlovable leaders, intolerable news reports, beyond the reach five-​star hotels and flights” (Mohanty 2019, 124). I desist from continuing the tirade of examples, but city-​lit has thus always displayed an acute awareness of the tangible history of its backdrop, notwithstanding the varying degrees of literary abstraction. It is also important to note that, by the definition this chapter is governed by, city-​lit has to display a sensitivity towards the connate mutation of the urban space as depicted through empirical evidence. As I will show in the following paragraphs, my curated canon of urban literature further represents the confusions and complexities of the neoliberal phase. The 1980s and 1990s saw several unique socio-​political developments in India, of which two figureheads are our main concern: (i) the fringed urban experience and (ii) the diasporic citizen. One needs to be cognizant that these two decades were the very residues of the old national politics of “socialism, secularism and non alignment” (Sharma 2014, 15), undercut by decades of economic disparity, social bias and dictatorial tendencies especially displayed by Indira Gandhi. And yet, political presence of the Congress’ was overpowering on the psycho-​social aspect of the Indian populace. From 1980 to 1984, Gandhi’s last years of rule was fraught with separatism within and without the Indian Union (specially in Punjab, Assam, Bihar and then undivided Andhra Pradesh). At the same time, the GDP growth of the country experienced a spike unprecedented in history, but retrospective studies show that economic inequality, formerly stable if not improving during Nehru and Gandhi’s first term, had risen as dramatically as the growth from the mid-​1980s, and employment, habitat and migration growth started to show a declining trend. Amidst the political violence and trudging economy, incidences of poverty rose steadily especially within the urban domains, while rural sectors showed a less intense signal of deprivation –​a trend intact in the next decade as well, although faulty statistical models and data embezzlement may display a rosier socio-​economic picture of that time, says Minhas, Jain and Tendulkar.4 “[N]‌o one is in command at any level …[T]he fear is growing that we are moving beyond the point of no return, to use a phrase from the jargon of airline pilots. The breakdown is becoming too visible,” wrote Romesh Thapar, the editor of the magazine Sunday (Guha 2017, 1473–​4).

“The lights cut out quickly”  203 I am again fawning on the reader’s imagination here. A grim, divided and often blood-​soaked urban picture emerges from all the dry statistical trivia. Burgeoning under poor growth of economy, the cities looked worn out, full with an ethnically variant crowd that has come to distrust each other. Military presence was everywhere, the newspapers were busy reporting either separatist unrest or ministerial assassinations. Big cities like Calcutta experienced more than a 100 MW shortage of required electricity on an average day, often plunging the city into complete darkness (Banerjee et al. 1990). Delhi’s roads were rife with fire, mangled dead bodies and enforced curfew during the Sikh massacre following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 (Singh 2017, 68). On these cinders of the Nehruvian dream of a “national freedom within the framework of an international co-​operative socialist world federation” (Kaur 2008, 206) emerged the urban spaces of “open competitive and unregulated market logic… state downsizing, austerity financing and public service reform through increasing privatization of social services” (Chattopadhyay 2017, 2). The first stable government of the 1990s (led by P.V. Narasimha Rao serving as the Prime Minister from 1991 to 1996) brought forward the immensely controversial ‘economic liberalization’ of India that dedicatedly focused on commerce and service orientation and expanded the role of private and foreign investment, thus initiating India’s foray into ‘globalization’ for the first time after Independence. More than a tangible social reform, neoliberalism affected the socio-​economic perspective of the citizens, germinating new modes of divide, existentialism, bias and alternations. The urban sectors, already suffering from dismal industrial output during the 1980s, faced continuing discouragement even after liberalization and apparent ease of capital movement, due to a plethora of legal intricacies, bureaucratic complexities and technological deficit (Mohan & Dasgupta 2004, 7–​9). It indeed seemed that the nation’s dreams outmatched its infrastructural means, birthing a sundry developmental pattern that indeed benefited some (like the commerce-​oriented urban service-​sectors5), but abandoned the still-​poor national mass to financial peril. The cities themselves were transformed into “heteropolis” (Banerjee-​Guha 2002, 126): a ‘hybrid place’, with a variety of actors ranging from grassroots organizations to policymakers, urban planners and private developers influencing its production. Political diversification –​a reaction against the decades-​long sustained Congress dominance over Indian politics –​brought in the rise of the ultra-​right, Hinduist, nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).6 The citizen’s life, already fractal even during the early years of the postcolonial along economic, religious class and caste lines, became even more multifarious with the exposure to new political, fiscal and diverse

204  Dibyakusum Ray but uncertain professional choices. The swarming crowd on the streets of the globalized cities of India, thus became the embodiment of –​as Kierkegaard (1847) calls it –​“untruth”: there no one is working, living, and striving for the highest end, but only for this or that earthly end … a crowd either renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision. (www.ccel.org/​k/​kier​kega​ard/​untr​uth/​untr​uth.htm) The Indian city-​lit has responded to this crisis, here represented through Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out (1984) and Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990), ranging from the citizen’s negotiation with alienation, solipsism and acculturation to the Indian citizen’s complete disjunction from the essential historical nature of their habitat. For example, Padmanabhan’s play “is based on an eyewitness account of a gang-​rape. In the end-​note that appears at the conclusion of the play, I say that it is based on a real incident. Despite the note, people ask, ‘Did it really happen?’ ”(Padmanabhan 2020, ix). This prevailing sense of denial and extenuation is clear from the very first scene (it is a one act play), when Bhaskar returns home from work to find his wife Leela disconcerted. Padmanabhan makes no attempt hide the innate urbanity of the play, as the stage direction makes clear in the very first instance: The curtain rises to reveal the drawing-​dining area of a sixth-​floor apartment in a building in Bombay. The decor is unremarkably upper middle class… the audience can see the sky and the rooftop of the neighbouring building, as yet unpainted. During the first scene, the sky wanes from dusk into night… A sofa and two armchairs are in the foreground, partially obscuring the dining table which occupies the area between the drawing room and the window. (2020: 4) In this background, and under the watchful but unintruding gaze of the housemaid Frieda (who, Padmanabhan expresses, must be “constantly in sight, performing her duties in a mute, undemanding way” (2020, 3)), the self-​absorbed man of the house Bhaskar is confronted by a recurring disturbance near his perfect family: there are constant screams of agony emanating from the next abandoned building, much to the chagrin of Leela, his wife: … But their sounds inside, inside my nice clean house, and I can’t push them out! (stops struggling) If only they didn’t make such a racket, I

“The lights cut out quickly”  205 wouldn’t mind so much! (pause, during which BHASKER rocks her gently) Why do they have to do it here? Why can’t they go somewhere else? (2020, 10) A redemptive narrative –​either by theme or characterization –​is not what Padmanabhan is interested in. The men are callous and asinine to the sound obviously emanating from an anguished gang-​rape victim, and the women –​although troubled by it –​consider it an annoyance, polluting their domestic periphery they are conditioned to care for. The urban bourgeois, at the cusp of the millennial India, is shown as anxious over its exposure to the imbrication of classes, specially pertaining a collapse of the segregated urban habitats of yesteryears.7 This atmosphere of anxiety and ‘invasion’ can also be read as the direct representation of the booming real estate business of the country during the 1980s, as the urban bourgeoisie’s habitable “gated housing projects” were mushrooming all around the urban peripheries concurrent with the expansion of Mumbai’s slums that housed more than 4 million people (Sharma 2010, 77). The physical presence of the ‘others’ in the post-​liberalized Mumbai is in such proximity that it can no longer be ignored, but any hint of existential concord is still far away. Bhaskar and Leela’s guests for that evening are either intrigued or disturbed by the constant wailing outside, yet their strange reluctance to interfere creates an atmosphere of bitter irony and oppressive self-​containment. The affluent Mohan, for example, perfectly emulates Bhasker’s incredulity, reacting with the cold precision of an ‘innocent’ observer of the crime that borderlines outrageous humour: LEELA: Uff-​oh! How can you talk of these things! BHASKER: And there’s a fair amount of crying, you see, so tears as well, to add to the phlegm. LEELA: Tears? You think they’re actually crying? BHASKER: Well, yes, I think so. It sounds like it anyway. MOHAN: So, so, rasping, gurgling, crying –​we’re getting a clearer picture of things now. LEELA: And is it genuine screaming, then? (Padmanabhan 2020, 22) The outrage continues, with Mohan and Bhasker rationalizing the event outside as “A religious ceremony! Sacred rites!” (30). The archetypal ‘woke’, Naina (“Leela’s friend. She is the same age as Leela but more attractive. A likeable sort who looks as if she supports all the right causes,” writes Padmanabhan) seems much more active than the other members at the party, all within the drawing room and never taking a step

206  Dibyakusum Ray outside of that hermetic periphery. She passionately theorises about the degree of severity of the crime (“Most forms of rape, especially gang rape, are accompanied by extreme physical violence!” 42), but flounders at the question of rape and promiscuity, her confidence clearly shaken when faced with Bhasker’s conjecture that the woman might be a ‘whore’, hence violable: “NAINA: (no longer sure of anything) You think these things happen all the time?” (49). Surinder, the brawny guest, concludes that the screams have to be stopped because it is violating the peace of the colony, “screwing this whole bloody colony, dammit! They know that we’re all standing here! Shitting in our pants, too scared to do anything but watch” (56). The hermetic, the ‘woke’, the vain and the masculine –​all these archetypes are rendered enfeebled in front of positive action and breaking class boundaries. In the background, Freida works constantly, her agency reduced to mere robotic motions. At the end, comically frustrated by their debilitation, the hosts and the guests commence the ultimate violation of the victim: taking photographs of the act. However, the screaming stopped by then: SURINDER: What’re you saying! NAINA: They’ve all gone! LEELA: (disappointedly) Oh! Then it must be over for tonight! The lights cut out quickly. The cast moves aside to afford an unimpeded view of the curtain over the window. (63) The nascently neoliberal Mumbai, as shown by Lights Out, was paltry in inclusivity despite having quietened hints of penitence (mostly through Naina, as she feebly continues her argument for intervening in the crime, although never indurate about it). This same parochialism, anxiety, conservative attitude and ‘otherization’ is again grappled with –​in a much larger spectrum than Padmanabhan’s –​by Delhi: A Novel, where Khushwant Singh has an explicit chapter-​specific approach to present the same theme –​every alternative chapter oscillates between timelines, the present (the 1980s) and the historical (ranging from the thirteenth century to the late-​Mughal), set against the backdrop the vast, ever-​changing city of Delhi. It is not a simple contiguity of the decadent ‘now’ and the utopic ‘then’; Singh carefully avoids maudlin nostalgia to regard the neutral nature of a metropolis –​Delhi was made through equal measures of violence, bloodshed, emancipation and welfare; it belonged to all, yet to none at all, forever stuck between the limbo between the ideatic and grittily realistic versions of a city. Singh, however, clearly prefers to evaluate the contemporaneous city as a different paradigm altogether –​he describes how the liminal, amazingly fecund city is systematically violated through

“The lights cut out quickly”  207 petty politics and religious dogmatism in the backdrop of an irony called neoliberalization. Also, Singh’s protagonist is a post-​diasporic subject: a middle-​aged, sardonic, unattractive and semi-​autobiographical irreverent Sikh journalist-​cum-​tour-​guide, who has left the London life and come back to spend his days in Delhi. Aware of the world, politics, history and meaning of ‘liberation’, Singh’s narrator thus has a deeper, and considerably more bitter, outlook towards neoliberalism and globalization as such. And yet, there is a fatalism in his attraction towards the city and his native country. The axis of the unnamed narrator’s sexual misadventures, however, is firmly cemented on the hermaphrodite Bhagmati –​a common Delhi fille de joie whom Singh describes as the ultimate embodiment of the city. Delhi and Bhagmati, both are of ambiguous identity, ugly, mistreated and mistreating to others, but a closer look will reveal: [D]‌omed mosques and pencil-​like minarets are spanned by rainbows, the earth exudes the earthy aroma of khas, of jasmine and of maulsari. Then the dusky Bhagmati glides towards you swaying her ample hips like a temple dancer; her mouth smells of fresh cloves and she speaks like her Imperial Majesty the Empress of Hindustan…It is a simple formula: use your heart not your head, your emotion not your reason… The truth is that I am somewhat confused in my thoughts. What I am trying to say is that although I detest living in Delhi and am ashamed of my liaison with Bhagmati, I cannot keep away from either for too long. (2017, 2) This spirit of equivocation slowly turning into pensive alienation, garbed in crude humour, continues throughout the novel. The narrator clearly despises the less-​than-​warm welcome he receives at the airport as he enters India, being eyed suspiciously by the customs officials. He is also no fan of the sterile political scenario that has taken over the post-​emergency nation either. Delhi –​once again ruled by the Congress government even after the general loss of popular faith and architecturing the Emergency in 19758 –​ is under the grip of circumlocuting, self-​referential political paralysis. The people, suffered, but the powerful thrived: There are red flags outside a petrol station with three men chanting ‘Death to petrol-​ stationwalla.’ Red flags outside Dr Sen’s nursing home. Six men yelling ‘Death to Doctors’. Red flags outside Food and Agriculture Ministry building. Four men in garlands sit cross-​legged on the lawn. A placard in front of them says Third Day of Relay Hunger Strike. A procession with saffron flags goes along Parliament Street chanting ‘Our religion and our country are one. The cow is our mother. Death to cow-​eaters.’ On the lawns of Connaught Circus there is a

208  Dibyakusum Ray political meeting. The speaker yells into the mike: ‘All together cry –​Jai Hind.’ The crowd obeys: ‘Jai Hind.’ (Singh 2017, 8) The newly emergent ultranational political Right, the clueless Left daydreaming about the Revolution, the Centrists encashing their past belligerence during the British rule –​all are lampooned by Singh. The narrator does not show any affection for anything or anybody, seeking refuge inside his shell of pungent humour and constant dubiety of human character –​from his colleagues and friends at work to the rich Europeans he chaperones in and outside of the city and occasionally has sex with. The only person he is reluctantly at ease with –​in spite of her less-​than​impressive appearance –​ She is dark and has pock-​marks on her face. She is short and squat; her teeth are uneven and yellowed as a result of chewing tobacco and smoking beedis. Her clothes are loud, her voice louder; her speech bawdy and her manners worse. (Singh 2017, 2) –​is Bhagmati, with whom he roams through the regal ruins of old Delhi, like two flaneurs on a sex-​tinged rediscovery of the foundation of a now-​ sterile city: We resume our flirting. But when you have only one ear, one eye and half-​a-​mind to spare for sex and have to keep the other… to confront anyone who suddenly bursts upon you, it is not much fun… We pretend we are deeply interested in archaeology, history, architecture. I light matches, examine the tiles and try to decipher inscriptions on stones. (49) This is also the initiation of a magic realist, omniscient, oscillating chapterization, where in every alternative yearn Singh depicts a single episode from some distant chapter of Delhi’s past, from the lowest plebeians to the great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, regarding religion, conversion, love, family, caste and wistful nostalgia. How did the nation-​state, and the cities within it, come to this unbearable, alienating state in spite of this checkered history of inclusivity? The narrator seems confused himself, as he keeps talking about the converted Hindu upper caste Musaddi Laal who reserves his Hindu identity to his family and community and invokes the Islamic commonality to the court of Sultan Ghiasuddin Balban (1216–​ 87). We read of Jaita Rangreta of Rikabganj, the real life Dalit commoner who –​vexed by the narrowly religious oppression by Mughal emperor

“The lights cut out quickly”  209 Aurangzeb –​undertakes an exodus from Delhi to Punjab, carrying the severed head of Sikh martyr Tegh Bahadur to be cremated in the Sikh holy city –​Anandpur. The plunderer Nadir Shah, the poet Mir Taqi Meer, the Anglo-​Indian Alice Aldwell desperate to escape the irate legions in 1857, the young rabid nationalist Ram Rakha experiencing a change of heart after witnessing M. K. Gandhi assassinated in cold blood –​violence/​piety, desperation/​cynicism, romanticism/​abject materiality shaped the city of Delhi as well as the country through seven centuries, culminating in the dystopic present. At the end of the novel and resoundingly back to the present, divided city, Bhagmati and the narrator witness the mob lynching and burning of the harmless, half-​crazed building gatekeeper, Budh Singh. The novel ends in a tone of frozen terror that entirely negates the rich and varied tapestry of Delhi legacy. Bhagmati’s effervescent charm that shone through her unsightly exterior is replaced by utter regressive chaos. Delhi is lost, and Singh’s hope in the variant legacy of Indian urbanism is lost as well during the last days of twentieth century. The bitter ravings of the aged Sikh entrepreneur in ­chapter 18, where he angrily professes that his life as a builder of Lutyen’s Delhi under the British was preferable than the state of the ‘independent’ nation, rings truer than ever at the end of the book, and remains significant as the chapter closes: We are amongst the poorest of the poor, the most ignorant of ignoramuses of the world. We breed like rabbits. Soon we will be more than we can feed, clothe, or shelter. Then we will resume fighting each other like dogs on a dung heap. We are also the corruptest of the corrupt. Everyone from the Prime Minister down to the poorest-​paid police constable has his price. And we are more prone to violence than the most violent races of the world. What we saw in the summer and autumn of 1947 when we slew each other like goats unveiled our real nature. You will see much worse in the years to come. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists will go on killing each other in greater numbers. Your Gandhi and his ahimsa are as dead as… as dead as … . Whatever the dead bird is called. (Singh 2017, 346) Thus, from the domestic to the pan-​Indian, from the hermetic to the diasporic and bourgeois exclusivism to the liminal between classes, Lights Out and Delhi: A Novel attempt to capture the contradictions and crises of the neoliberalism of the 1980 and 1990s in its multifaceted spectrum. The aim of the chapter was to present the intertwined ethics and value systems of these two decades in the urban context, and the promises as well as the sociological effects of globalization. How far reaching was the effect of India’s first steps into internationalism? How does the open market

210  Dibyakusum Ray policy actually affect the citizens? Even more importantly, who were the citizens of the booming Indian metropolis? While Padmanabhan gives us a glimpse of the fast-​contracting social inclusivity of Mumbai in the context of starker social-​spatial striations, Singh makes the reader aware of the vast history of violence/​peace, hope/​cynicism, dreams/​despairs essential to the historic Indian-​urban that are completely defaced and distorted with neoliberal assault. Together, as I argue, they also serve us some prophetic markers to gauge the nature of the twenty-​ first century’s crisis-​ridden Indian city spaces as well. Notes 1 It will be interesting to further elaborate on this methodological quandary, of the unique nature of city-​lit in a postcolonial country, possibly different from its first-​world counterpart. Malcolm Miles, while more complex and modernist than Lehan by admitting that “urban conditions frame changing modes of writing,” still distances literature from data and makes the former a respondent “to the intrinsic interest of its material, to literature’s aesthetics” (Miles 2019, viii). My argument, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, is that the tangible, statistically robust history of urbanism can also be displayed through literature. The prerequisite of literary discussion as ontologically different from archival historiography is debatable and, as I think, unnecessary. 2 This section, mostly urban, consisted of public and private service-​industry executives and high-​ranking government officials, the number of which had increased manifold from 1960 to 1965 during Nehru’s city-​centric administrative and industrial drive. The lifestyle difference between them and the non-​ elite citizens was glaring. “While about two-​thirds of the urban population lived below the average of the urban consumption of Rs. 359 per annum, this section –​the U-​sector –​found ever newer avenues of expenditure to feed its voracious appetite for luxury goods” (Banerjee 2014, 38). 3 As Pritika Hingorani summarises: [D]‌ espite an attempt to take an integrated approach to housing, policy interventions were fragmented and overlapping in their objectives and strategies. Urban poverty alleviation programs remained isolated from other related sectors and area specific programs thus reducing their effectiveness. Moreover, the makeup of programs and the manner of their implementation went through frequent changes. This together with the limited use of communities in designing and implementing programs further contributed to poor housing outcomes for the lower income groups. (Hingorani 2011, 8) 4 By employing ‘proper’ mathematical models, the trio shows that “For the Indian union as a whole, the population in poverty grew from 308.3 million in 1970–​ 71 to 346.0 million in 1983 and to 361.2 million in 1987–​88,” among which

“The lights cut out quickly”  211 “the corresponding rate of growth of urban population in poverty was about 2.5 to 2.6 per cent between 1970–​71 and 1987–​8.” They also unequivocally accuse the Planning Commission to have “continued to indulge in mindless tinkering” of available data (1991). 5 “…while India’s industrial and service sectors contributed to 45 percent of the GDP in 1961, this grew to 70 per cent of GDP in 1981, and by 2001, these sectors accounted for almost 80 per cent of India’s GDP” (Mohan & Dasguta 2004, 9). 6 Again an oft-​cited chapter from India’s political history, the rise of BJP (a political conglomerate of JP, the Hindu nationalist RSS and other marginal parties with similar nationalist agenda) is a mix of contemporaneous reactionary politics and dormant forces of the past coming under a monolithic religio-​ nationalist identity. Although gathering strength from the political clout of once-​mighty Janata Party, BJP’s meteoric rise in the 1990 owes to the violent Ram Janmabhoomi Movement –​a nationwide rally building Hindu pride and awareness, constantly fuelled by incessant riots in different parts of the country. The demolition of the historic shrine Babri Masjid in 1992 on the claim of it being built on the site of a mythical temple, sparked nationwide tension, propelling Khushwant Singh to write: “Fascism has well and truly crossed our threshold and dug its heels in our courtyard. And we have only ourselves to blame for this” (2003, 6). It might be interesting to note that in spite of its nationalist ethnocentrist thrust, a large amount of moral and financial support came from the expatriate Indians and a certain moneyed class, based overseas, known as the Non-​Resident Indians (NRIs). Bound by nostalgia, idealized visions of the past, a sense of familiality and money-​ laundering purposes, this section of the pre-​diasporic Indians formed what Arvind Rajagopal calls “syndicated Hinduism” (Rajagopal 2001, 244). 7 Mumbai’s history at the initiation of neoliberalization is fascinating and deserves a far longer discussion. The 1980s city was an eruptive zone of segregation, criminalization, economic boom and radical politics. Ethnic-​religious tension was high with the strengthening of ultra-​Right party ‘Shiv-​Sena’, which was sharply contrasted by militant leftism, which propelled the massive mill-​ workers’ strike during the late 1970s. Gyan Prakash has minutely shown how the political skirmish “tore apart Bombay’s urban fabric,” thus initiating the “ominous web of connections between real estate, the underworld, and politics” (2011, 295). While in constant spotlight thanks to its status as financial capital of the country, Mumbai laboured under acute segregation-​politics, with “the suburbs and extended suburbs of the city experienced a real-​estate boom that converted the most essential human service –​housing –​into a commodity in the market for profiteering and speculation” (2010, 78). Padmanabhan’s play takes place in a similar setting, with gated communities to keep the destitute away, and surrounded by slums, shanty-​towns as well as empty apartments infested with poverty and crime. The massive, extensive city of Mumbai, which embodies at once money, culture, and history, belongs to nobody and everybody. Every individual has a unique story to tell, including their struggles, dreams, aspirations, political

212  Dibyakusum Ray views, and ideas. This has inspired literary giants, who have documented, adapted and/​ or fictionalized their characters, plots, and stories about Mumbai. (Mamta Mantri 2019, xxix) 8 It is to be noted that Khushwant Singh was a supporter, and then a long-​time defender of the Emergency, maintaining in his later essay “Why I Supported the Emergency” that such a measure from the government was necessary and welcomed by the people of the country to curb lawlessness in the name of protest (2015, 12–​13). He also dismissed parts of atrocities as excessive rumours, concluding that “There may be other occasions to impose an Emergency in the country. If we do not make the mistakes of 1975–​77, we would be able to keep the country on the right track when it begins to wobble” (15). It is during the 1984 Sikh pogrom he had a complete fallout with the Congress government (although still exonerating Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as misinformed and not directly responsible): “the November 1984 anti-​Sikh violence will remain a blot on the face of our country for times to come. No one will take the findings of these sarkari commissions of inquiry seriously. It will be left to historians to chronicle events that led to this tragedy and the miscarriage of justice that followed” (Singh 2005).

References Ananthamurthy, U.R. (2016). Bara. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan. (2003). Aparajito: The Unvanquished. Delhi: Harper Collins. Banerjee, Nirmala, Gautam Adhikari and Jean Racine. (1990). “Addendum D. The Power Crisis in Calcutta.” Calcutta 1981: The City, Its Crisis, and the Debate on Urban Planning and Development. Ed. Jean Racine. New Delhi: Institut Français de Pondichéry. 197–​208. http://​books.open​edit​ion.org/​ifp/​5284 Banerjee, Sumit. (2014). In the Wake of Naxalbari. Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad. Banerjee-​ Guha, Swapna. (2002). “Shifting Cities: Urban Restructuring in Mumbai.” Economic and Political Weekly 37(2), 121–​128. www.jstor.org/​sta​ ble/​4411​593 Bhagat, Ram B. and Soumya Mohanty. (2008). “Trends and Patterns of India’s Urbanisation: A Demographic Assessment.” Paper Presented in the Annual Meeting of Population Association of America, New Orleans, USA. 16–​19 April 2008. Accessed 4 September 2022. https://​paa2​008.prince​ton.edu/​pap​ers/​80531 Chattopadhyay, Soumyadip. (2017). “Neoliberal Urban Transformations in Indian Cities: Paradoxes and Predicaments.” Progress in Development Studies 17(4). Accessed 5 September 2022. doi:10.1177/​1464993417716355 Desai, Anita. Voices in the City. (2019). Delhi: Orient Paperbacks. Gangopadhyay, Sunil. (2005). Pratidwandi. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. George, Susan. (1999). “A Short History of Neo Liberalism.” The Transnational Institute. www.tni.org/​en/​arti​cle/​short-​hist​ory-​neolib​eral​ism. Accessed 1 September 2022.

“The lights cut out quickly”  213 Guha, Ramchandra. (2017). India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kindle. Hingorani, Pritika. (2011). Revisiting Low Income Housing: A Review of Policies and Perspectives. Indian Institute of Human Settlements: Indian Urban Conference. Joseph, Sarah. (2007). “Neoliberal Reforms and Democracy in India.” Economic and Political Weekly 42(31), 3213–​18. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​4419​870. Accessed 3 September 2022. Kaur, Navtej. (2008). “Nehru as a Prophet of World Peace.” The Indian Journal of Political Science 69(1), 203–​ 22. JSTOR www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​41856​405. Accessed 3 September 2022. Kierkegaard, Soren. (1847). “On the Dedication to the Single Individual.” www. ccel.org/​k/​kier​kega​ard/​untr​uth/​untr​uth.html Lehan, Richard. (1998). The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mantri, Mamta. (2019). Bombay Novels: Some Insights in Spatial Criticism. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publications. Miles, Malcolm. (2019). Cities and Literature. London: Routledge. Minhas, B. S., L. R. Jain and S. D. Tendulkar. (1991). “Declining Incidence of Poverty in the 1980s: Evidence versus Artefacts.” Economic and Political Weekly 26(27/​28), 1673–​1682. Accessed 5 September 2022. www.jstor.org/​sta​ ble/​4398​123 Mohan, Rakesh and Subhagato Dasgupta. (2004). “Urban Development of India in the Twenty-​First Century: Policies for Accelerating Urban Growth.” Working Paper. Stanford Centre for International Development. https://​kin​gcen​ter.stanf​ ord.edu/​sites/​g/​files/​sbiy​bj16​611/​files/​media/​file/​231w​p_​0.pdf Mohanty, Jagadish. (2019). South-​Facing House and Other Stories. Dublin: Black Eagle Books. Padmanabhan, Manjula. (2020). Lights Out. New Delhi: Worldview. Prakash, Gyan. (2011). Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rajagopal, Arvind. (2001). Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. London: Cambridge University Press. Ram, Ronki. (2012). “Reading Neoliberal Market Economy with Jawaharlal Nehru.” South Asian Survey 19, 221–​241. doi: 10.1177/​0971523114539610 Ray, Dibyakusum. (2022) The Postcolonial Indian City: Literature, Policy, Politics and Evolution. New York: Routledge Research. Ren, Julie. Postcolonial Urbanism. (2020). Oxford: Oxford Bibliographies. www. oxfor​dbib​liog​raph​ies.com/​view/​docum​ent/​obo-​978019​0922​481/​obo-​978019​ 0922​481-​0018.xml Sharma, Chanchal Kumar. (2014). Rise and Demise of Nehruvian Consensus: A Historical Review. Munich Personal RePEc Archive. Accessed 12 September 2022. https://​mpra.ub.uni-​muenc​hen.de/​62863/​1/​MPRA_​pape​r_​61​434.pdf Sharma, R.N. (2010). “Mega Transformation of Mumbai: Deepening Enclave Urbanism.” Sociological Bulletin 59(1). 69–​91. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​23620​846 Singh, Khushwant. (2003). The End of India. London: Penguin.

214  Dibyakusum Ray —​—​—​. (2005). “1984 Anti-​Sikh Riots: Victory to the Mob.” Outlook. 22 August 2005. www.outlo​okin​dia.com/​magaz​ine/​story/​vict​ory-​to-​the-​mob/​228​338 —​—​—​. (2015). Why I Supported the Emergency: Essays and Profiles. New Delhi: Penguin. —​—​—​. (2017). Delhi: A Novel. New Delhi: Penguin Random House. Singh, Pav. (2017). 1984: India’s Guilty Secret. New Delhi: Rupa. Kindle. Spengler, Oswald, Arthur Helps and Charles Francis Atkinson. (1991). The Decline of the West. London: Oxford University Press.

Part IV

South Asian Transactions Between Subcontinental Flow and Transnational Frictions

15 Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Ceylonic Indigenization Movement Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne

Introduction The formation of mass societies is a result of dissemination of mass media. Publishing industry, thus, developed concurrently with the expansion of capitalism. Hand in hand with the print capitalism, homogeneous language societies were engendered by similar conception levels and similar ideas (Anderson 2006, 37–​46). In addition, those who were engaged in that industry became very rich and influential. The diffusion of exposition media had been equally instrumental in the creation of a public sphere in Sri Lanka. During the colonial era, both the missionary and the Buddhist groups had developed education, thereby enhancing literacy. As a result, publications involving the language as the media such as books, newspapers and periodicals gained popularity. However, K. N. O. Dharmadasa (2012, 49) observes that the print industry did not prosper in Sri Lanka as in Europe (that is, in Sri Lanka, publishing industry did not expand in the form of an industry). It rather gained publicity as a media to popularize Buddhism or Catholic religion, with the early publications normalizing certain empire-​sanctioned religious or national individualities. Therefore, it was not the colonizer who was subject to criticism, but the native who appreciated the colonizer’s culture. Thus Sri Lankan society was structured purely on the basis of religious and national ideology (Dharmadasa 2012, 48–​56), which were prescribed by the colonizer. Later a movement broke ground, with linguistic thematics replacing religion as the principal motif of discussion. Kumarathunga Munidasa and the Hela Haula conducted by him made an effort to create a Sinhala language society. Thus during the colonial era itself, the mass society of Sri Lanka was organized based exclusively on polarized cultural aspects. National and language promotion movements took a lead in it. However in 1948, Sri Lanka achieved Dominion status and thereby the country gained political independence, through it was in 1972 that

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-20

218  Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne Sri Lanka received complete freedom forming a nation-​state. In post-​ Independence Sri Lanka, a modernist social refinement took place and it appeared to assume the mode of an indigenization movement. A modernized shape was attributed to the national movement that was prevailing then. Within this project were three main sources of knowledge: knowledge identified as native knowledge and knowledge sources identified in isolation as Indian knowledge sources and European knowledge sources. An enhanced value was seen to be induced to the native culture and attitudes within the modernization movement, which became politically more forceful in 1956. However, the source for the major part of the knowledge therein was Indian or European knowledge. This post-​ colonial indigenization movement alone had been one that consisted of European discipline. Those who took the forefront thereto were the learned class who had their education in English and possessed western discipline. Several characters can be identified in the post-​colonial indigenization movement. Among them, Martin Wickramasingha (1890–​1976), the celebrated Sinhala novelist, acquired a prominent position. Sunil Santha, the pioneer of modern national aesthetic music, is the second distinctive character. Ediriweera Sarachchandra, the Sinhala dramatist, and Lester James Peiris (1919–​2018), the filmmaker, were the other trendsetters of Sinhala culture. They set up a new culture assembling varied cultural components. Enormous was the contribution this group made towards creating and suffusing many of the cultural values, which has a vast effect on the lives of Sri Lankans today. Among them, that Sunil Santha and Sarachchandra were educated in Santiniketan of India is a matter to be reckoned with. The basis of the vision of Santiniketan had been the cosmopolitanism of Tagore. Oxford bibliographies define cosmopolitanism as follows: The term cosmopolitanism derives from the Greek word kosmopolites, meaning “a citizen of the world”. It was first used by the Cynics and later the Stoics, who used it to identify people as belonging to two distinct communities: the local and the wider “common”. This understanding of cosmopolitanism denotes only one of its meanings. Its conception nowadays is broad, and no single definition is sufficient to embrace all its meanings. A distinction can be drawn between moral and political cosmopolitanism; cosmopolitanism can be understood as a perspective on global justice and as a concept within which the discourse on human rights and theory of justice takes place. (Oxford bibliographies) Tagore’s cosmopolitanism has been extensively explicated by critics including Amartya Sen, Ashis Nandy and Martha Nussbaum. Although

Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Indigenization Movement  219 such matters are not being discussed herein, a brief description concerning Tagore’s Santiniketan is necessary to contextualize the present discussion. According to Appiah, cosmopolitanism has an adverse aspect as well. Islamic fundamentalism too is somewhat cosmopolitan in nature. They talk about an Islamic culture not bound by national and state boundaries. Despite them imagining of an international culture, aspiration therein is not a cultural pluralism but a ferocious nationality (Appiah 2017, 220) that values Tagore’s cosmopolitanism, cultural pluralism and coexistence. However, in which manner did our aforesaid two cultural agents, educated in Santiniketan, put that concept into practice in Sri Lanka? Or else, had they not made use of that knowledge? What were the barriers they encountered in making use of that knowledge? What had been the consequences of not making use of those purports as the basis for Sri Lankan culture? The objective of this research is to discuss those three issues in depth. It is expected that a multireligious, multicultural and multicultural space like Sri Lanka should be worried about the Santiniketan brand of philosophical cosmopolitanism. As Ramachandra Guha explains: Speaking in Cambridge in 1880, a high official of the British Raj named Sir John Strachey said that the “first and most essential thing to learn about India” is that “there is not, and there never was an India”. Strachey thought it “conceivable that national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries”, but “that they should ever extend to India generally, that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the Northwestern Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible”. (newstatesman.com) Even before India was to be free in 1947, Winston Churchill had predicted that post-​independence India would disintegrate and fall back into the Middle Ages. Contrary to the prediction, India has not regressed into 565 princely states. That non-​dividing strength came from the Indian cultural movement, a moral strength created by Tagore’s spirituality, Gandhi’s example and Patel’s commitment. Sri Lanka too had the ability to follow that type of invented new cultural model for unifying all communities within their diversity. Research Methodology Sri Lanka is a country that is frequently disturbed by ethnic and doctrinal conflicts. In addition, there are massive conflicts between castes with prevailing gender distinction and social status firmly rooted in the

220  Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne concealed cultural structure of Sri Lankan society, without casting a significant social influence. These matters were revealed in the course of the Dealing with Diversity research project carried out by Clingendael Institute of Netherlands (Frerks & Klem 2004, 6–​15). When the cultural compositions of all those social segmentations were studied in depth, it was observed that all those dissonant manifold identities had been constructed during the colonial or the post-​colonial era. Those issues were revealed in a research carried out in the University of Sabaragamuwa, and it was believed that cosmopolitanism often acts as an ideal condition in which such sectarianism is neutralized. Therein we came across the analyses of Martha Nussbaum, Kwame Anthony Appiah and so on. In his analyses, Nussbaum has used Tagore’s ideas of cosmopolitanism extensively. Accordingly, our studies on Tagore’s practice and reverie and also about his intention for Santiniketan and Visva-​Bharati University were expanded. Books, YouTube associated films, websites and blog pages came very handy for that purpose. Since we were aware that many of those involved in the Indigenization Movement in Sri Lanka have had their education in Santiniketan, we came across a situation where we had to sort out the problem as to who were the most important persons among them. Among those who were involved in the cultural nationalization movement, the two characters who represented a dominant part and who offered the possibility of adequate literal sources and data were considered the base for our study. Out of the names thus found (the names stated in those books), a list of names of persons with whom discussions to be held was compiled and information was obtained by way of discussions with those who were still alive and from those who were healthy enough to obtain information. All those discussions were taped and duly photographed. In the process of searching for information through internet, a multitude of valuable information in both Sinhala and English was found in response to Google searches through the two names Sunil Santha and Sarachchandra. Meanwhile, information was obtained from audio, audio-​visuals, pictures, PDF, web and blog media as well. This literature addresses the ontological questions of the research. It uses a subjectivist philosophical approach in ontology. Therefore, a subjective approach to the basic data can be seen. Although grounded theory is the primary methodology used in this research, some aspects of it are developed within the phenomenology. In all the information, attention was focused only on qualitative aspects and not on quantitative matters. Information was set up aiming at our three basic questions. Observations were carried out to find answers to the questions constructed by us. Such information is summarized in the analysis. Presented in the form of determinations are the answers that could be offered to our three problems through that analysis.

Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Indigenization Movement  221 Santiniketan Philosophy Nussbaum, discussing the vision of education by Socrates, identifies Tagore as a person who tried out that system in an oriental zone. Santiniketan is the centre that performed that educational research activity: I have spoken so far of a Socratic method that had wide influence in Europe and North America. It would be wrong, however, to think that a Socratic approach to early education was found only there. Rabindranath Tagore in India conducted a closely related experiment, founding a school in Shantiniketan, outside Kolkata, and, later, as mentioned, a liberal arts university, Visva-​Bharati, to go with it. Tagore was far from being the only experimental educator in India in the early twentieth century. (Nussbaum 1994, 67) Nobel Prize winner economist Amartya Sen, a former student of Santiniketan, states that Santiniketan education is one that comparably studies different cultures in the world. I am partial to seeing Tagore as an educator, having myself been educated at Santiniketan. The school was unusual in many different ways, such as the oddity that classes, excepting those requiring a laboratory, were held outdoors (whenever the weather permitted). No matter what we thought of Rabindranath’s belief that one gains from being in a natural setting while learning (some of us argued about this theory), we typically found the experience of outdoor schooling extremely attractive and pleasant. Academically, our school was not particularly exacting (often we did not have any examinations at all), and it could not, by the usual academic standards, compete with some of the better schools in Calcutta. But there was something remarkable about the ease with which class discussions could move from Indian traditional literature to contemporary as well as classical Western thought, and then to the culture of China or Japan or elsewhere. The school’s celebration of variety was also in sharp contrast with the cultural conservatism and separatism that has tended to grip India from time to time. (Sen 2005, 115) Satyajit Ray, yet another old student of Santiniketan, states that the institution was the origin of his global vision. I consider the three years I spent in Santiniketanas the most fruitful of my life... Santiniketan opened my eyes for the first time to the splendours

222  Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne of Indian and Far Eastern art. Until then I was completely under the sway of Western art, music and literature. Santiniketan made me the combined product of East and West that I am. (2001) However, none of the Sri Lankans who had their education in Santiniketan, unfortunately, appear to have deeply grasped the cosmopolitan philosophy therein. Neither of Sarachchandra’s publications Pin Ethi Sarasavi Waramak Denne, the autobiography he published in the 1980s or in the series of articles titled “Through Santiniketan Eyes” (Sarachchandra 2001, 53–​83) he wrote for the newspaper Kesari People’s Weekly between 1941 and 1944 featured them. The series was published in Chunnakam, Jaffna, while he was in Santiniketan and reflects something to the effect that he had not identified with the cosmopolitan global vision. But in the practice of drama, he is seen as universal, interested in creating a culture for the newly emerged middle class, having lost interest in the public space. In addition, he seems to have been inspired by the practices and vision of hardliners like B. V. Keskar, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting between 1952 and 1962 in India, and former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Sunil Santha’s situation is different. He looks at localization from a nationalist perspective; and yet, he is never far from universality. His book, Indigenous Music (Deshiya Sangeethaya), suggests taking inspiration from the whole world and making our own good music (Sunil 2019, 54–​55). The same can be seen in his musical usage. His approach was based on various world music traditions in his creative works. It is expected that his music has also been influenced by Tagore; and if it was not, then this curious omission needs to be rationalized. Some of the Indigenous middle-​class cultural agents who followed the Indian nationalist cultural movement led by the leaders like Keskar blocked his path. He was expelled from Radio Ceylon in 1952, under the instigation of Lionel Edirisinghe, who studied with Sunil Santha at the Bhatkhande Music Institute. Sarachchandra was the powerhouse of the radio advisory board at the time and the head of the Radio Ceylon, M. J. Perera, was a friend of him. This audition was conducted by S. N. Ratanjankar, a teacher of Hindustani classical music from the Agra Gharana and former principal of Bhatkhande Music Institute. It is also reported that he was greatly displeased with this audition in India (“The thorn of re-​auditioning”). Sunil Santha and Sarachchandra: Biographical Details Both Ediriweera Sarachchandra (1914–​1996) and Sunil Santha (1915–​ 1981) took pains to create a native culture in Sri Lanka. Sunil exerted

Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Indigenization Movement  223 an effort to formulate a native music; Sarachchandra exerted an effort to bring about a native drama. Sunil Santha commenced his cultural intervention by composing the popular Sinhala song “Olu Pipeela” (Water Lily Bloomed) in 1946 and Sarachchandra did so by writing the translated drama Mudalalige Peraliya (The Moneylender’s Change) in 1943. Both of them were Catholics and belonged to Karava caste. Both formerly had English names and got those changed later. Sarachchandra’s original name was Yustus Reginald De Silva, while Sunil Santha’s was Don Joseph John. Sunil Santha was a professional musician while Sarachchandra was a university lecturer. Sunil held the opinion that a national music had to be compiled obtaining the influence of all the affluent musical traditions in the world. He took a firm stand that the form of music thus made shall not take a highly ascendant form but will follow a common average music (Sunil 2001, 28). Sarachchandra rather believed that native music must be more classical in nature that goes hand in hand with classical Hindustani music (Sarachchandra 2013, 158–​160). In dramaturgy, he believed strongly in the Oriental style, with a penchant to follow the Indian classical drama style. What he saw as indigenization was Indianization (Sarachchandra 1993, 1–​22). His conception was that the general public lacks the capability of enjoying classic culture and the general level of taste is too plebeian. Suni Santha met Sarachchandra at Santiniketan in 1939 and was instructed to go to Lucknow and study Hindustani music with the latter’s encouragement. Sarachchandra probably felt that he would learn Hindustani music and popularize it in Sri Lanka. But shortly after his arrival in Sri Lanka in 1944, Sunil began to compose songs in the style of a newly invented simple but classical music style. Sarachchandra did not like the universal appeal of the music as his taste ran towards the more elitist access of the art. Sunil Shantha opposed the inclusion of social class into his usage of art and wanted to make new music tradition that could be tasted and enjoyed across class, race and religious divides. This resulted in his popularity among the masses. Dr. B. V. Keskar was the information and broadcasting minister in the Nehru government that came to power in 1952. Under his ten-​year plan, film songs were banned on All India Radio and there was a controversial classification of musicians. S. N. Ratanjankar, an ally of Keskar in Maharashtra, was given the responsibility of classifying them. Sri Lanka too got Ratanjankar to classify the musicians. Sunil Santha was the only artist in Sri Lanka who boycotted this test. It was Sunil Santha who led W. D. Amaradeva (Albert Perera) to the audition. He passed the test well and permission to visit Bhatkande was also obtained from Ratanjankar. Sunil also helped him to collect the necessary fee for that. But when he returned to Sri Lanka, Amaradeva displayed no interest in

224  Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne what was considered the national Lankan music of the time, and instead followed the rote Hindustani classical path. Sunil Santha finally quit music and spent a life doing small works like radio repair. This conspiracy diminished the cosmopolitan music that Sunil Santha was preparing to produce. Analyses The first task of the present study is to ascertain if the two cultural agents had absorbed cosmopolitanism, the efficacious core of Santiniketan through a perusal of their writings and observing the practice. Critics are of the opinion that the core of cosmopolitanism is absent in Sarachchandra’s writings (Amarakeerthi 2011, 19). He was a person who held varied opinions on different occasions. His global vision oscillates from nationalism to humanism. But the specialty of the Sangita Bhavana at Santiniketan is the universally popular Rabindra Sangeet. This is the new school of Indian music, so called after its author. Rabindra Sangeet is a bold and admirable departure from the rigid conventions of the classical music of Hindustan. Rabindranath loosened the soul of Indian music from the fetters of Raga and Tala and set it free to breathe forth anew. He gave it a freedom it had never known for at least a thousand years. But pundit conservatism is still an enemy to the new movement, although the songs of Rabindranath are on everybody’s lips, from the extreme North to Ceylon (Sarachchandra 2001, 73). It is Rabindra Sangeet that Sarachchandra identifies as the specialty of Santiniketan. He held that the cosmopolitan approach therein is a liberal humanist approach. In his autobiography Pin Ethi Sarasavi Waramak Denne published in 1985, he has included a separate chapter about Santiniketan. Sarachchandra expressed his objective of entering Santiniketan: I entered Santiniketan in 1939. In the years adjoined, aesthetes of middle class initialized their way to India in a search of our art of music and art of drama. (Sarachchandra 1997, 70) He had decided to attend Santiniketan because it was a trend and many had been there and availed themselves of the fallacy of Bengali renaissance movement. However, it is made clear by his statements that he had no appreciation for the education and practice of Santiniketan. He had also noted that he advised Sunil Santha to leave Santiniketan and quickly to move to Bhathkhande and study music there (Sarachchandra 1997,

Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Indigenization Movement  225 82) Despite his initial reactions, Sarachchandra voices certain contentment in Santiniketan. Though looked down upon by Gandhi, Tagore also made a great contribution in obtaining freedom for India from the British Empire. Tagore’s poetry and the institution established by him were instrumental in convincing the world that it is an uncivilized act to keep a nation inherited with a cultural blessing not second to any other nation in the world pressed down by force. Santiniketan is the result of an effort to re-​establish and maintain at least a fraction of ancestral Bharath. Another fact proved by Santiniketan is that the old Bharath culture had been constructed on great purushartha. Irrespective of whether it would suit the present day society, the way forward must be on the blessings of those who breathe (Sarachchandra 1997, 78). Sarachchandra likewise views as a matter of surprise that the name of the film director in Sri Lanka who is in line with Satyajit Ray of India and Akira Kurosawa in Japan happens to be an English name such as Lester James Peiris (Sarachchandra 1997,73). That denotes Sarachchandra did not perceive the world with a cosmopolitan vision. Although that was the situation in the stage of ideology, in making his drama Maname, he had exerted an effort to use as much Asian raw material as possible in that task. It is rather a zonal practice than a native one. He also made use of western know-​how as well in his dramas. Limiting the stage time to around 2.5 hours, obtaining guidance from Greek “chorus” in “Potheguru” (the presenter in the drama) arrangement, use of European “Proscenium” stage or “Amphitheater” stage are examples. However, Sarachchandra and his students have always attempted to hide the European influence. Studying Sarachchandra’s convention of art, we can say that he did not have cosmopolitan ideas. However, the fact that he was a liberal humanist needs to be stated. In the interview he had with A. J. Goonawardane, he has clarified his humanist standing. Now let us refer to the writings and practices of Sunil Santha. He entered Santiniketan in July 1939 to study classical music and Wanga music. In 1940, he entered Maris College of Hindustani Music in Lucknow, which was the College of Music in Bhathkhande. Having studied there for four years, he returned to Ceylon on 24 December 1944. He had obtained “Visharada” degree for playing sitar and first-​ class qualification of Intermediary Diploma for singing. For his education in Bhathkhande, he had been awarded a scholarship of Rs. 50 from the Government of Ceylon. Thus returning to Ceylon, he applied for the position of a music teacher but was offered an appointment as a physical training teacher, which he refused to accept. Lionel Edirisinghe was his contemporary at Bhathkhande. Sunil was a student who excelled in singing and playing sitar in his academic year but was not worldly

226  Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne enough to seek important social connections. Lionel Edirisinghe went to Santiniketan and studied with Indira Gandhi, the future Prime Minister of India. Prior to issuing the certificates, the then Minister of Education in Ceylon took measures to bring Lionel to Sri Lanka and grant him the post of Principal of the newly created Government Music College of the country. Sunil, who was highly qualified, was refused even a school appointment (Lanka). It is said that Dr. C. W. W. Kannangara who was the Chairman of the Education Administration Committee of the Second State Council (1936–​1947) had asked Lionel Edirisinghe to accept that position (Ranathunga 2013, 58). Sunil Santha made a living thereafter through tutoring and composing music. Having read the writings of the members of “Hela Haula” organized under the leadership of Munidasa Kumarathunga, which initiated standardization of Sinhala language and to cast it up with a comprehensive Sinhala Glossary, Sunil Santha started implementing patriotic element in his works. Carrying out research on the formulation of an indigenous music together with his contemporary Devar Suryasena, Sunil Santha looked at designing an indigenous music through an understanding of folklore music, chanting of “Weddas” (Indigenous tribe in the country) classical music, “Wanga” music and western music. The very first recording of songs in Radio Ceylon in 1946 was by Sunil Santha, with three songs including the song “Olu Pipeela”. In the same year, the collection of songs titled “Ridee Walawa” (Silver Cloud) was recorded. He later had published books of songs and notations in both Sinhala and English. The songs he sang in the radio earned him popularity in the country and for a time he was the most popular singer in Ceylon. University litterateurs parted company with him due to him joining “Hela Haula”, which was later considered the first generation of the national freedom movement. Litterateurs from the University of Ceylon, commenced in 1943, represented the modernist national freedom movement. Particularly during the post-​colonial era, those University litterateurs held the domain in the cultural movement. Sarachchandra had a prominent role in that campaign. Sunil Santha was one of the endmost links remaining in 1948 from the pre-​freedom campaign initiated in 1848. Sunil Santha established the initial step for the invention of a national music by way of radio, recording songs, books of songs and music classes at a time when Radio Ceylon changed hands from British rulers to local administrators. The first Sinhalese chief of the Radio Ceylon was M. J. Perera. He had been a university colleague of Sarachchandra. Perera had offered a wide avenue to Sarachchandra and his team in Radio Ceylon, which enabled Sarachchandra to play a major role in paving the way for M. J. Perera to that position. Sunil Santha, who had an obtrusive popularity at that time, called a national mode of music that was simple and

Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Indigenization Movement  227 entertaining for all. Sarachchandra did not appreciate this simplicity. He wanted a classical music that only elite class could enjoy. His idea was that the national music of the country must be none other than the classical music of India. Plotting to overcome this clash of opinions, Sarachchandra and his bevy organized an audition for grading radio artists. Sunil Santa had boycotted the gradation test and hence lost his entry to Radio Ceylon. Interestingly, the gradation was judged by S. N. Ratanjankar, Sunil’s former teacher at Bhatkhande. Thus, after that audition held in 1952, Sunil Santha was shown the door. Only in 1967 could he re-​enter the radio. During the interim period, though under trying circumstances, he did not part with musical activities. He directed music for the film Rekhawa in 1956 and for Sandeshaya in 1959. Both films are very important in the history of cinema in Sri Lanka (Kulathunga 2017). Having denied radio to Sunil Santha, a group of elitist scholars led by Sarachchandra and Lionel Edirisinghe made arrangements to lift up Albert Perera alias W.D Amaradeva, who in fact was one of Sunil’s students through the radio, popularize simple singing based on critical classical music. Thus Amaradeva became the pioneer of modernist music campaign. When Sunil Santha returned in 1967, the “Hindustani Classical campaign” had succeeded in ruining the path he had opened towards a national music, leaving it to be overgrown with scrub jungle without virtually leaving a trace. Sunil, expressing his views on an education of national music, states: There is no difficulty in our country to learn almost all the languages in the world. Many learn here nearly all languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Wanga, Latin French, English etc., but no National Education is attained by any of those. Likewise, all types of music such as Hindustan, Karnataka, and Western can be learned in our country. However, none of those makes a National Education. How many of those who went along with only English are acting with loyalty to Sinhala? (Sunil 2001, 22) Sunil refers to national music placing emphasis on its unique identity embodying the nature of the society and the demographic characteristic of the space. The artist has no way out of that. It is important for him to search for national identity within cultural pluralism. The national music he suggests shows off only when it is placed on the same stage alongside the other music traditions of the world. The national music he suggested was meant to be in tune with the universal music and not to be isolated. In a study of his musical compositions, numerous national musical compositions structured in the light of widespread global cultures can be identified.

228  Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne According to Dr. Tony Donaldson, instruments that Sunil used in his music have a decidedly multicultural quality. In studying his orchestra, we have to think about the instruments he used, and how he drew the sound of instruments into his music world. When Sunil began recording his songs in 1946, the Radio Ceylon Orchestra did not exist and so recording artists had to find and fund their own orchestras. It was a struggle for Sunil Santha to find good musicians in those days which may have influenced the choice of instruments in his early orchestra in the 1940s. But when we look back over his lifespan, we see that he selected musical instruments from four music cultures: Sinhala, Western, Indian and Hawaiian. He used Sinhala bamboo flutes and drums. From Western music culture, he mainly used the clarinet, piano, guitar and occasionally a cello. Flutes and violins were also used but these two instruments are not exclusively Western but are universally found in most cultures around the world. A violin in Sri Lanka could conceivably belong to a Western orchestra or an Indian Oriental orchestra depending on how it is played and the context in which it is played. (Donaldson 2016, 35) Obstacles Confronted in the Approach to Cosmopolitism As stated by H. A. I. Goonetileke, save for anti-​capitalism collisions, conflicts between nations were minimal during that era. Indian National Movement and Leftist Movement had launched their campaigns against Capitalism. Neither communal hang-​ups nor ethnic tensions had be-​gun to raise their ugly heads, and the over-​riding national urge was for a sovereign Sri Lanka (or Ceylon as it was then) after four centuries of European influence and domination. The visit of Gandhi in 1927 had aided and abetted this tendency and the “Quit India” struggle and “Swaraj” ideal were in the ascendant. Indian leaders of the stature of Jawaharlal Nehru, Kamaladevi Chattopadhya and C.R. Rajagopalachariar were welcomed and listened to with rapt attention. Two decades of the remarkable Jaffna Youth Congress idealism and its links with the South of the island were a powerful impulse towards freedom from crown colony to independence on less rigid, restricted and communally infected lines. The socialist thrust in this direction had also be-​gun in the thirties. (Sarachchandra 2001, 50) The description above makes it clear that there had been no sufficient clearance for cosmopolitism during that period. Similarly, it is in recent

Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Indigenization Movement  229 times that ethnic conflicts have heightened. Those cosmopolitan critics like Nussbaum recommended reading Tagore’s writings with a cosmopolitanism view during the recent times. Nationality was the influence exerted by the ethnic movement from Bengali renaissance. Ideas expressed by Tagore against ethnic attitude are not known widely in Sri Lanka. Never had Tagore’s book titled Nationalism been taken up for study in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan has identified him as a spiritual chieftain in Bharath. Up to recent times, his cosmopolitan vision had not at all been taken up for conversations. Liyanage Amarakeerthi (professor and a contemporary critic) deliberates on Sarachchandra and others’ understanding of Tagore’s doctrine: [t]‌hose days: Sinhala speaking intellectuals were on a path in search of Nationality for freeing from Colonization and Westernization. Therefore Sarachchandra and others could only grasp the discourse of Nationality associated with Bengali enhancement and not the discourse on Cosmopolitism. (Amarakeerthi 2011, 19) The fact that the national campaign during the colonial era was mainly based on nationality and religion is yet another matter that needs careful deliberation. While fighting for freedom as groups organized separately (Sinhala, Tamil, and Moor), the target was to address native inhabitants who put a premium on the culture of colonials rather than colonials themselves. The National Cultural Campaign had been organized in the form of a movement against Sinhalese acceding to an alien demeanor. At least an interest in infusing the culture with a global basis took place within the modernist campaign. That also could not be freed from ethnic and religion-​ based ideologies, which were strengthened beforehand. The classic example thereto is that the S. W. R. D. Bandaranayaka’s (1899–​ 1959, former Prime Minister) movement in 1956 too was characterized by ethnic and religion-​based elements. Those who were involved in the cultural movement during post-​colonial era were unable to refrain from the authority of such hegemony of forces prevailing during the colonial era. Had they taken to a cosmopolitan approach, they would have been subject to annoyance of the Sinhala nation. In the accusations levelled against some of the designs of Sunil Santha, cosmopolitanism features contained therein had been questioned. Repercussions of Non-​Acceptance of Cosmopolitism The objective of this study had been to discuss the problems confronted by masses due to non-​acceptance of a global vision in a society where it must

230  Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne have been. As a result of the Sri Lankan movement for the formulation of a national culture having been ethnic and religion oriented, a society that recognizes and values diversity had not been established. That defect is seen in the whole of Sri Lankan culture. They cannot abide themselves by other nations, other religions and alternate sexes in human merger. Due to enviously looking down at the colonist’s culture, efforts have been made to cast words fabricated according to Sanskrit and Pali languages in place of the words that came to Sinhala from English language. Thereby an illogical language was created. Making of the word “Guwan Viduliya” to represent the English word “Radio” can be cited for an example. The word “Guwan Viduliya” means electricity transmitted through sky, which could resemble lightning. There could have been nothing wrong if the same English word “Radio” was used instead. On the other hand, although those who were involved in the national and indigenization movement in Sri Lanka stressed on ethnicity in public, their personal lives were not congenial with such ethnic characteristics. Most of those national leaders were those educated in English and frequently were married to foreign women. English was spoken at their home. Therefore those who speak English hold a comparatively high power in Sri Lankan society. Those who are working in Sinhala language have less power. Likewise the ethnic approach had also been instrumental in creating a confounded social value structure. Keeping away from cosmopolitism has also caused the creation of a cultural distinction. In the event of the creation of an intellectual classical art confined only to educated upper middle class, those who were uneducated and at low economic levels were removed from that culture. For example, the audience of drama staged by John De Silva did not have a distinctive nature as to whether it was elite or subaltern. However, the audience for Sarachchandra’s Maname was scholars, but the music Sunil Santha attempted to bring about had no class distinction as such. It was a music that suited the taste of everybody. The music popularized by Amaradewa, however, was limited to a group of educated upper middle class only. So two types of music –​popular music and classic music –​had evolved. It was that cultural class distinction which caused a popular singer like H. R. Jothipala (the most popular singer in the country) to be looked down upon by scholars. Conclusion The lesson learned by the Sri Lankan indigenization movement from Bengali renaissance or from Santiniketan was the message to uplift the indigenous culture. This indigenization movement did not imbibe cosmopolitism, which was Tagore’s deep philosophy. It can be identified

Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Indigenization Movement  231 that the indigenization project was implemented in two power camps. One of the camps belonged to the first generation of the national movement for freedom. Their thinking was more universal. They were closer to the ideas of philosophers with a broader vision, such as Tagore. The second generation of the national movement for freedom consisted of a modernist faction that was hypnotized by the concept of the nation-​state. These were inspired by the indigenization movement of India, but their heroes were Nehru, Patel or Keskar. Sunil Shantha tried to infused a global sense into his nationalist ideas and usage. His nationalist approach was not based on racism at all. But the modernist group, along with the civil power of the country, created a nationalism based on ethnicity and Sinhala Buddhist racism. Sunil Shantha used all the traditions of the West and the East to make his music compositions. The so-​called modernist scholars have labelled him a “Kantaru player”. The fact racism and religious-​ based indigenization movement that operated in the post-​colonial period later produced very harmful results. The racist and religious clashes that erupted are one result of this movement and the other consequence is the creation of a stressful and irrational community. Bibliography Amarakeerthi, Liyanage. “Jathiwadayata Erehiwa Sarwahahumikathwaya”, Sanskruthi Vol. 22, Issue. 2. Boralesgamuwa: Sanskruthi, 2011. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, revised edition. London: Verso, 2006. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanisms. New York: NYU Press, 2017. Dharmadasa, K. N. O. Sinhalaya ha Mudrana Shilpa thakshanaya in Muditha, Ed. Karunathilaka, W. S. and others. Colombo: Godage, 2012. Donaldson, Tony. The Man Who Invented Sinhala Music for a Modern Age. Colombo: Sunil Santha Samajaya, 2016. Frerks, Georg E., and Bart Klem. “Dealing with diversity, Sri Lankan discourses on peace and conflict”. Clingendael Institute of International Relations, The Hague, 2004, 1–​49. Gunawardana, A. J. “Theatre in Asia: An Introduction”. The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 15, Issue 2: Theatre in Asia, Spring 1971: 47–​62. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​ S00125​9620​0539​571 Nussbaum, Martha. “Patriotism and cosmopolitanism”. The Cosmopolitan Reader Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994: 155–​162. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pratap, Jitendra, “The thorn of re-​auditioning” The Hindu, 5 November 2009. Ray, Satyajit. Our Films, Their Films. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2001. Ranathunga, Dayarathne, “Shasthriya Sangeetha Prabodaya”. Handa. Ed. Kuruwitabandara T., SLBC: Colombo, Vol. 9, January–​March 2013, 56–​63. Sarachchandra, Ediriweera. “Sarasangrahaya”. Ed. Galahitiyawa, P. B., Dharmadasa, K. N. O. Padukka: Government Press, 1993.

232  Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne Sarachchandra, Ediriweera. Pinethi Sarasavi Varamak Denne. Sarasavi: Nugegoda, 1997. Sarachchandra, Ediriweera. Through Shanthiniketan Eyes, Trans. Gamlath, S. Colombo: Godage, 2001. Sarachchandra, Ediriweera. “Bharatheeya maha sampradayen midee ya hekida?” Handa. Ed. Kuruwitabandara T., SLBC: Colombo, Vol. 9, January–​ March 2013, 158–​160. Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New Delhi: Macmillan, 2005. Sunil Santha. Sunil Samara. Ed. V. Vitharana, Rajagiriya: Sunil Santha Society, 2001. Sunil Santha. Deshiya Sangeethaya. Jaela: Sunil Santha Society, 2019. Interviews Aravinda, Jayantha, face-​to-​face interview on Sarachchandra (2 July 2018). Dharmadasa, K. N. O., face-​to-​face interview on Sarachchandra (9 March 2017). Fernando, Mychel, face-​to-​face interview on Sarachchandra (7 March 2017). Kulathunga, Wasantha, face-​to-​face interview on Sunil Santha (8 December 2017). Lanka, Santha, face-​to-​face interview on Sunil Santha (8 December 2017). Websites www.oxfor​dbib​liog​raph​ies.com (28 November 2018) https://​sarach​chan​dra.org/​index.php (28 November 2018) www.newst​ates​man.com/​asia/​2007/​08/​dem​ocra​tic-​india-​brit​ish (4 April 2020)

16 From Villain to Superhero Reimaginings of Ravana in Twentieth-​ and Twenty-​First Century Sri Lanka Kanchuka Dharmasiri

Introduction The energetic theme song of the Sri Lankan television series Ravana,1 which portrays Ravana as an “auspicious elephant” and a “warrior lion in his majesty and power” arouses my curiosity and compels me to sit in front of the television every weekend. This version of Ravana immediately establishes its autonomy from Valmiki’s Ramayana by asserting that the television series is not based on his text but that it portrays “the rise of the Yakkas against foreign interventions”2 –​the foreign invaders being the Indians in this particular case. The narrative takes place in Hela Land,3 with specific references to current locations in Sri Lanka. Ravana’s grandfather King Sumali has lost his crown to the Indian-​backed King Kuwera and is in hiding, awaiting the birth of Ravana. The series moves forward with tremendous anticipation of this future king and every other word that is uttered is about Ravana while every other woman in the series is keen on getting pregnant by Vishwas Muni in order to produce the royal child. As commercials interrupt the progression of the story, I flip channels only to discover, to my amusement, another version of the Ramayana on Hiru TV.4 This one is a Hindi version, Siya Ke Ram (2015), dubbed in Sinhala. I watch the glamorous looking Rama and Lakshmana clad in glittering clothes battling with demons as Sita observes them in awe. In the Indian series, Ravana’s kingdom is gray and dark. Out of curiosity and in an effort to comprehend the recent burgeoning interest in the narratives of Rama, Ravana and Sita, I sit down every weekend to watch these two television dramas. Intriguingly, they happen to overlap in their telecasting time, creating a competition between the two figures yet again in the media world. Two years later, in 2020, amidst COVID-​19 fears and uncertainties, the second series of Ravana is telecast and a seven-​foot-​tall fair-​skinned Ravana with shoulder length silky hair graces the screen; he is calm, but unparalleled in his strength. As the series moves forward, Ravana learns to transform into any shape that he desires, heal people in critical DOI: 10.4324/9781003428572-21

234  Kanchuka Dharmasiri conditions, read minds and travel time. He is a superhero. I am intrigued by the different Ravanas I have come across in the past and continue to encounter in the present: the villain in the mainstream versions of the Ramayana, the protector of the “original” or Hela inhabitants of Lanka, the powerful Tamil king, the tourist friendly Ravana, the scientist, the medicine man and now the superhero. In fact, in recent years, the figure of Ravana has become a significant and familiar sign in the Sri Lankan cultural imaginary. On the one hand, the narratives in Sinhala construct a story of Ravana, which predates Vijaya, who is seen as the Indo-​Aryan ancestor of the Sinhala people and on the other hand, Tamil narratives create Ravana as a Dravidian hero who safeguarded his community from invaders. In an attempt to establish a historical claim to the island, both communities appropriate Ravana as their own hero; narratives of the nation and national origin are created around this character who cannot be contained within a single national boundary. Likewise, the concept of a Ravana trail and the reclaiming of Sigiriya and other historical sites as spaces inhabited by Ravana is promoted by the proponents of the tourist industry in attempts to attract more tourists. What I propose to do in this chapter is to analyze a select number of theatrical and cinematic texts where Ravana figures as a main character in the popular cultural context in Sri Lanka from the twentieth to the twenty-​ first century and to examine the socio-​political and economic workings of these retellings which render Ravana a hero in both Sinhala and Tamil cultural contexts. In the course of the chapter, I will examine how the modern myths of Ravana are entangled in ideologies of nationalism, neoliberalism and power and how the image of Ravana is always already in a process of transformation. I will place this discussion within a framework of translation, rewriting and retelling. Rewritings and Retellings The multiplicity of the Ramayanas is astounding. It is a text, as A.K. Ramanujan so beautifully points out in “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” which is “always already.” Ramanujan illustrates the inability to trace an originary text and demonstrates how the story is marked by its multiple retellings. He claims, no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling –​and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in a text. In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time. The stories are there, “always already.” (2006, 158)

From Villain to Superhero  235 Ramanujan’s essay was removed from the Delhi University Curriculum in 2012 in the context of a strengthening Hindutva movement.5 Yet, Ramanujan was merely demonstrating, with specific examples, the various retellings of a well-​known story. In fact, one of the defining features of the Ramayana has been its multiple retellings and as Romila Thapar contends, “The recent attempt in the politics of Hindu nationalism to homogenize the story and present a single vision is antithetical to the tradition of how the story was perceived in Indian culture” (Thapar 2001, x). The desire to fix one single narrative of the Ramayana as the ultimate Ramayana says more about the religiously and politically conservative moments and movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries than indicate anything definitive about the text. The version(s) of the Ramayana as articulated by right-​wing groups points out how our retellings are marked by the prevailing ideological milieu. Many theorists of translation have illustrated the difficulty of understanding translated, rewritten or retold texts without an awareness of the context in which they are produced. Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere emphasize that “It is impossible to analyze textual matters without looking at the poetics and ideology of the cultures into which they are being written” (Gentzler 2016, 119).6 The incident concerning Ramanujan’s article is a case in point of such an instance, but the unfortunate fact here is that an article which would have inspired people to actually read the Ramayana was removed from the curriculum. Ramanujan’s essay celebrates the imaginative potential of the retellings of the Ramayana; for him, “Ramayana is not merely a set of individual texts, but a genre with a variety of instances.” In fact, numerous writers, storytellers and artists have created works inspired by the Ramayana. R.K. Narayan, who “composes” a Ramayana based on Kamban’s text, claims “The impact of the Ramayana on a poet […] goes beyond mere personal edification; it inspires him to compose the epic again in his own language, with the stamp of his own personality on it” (Narayan, xxiv).7 Both writers illustrate the ways in which the Ramayana gets infused with specific localities, local sounds, colors and events as it is retold/​rewritten. Therefore, “In the Bengali Ramayana, Rama’s wedding is very much a Bengali wedding” while in the Thai Ramakirthi, the locations of the story are situated in specific places in Thailand (Ramanujan, 45). And storytellers “would not miss any chance for a contemporary reference”: for example, they “would compare that Pushpak Vimana to a modern airliner, with the additional capacities that it could be piloted by mere thought …” (Narayan, 156). Ramanujan and Narayan are acutely aware of the ways in which local contexts and specificities enter the narratives as they are told and retold.

236  Kanchuka Dharmasiri This is a well-​known premise, but one that needs to be reaffirmed and rearticulated in contexts where the tendency to homogenize dominate political and cultural discourses. In studying the contexts in which stories are rewritten and tales retold, one also needs to pay attention to the genres and methods in which texts travel and circulate. In the current context, electronic media and digital culture play a crucial role in disseminating rewritings of various texts. Lefevere and Bassnett suggest that “What impacts most on members of a culture […] is the ‘image’ of a work of literature, not its ‘reality’ ” and argues that “translation operates more by its ‘image’ as constructed not by the original text or scholarly articles about the text, but rather the images created by translations and rewritings, more often than not in the cinema, television, and popular culture” (Gentzler 2016, 124). The dominance of such modes becomes obvious when one explores digital and social media outlets such as Facebook, YouTube, fan blogs, fan-​fiction and other avenues where there is a plethora of reworking of a specific character or work. Exploring the profusion of new media and the ways in which they have transformed the art of rewriting, Edwin Gentzler claims that “the nature of translation [has] changed with the age, as has the media through which translations travel” (2016, 5). Hence, while exploring the specific contexts and ideologies that influence and color texts, it is also important to examine the ways in which these texts travel through time, genres and media. Quite intriguingly, such issues are a part of the controversy surrounding the banning of Ramanujan’s article in 2012. Vinay Dharwadker points out that some protestors who were vehemently rejecting Ramanujan’s essay were not familiar with Valmiki’s Ramayana, the very text whose sanctity that they wanted to protect. In fact, it was precisely the presence of an essay which translated Valmiki from Sanskrit that created discomfort among certain right-​wing segments. Dharwadker claims that “As believers misled by secondhand accounts and bowdlerized retellings of the epic –​ and hence as the first casualties of their own censorship –​fundamentalists were probably taken aback to discover how Valmiki narrates this story” (Dharwadker 2012, 442). It is possible that some protestors who were accustomed to a different retelling of the story were surprised by the translated excerpts from Valmiki’s Ramayana. After all, most people know the Ramayana through “oral, performances and media sources,” including “films, television series, and commercial videos” (2012, 443). I was particularly struck by the example Dharwadker provides of one of the protestors: An Unnamed young ABVP activist unwittingly exposed this fact and the sanctimoniousness of the party line that accompanies it when he

From Villain to Superhero  237 asserted publicly that “I grew up watching the Ramayana as shown on the TV… ..There can be no other version of it. (443)8 For this young man, the Ramayana is Ramanand Sagar’s 1987 television series; for him, Ramanujan’s translations of the Valmiki text is heresy! In the next section of the chapter, I will examine several retellings of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka and as I do so, I will pay attention not only to the ideologies that mark and influence the retelling and dissemination of these texts, but also to the new media and genres through which they travel. I will examine the image, especially of Ravana, that is created by these retellings in cinema, television, and popular culture and explore how they are intricately connected to the ideology and politics of the times. Many Ravanas in Sri Lanka There are many Ravanas in Sri Lanka: there are many Ramas and Sitas too. In this section, I trace a diverse range of Ravanas from the 1930s onward to the present. Obviously, this study is by no means exhaustive. I am merely trying to examine several significant moments in which the figures of Rama and Ravana have remerged in Sri Lankan popular culture in an effort to study the poetics and the politics of the texts and the contexts. Let me begin with the works of John de Silva, a prominent dramatist in Sri Lanka who, influenced by Indian Parsee musicals, created Nurti, performances with elaborate sets, costumes and Indian ragadari music. One of the first plays that he wrote and produced was Ramayana Natakaya/​The Ramayana Play. After the play was first performed in 1886, the theater space was burned down by his adversaries. Speaking about the destruction caused by this event, De Silva writes that “the play was disrupted because the theater was set on fire in the same way that Hanuman set fire to Sri Lanka” (Ariyarathne 1992, 167). Though the burning of the building is not connected to the content of the play, the reference to Hanuman and the fact that De Silva subsequently sold the scripts with the title, Seethaharanaya or Ginigath Ramayanaya/​The Abduction of Sita or The Burned Ramayana, attest to the audiences’ familiarity with the Ramayana story. John de Silva’s play follows the plotline of Valmiki’s narrative and places Rama at the center –​“Hear the story of the late Rama,” sings the narrator as the play begins –​while Ravana plays a secondary role as the stereotypical villain.9 Constantly called a “women thief,” Ravana even becomes an object of ridicule. In a critical moment in the play, during the war between Ravana and Rama, Hanuman makes the observation, “Ah! If we suffer to this extent when our one nose gets a common cold, how difficult it must be when all these ten noses get a cold” (Ariyarathne, 199).

238  Kanchuka Dharmasiri At the same time, Ravana does not even figure in John de Silva’s sequel to the Ramayana Natakaya, Uttara Rama Charitaya/​The Noble Character Rama (1906), which begins with Sita’s banishment to the forest. Neither play offers a critique of Rama’s actions and end in a happy note where Rama and Sita are reunited. Commenting on a 2017 restaging of De Silva’s Ramayana,10 Dilshan Boange, a critic, asks, In this postcolonial era I cannot help but wonder if it never occurred to de Silva who was a pioneer of Sinhala theatre to have imaginatively designed a storyline that does not hold dogmatic adherence to the politics of Valmiki’s narrative?”11 Boange poses this question in 2017 in a postcolonial and post-​war context. In fact, De Silva is known to have made some controversial statements that carried anti-​Muslim sentiments right before the performance of his plays.12 Even with such sentiments, would it have been possible for him to have imagined a different Ravana in the 1930s? This question brings us to the language politics of the late nineteenth century. This was the time around which Sinhala and Buddhist nationalism emerged in colonial Lanka where Sinhala ideologues started claiming that Sinhalese had an Indo-​Aryan origin, while Tamils had their historical roots in South Indian Dravidian culture. This theory was founded by European linguists such as Max Muller who were interested in different linguistic structures in South Asia. Later on, certain Sinhala nationalists adopted this linguistic identity to denote a racial identity and to claim that Sinhalese were superior to the Tamils as a result of their Aryan roots. Hence, the Sinhala majority identified with a historical connection with the Indo-​Aryans and within such a context, one could ask as to whether there was any other way in which De Silva could have conceived the Ramayana. Considering the socio-​cultural climate of the times, there is no avenue for De Silva to have imagined a different kind of Rama or Ravana.13 Even when J. B. Dissanayake wrote Ravana Geetha Natakaya/​Ravana, The Musical Play in 1957, he emphasized the role of Ravana, but did not divert from Valmiki’s plotline. If there is a positive projection of Ravana in the mainstream Sri Lankan cultural context in the early to mid-​twentieth century, one finds that not so much in Sinhala works, but in Tamil texts. When S. Vidyanandan and S. Maunaguru produced Ravanesan in 1963, they were interested in reviving the traditional koothu style as well as reenacting the story of a heroic Tamil king. “According to Vidyanandan, Ravana is a proud Tamil King who ruled Sri Lanka,” claims Maunaguru, who played Ravana’s role as a University student in 1963 and who subsequently produced several versions of the play over the years. Their choice of Ravana as the

From Villain to Superhero  239 central focus of their play was influenced by the South Indian Dravidian movement14 and was done at a point in Sri Lankan history where questions of the nation and national identity became significant. Ravana is a strong and proud monarch in the play and is motivated by a singular desire to win the war and in maintaining “his stature of heroism in the face of crisis” (Maunaguru 2009). The play has evolved and transformed over the years. In this somewhat chronological analysis of the various reemergings of Ravana in Sri Lanka, I would like to briefly examine the film Seetha Devi, directed by Manik Sandrasagara in 1978 because the film complicates Ravana’s image unlike the works in Sinhala we have witnessed thus far. Seetha Devi begins with the scene where Sita –​quite interestingly played by Mamtha Shankar –​having seen the golden deer, pleads with Rama to bring it to her. Rama and Lakshmana leave the scene as Ravana arrives as an ascetic. When Sita approaches him with water, he transforms into his true self. As the enraged Sita tries to get away from Ravana, he grabs her hand and then looks up at the sky, to what we think is the Pushpaka Vimana, but the scene then suddenly cuts to the contemporary context with a helicopter in which we find Professor Ravi Ranaraja, a renowned professor who firmly believes that he is Ravana reincarnated. Ranaraja’s actions are driven by this belief as the film juxtaposes the ancient narrative with the modern-​day story. The Ravana one encounters in this film is passionate, irrational and does not have much self-​control. After abducting his friend’s wife, Janaki, he tells her that he wants to change the ending of the story but ends up meeting a similar fate as Ravana in Valmiki’s version. Initially he does not harbor feelings for Janaki, but eventually starts sensing a connection with her and attributes it to a samsaric link that has bound the two with a golden thread.15 Though Professor Ranaraja/​Ravana is singularly driven by the desire to procure Janaki/​Sita’s love, his portrayal is nuanced in this film. Though Sandasagara’s film portrays Ravana in a sympathetic light unlike the works in Sinhala we have witnessed thus far, it does not move away from the basic structure of the mainstream version of the Ramayana narrative. It is with Arisen Ahubudu’s play, Sakvithi Ravana/​ Ravana, the Universal Ruler, performed in 1988 that one starts to detect a pronounced change in the way in which the Ramayana story is retold in Sinhala theatrical works. The play takes no heed of the Indian story –​ in fact, it dismisses it as inaccurate –​and works to elevate the character of Ravana by portraying him as a strong monarch who ruled not only Lanka but many other kingdoms around the world. Ahubudu’s play denies that Ravana abducted Sita and is based on the premise that Vibheeshana, Ravana’s half-​brother was plotting with Rama to overthrow Ravana in order to become the King of Lanka. Ahubudu was a pioneering member of the Hela Hawula/​The Hela Collective, a group that sought to uncover the

240  Kanchuka Dharmasiri “pure” and non-​Sankritized Sinhala language, which was termed “Hela.” The focus on an uncontaminated language eventually lead to a discourse on a pure race, a race that inhabited the island 5,000 years ago prior to the arrival of the Aryans.16 Kings such as Ravana were seen as the rulers of the dynasties that existed prior to the invasion of the Hela Land by other races.17 The desire to create a Ravana who no longer conforms to the stereotype of the villain coincide with the next phase in Indo-​Lanka relations as well as the changing political conditions in the island with the war between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Within the context of the conflict, the Sinhala and Tamil communities were involved in an ideological contest to claim that they were the historical owners of this island and started reinterpreting the same historical, archaeological and literary “evidence” in different and competitive ways to support their contesting historical claims. The mythical figure of Ravana who is believed to have lived many centuries before prince Vijaya gained a newfound interest among Sinhala nationalists. At the same time, the increasing anti-​Indian sentiments after the Indo-​Lanka accord signed in July 1987 changed the relationship between Sri Lanka and India, with a growing suspicion from some segments in Sri Lanka toward Indian intervention.18 In this context, Rama could no longer be the hero of the story, he was an Aryan who colonized the Hela inhabitants; Ravana was the indigenous king who was wrongly ousted by the Indian rulers. Hence, to reinstate Ravana as an historical ancestor of the Sinhala community, Valmiki’s version of the Ramayana had to be challenged. Here, it should also be noted that the then president Ranasinghe Premadasa19 patronized Ahubudu’s play. Hence, Sakvithi Ravana becomes part of a larger political and nationalist project to construct a negative image of Indian intervention and to iterate a separate identity for the Hela race. Quite interestingly, in the 1990s, amidst the war between Sri Lankan government forces and the LTTE, while the Sinhala writers were appropriating Ravana as a symbol of Hela power, Tamil writers were using the already existing heroic image of Ravana in the Tamil community for their own nationalist agendas. The 1995 radio play, Ilankai Munn/​The Soil of Lanka, written by Pon Ganeshamoorthy, was broadcast in the Pulikali Kurel/​Voice of Tigers and focused on the battle between Ravana and Rama. According to this play, Ravana was a powerful and mighty king who was wrongly treated by the Aryans. Mahendran Thiruvargan, a lecturer in the University of Jaffna, recalling his exposure to this story in his childhood claims, “the story was not that different from Valmiki’s Ramayana in the beginning, but what is so memorable is the last episode. In the climactic moment of the battle between Rama and Ravana, the line “Ravana is winning, winning, winning… .” is repeated. In a write-​up of

From Villain to Superhero  241 the play, it is stated that “the play exposed the treacherous deeds that the Aryans did to the Tamil King Ravana and the Ilankei (Lankan) soil” and that the “Ramayana is against the culture of Tamils.” The play was published in a book form in 2008 with an introduction –​or a blessing –​by Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE where he states that with this miserable existence, the Tamils have lost their own self and cannot survive as empty men. He emphasizes the need for Tamils to know their origin and uniqueness in history, in ancient history, and sees this play as an attempt to achieve such a goal. There were many requests to rebroadcast the play and it was done so. Sakvithi Ravana and Illankei Munn were written under the patronage of political leaders, and the intriguing fact here is that both the Sinhala and Tamil retellings portray King Ravana as a mighty ruler who protected their communities from foreign invaders –​in the case of Ahubudu’s retelling, the villains are Rama and Vibheeshana and in Ganeshamurthy’s play, the villains are the Aryans –​a combination of the Indian invaders and the Sinhalese. Both communities resort to a figure that they associate with an ancient and originary moment of racial purity. Hence, despite the moves to create a dichotomous identity for the Sinhala and Tamil communities in Sri Lanka, such moments of confluence, or the moments of having shared symbols and characters speak of the complex interconnections and intersections that define the socio-​cultural fabric of the country. At the same time, it should be noted that while the Tamil artists20 were already more attuned to Ravana’s plight in Ramayana, especially through the influence of the Dravidian movement, it is only recently that the Sinhala writers, with such passion and almost a certain amount of aggression, have started to appropriate Ravana as a Hela ancestor. Though multiple folk tales and oral narratives of Ravana have existed for centuries, it is only recently that they have been seized and appropriated by certain nationalist groups to create a homogenous narrative about Sri Lanka’s past and the existence of the Hela race. In fact, the recent rewritings of Ravana as a heroic figure who is the historical ancestor of the Hela people seems to be mostly supported by far-​right religious and nationalist groups that emerged in the last two decades, such as Ravana Balaya/​Ravana Power, groups which hark back to a concept of a pure Hela race with direct antipathy toward Muslim and Tamil communities. These groups have their support base in newly emergent Sinhalese business classes in Colombo and other suburban areas in the South. Some are active in visual and social media. Certain private media stations that telecast stories about Ravana are part of this entrepreneurial class. This speaks to the ways in which the current trend of ethno-​nationalism goes hand in hand with economic liberalization and commercialization. The reinstated Ravana figure in the present-​day Sinhala culture industry

242  Kanchuka Dharmasiri offers an excellent example of this tendency. Ravana has now become a commodified mythical figure in the tourist industry –​Sigiriya is promoted as Ravana’s abode for Indian tourists –​and commercial media. It serves the political interests of far-​right groups who are searching for the oldest possible mythical ancestor in history and media companies who are transforming far-​right nationalism into a new market space. It is only within such a politically charged context that a very light-​hearted comedy such as Sita Man Awa/​Sita I’m Home! (2013), directed by Jayasekera Aponso, could attract so much fury from right-​wing religious groups such as Ravana Balaya. During the film’s premiere in Colombo, members of the Ravana Power forcefully entered the film theater and demanded that the film not be screened because it represented “our mighty king” as a crazy man and went to the extent of demanding the censor board to ban the film. Sita I’m Home is based on a folk tale of Ravana in Sri Lanka where it is said that Ravana does not die from Rama’s arrow, but that he merely loses consciousness and is in a long coma inside a cave for 5,000 years, awaiting to be revived. The film starts with this premise as Ravana awakens in the twenty-​ first century through the intervention of an Indian soothsayer who secretly plots to appropriate his powers. Ravana is completely flabbergasted by the new developments in the world and a tourist guide inculcates him into the realities of the present age. Though Sita I’m Home was met with opposition by far-​right Sinhala nationalist groups, the latest version of Ravana on Derana television, on the contrary, is seen as a positive rendering of a historical figure. The Facebook fan page of the series as well as the YouTube channel with millions of viewings every week attest to the popularity of the show and the way in which many spectators see the Ravana who appears on Derana television as the Hela ancestor of the Sinhala people. Such sites are an indication of the ways in which stories and images travel in the present age. I find Gentzler’s observations about rewriting and media useful here: Young people using new media have taken such “rewriting” processes to new heights: authoring blogs, spinning the news, adapting music and film, creating YouTube pastiches, devouring comics, playing games, expanding upon original characters in fan fiction, and crowd-​sourcing translations, all taking standard texts, regardless of the original language, and rewriting them in new terms and genres. (Gentzler, 7) A close look at the fan comments on Derana television’s Ravana –​according to Gentzler, these are post-​translation effects –​gives a sense of the way in which this drama is received by a cross-​section of spectators and how many of them view this obviously melodramatic series, which is akin mega

From Villain to Superhero  243 soap-​operas that dominate the small screen, as a “true” account of history. One fan remarks, “Frankly, people in our country still don’t have a proper knowledge of history. I am thankful to TV Derana for taking history to the people… Hela people, unite!” Another asserts, “In a country where there are idiots who believe in the Ramayana (this is a reference to Valmiki’s text), to create such a work and have a group which appreciates it is something to be proud of.”21 Apart from a few comments which are critical of the series, most comments extol the idea that this television channel has finally managed to instruct our future generations about the island’s history.22 While the Ravana series telecast on Derana is seen in a positive light, Siya ke Ram aired on Hiru TV was met with a different fate. The Indian series abruptly ended in January 2020, at the precise moment in which Ravana abducted Sita and flew away in the Pushpak Vimana. A random narrator commented “In Valmiki’s Ramayana, it is said that Rama and Lakshmana arrive in Lanka and that they take Sita back to Bharata. Yet, the power and strength of the mighty Ravana still astonishes the world today.” This sudden curtailment of the series left some spectators baffled. What is the reason for this abrupt ending? Does the image of Ravana in the Indian series no longer adhere to the image of Ravana that is promoted in the current culture industry in Sri Lanka?23 In fact, when Ravana, The Musical Play (1957) was revived in 2017 as Ravana Seethabhilashaya/​Ravana’s Aspiration of Sita, the plot was changed in such a way that not only does Ravana survive the battle with Rama, but he also jumps into the fire to save Sita.24 Ravana’s character dominates the performance space as he comes brandishing his sword in the Pushpaka Vimana. While J.B. Dissanayake and Namel Veeramuni created this Sinhala play, which endows Ravana with certain superhuman qualities, S. Maunaguru in his recent renditions of Ravanesan has been more interested in exploring the human side of a character who has hitherto been portrayed as a brave king who went to a war and brought about not only his demise, but the demise of his entire country and family. Within a context of an ongoing war between the Sri Lanka state and the LTTE, Maunaguru rewrote the play in 2000. He claims that, with insight as an older man, I tried to portray Ravana as a more human character. Rather than the usual arrogant portrayal, I depicted him as someone who brashly entered war, realized it was a mistake but was too proud to back out.25 In a highly politically charged atmosphere in the early 2000s, his self-​ reflexive play was met with criticism of a different kind and he “was getting angry calls based on some interesting and innovative interpretations of

244  Kanchuka Dharmasiri [his] meaning in the play.”26 In subsequent versions, Maunaguru has placed Mandodari, Ravana’s wife, in the center of the narrative with her anti-​war stance. Maunaguru’s retellings are driven by a conscious desire to address contemporary issues. Conclusion What I have focused on thus far are the theatrical and cinematic representations and rewritings of Ravana. I have not looked closely at the numerous literary works that occupy multiple shelves in bookshops nor have I examined the ways in which some of the books on Ravana were recently shifted to the “historical texts” category in certain bookshops.27 I have likewise not discussed the ways in which the recent reemergence of the Ravana myth has affected people’s day-​to-​day practices such as the happenings at the Ravana Temple built at the Dewram Vehera situated in a Colombo suburb where a weekly religious ceremony is performed for Ravana as he begins to occupy a space that is closer to a god. While the religious performances and performatives at the temple render Ravana a deity of a certain kind, there is also a move in the cultural context to render Ravana more human. Instead of the ten-​headed Ravana, we are often offered images of a Ravana with one head. He appears prominently in the recent wall paintings and28 as a result is a constant presence in public spaces.29 In the first week of December 2020, Devendra Devayan Vahanse of Ritigala came forth as a descendant of Ravana, claiming that he has found the cure for COVID-​19. Quite interestingly, he was given a considerable media coverage through ITN, which is a government-​sponsored television channel. Hence, while the story of Ravana has been a constant presence in Sri Lankan culture, both in Sinhala and Tamil communities, the latest manifestations of the Ravana figure have distinct differences from the ones which were told before. In a heavily mediatized context, the Ravana who appears and reappears, changes and transforms. One of the salient features of the present discourse on Ravana is the need to render him either human or god, and to reiterate his presence in history. This desire is present in both Sinhalese and Tamil communities, but the intensity of the process is more marked in the Sinhala cultural imaginary, in their attempt to find a historical ancestor, beyond Vijaya who has his roots of origin in North India. The precise issue with the recent retellings of the story has been the effort to homogenize the Ravana narrative and to present it as authoritative and original; this is the case in Sri Lanka and India. At the same time, the current discourse is intent on obliterating the multiple retellings of a profusely imaginative story and rendering it into one single fixed text.

From Villain to Superhero  245 Reflecting on the attempts to transform a mythical character into a historical fixity, I wonder whether transforming mythology into history, the imaginary into reality and fictional characters into living beings is a common characteristic of our times. It is necessary to explore as to under what specific circumstances such transformations become possible and what specific socio-​political and economic factors make these new processes of transcreating and rewriting possible. This brings us to another reversal of the translational moment in this age of digital and social media. Recently, I saw a news item on the internet about a woman named Pixee Fox, who is interested in remodeling herself as Disney’s Jessica Rabbit, and as a result has done several surgeries, including one surgery to remove four of her ribs in order to achieve the perfect waistline that would enable her to become her cartoon hero. There are several other such instances, especially women and men changing their bodies and going through multiple plastic surgeries in order to become fictional characters of their liking, especially to become Barbie dolls and Ken dolls. We live in interesting times, we live in times where human beings are trying to become fictional characters, trying to emulate toys, superheroes and cartoon images. Perhaps the digital and the virtual spaces might even appear more real than the concrete spaces we inhabit, the images on screen may seem more “real” than the concrete evidence we find in scholarly research and archives. Hence, what can be gauged from the viewers’ comments on the Derana TV series Ravana is the intriguing fact that many spectators view this extremely melodramatic television series, not as a fictional universe created by digital technology and mostly very exaggerated and unconvincing acting, but as a true account of history. Perhaps, the next challenge for translation scholars would be the task of analyzing the ways in which cartoon, mythical and fictional images translate into historical and real-​life characters and how human beings translate into cartoons and fictional characters. Notes 1 2 3 4

The high budget teleseries was first aired in 2018 on Derana television. This line appears immediately after the theme song. A time and space that predates the coming of Vijaya. Derana TV and Hiru TV are two contending channels and both operate on a rather nationalist ideological basis. 5 Vinay Dharwadker claims, More than a year into the university’s 2006–​12 curricular cycle, however, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) –​the student wing of a thrice-​ banned Hindu-​ fundamentalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak

246  Kanchuka Dharmasiri Sangh (RSS) –​launched a campus agitation against the essay and its prescription on the curriculum. The ABVP’s initiative was supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the national political arm of the RSS, and was coordinated by the Sangh Parivar, which serves as an umbrella for the whole “family” of organizations affiliated with the RSS. (Dharwadker 2012, 435) 6 Lefevere states that “Translations are produced under constraints that go far beyond those of natural language –​in fact, other constraints are often much more influential in the shaping of the translation than are the semantic or linguistic ones” (1982, 7). 7 R.K. Narayan, in his retelling of the Ramayana (1972), constantly comments on the way in which his own text adheres or differs from Kamban’s Ramayana; at one level, Narayan’s text functions as a meta-​narrative on the translation process. R.K. Narayan. The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic. New York, Penguin Classics, 1972. 8 Parashar, Arpit, and Vishwajoy Mukherjee. “Which Version of Ramayana Would Ram Read?” Tehelka. Anant Media, 24 November 2011. Web. 6 December 2011 (Quoted in Dharwadker’s “Censoring the “Rāmāyaṇa.””). 9 Ramayana Natakaya basically follows the plot of Valmiki’s Ramayana and consists of many melodies song which have become classics. 10 John de Silva’s Ramayanaya was revived in 2017 by the Tower Hall Theatre Foundation, a national drama institute in Sri Lanka connected to the Cultural Ministry. 11 Boange, Dilshan. “Encountering John de Silva’s Ramayanaya.” Sunday Observer, 19 February 2017. www.sun​dayo​bser​ver.lk/​2017/​02/​19/​art/​encou​ nter​ing-​john-​de-​silva%E2%80%99s-​ram​ayan​aya 12 Yet, quite interestingly several Muslim businessmen supported his theatrical ventures. 13 Quite interestingly, even for us, as school goers, Rama was the hero, though we always were intrigued by Ravana’s character. 14 Maunaguru (2009) http://​maunag​uru.blogs​pot.com/​2009/​06/​ravane​san.html 15 The only song in the film, “Nim him sewwa ma sasare/​I sought direction in Samsara” sung by W.D. Amaradewa is a very popular song. 16 The term Hela, once a linguistic marker, has come to denote a community who inhabited the island before the arrival of the Aryans. 17 This narrative does get complicated because it is in fact Vibheeshana who is one of the guardian kings of Sri Lanka. I have not seen any effort to reconcile this paradox except in the recent TV series where Vibheeshana was portrayed as a saint. He is seen as a protector of Buddhism too. Hence, I am not quite sure how Vibheeshana’s status as a traitor works with his status as one of the four warrant gods. 18 In fact, the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) was called the Vanduru Hamudava (Army of Monkeys). 19 Ranasinghe Premadasa was a prominent critic of the Indian intervention over Sri Lanka’s national question. Two major slogans of his election campaign in

From Villain to Superhero  247 1988 were returning Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) from Sri Lanka and abolishing the Indo-​Lanka accord signed in July 1987. 20 I mean the works in Sinhala and Tamil, again, there is no simple binary here, for example, Manik Sandarasagara who directed Seetha Devi was Tamil, but did all his films in Sinhala. 21 www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​wfFzZ-​oCtvM 22 The Ravana teledrama came second in popular votes. 23 Apparently, in Siya ke Ram, Ravana is killed by Sita in her Kali form. 24 The 2017 version of Ravana Geetha was directed by Namel Veeramuni and he had rewritten the ending of the play. 25 Thulasi Muttulingam. “The Story of Ravana and Mandodari: giving womankind their say.” https://​eye​ofth​ecyl​one.wordpr​ess.com/​2017/​06/​09/​the-​story-​ of-​rav​ana-​mandod​ari-​giv​ing-​womank​ind-​their-​say/​ 26 He further claims, “I had a lot of trouble defending myself against interpretations in the modern context that I had never intended.” https://​eye​ofth​ecyl​ one.wordpr​ess.com/​2012/​05/​08/​profes​sor-​maunag​uru-​icon-​of-​ind​igen​ous-​ tamil-​cult​ure/​ 27 Books by Mirando Obeyesekere and Suriya Gunesekara were shifted from the fiction section to the history section. In fact, these two writers have been instrumental in creating the recent discourse on Ravana. 28 In 2019, there was an island-​wide craze to paint the walls in cities and villages and two images that dominated the walls were that of King Ravana and King Dutugemunu. 29 From 2018, Ravana’s image started appearing in a list of school in a school text book of Kings in Sri Lanka.

References Ahubudu, A. (1988). Sakvithi Ravana/​Ravana, Ruler of the Universe. Colombo: Sayvodaya Grantha Prakashana Seva. Ariyarathne, S. (1992). John de Silva Natya Ekathuwa/​A Collection of John de Silva Plays. Volume 1. Nugegoda: Piyasiri Printing Systems. Bassnett, S., and A. Lefevere. (1990). Translation, History and Culture. London: Printer Publishers. Boange, D. (2017) “Encountering John de Silva’s Ramayanaya.” Sunday Observer. www.sun​dayo​bser​ver.lk/​2017/​02/​19/​art/​encou​nter​ing-​john-​de-​ silva%E2%80%99s-​ram​ayan​aya Dharwadker, V. (2012). “Guest Column: Censoring the “Rāmāyaṇa.”” PMLA, 127(3), 433–​450. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​41616​838 Gentzler, E. (2016). Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-​Translation Studies. New York: Routledge. Lefevere, A. (1982). “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature.” Modern Language Studies, 12(4), 3–​20. https://​doi. org/​10.2307/​3194​526 Maunaguru, C. (2009). Maunaguru blogspot. http://​monag​uru.blogs​pot.com/​ 2009/​06/​ravane​san.html

248  Kanchuka Dharmasiri Narayan, R.K. (2006). The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic. Ed. Pankaj Mishra. New York: Penguin Books. Ramanujan, A.K. (2006). The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. Ed. Vinay Dharwadker. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Thapar, R. (2001). “Introduction.” Questioning Ramayanas. Ed. Paul Richman. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 245n5 refers to note 5 on page 245. 81/​2 (film) 94, 97 100 Goru Marile Baghoru Moron (film) 36, 41–​42, 43 Abartan (film) 38 Abedin, Zainul 143 Abhijan (film) 102 Agarwala, Chandrakumar 17 Agarwala, Jyoti Prasad 13, 17, 25–​29, 38, 44–​5 Agarwala, T. 44–​5 Aguiar, Marian 185 Ahom 12, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25–​6; linguistic identity politics 39–​41 Ahubudu, Arisen 239–​241 Ajeyo (film) 24–​25, 29–​32 Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) 236–​237, 245n5 Ali, Ahmed 200–​201 Alien (film) 104 Allende, Isabelle 160 All India Radio 223 Althusser, Louis 52 Amaradeva, W. D. 223–​224, 227 Amarakeerthi, Liyanage 229 Amazon Prime 46 Anand, Mulk Raj 173 Ananthamurthy, U. R. 201–​202 Antaral (film) 110–​114, 118 Anti-​Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association 142 Antonioni, Michelangelo 94 Apollinaire, Guillaume 158 Aponso, Jayasekera 242

Appiah, Kwame Anthony 219, 220 Apur Sansar (film) 101, 103 Arabian Nights 18 Aranyer Din Ratri (film) 95, 101–​102 Arasaratnam 53 architecture: Calcutta 102–​103; Goa 71–​73; Pondicherry 53, 58, 59–​60, 62 Aristotle 36; Poetics 37 Ashani Sanket (film) 103, 104 Assam 11–​21, 29–​32; Bangladeshi immigrants/​refugees 29–​30; English education and the moral question 13–​15; history of cinema 37–​39; humour and cinema 36–​46; language politics 36–​46; late nineteenth and early twentieth century 15–​18; Nellie massacre 31–​32; nineteenth century 11–​12 Assam Accord (1982) 23 Assam Bandhu 17, 26 Assamese language: education 16; identity politics 36–​46 Assam Movement 23, 28, 30, 32n3 Autograph (film) 104 avant-​garde 108–​119; Misra 161; Ray’s films 94, 101 Avikunthak, Ashish 108–​119 Baba, Machhli 102 Bachchan, Amitabh 104 Bachelard, Gaston 87–​88 Baer, Ben Conisbee 190 Baij, Ramkindar 143

250 Index Bairagi, Paramananda 46n5 Balibar, Etienne 125 Bandaranayaka, S. W. R. D. 229 Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan 158, 172, 190, 200 Bandyopadhyay, Manik 83–​85, 140, 158, 194 Bandyopadhyay, Sharadindu 193 Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar 139–​142, 147, 175, 190 Banerjee, Sumit 210n2 Bangladesh: Assam Movement 28; Communist Party 123; formation 29; liberation war 121–​123, 201; Mokammel’s films 121–​134 Banhi 12–​13 Bapiraju, A. 175 Barua, Birinchi K. 18 Barua, Gunabhiram 17 Barua, Jahnu 23–​24, 29–​32, 38 Barua, Padmanath Gohain 11, 13, 17, 23–​27, 38, 40 Baruah, Padum 38 Baruah, Sanjib 29, 40 Bassnett, Susan 235, 236 Basu, Pratibha 195 Basumatary, Kenny 45 Basumatary, Rajni 45 Beckett, Samuel 108–​119, 158 Bengal: Assamese cultural acculturation 12; Assamese governance 16; Assamese linguistic identity politics 39; Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha 139–​141; Elias’s Khoabnama 144–​147; famine (1943) 139–​143, 172–​173; Kopai flood (1943) 139–​140; literature 156–​171; Mallabarman’s Titas Ekti Nadir Nam 147–​149; modernity 25, 143; Muslims 29–​30, 31; partition 121–​134, 143; railways 190; Ramayana 233–​234; Ray’s films 93–​105; refugee crisis 200–​201; region 143–​144; renaissance 26, 229, 230 Bengali language: Antaral (film) 110, 111; Bandyopadhyay’s Padma nadir majhi 83–​86; education 16; Mallabarman’s Titas ekti nadir nam 83–​85, 91

Bennett, Bruce 25 Bergman, Ingmar 95 Bezbaruah, Lakshminath 13, 17, 18, 20, 27 Bhabha, Homi 171 Bharatamuni 37 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 203, 245n5 Bhatnagar, M. K. 181n6 Bhattacharya, Bhabani 172, 179 Bhattacharya, Bijan 172 Bhattacharya, Nabarun 156, 166–​168, 170–​171 Bhattacharyya, Debjani 145 Bhavana, Sangita 224 Bhole Babar Lotaari (film) 36, 42–​43 Bhuyan, Surya Kumar 26, 46n5 Biswas, Chhobi 95, 102 Boange, Dilshan 238 Bogart, Humphrey 99–​100 Bollywood 13, 38 Bombay see Mumbai/​Bombay Bora, Jatin 38 Bora, Manju 29 Borboruah, Hiteswar 26 border crossings 24, 31, 144, 151–​153 Bordoloi, Gopinath 20 Borphukan, Laliksula 12 Borpujari, Utpal 35 Bose, Samaresh 92n1 Braganza, Alfred F. 75 Brah, Avtar 124–​125 British Film Institute 194 British India: Assam 11–​21, 40; Bengal 139–​141; cosmopolitanism 218; Pondicherry 50, 51–​52; railways 186, 192–​193 Bronson, Mr., Assamese English Dictionary 16 Brown, Nathan 15, 16 Bruckner, Pascal 50, 55–​56 Bryant, J. 36 Buddhism, Sri Lanka 217, 230–​231, 237 Bulbul Can Sing (film) 45 Buñuel, Luis 113–​114 Buranjis 12–​13, 15–​17, 26, 46n5 Burden, Robert 187 Burma/​Myanmar 12 Burroughs, William 158–​160

Index  251 Cahiers du Cinema critics 94–​95 Calcutta/​Kolkata: architecture 103; Bhattacharya’s Lubdhak 166–​171; Black Hole of 162, 191; city-​lit 201; earthquakes 166–​167; electricity shortages 203; Ghosh’s Gun Island 168; literature’s avoidance of 99; Mokammel’s films 124–​126, 128; railways 191–​192; Ray’s films 96, 97, 99, 102–​104 Calder, John 113 capitalist world-​ecology 172–​180 Casanova, Pascale 157 caste issues 14; food crises 172, 176; Indian cinema 98–​100; Mallabarman’s Titas Ekti Nadir Nam 147–​148; Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve 175; Mokammel’s films 124; railways 190; Sri Lanka 219–​220 Catholicism 71–​72, 74, 217, 223 censorship, India 13, 19–​21, 100 Ceylon see Sri Lanka/​Ceylon Ceylon University 226 Chakravartee, Kaviraj 15 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan 174 Char... The No-​Man’s Island (film) 151 Charulata (film) 94, 95, 102 Chatterjee, Partha 15 Chatterjee, Soumitro 101 Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi 228 Chattopadhyay, Soumyadip 203 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 99 Cheah, Pheng 157 Chetty, Sunku Muthurama, and family 50, 53, 59 children’s literature 188 Chiriyakhana (film) 95 Chitra Nodir Pare (film) 123, 126–​128, 129 Chittaprosad 143 Christianity: Goa 71, 74; Pondicherry 52; Sri Lanka 217, 223; see also missionaries Churchill, Sir Winston 219 cinema/​film: Assam 11, 13, 19–​21; avant-​garde 94, 101, 108–​119, 160–​161; food crises 172; humour 35–​46; and modernist literature 143; Mokammel’s films 121–​134;

Prayoga 118–​119; rivers 83–​91; Sri Lanka 227; see also specific films Cinema Prayoga 118–​119 city-​lit 198–​210 Clarke, Michael 78 class issues: Assam 16, 40; Goa 71–​73, 74, 75–​76; India 14, 173, 175, 190, 201; Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve 175; Mokammel’s works 121, 130; Pondicherry 49–​63; railways 190; Ray’s films 95–​96, 102; Sri Lanka 219–​220, 222–​224, 230; United Kingdom/​Great Britain 15 Clavin, Patricia 24 Clingendael Institute of Netherlands, Dealing with Diversity project 220 Clive, Robert 51 Cohn, Bernard 143–​144 Communist Party, Bangladesh 123 Congregation of St. Louis de Gonzague 61 Congress Party 55, 98, 198, 202 Cortes, Sebastian 49–​50, 55–​60, 62 cosmopolitanism 217–​231 COVID-​19 pandemic 1, 233, 244; trains 184, 193 Cutter, O. T. 16 Dali, Salvador 113–​114, 116 Daly, Nicholas 187, 188 Damrosch, David 156 Das, Jayanta 36 Das, Rima 45 Das, Setona 36, 42, 43 Dasgupta, Subhagato 203 Deckard, Sharae 175–​176 Deka, Hiranya 36, 41, 43 Deleuze, Gilles 88–​90, 106n7, 115 Delhi: city-​lit 199, 204, 206–​210; Sikh massacre 203 Delhi University 234–​235 Desai, Anita 200–​201 De Silva, John 230, 237–​238 Dharmadasa, K. N. O. 217 Dharwadker, Vinay 236–​237, 245n5 Different Trains 1947 (audio-​visual narratives) 193–​194 Dissanayake, J. B. 238, 243 distant reading 157 Do Bigha Zamin (film) 172 Donaldson, Tony 228

252 Index Dupleix, Joseph François 51, 52 Duras, Marguerite 158 Durkheim, Emile 200 Dutta, Akshaykumar 191–​192 Edirisinghe, Lionel 222, 225–​227 education: Assam 15–​18, 26; English 11, 13–​15, 218, 230; France 61; Pondicherry elite 54, 61–​62; Santiniketan 218–​226, 230; Sri Lanka 217, 218, 230; United Kingdom/​Great Britain 61 Eisenstein, Sergei 158–​160 Ek Chhoti si Mulaqat (film) 98 Ekti Golir Atyakahini (documentary) 123–​124 Elias, Akhtaruzzaman 144–​147 elite: Goa 71–​72, 75–​76; Pondicherry 49–​63 England see United Kingdom/​Great Britain English education: India 11, 13–​15; Sri Lanka 218, 230 Epstein, Jean 89 Era Bator Xur (film) 38 Faiz, Faiz Ahmad 83 famine 140–​141, 143, 172–​179 Fellini, Federico 94 Ferguson, M. A. 36–​37, 44 film see cinema/​film Film (film) 109, 111, 113–​116 food crises 172–​180, 201 Ford, John 100–​101 Ford, T. E. 36–​37, 43 foreigner/​foreignness 25, 29, 31 French cinema 94–​95 French East India Company 51–​53 French India 49–​63 French India Socialist Party 54–​55 French Revolution 60, 61 French School 89–​90 Frost, Robert, ‘Mending Wall’ 130 Gadapani (historical/​mythical figure) 12, 25, 27, 28 Gait, E. A. 26 Gajarawala, Toral Jatin 144 Gandhi, Indira 98, 160, 198, 201–​203, 226

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 219, 225, 228 Gandhi, Rajiv 160, 198, 212n8 Gandhi, Sanjay 160 Ganeshamoorthy, Pon 240–​241 Ganga (film) 92n1 Gangar, Amrit 118 Gangopadhyay, Sunil 95, 124, 201 Garg, Zubeen 38 Gellner, Ernest 32n1 gender: Assam 11, 21, 43–​44; Sri Lanka 219–​220; see also women Gentzler, Edwin 235, 242 George, Rosemary M. 181n2 George, Susan 198 Ghar Wapsi 33n15 Ghatak, Ritwik 83–​88, 90–​91, 118, 124, 134, 147–​151, 153 Ghosh, Amitav 124, 156, 168–​171 Ghosh, Sankho 124 ghost stories 192 Girls Friendly Society (Great Britain) 15 Goa: ‘authentic’ 71–​73; bazaars 64–​67; carnivals 76–​77; cultural loci 73–​77; Kunbi dance 75, 76, 78; Mando 75; Miranda’s sketches 64–​78; state–​corporate nexus 67–​71, 73, 78; as synergistic cultural interface 77–​78; Tiatr 74, 75, 78; tourism 66, 67–​73, 78 Gogoi, Ranjan 32n4 Gohain, Hiren 30–​31, 32 Gohain-​Baruah, Padmanath 26, 27 Gonga Silonir Pakhi (film) 38 Goonawardane, A. J. 225 Goonetileke, H. A. I. 228 Gooptu, Sharmishtha 98 Goopy Gyne, Bagha Byne (film) 95 Goswami, D., Kavya Shastra 15 Goswami, Hemchandra 17 Goubert, Edouard 54–​55, 60 Gramscian theory 53–​54 Great Britain see United Kingdom/​ Great Britain Great Indian Peninsula Railways 186 Gremillion, Jean 89 Guha, Ramachandra 174, 175, 219 Gulzar 195 Gunesekara, Suriya 247n27

Index  253 Hamsun, Knut 177, 178 Handique, Aideu 13 Harvest (play) 172 Hazarika, Bhaskar 45, 46 Hazarika, Bhupen 38 Hela Hawula 217, 226, 239–​240 Herbier, Marcel L’ 89 Hindi language 111 Hinduism: Ajeyo (film) 31; Antaral (film) 111; Bharatiya Janata Party 203; cinema ban in Assam 38; city-​ lit 208; degradation causes 190; food crises 172; Ghar Wapsi 31; India 13, 14, 21, 30; Indian cinema 98–​99, 105; Kalkimanthankatha (film) 117; marriage 14; Mokammel’s films 122–​124, 126–​131; Nayak (film) 96; Pondicherry elite 52; Ramayana 235 Hingorani, Pritika 210n3 hippies, Goa 64, 71, 73, 77–​78 Hogan, Patrick Colm 56 Hore, Somnath 143 How Green Was My Valley (film) 100–​101 humour and cinema 36–​46 hunger see food crises Hunt, Alan 15 Huq, Hasan Azizul 124 hypermodernism, Ray’s films 94–​98, 102–​105 identity: Assamese linguistic identity politics 36–​46; crisis, Pondicherry 49–​63; Mokammel’s films 121–​134; railways 196; Sri Lanka 220, 227 Ilankai Munn (radio play) 240–​241 illiteracy/​literacy: Assam 16, 40; Sri Lanka 217 India: Aadhar card-​related deaths 181n4; Advisory Publicity Committee 19; avant-​garde 109–​114, 117–​119; Bollywood 13, 38; Brahmo Marriage Act (1860) 14; Cinematograph Act (1918) 19, 21; Cinematograph Films Act (1927) 19; Citizenship Act (1955) 33n5; Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, 2019) 3, 22, 25, 30, 32; city-​lit 198–​210; Emergency 207, 212n8; famines 140–​141, 142, 172–​173;

fluid border regions 3; freedom movement 24, 27–​28; Government of India Act (1935) 20; hunger-​ related deaths 181n4; independence 22, 24, 28, 172–​173, 193–​196; indigenization movement 231; majoritarianism 1; Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve 173–​180; mass media 223; Mokammel’s films 121–​134; National Register of Citizens (NRC) 3, 23, 30, 32; neoliberalism 198–​199, 202–​210; Partition 29–​30, 31, 121–​134, 143, 147, 151, 184, 193–​196; railways 184–​186, 189–​196; Ravana 244; Ray’s films 93–​105; Santiniketan 218–​226, 230; and Sri Lanka, relationship between 240, 246n19; Universities Act (1857) 15; Widow Remarriage Act (1956) 14; see also Assam; Bengal; British India; Calcutta/​Kolkata; Goa; Mumbai/​ Bombay; Pondicherry Indian National Congress 54–​55, 98, 198, 202 Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) 246n18, 246n19 Indian People’s Theatre Association 83–​84, 172–​173 Indo-​Lanka accord (1987) 240, 246n19 Indramalati (film) 38 Islam: Assam 32, 33n15; cosmopolitanism 219; De Silva’s anti-​Muslim sentiments 238; India 13, 30–​31; Indian Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) 33n5; Mokammel’s films 127–​129 Jaffna Youth Congress 228 Jafir, Amin 50, 55–​56 Jago hua savera (film) 83, 86 Jaikumar, Priya 19 Jain, Gaurav 161 Jain, L. R. 202 Jalsaghar (film) 102 Jameson, Fredric 106n9 Janata Party (JP) 211n6 Jataka stories 18 Jha, Mohan 181n6 Joi Baba Felunath (film) 102

254 Index Jonaki 17, 26 Joseph, Margaret P. 181n6 Joseph, Sarah 198 Jothipala, H. R. 230 Jotugriha (film) 97 Joyce, James 158 Joymati (film) 11, 13, 17, 23–​29 Joymati (historical/​mythical figure) 12, 23, 26–​29 Kale, Pramod 74 Kalkimanthankatha (film) 113, 117–​119 Kamban 235, 246n7 Kamm, H. 52, 58 Kanchenjungha (film) 93–​95, 101 Kandali, Madhav 15 Kannangara, C. W. W. 226 Kapur, Akash 50, 55–​56, 62 Kapurush (film) 95, 101, 103 Kar, Bimal 172, 192 Kardar, A. J. 83, 86–​87, 87 Karnaphulir Kanna (documentary) 124 Kaul, Mani 103, 110, 118 Kaur, Navtej 203 Keaton, Buster 111, 113, 115–​116 Keskar, B. V. 222, 223, 231 Khan, Mehboob 172 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad 14 Kierkegaard, Søren 204 Kokoschka, Oskar 32n1 Kolkata see Calcutta/​Kolkata Kothanodi (film) 46 Kumar, Uttam 97–​98 Kumarathunga, Munidasa 226 Kurosawa, Akira 95, 225 Lahiri-​Dutt, Kuntala 149 Lal Shalu (film) 123 Langley, Lee 54 language politics in Assam 35–​46 Lassally, Walter 86 La terra trema (film) 86 Lecercle, Jean-​Jacques 142 Lefevere, Andre 235, 236, 246n6 Lehan, Richard 199, 210n1 L’Herbier, Marcel 89 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 240, 243 literacy/​illiteracy: Assam 16, 40; Sri Lanka 217

literature: Assam 11, 16–​18, 23; children’s 187–​189; city-​lit 198–​210; ghost stories 192; Ray’s films 93–​105; rivers 83–​91; Sri Lanka 218, 222–​225, 230; travel narratives 187–​196; United Kingdom/​Great Britain 16, 18; see also specific authors Local Kunfu (film) 45 London Society for Protection of Young Females 15 Lotman, Yuri 105 Lukács, G. 178 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 13 Madkholkar, Gojananda T. 175 Mahabharata (epic poem) 15 Mahabharata (film) 104 Mahanagar (film) 101 Mahanta, Aparna 26–​27 Mahanta, Ratneswar 26–​27 Mahapurush (film) 95, 102 Mahmud, Altaf 83 Majumdar, Kamalkumar 158 Mallabarman, Advaita 83–​87, 140, 147–​150 Mann, Paul 108–​109 Manto, Sadaat Hasan, ‘Modesty’ 194 Mantri, Mamta 211n7 Marciniak, Katarzyna 25 Marcuse, Herbert 159–​160 Markandaya, Kamala 172–​180 marriage: Hindu 14; widow remarriage 14, 17 Marxism 99, 123, 147, 157–​158 mass media 217, 222–​223, 226–​228, 242 Master, Natasha 125–​126 Maunaguru, S. 238–​239, 243–​244 Mehrotra, Rahul 64, 65, 67 Metcalf, Thomas 18 Mezzadra, S. 152 Miles, Malcolm 210n1 Mills, A. J. Moffat 16 Minhas, B. S. 202 Miranda, Mario 64–​78 Misra, Subimal 157–​162, 170 missionaries: Assam 12, 14, 16, 40; Pondicherry 61; Sri Lanka 217 Mission China (film) 38 Mitra, Tripti 83

Index  255 Mitry, Jean 89 Modigliani, Amadeo 32n1 Mohanty, Jagadish 200–​202 Mokammel, Tanvir 121–​134 Moore, Jason W. 174, 175 Moretti, Franco 100, 157 Mother India (film) 172 Mountbatten, Lord 122, 131 Mudaliar, Kanakaraya (Pedro) 50, 52–​53 Mudaliar, Thanappa 52–​53 Mukherjee, Arindam 99, 101, 105 Mukherjee, Janam 157 Mukherjee, Madhabi 102 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 16 Mukherjee, Srijit 104 Muller, Max 238 Mumbai/​Bombay: city-​lit 204–​210; industrial capitalism 174; neoliberalism 204–​206, 209–​210, 211n7 Muni, Paul 99 Munidasa, Kumarathunga 217 music: Assamese humorous cinema 43; Rabindra Sangeet 224; Sri Lanka 218, 222–​228, 230–​231 Muslim League 128 Myanmar/​Burma 12 Nabanna (play) 172 Nagar, Amritlal, Bhookh 172 Nandy, Ashis 15, 218–​219 Nanni, Giordano 185 Narayan, R. K. 173, 177, 235, 246n7 Nariman, Rohinton Fali 32n4 Nayak (film) 93–​105 Nayakkar, Savarirayalu 61 Neelima, Kota 181n4 Nehru, Jawaharlal 160, 202, 210n2, 222–​223, 228, 231 Neilson, B. 152 neoliberalism, India 198–​199, 202–​210 Nesbit, Edith 188–​189 Netflix 46 New Media 100 New Wave cinema 95, 100 Nietzsche, Friedrich 114–​115 Ningni Kai (film) 36, 41, 43 Nixon, Rob 179 Nodir Nam Modhumoti (film) 123

Non-​Resident Indians (NRIs) 211n6 Nouveau Roman movement 94, 100 Nouvelle Vague movement 94–​95 novels see literature Nussbaum, Martha 218, 220, 221, 229 Obeyesekere, Mirando 247n27 Ollikainen, Aki 177 Othering 35, 40 Padmanabhan, Manjula 204–​210 Pakistan: Mokammel’s films 121–​126, 132–​133; Muslims 29; railways 193; river novels/​films 83–​91 Panchatantra 18 Pandey, Anjali 35 Panigrahi, Kalindi Charan 175 Parker, Leonard 54 Parker, Walter Hugh 54 Pasolini, P. P. 90 Patel, Sardar 219, 231 Pather Panchali (film) 127, 189 patriarchy 14, 15, 100 Peepli Live (film) 181n4 Peries, Lester James 218, 225 Perera, Albert (W. D. Amaradeva) 223, 227 Perera, M. J. 222, 226 Periyar 14 Perreira, Joan 54 Persian language 46n5 Phukan, Anandaram Dhekial 16 Pillai, Ananda Ranga 50, 51–​52, 53, 62; Cortes’ Pondicherry 55–​56, 58–​60 Pillai, Thiruvengadam 51 Plato 36 Poe, Edgar Allan 164–​166, 170 Poggioli, Renato 101 Pondicherry 49–​63 Portugal 71–​72, 73 Pound, Ezra 156 Prabhakaran, Vellupillai 241 Prakash, Gyan 211n7 Prasad, Ritika 191, 193 Pratidwandi (film) 103 Premadasa, Ranasinghe 240 print industry 187, 217 Progressive Writers’ Association 83, 142 Proust, Marcel 158

256 Index Quart, Alissa 150–​151 Rabindra Sangeet 224 Radcliffe, Lord 122, 127, 131 Radio Ceylon 222, 226; Orchestra 228 Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur 128 Rai, Himangshu 13 railways 184–​196 Rajagopal, Arvind 211n6 Rajagopalachariar, D. R. 228 Rajkhowa, G. 17 Rakesh, Mohan 211n5 Ram, Ronki 198 Ramabai, Pandita 14 Ramakrishna 160 Ramanujan, A. K. 234–​237 Ramaswamy, V. 158 Ramayana 15, 233–​245 Ramayana Natakaya (play) 237–​238 Ramazani, Jahan 110, 144 Ram Bijaya 18 Ram Janmabhoomi Movement 211n6 Rao, P. V. Narasimha 203 Rasa theory 37 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 33n15, 245n5 Ratanjankar, S. N. 222, 223, 227 Ratnakar (film) 38 Ravana (Hindu king) 233–​245 Ravana (television series) 233–​245 Ravana Balaya 241–​242 Ravana Geetha Natakaya (play) 238, 247 Ravana Seethabhilashaya (play) 243, 247n20 Ravanesan (play) 238, 243 Ray, Hemendra Kumar 156, 162–​166, 170–​171; ‘Bandi Atmar Kahini’ 162, 165–​166; ‘Jibanta Mrityu’ 162–​166 Ray, Kalidas 140 Ray, Rajat Kanta 141 Ray, Satyajit 93–​105, 127, 189, 221–​222, 225 Rekhawa (film) 227 religion: Antaral (film) 111; Assam 16, 18; Bangladesh 29–​30; East Pakistan 29–​30; France 60; Goa 71, 74, 76; India 30, 33n5; Mokammel’s films 122–​124, 126–​131; Pondicherry elite 52–​53; Sri Lanka 217, 223,

229–​231, 244; see also specific religions Ren, Julie 199 Renoir, Jean 89–​90 river novels/​films 83–​91; Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha 139–​143; Mallabarman’s Titas Ekti Nadir Nam 148–​151 Robbe-​Grillet, Alain 95, 100 Roti (film) 172 Routledge, Paul 67–​68, 71–​72 Roy, Hememdra Kumar 192 Roy, Raja Rammohan 13 Ruggiero, Vincenzo 66–​67 Rukmini Haran 18 Sabaragamuwa University 220 Sagar, Ramanand 237 Said, Edward 46n1 Saikia, Bhabendra Nath 38 Sakvithi Ravanal Ravana, the Universal Ruler (play) 239–​241 Samanta, Gopa 149 Sandeshaya (film) 227 Sandhyarag (film) 38 Sandrasagara, Manik 239, 247n20 Sangh Parivar 245n5 Sankar 96 Sankardeva 15 Santha, Sunil 218–​220, 222–​231; biography 222–​224; Indigenous Music 222; ‘Olu Pipeela’ 223, 226; ‘Ridee Walawa’ 226 Santiniketan 218–​226, 230 Saptapadi (film) 97 Sarachchandra, Ediriweera 218–​231 Sarangi, Sourav 151–​153 Saraswati, Dayanand 13–​14 Saraswati, Hem 15 Saraswati, Ram 15 Sarkar, Bhaskar 151 Sarma, Arun 30 Sarothi (film) 38 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 35, 160 Schneider, Alan 107, 111, 113 Seemabadhwa (film) 103 Seetha Devi (film) 239, 247n20 Sen, Amartya 218–​219, 221 Sen, Kesab 190 Sengupta, Madhumita 41 Seton, Marie 102

Index  257 Shahani, Kumar 110, 118 Shakespeare, William 168–​169 Shankar, Mamata 239 Sharma, Chanchal Kumar 202 Shatranj ke Khilari (film) 101, 104 Shimantorekha (film) 124, 128–​131 Sholokov, Mikhail Alexandrovich 126 Sidwa, Bapsi 194 Siegel, Benjamin 172 Simek, Nicole 179 Simmel, Georg 200 Singh, Khushwant 194, 204, 206–​210 Singh, Nanak 175 Sinha, Kaliprasanna 191 Sinhala language and culture 217, 226–​231; Ravana reimaginings 233–​245 Sisters of St. Josephine of Cluny 61 Sita Man Awa (film) 242 Siya Ke Ram (television series) 233, 243 social class see class issues social identity theory 36 Socrates 221 Sonar Kella 102 South, Nigel 67 Spengler, Oswald 200 Spivak, Gayatri 45 Sri Aurobindo Ashram 49, 52, 54, 57, 59, 61 Sri Lanka/​Ceylon: economic crisis 1; independence 217–​218; indigenization movement 217–​231; National Cultural Campaign 229; Ravana reimaginings 233–​245 starvation see food crises Strachey, Sir John 219 Subarnarekha (film) 147, 150 Sulikpha 12 Sur, Malini 152 Suryasena, Devar 226 Swapnobhumi (film) 124, 128–​129, 132–​133 Tagore, Rabindranath 127, 160; ‘Banglar Mati Banglar Jol’ 129; cosmopolitanism 218–​231; The Home and the World 156; Nationalism 229; Ray’s films 94, 95, 102 Tagore, Sharmila 96–​97, 102, 103

Talukdar, Himjyoti 45 Tamil culture 234, 238, 240–​241, 244 Tarafdar, Rajen 92n1 Tendulkar, S. D. 202 Terra Trema, La (film) 86 Thailand, Ramayana 235 Thapar, Romesh 202 Thapar, Romila 235 Thelan, David 24 Thiruvargan, Mahendran 240 time, and railways 185, 186, 196 Titas Ekti Nadir Nam (film) 83–​88, 91, 147–​151, 153 Tolstoy, Leo 158 tourism: Goa 66, 67–​73, 78; Pondicherry 50, 55; Sri Lanka 234, 242 Tower Hall Theatre Foundation 246n10 trains 184–​196 Trans-​Europ-​Express (film) 95 translation 235–​236; Bengali literature 142, 156–​171 travel narratives 187–​196 Un Chien Andalou 113–​114 United Kingdom/​Great Britain: bourgeoisie 16; capitalism 16; cinema/​film 19; decentralized colonial governance 60; gender 15; Girls Friendly Society 15; India Office 19; literature 16, 18; London Society for Protection of Young Females 15; railways 186; see also British India United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) 38 United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) 133 United States of America 19, 24 University of Ceylon 226 University of Delhi 234–​235 University of Sabaragamuwa 220 Urdu 132–​133 Uttara Rama Charitaya (play) 237–​238 Uttar Falguni (film) 97–​98 Vahanse, Devendra Devayan 244 Vaishnavism 15 Valmiki 233, 236–​240, 243, 246n9

258 Index Vanduru Hamudava 246n18 Vasudevan, Ravi 21 Veeramuni, Namel 243, 247n24 Verne, Jules 186–​187 Vidyanandan, S. 238–​239 Vidyasagar, Ishwar Chandra 13–​14 Vietnam 56 Vigo, Jean 88–​89 Village Rockstars (film) 45 Virilio, Paul 106n2 Visconti, Luchino 86 Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) 33n15 Visva-​Bharati University 220, 221 Vyjayanthimala 160 Waliullah, Syed 123, 158 Weber, Max 200 White, Stephen 60–​61 Wickramasingha, Martin 218

widow remarriage 14, 17 Wientzen, Timothy 177–​178 women: Assam 21, 28, 43; India 11, 13, 14–​15; Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve 175; United Kingdom/​Great Britain 15; widow remarriage 14, 17; see also gender World Cinema 94, 95 worlding, transnational 156–​171 world literature 156; Misra 157–​163; Ray 162–​166 xenophobia 55 Yadav, Shivlal 159 Yandaboo, Treaty of 11, 18 Yeats, W. B. 156 YouTube 38, 46 Zillmann, D. 36